The Black Hole (short story)

The coffee shop is warm.  The windows that separate the customers from the four o’clock February darkness stream with condensation on one side, and rain on the other.  Anne sits in the corner, as usual, where she can watch the women with their best friends and toddlers in high chairs.  But it is the children in school uniform who catch her attention today.  Neat shirts with ties and hair in plaits.  Lovingly ironed, lovingly plaited.  Small hands curling around crayons, colouring.  “Don’t use so much black,” the bigger girl says.  “It ruins everything.”

Anne used to hate school, especially primary school.  She was afraid all the time.  The teachers were mostly nuns, and the ones who shouted were the nicer ones.  Silence was more deadly.  Their faces were framed by square wimples emphasising grimace lines and faint moustaches.  She marvelled at their black-clad bodies gliding by with hands hidden in mysterious folds.  She was clever and mostly well-behaved, but all she remembered were the slaps and the fear.

              School seems different now.  She often watches the children running and laughing their way towards the waiting mothers with their arms folded at the school gate.  In contrast to her memory of heavy brown satchels and duffle coats they look colourful and happy.  But Anne’s two wouldn’t be going.  One year she bought them uniforms, a boy’s and a girl’s. Navy trousers, a pinafore, two shirts and two grey jumpers. She hung them in the wardrobe and, when he saw them, he said she was mad.  He left that summer.  It wasn’t just about the uniforms.  She had no love left anyway and she didn’t really miss him.  The house is quiet now - more time to think.

            Of course the babies were given names, but Anne didn’t like to use them.  She never said their names out loud.   It was too personal.  A reminder of their black hair and soft stillness.  Ciarán and Bróna whose lives inside her were the only lives they had.  Their mouths made the shape of a cry but they had no voice and no breath.  Soft, slender fingers that would never play the piano.  Lungs like deflated balloons.  A cruel type of parenthood bestowed on them, twice.  He had been just as upset as she was at the deliveries, maybe even more so.  But he got over it.  They didn’t live in him.

            The uniformed children in the coffee shop are drinking Coke and eating chocolate.  It’s all around their mouths and she can see the chocolate on their teeth when they laugh. Their mother smiles at them and wipes their faces with a napkin.  Foolish woman.  The babies would never have eaten chocolate.  Once she told a woman in the coffee shop that she should give her children healthier food that wouldn’t rot their teeth.  The woman called her crazy.  Maybe she was right.  They couldn’t all be wrong.  They have children, and she doesn’t.  They win. 

Her heart gives a lurch as a mother and boy came in – this is the child she imagines to be like Ciarán. He is about ten with jet black hair and a serious expression, like her father.  She knows he will order a sandwich and sparkling water - although once he ordered a chocolate muffin - but a treat is alright every now and then.  She has his picture on her fridge, taken surreptitiously with her smartphone, alongside the photo of the girl who comes in on Tuesdays whom she calls Bróna. The girl is spirited, with dark hair and blue eyes like her own.  She wears striped laces in her shoes and her feet are never still.  She drinks orange juice.

Sometimes Anne takes notes, collecting little details she overhears.  She knows it was the boy’s birthday three weeks ago and that he got the Lego he wanted.  He’s been to the cinema a few times recently and he likes Fifa, but only at the weekends.  That’s good.  She would hate to think of him playing video games every day.  She wouldn’t have let Ciarán do that.  The girl speaks quietly so it’s hard to hear her, but she seems to like sport because she has a tennis racquet with her every Tuesday, and she has a wrist-band with the county colours.

Once a neighbour came in to Anne’s kitchen and asked her who the children in the photos on the fridge were.  She hesitated before saying they were her niece and nephew.  She knew her neighbour was dubious about this explanation when she asked;

“Oh, you never told me about them.  What are their names?”

Anne had deliberately dropped a jug of milk on the floor to cover her embarrassment, and by the time it was all cleaned up, the question was forgotten.  When the neighbour left, she felt nauseous, and promised herself that it would never happen again.  From then on she always kept an A4 page with a fake shopping list written on it hanging over the photos, just in case.

            The neighbours are good to her.  She was too embarrassed to go out for months after the day she borrowed the baby girl.  She never meant to keep her.  She just wanted to see a baby in this house.  Once.  She knew she’d have to give her back and even left a note on the pram, in black marker.  She wrote it before she left the house:

“I PROMISE I’LL MIND HER.  I’LL BRING HER BACK IN TWO HOURS.”

