— I’ll come and collect it.
— Can you bring me a tee-shirt to wear?
She can. She’ll see him in thirty minutes. What time does he start work in the morning? Nine, he pants.
*
He’s waiting, agitated on the corner they agreed on, sits into the car, removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. She pulls a shirt of her husband’s from her string bag she uses to transport vegetables, brushing a piece of cabbage from the cotton.
He repeatedly thanks her as he does the transfer. He’s awful worked up. Not at all, she says. Not at all, sure it’s nothing. But he’s stranded, how is he going to get it back? She’ll bring it of course. The same spot. I’ll bring it early she says because Himself will want the car. He leans over on departure and pecks her cheek. It’s a boyish quick peck.
*
Once washed the shirt must rotate. It hangs above the range until her husband comes in from the fields. She removes it to the airing cupboard when she hears his feet on the path. After the dinner is taken and he’s gone within to the fire, she whips it back above the range and calculates she can risk it hanging there, deciding Himself will not notice. Beautifully oblivious after Prime Time, he exits again saying he’s to go back the road amid grumbling about the state of the country and how Fianna Fail will drive us all into the ditch.
— Headfirst into the bloody ditch is where we are headed, he laments.
Is he taking the car?
He thinks he might.
He might call in on a neighbour.
Once the car is gone the shirt is safe. The shirt hangs and dries until Joanie calls in and her eyes immediately light on it. That’s a lovely shirt, she says. Eyeing it. Joanie’s seen it and she’ll tell the girls and they’ll all be lookin’ for it when they visit.
*
He comes again, Halim does.
Asks strange questions.
Again, he only wants to know about childbirth. She gives him details of her children: names and ages, hoping he’ll respond with a clue to his own age. But no, nothing, so then she talks about their different personalities, searching his face lightly to see is this the information he is after, but his eyes dart at her and away from her and he’s not interested in their Leaving Cert results or their potential in the world of plumbing, or nursing, or Áine’s banking exams. He turns his thumbs, forward then back, frustration, something in the conversation is frustrating him, and this is difficult, she wants him comfortable, he must be comfortable for the circumstances already shriek sufficient with discomfort. Her, the old pillow she is, and him, so taut and well sprung. Warmly she keeps her eye on his, while considering whether to touch his arm and when she does, lightly just the top on his wrist, he blurts it out like she’s given him an electric shock … the birth, the birth, how was it?
She’s stuck.
Our Woman is stuck.
Her hand is on his wrist and his question is odd. Will it be even odder if she pulls it off. It would so she leaves it, but it’s no longer light, rather she’s clutching his arm nervously, uncomfortably.
— How was it? he repeats.
— It was childbirth, she replies. Uncomfortable, unpleasant, bloody and … would he like more tea? She lifts her hand away to go for the teapot. He does not want tea. He’s waiting on her, he wants to return to childbirth. It is pure madness, live and interactive on her sofa on a Sunday. And he takes her hand and puts it strangely on his belly, like there’s a baby in there. It’s uncanny. Perhaps he has children some other place. Perhaps he has children all over the place. Perhaps he wants to import them. Perhaps he wants her to help him import them. She only knows whatever he has and wherever it is, it is not her business. If it were to become her business, it may make it difficult for him to sit on her couch. A scenario that wouldn’t please her. She doesn’t wish for anything that would make him cease visiting. And this is the reason she attends to it.
With her hand on his stomach and longing to oblige his request — was it, after all, so unreasonable — a man who came from a uterus having questions about what came from hers since he hadn’t one of his own?
Well, she says, what exactly is it you want to know, I am happy to tell you if it really does interest you this much.
All of it, he replies. All of it.
*
Our Woman thinks back and commences. They lie against her couch and she talks into the space between them and the fireplace. Neither looks at the other as she soliloquizes and the fire handily cracks a bit to cover up the odd word.
Remember, she begins, I have had three children and so each birth was different. For starters they were all born in a different season and we’d different problems around the farm as each arrived. I delivered every one of them alone in a room except for a doctor or nurse who called in occasionally to ask how was I getting on and then took over at the end. In those days your husband was not allowed in the room while you gave birth. When my son was born my husband did not know he’d arrived for two days because there were a lot of problems with a sick cow at the time and he was out day and night tending to it and I had gone to Castlebar and stayed there and word had been sent, but we’d no phone then and well you don’t want to know this. The worst birth was the first, my eldest daughter, it was an indicator of what was to come for she’s a difficult and obstinate girl and pardon my vulgarity, but she has a very big head. I was offered a handful of blue and pink pills, which at first I refused, then seeing how awkward this creature was I requested they hand them to me again. They didn’t make a difference, but my waters, which had insisted on not breaking then dropped out of me and my distant memory of her birth is that my feet were as wet as a penguin’s.
He laughs.
Great, he’s still alive, she thinks.
— I can only say to you that it was an inhumane experience that I vowed so help me God I would never repeat as long as I was in the full control of my senses.
— You felt no joy? No elation? He asks. You had no moment of completeness?
— I was stitched from my arse to my elbow. I was tired, I was resentful and I wanted to cut my own hands off.
— And then?
— Then I had a cup of tea and six weeks later I felt better.
*
My second daughter flew out of me with so little warning she nearly landed head first in a bucket. That’s all I can say about it. To this day I am still confused by everything she says and she speaks in a terrible hurry and gives you no real information about anything that has happened or is likely to happen to her. If, though, you were to ask me which daughter you should marry, I would say my son, but failing that this daughter, for the older one has a vicious streak I’d be keen you avoid.
My son, Jimmy, was the last one obviously and since I knew I would not be doing it again I minded it less. It was not an easy birth but the hospital was better and I’ll tell you the truth a strange peace came over me where I could have surrendered and died. I couldn’t explain it to you if I tried. But when I didn’t die and found I had a baby I felt not joy but certainly more contentment than with the previous two. And he was a very easy baby.
But Halim’s not satisfied with this, he wants to know about the birth. Does it hurt? And if so how? Explain this pain to him. Explain how the stomach contracts. And how the body pushes out the baby. And could she tell when she became pregnant? He’s pressing her for minute details, and yet here they are the two of them sat so peaceful.