In Eternal

In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Mary stands by the window, her fingers making cat’s cradles in the air. It is a winter afternoon, and the light is pale. It rimes the floral-patterned bedlinen, the hem of her long camel coat. There are water spots on the mirror. She would like to give the place a good going-over, to scrub the dust from the skirting boards and brush the cobwebs from the light fixture. Not that the room is dirty⁠—not really. Only cheap. Only a little grubby at the edges. The hotel is a nondescript new-build on the outskirts of the city, near to the train station. Mary walked quickly through the lobby when she arrived, fearing questions, but the girl behind the reception desk didn’t even look up from the magazine she was reading. Perhaps this sort of thing is common here. The man Mary has come here to meet is in the en-suite bathroom. She can hear running water through the walls. Making himself ready. Her pulse chatters in her throat, rapid as a baby bird’s. She should take her coat off, she thinks. It seems like the thing to do. But every time her hands move to her lapels they flutter away again, coming back to rest in a spot just above her navel. Her stomach turns, the lurching of it somehow not unpleasant. Under her coat she is wearing a dress of green rayon, the one with the rosette at the collar, and underneath a plain slip that is fraying at the seams. Below that she has on a peach-coloured brassiere and knickers of a similar colour, the closest thing she has to a matching set. Her nylons are new, purchased that morning with money she took from Bridget’s piggy bank. Mary hopes their perfect sheen will distract him; from the weight of her breasts, the soft flesh of her thighs, the lightning tracery of stretch marks across her hips and belly. He has already told her that she is beautiful, but she fears he will shrink from the fullness of her. The pipes give a sudden, high shriek as a tap is turned off. Three heartbeats of silence pass, and then the door to the en-suite bathroom opens. The man Mary is here to see is not particularly handsome. His hair is thinning at the crown, and there are dark spots on the backs of his hands. But he smiles when he sees her, a broad and honest smile that deepens the creases around his eyes, and after years of not being seen at all, that is more than enough. Where and how they met is immaterial. She is here now. Mary removes her long camel coat, folds it over her right arm, and lays it neatly on the chair by the window. The coat had been John’s gift to her a week after she first stepped foot on English soil. Her good tweed overcoat, inherited from her mother, was ruined on the crossing from Dublin to Liverpool. A summer squall had bruised the sky not long after the ferry came out of port, and the vessel was bobbing queasily on the choppy water. Christopher had picked that inauspicious moment to make himself known, two weeks ahead of schedule. Mary’s waters broke as she was clinging to the guardrail on the ferry’s top deck and were sluiced away by the rain within moments. A woman called Agnes, a navvy’s widow from Kildare, acted as midwife. She’d six children of her own and knew the workings of it. It was her who folded up the tweed overcoat and propped it, businesslike, under Mary’s hips, to be spoiled beyond salvation in a rush of amniotic fluid. Mary’s screams, she was told later, had the lads in the engine room crossing themselves. Later she would hardly remember screaming at all. Only Agnes placing the squirming, wailing infant in her arms, his body red and wet as a skinned rabbit, and the way she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. She called him Christopher, the name she and John had agreed when he left to work the beet harvest. One of the crewmen opened a bottle of sherry to wet the baby’s head. By the time the ferry came into port an hour later, Christopher was asleep at Mary’s breast, and the sky was so cloudless you’d never know it had rained at all. Her fourth child will be born in a hospital room, a modern phenomenon that her mother would never have approved of. Mary will be brought in on the advice of her doctor because of the high levels of protein in her urine, and she will be grateful for it. It will not feel right, somehow, to birth this child at home, in the same bed where Declan and Bridget filled their tiny lungs for the first time. Mrs McKee will mind the children when Mary is admitted, albeit reluctantly. She will have heard the backyard gossip, same as everyone else. Mary will not require Mrs McKee’s approval. All Mrs McKee needs to do is keep the children fed until Mary returns home and to keep her cat’s arse of a mouth closed while they’re in earshot. It will be a difficult birth. There will be moments where Mary will be certain that she will die in that room, with its bare lightbulb and walls so white it hurts to look at them. She will tell the doctor that she needs her rites, and he will pretend not to hear her. The maternity unit will have opened its doors for the first time less than a month before. It will smell like paint and antiseptic. Mary will be sick into a metal dish that a nurse will hold beneath her chin, again and again until there is nothing to bring up but bile. When it is over, the midwife will ask Mary if she wants to hold the child, and Mary will say no. She will ask

