She didn’t seem worried about the fluttering when I told her about it. She didn’t frown or do anything but sit in her chair drinking. Perhaps I was making a fuss about nothing?
‘Go and buy some vitamin tablets,’ she said in the end, after I’d made a scene of drinking down some salt water with the tiniest bit of salt I could get away with. It made me retch, but nothing came up.
Mammy sent me to the shop and told me exactly which vitamins to buy. They were called Haliborange, and she announced later that all the children in the house were to take them.
‘Line up now,’ she ordered the younger kids. I felt pleased that Mammy was trying to help me get over my sickness. She was looking after me, and she was making sure the little ones didn’t get sick too. She’d never given us vitamins before, and they weren’t cheap either. I’d been surprised how much money she gave me to go to the shop.
Mammy dished out a tablet to each child in turn, but when she got to me at the end of the line she put the box of Haliborange down and brought out a dark bottle of medicine, telling me that, because I was older, I needed different vitamins.
It was dark, thick, sticky liquid that looked like treacle but tasted a bit fishy. It was foul, but I dutifully licked the spoon clean, hoping my sickness and funny tummy would get better soon.
Mammy told me to keep taking the salt water too, just to ‘make sure’, and so I did, but all that happened was that I started to feel even more unwell.
I couldn’t understand it. I was drinking pints of salt water, eating raw eggs and liver and taking my vitamin mixture, all of which were meant to ‘do me good’, so why weren’t they helping?
I didn’t look ill. We all had Mammy’s fine skin, and I had roses in my cheeks. I was still feeling very sick in the mornings, though, and in the afternoons I was exhausted.
When I complained to Mammy that I didn’t seem to be getting better, she just told me to keep drinking the salt water and taking the vitamins. In the end I stopped complaining.
Daddy didn’t seem worried at all. One night I felt so weary and my head ached so much I begged him to leave me alone. ‘Daddy, please, no,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll be sick.’
‘Get here now!’ he sneered, tying his belt around my chest. ‘You know what happens if you start!’ As he tightened the buckle, I could feel my heart beating ferociously in my chest. It was going so fast I was sure it would burst out and snap that leather belt right off me.
I wished I actually could be sick, thinking that would make Daddy get off me. My stomach was doing somersaults. He smelled worse than usual tonight. He’d used the toilet bucket, and the room smelled overpoweringly vile too. I wished I could vomit all over him, but I just lay there feeling sick and helpless and suffocated by his sweat and reeking breath.
The next day, I was sitting behind my desk listening to the teacher when I felt something move sharply inside me. It felt like a kick. It wasn’t a flutter like before. It was unmistakably a kick. But how could something kick me inside my stomach? What had got in there?
I stared at the blackboard and tried to work it out. What could the explanation be? What illness could make something feel like it was kicking me inside the tummy?
I looked around at my classmates. They were all just staring at the blackboard or looking bored and jotting notes like always. Everything looked so normal, but I felt detached, like I was on a different planet from everybody else. I looked round again and felt a wave of loneliness sweep over me. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone what had just happened. How could I? I didn’t even know what it was, so how could I explain it? People might laugh at me or think I was mad.
I had to talk to Mammy again. She had helped the first time, rushing me out to buy vitamins, so she must care about this and she would help me again.
I raced up to her bedside as soon as I got in from school.
‘Mammy, something’s banging inside my stomach,’ I told her. ‘It’s scaring me.’
I looked at Mammy intently, desperately hoping she would have another answer, or another medicine that might work better. She looked back at me with no expression in her eyes. ‘You’re having a baby,’ she said in a harsh, frosty voice.
The room around me started to shift. The walls wobbled and the floor tilted. Nothing was still except for Mammy. She sat propped up like a shop dummy in front of me, her eyes directed at me but seeming to look straight through me.
I didn’t know what she meant. I was eleven years old, and little girls didn’t have babies. Only mammies had babies, and I wasn’t a mammy.
I stared at my mammy and didn’t know what to say. My lips felt as if they were stuck together. The room was swirling around me. I still felt sick, and the mere thought that I was having a baby made me feel sicker still.
How could a baby get inside my tummy? My tummy wasn’t big enough to have a baby in it. It wasn’t big and round like Mammy’s was when I pushed my ear up to it to listen for baby Michael’s heartbeat.
Mammy began to speak again as I stood in front of her, dumbstruck. This time her voice was angry.
‘You’re a freak,’ she blurted out. ‘Your baby will be disabled.’
I knew it was real now, and what Mammy was saying was true. I didn’t understand anything at all about