            The guards were very understanding.  They brought a psychologist and nobody pressed charges. The mother was hysterical and Anne wrote a letter of apology to her. But she added a warning that she should have been watching the pram instead of chatting to her friends – anything could have happened.  The guard said it might be best to leave that bit out, but Anne said ‘Take it or leave it.  That’s what I want to say.’

 Anne could see people pointing at her afterwards when she went out, so she stayed at home for a long time, eating Chinese takeaways at night. Gradually she began to go out again, mostly after dark.  Now the neighbours bring in dinners to her some days, and she goes to the coffee shop in the afternoons. And the library on Fridays.

            The photos on her walls tell another story.  The white wedding.  Twelve years ago when he had hair and she had sanity.  She was a nurse then - a good one.  People used to call her “Nurse Cassidy” and leave in boxes of chocolates for her when she nursed their relatives in hospital.  She didn’t have the babies until she was forty two – an “elderly primigravida” – and she had hardly ever missed a day from work before then.  She thought she would never become pregnant and it didn’t seem to matter.  Until nothing else mattered.

            There’s always a pile of books on the kitchen table – mostly thrillers and a book about astronomy.  Anne loves to read about space exploration and the existence of unexplored galaxies.   Light years in the darkness.  The babies are out there somewhere.  She imagines she sees them in the night sky and in fluffy cloud formations.  Once, after drinking an entire bottle of Merlot, she saw their sleeping faces all over the wallpaper.  She dreams that some day she will find them and they will call her “Mama”.

            When she worked at the hospital a child had accidentally called her “Mammy” one day.  He was drawing a picture and she came to help him retrieve his green pencil which had fallen on the floor.  When he realised what he had said they both laughed and she said “Do I look like your Mammy?”  And he said, “No, she’s pretty”.  It hurt a bit but she didn’t really mind. Not then.  She had lots of pictures and cards given to her by children she had nursed, with their misspelt words and childish handwriting. She used to love reading them, but now it felt like they were given to someone else.

            The boy whom she imagined to be Ciarán, is leaving the café now with his mother. Sometimes she gives him a little wave but he seems embarrassed, so she just smiles today and watches him put his red Manchester United school bag on his back. His mother pulls his hood up in the doorway and Anne keeps looking until he and his mother become silhouettes in the wet, black evening.  She imagines a series of tableaus of them at home: doing homework at the kitchen table; watching TV by an open fire; reading a bed-time story.  It makes her happy, like she has arranged the colours of a kaleidoscope in a pleasing pattern, before they jumble up again. Then, after finishing her coffee, she walks home.

            It’s Ciarán’s anniversary.  Anne stands at the graveside staring at the football she has placed there.  He’s ten today.  In December, Brona will be ten too.  She will do this again when the time comes.  She doesn’t normally come to the grave.  When she placed the first white coffin into the black earth, she vowed she would not come back.  Then nine months later she stared into the same black hole – its gravitational force had stolen another one of her babies.  Black hole above, black hole below.  Everywhere was black.  She was the human vortex through which life passed but couldn’t be sustained.  She wanted to die. 

            She doesn’t feel like that now.  It’s probably the tablets.  They numb her and make emotions feel like logic she has to work out.  It’s better than the pain.  Better than the dread that used to descend on her from the moment her eyes opened. Better than hating herself and her stupid body.

She senses somebody approaching but she doesn’t look up, not wanting to talk to anyone.  Then she realises it’s him.  She hasn’t seen him since the day he said he couldn’t take it any more, and she knew he meant it when she looked in the wardrobe and noticed his clothes were gone.  It’s five years ago and she hasn’t heard from him since.

 But here he is in a blue jacket, carrying white flowers.  He gets down on his hunkers and puts them carefully on the grave beside the word “Ciarán”.  

“I’m glad you’re here.  It’s his birthday,” she says.

“I know.”

 How are you now?”  he asks, looking at her face.

“I’m ok, and you?”

He shuffles from foot to foot before saying:

“They have a brother.”

“What do you mean?”  She doesn’t get it.

“I mean Ciarán and Bróna have a brother.”  He seems embarrassed.

“Oh! Congratulations,” she says, and for the first time in years, tears come.  Lots of them spilling down her contorted cheeks into her mouth and dripping from her chin. She slowly kneels beside the grave and whispers: 

“Please go.”

“I’m sorry Anne”.

“Don’t be. I’ll be fine.”

She hears the stones crunching under his feet as he walks away.  When he’s out of earshot she says:

“Happy birthday Ciarán.  “You’re my only boy, the only boy I have.  I’ll never replace you.’

Then, clutching her coat across her chest, she begins the long walk home.