Every morning when I opened my eyes, I really looked forward to school. It wasn’t just because I could have a laugh with my friends and enjoyed escaping from home, I was learning new things every day, and I found out I was good at reading and writing, and could even do maths better than I ever had before.
Now I was bigger, I washed myself with a bucket of water and a rag and managed to clean my clothes sometimes, too, after Esther visited and brought us soap and washing powder.
Nobody called me smelly any more, and even though my head still itched, I felt better about my appearance. The horrible things that happened outside of school still happened but, for the first time, they didn’t feel like they were the whole of my life.
Daddy had bought us a black Yorkshire terrier, and we named him Charlie. I loved him to bits. He would follow me to school every day and wait for me outside the school gates until I came out at lunchtime. He was very special, and I loved him dearly. He made me smile.
I hadn’t been in my new class very long when I started to feel sick a lot. It wasn’t much after my eleventh birthday.
It was a very strange sort of sickness. It wasn’t like the way I felt sick when Aunt Mag made me eat her disgusting mutton stew, or when Mammy mashed up those pills from the big white tub into my sandwiches, which I now knew said ‘Valium’ on the side.
This sickness was different from any other sickness I’d felt before. I had this funny feeling in my stomach all the time and I felt sort of dizzy. The strange thing about it was that I didn’t feel I was actually going to be sick, it was just a constant feeling of having a queasy tummy.
It went on for days and days, and eventually weeks. At first I was scared of telling Mammy about it because I didn’t want any more of that medicine in case it made me feel worse. I’d worked out that the white pills gave me sickening headaches and made me dizzy and forgetful, so I didn’t want any of those. I’d prefer just to feel sick.
The sickness just wouldn’t go away though, and in the end I decided I had better tell someone. I didn’t want to tell the nuns because I didn’t want to be sent home from school, so one night I told Mammy.
‘Mammy, I feel sick and want to vomit, but nothing’s coming out,’ I explained. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
I was relieved that Mammy didn’t ignore me. In fact, she seemed to know what to do straight away. She didn’t shout at me for complaining, and she didn’t try to give me those white pills either, so I was very glad I had told her my problem.
‘Drink a pint of salt and water,’ she told me firmly.
She didn’t seem worried, and didn’t even get out of her rocking chair or put down her tumbler of port. It couldn’t be anything serious. ‘Just go and drink a pint of salt and water, Cynthia,’ she said with confidence.
I felt relieved I was getting a cure, even though I retched as I forced the disgusting salt water down my throat.
I was very disappointed when I didn’t vomit or feel any better, but thankfully Mammy knew what to do. ‘Add more salt,’ she told me. ‘Add as much as you can.’ I poured in huge spoonfuls, but Mammy’s cure still didn’t work. I wasn’t sick, I just had a raging thirst.
When I went to bed, I prayed that I’d wake up feeling better the next day, but I didn’t. As soon as I opened my eyes the sickness swept over me. I felt worse instead of better, but I’d noticed the mornings were always worse.
My tummy felt weird now too. I didn’t feel like eating my Weetabix for breakfast, and when I got the little ones ready for school my head was spinning.
Changing the babies’ nappies made me gag, but still I couldn’t be sick. I just felt nauseous, it was so weird. I didn’t want to tell Mammy again in case she made me drink more salt water. It hadn’t helped, and it tasted foul. I didn’t want any more of that.
So I put up with the sick feeling for what felt like weeks, hoping every day it would just go away.
One day, I was sitting at my desk concentrating hard on a maths problem on the board, when I felt something fly inside my stomach.
It felt exactly like a butterfly, but not like the type of butterflies I got when I felt scared. This felt like I really had a butterfly fluttering its wings inside me.
I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there feeling strange. I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my friends at school. I thought they would think I was weird or telling one of my silly stories to entertain them. Maybe I was imagining it? No, I felt it again and again. I held my book low down across my tummy in case you could actually see my tummy move.
The sickness was still there too, and now I had something fluttering inside me. What if I had something seriously wrong with me? I had to talk to Mammy again. Hopefully, this time, she would know of a better cure.
‘Have a pint of salt water,’ Mammy told me again sternly. ‘Put as much salt in as you can.’ I
