She would not go to Casualty, Hanna said, and she would not go to bed, she would sleep sitting upright in an armchair, she would get the blood off her face, and it would be fine. This is what she told Hugh. She headed out past her boyfriend and her baby, and sat down on the stairs.
‘I am just going to the bathroom,’ she said, and she leaned her head against the bannister.
There were coloured lights outside the door, and before she knew it, the place was full of men. Ambulance men, huge and bizarrely light on their feet.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
The paramedic was pretty relaxed. He crouched below her on the stair.
‘What have we here,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Hanna.
‘Scalp,’ he said. ‘Oh, the scalp’s a fright.’
‘You are such a dick,’ Hanna said over his shoulder, to Hugh. ‘Why do you have to be such a fucking dick?’
‘Look at yourself,’ said Hugh, and he meant it literally. So Hanna looked down. She saw her T-shirt slicked on to her torso, the outline of her left breast perfectly stiff, like a sculpture of herself in dried blood.
The baby smiled.
And before she could refuse, they had her sitting up on a gurney, belted in. Before she could say, ‘Where’s my baby?’ the guy said, ‘He’ll be in first thing,’ and Hanna felt herself loosen and be relieved. Happiness slipped into her as she was pulled backwards up the ramp, and happiness tugged at her insides as the ambulance pulled silently away. All she lacked was a siren, to shout it. She was happy.
‘It’s a bit late for that, sweetheart,’ said the paramedic. ‘They’re all asleep in their beds.’
In Casualty, they cleaned her up and put her in a gown, and though they snipped and shaved her hair back from the wound, Hanna did not even need stitches in the end. She was left on the trolley to sleep and woke with a filthy headache, and no offer of pain relief. The trolley was in a corridor. The woman who came along to check and discharge her did not ask about post-natal depression and this was almost disappointing. (‘No, I’ve always had it,’ Hanna wanted to say, ‘I had it pre-natally. I think I had it in the womb.’) All the woman wanted to talk about was drinking — which Hanna thought was a bit obvious, given the circumstances. She was also quite condescending. But Hugh was calm by the time he arrived in with clean clothes and the baby, who had stopped smiling now and defaulted to his usual screams.
‘I think it’s a tooth.’
‘Did he sleep after? Did you put him down?’
In the car, they fought about the baby, and fell silent.
And that was it. For weeks, it was just, ‘Hanna cut her head,’ and once, when the buttons wouldn’t fasten on the babygro and Hanna thought she might actually throw the baby away from her, she might hit the baby against the wall, Hugh took over the buttoning and said, ‘See someone. Take a fucking pill.’
Meanwhile, he slept with her — he fell asleep in a normal way. And he also had sex with her — his erection was unaffected, that is, by the memory of Hanna encrusted in two pints of her own blackening ooze, and once he fuzzed his finger along the fine stubble around her wound and said, ‘Oh, my love.’ He reminded her to buy milk before he went out in the morning, and he mopped his butcher’s counters last thing at night. He looked after the baby all the hours that he was home, although he wasn’t home much. You could not accuse him of neglect.
Hugh was out at RTÉ working on a soap, which was brilliant — the work was brilliant, the soap was just a soap — but he was there all hours, talking to lighting and props, getting the right Ikea sideboard to set against a side wall. Once all that was settled in, he would be home at a regular time, but he was also doing drawings for a pocket Romeo and Juliet and hustling for a thing about Irish Mammies in the Olympia called Don’t Mind Me I’ll Sit In The Dark. Retro was where Hugh was at. Normal with an edge. ‘Just give me a litre of Magnolia matt emulsion,’ he liked to say. ‘And a place to stand.’
So Hugh was flat out. There was a mortgage to pay. Hanna pushed the buggy up to the Phoenix Park or along the quays into town and then she pushed it back to their little house in Mount Brown. Five kilometres to Stephen’s Green and back, ten kilometres the long way around the Park. Seven months after the birth, she was back in her skinny jeans, but what was the point of looking good, when no one cared? She went to an opening night at the Abbey and flirted like crazy, but it was as though no one found that relevant any more. Hanna drank, that evening, until she could not feel her arse sliding off the high stool. No one noticed that either. Not even her.
It was true that Hanna got pissed as soon as she left the baby, but it was also true that she never left the baby, or hardly ever. She mixed up vodka in a fruit juice bottle to bring on a girls’ night out and it was supposed to be a joke — the label said ‘Innocent’ — but she finished it on the way into town and didn’t tell them about it, when the moment came. Hanna could not face the girls and their talk of diets and auditions, bitching about the state of Irish theatre and the many shortcomings of their men. The girls did not have babies, or not yet. They were really jealous. They thought having a baby would solve something fundamental in their lives.
The Innocent bottle was interesting. Hanna tried it in front of Hugh and he didn’t notice it, either. It wasn’t within his range.
Hugh was a very tidy person. He got upset if there was a scratch on something, or a mark, if there were used tea bags on the kitchen counter or a damp towel on the floor. Living with him put Hanna semi-permanently in the wrong. He told her to pick her knickers up off the stairs, in a tone of great disgust. Or he wanted to shag her on the stairs. One or the other. Sometimes both. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind.
They had, in the early days, enormous amounts of sex. It was not high-quality sex, but it was terrifically frequent. Then it just got terrific. Nothing outrageous, Hugh was a straight-up kind of guy — unless he plucked one of his cooking hatchets off the magnetic strip on the kitchen wall and stuck it in her, one fine day. There was no sign, anyway, of murderous intent. There was just this massive, penetrative intent that felt like murder, at least to Hanna. Not that she minded, being killed. And it was in the course of one of their happy little fuck-fests, tender, savage and prolonged — well done, us! — that the baby happened.
Happened.
The baby arrived.
Hugh made a baby in Hanna because he loved Hanna. In the middle of all that fury, a baby.
Hanna did not realise, of course. She thought her beer had gone off, the wine was corked, she got a pain in her back and there was a density to her coming that was muscular and new. She woke one morning utterly abandoned, wrecked. And, after a couple of weeks of this, she said, ‘Oh.’
Hugh was delighted, ecstatic. He loved the baby both inside and outside of Hanna, and he loved the baby’s clever mother. But he did not have sex with the baby’s mother, after the baby came. He fought with her instead.
‘What the fuck is this doing here?’
‘What?’
‘My script is under there.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘My script. I’ve been looking for my script and now its covered in. . Jesus.’
Hanna shoved the buggy down the quays into town replaying the fights in her head. Push. Push. Shove. Shove. She was so lonely, she was horny all the time now. And it was a bit like sex, she thought — the fighting — but it really wasn’t sex. Throwing Hugh’s phone into a gorse bush up the mountains, or her own stupid cheap clutch bag into the River Liffey. There were long and impossible silences on the hard shoulder, there was the time she walked back down the motorway leaving the baby in the car seat, eating his crinkly toy. There was the broken front light and the deep scrape along the passenger door — Hugh really hated it when she pranged his precious car, because Hugh claimed to be calm but he really wasn’t calm, Hugh was stony and white with rage.