Message in a Romance Novel

Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar The day Mother was not waiting for us when we returned from school at our usual time, I knew she had gone to meet the man. He had written to her only two days ago, and I knew from the expression on her face. She looked dreamy and distracted, the face of someone making plans of her own. So, taking my younger sister by the hand, the two of us went to the house of a family friend. The auntie there knew my parents. I told her about our parents being away, that no one had come to pick us up from school. That got us sympathy and we stayed for lunch—a bit of rice with ghee, and a potato and pea curry. After that, I got my sister home safely. I admit I did that to impress my sister. To show her I could manage things when Mother let us down. She trusted me, even when we had to cross the dangerous main road that lay between our school and home. Many a time, I’d drag her across the moment a gap appeared in the traffic. Sometimes, there came a sudden squeal of brakes, an impatient horn somewhere, and then my sister’s frightened sob as I pulled her up onto the sidewalk. This was rare, though my sister thinks differently now. We never argue about it much; we know we must never reach a point where we get too judgmental about our mother. Once we were safely over, my sister always looked up at me scared, even angry. That afternoon when Mother wasn’t around, I felt a deep satisfaction as I bent down to hiss: “Today, she isn’t there to listen to you. Complain all you want.” In those days long ago, when we never felt the heat of summer nor the sharp sting of winter, crossing a road never seemed a big danger, not to me, as a fifteen-year-old. Also, stories were easy to find, make up, and tell; and, in the pre-television days, stories seemed to be everywhere, especially where my mother was concerned. My mother’s lover was a pilot. He flew old planes at a secret air base where my mother first met him. At that time, we did not live in Delhi, but somewhere in the east of the country. The air base had come up during the time of India’s war with China in the early 1960s. Set up with American help, the air base was two hours from the sea and located in a dry part of the country. Tall eucalyptus trees girded one side, looking over the curved steel hangars that glinted like daggers in the afternoon. The soil’s red underlayer was clearly visible amidst clumps of dry grass. On quiet days, we could hear the airplanes from a long way off, watch them land like beetles before vanishing into the clump of trees. Our house was on the edge with the eucalyptus trees, the last in a row of houses that faced an empty expanse of drying grass and tall yellow weeds. The weeds and the tall grass against the yellow and blue sky gave a strange shimmer to things. Sometimes I had a sense of things subtly moving, perhaps swaying—the trees, the tall grass, even the pebbles on the narrow muddy lane seemed to skitter, jump, and move away. The airstrip, as I discovered when I took my sister out on my new bicycle, was a straight gray aisle of concrete that ran from the hangars at one end to the four-storied, white-walled administrative edifices on the other. The planes, after landing, would zoom to that end, turn around, and then decelerating  ever so slowly, would glide toward the hangar, rocking and shaking as if shrugging off the long journey it had just made. I don’t know when I first noticed that look of longing on my mother’s face. Did she look a little too long at the landing planes, or was it that one plane that did a series of stunts in the air as it filled up the sky one late afternoon? Its loops, its zigzags through the billowing white clouds? My mother lifted a hand to her mouth as the plane rose and fell, and then she looked at us, the quickest of glances to see if we had noticed. But I was the only one who knew about the pilot and what he meant to her. When he first came to the airbase, the pilot made the customary formal call to my parents. He came with his wife and son. I heard them that first evening as I peered through the loose pink curtain that fell like a waterfall, wavy in its thick folds, separating the drawing room from the rest of the house. As children we could wrap ourselves in it and twirl in its folds, and the grown-ups never noticed. Still, I saw things I never should have. The pilot was a short, trim man, a high forehead with twin just-developing bald spots, and eyes that twinkled and had a unique shine to them. The glow on his face was clearly visible, for he never once looked away from my mother. His smile never faltered either. I was surprised no one noticed. This, and the way our mother began mysteriously vanishing some afternoons. For my sister, it wasn’t really a mystery, but I was then a teenager, more observant, more judgmental, and critical of my mother. When she said she had to go to the bigger town, an hour away, to get supplies for the women’s club or for some charity work, I knew she was planning to meet the pilot somewhere. At the small airbase, we didn’t have to worry about crossing a big road—that would happen a year or so later after our father’s transfer to Delhi—or that someone had to be there when we came home from school. A big school bus,