There's Something I Have to Tell You by Michelle McDonagh

Author:Michelle McDonagh [McDonagh, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC031100, FIC031000, FH, FF
Published: 2023-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

20

Kate

There was a message on her phone from Niamh to say the search of the cottage was complete and they were free to move back in. Although she would be glad to see the back of the scene-of-crime team, and a return to some kind of normality on the farm, the thought of returning to those gloomy rooms after the light-filled luxury of the farmhouse depressed her. And they couldn’t leave Christina on her own, rattling around this great big house. It made sense for them to stay here for the time being.

It was a good distraction for the kids too. Kate suspected they still didn’t realise that Ursula and Jimmy’s absence from their lives was a permanent one. It was their first experience of loss – how could they be expected to understand the perpetuity of death? That this time Ursula and Grandad wouldn’t be coming back with a bulging duty-free bag stuffed with last-minute gifts. Her own first real experience of loss had been her mother; but she had lost her years before she went into the ground.

The broken creature her father had helped from the car into the house ten never-ending days after she went in to have the baby didn’t even look like her mother, looked more like Granny after the arthritis sank its teeth into her. Bent and shuffling and whitewashed. Her empty stomach hung off her, a limp, useless pouch. Every day while she was gone, Kate had asked Aunty Caroline when Mammy was coming home. Every evening, she greeted her father at the door with the same question.

‘Soon, Katie love, soon’, he had promised.

She had known something bad was happening. It was as if the house itself was on tenterhooks. She heard the adults speak in loud whispers, heard her father tell Sandra from next door that he was coming ‘bottom first’, which by the sound of the neighbour’s gasped reaction was not a good thing. It had been a he. A baby boy.

The day before the wraith imitating her mother came home, her father sat Kate down.

‘I need to talk to you, Katie love. It’s about the baby. Baby Kevin.’ His voice had broken. ‘He was a very sick little baby so Holy God had to take him back to heaven. Mammy will be coming home tomorrow, but she won’t be bringing the baby with her.’

She had been sad about the baby but happy that her mother would be home soon. She missed her so badly it hurt.

‘That’s OK, Daddy. Don’t worry. We can get another baby. When Mammy comes home.’

He had nestled her into his chest, her head under his chin, and she felt the moist heat of his tears tickle her scalp.

Her mother had spent the best part of three months in bed after that, crippled with pain. Aunty Caroline had to go back to her job in Dublin, so Sandra next door and a couple of other neighbours kept an eye on Kate while her father was at work.

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