Feelings of Fear (24 page)

It was after eleven o'clock. He asked her if she wanted anything to eat or drink but she said no. He switched on the television in the living-room but there was nothing on but lacrosse and an old Errol Flynn movie. Catherine stayed in the bedroom, staring at the wall. In the end he came in and sat next to her again. “Listen,” he said. “Maybe I made a mistake.”

She glanced up at him, and she looked very pale and very tired.

“If you want to go back, I'll take you back. I just thought I was doing the right thing, that's all.

“Why don't you get some sleep and we'll make an early start in the morning.”

She said nothing, but closed her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry for being in love with you. I'm sorry for being human. What else was I supposed to do?”

He watched television until just after midnight, and then he undressed and climbed into bed with her. She was breathing softly against the pillow. He reached out and touched her arm, and then her breast. Then he ran his hand over the swelling of her stomach. He could feel the baby stir and kick, like somebody kneading dough.

He slept uneasily until four minutes past three. He kept having fragmentary dreams about people laughing and talking in other rooms. He woke with a strong hard-on and he reached out for Catherine again. She was still quietly breathing. He caressed her breasts through her nightgown and then he drew her legs apart and climbed on top of her. Maybe it was wrong of him to fuck
her while she was asleep, but he needed her so urgently. She felt dry, in the darkness, but he spat on his fingers to moisten the end of his cock. Then he pushed himself into her, and started a deep, plunging rhythm.

She woke up. He sensed her wake up. But he was too close to his climax to stop, and he kept on thrusting himself into her, harder and harder. He heard her panting, quick and harsh, and he thought, great, she's getting into it too. He said, “Come on, baby, you're wonderful. Come on, sweetheart, you're fantastic.”

It was then that she screamed. It was a piercing, gargling scream, and he could feel spit fly all over his face. He jerked upright, his skin freezing in fright, and then she screamed again. He scrabbled to find the bedside lamp, and managed to switch it on, but then it dropped on to the floor, so that what he saw was illuminated by an angled, upward light that made it look even more terrifying than it was.

He was kneeling between the legs of a shriveled old woman. Her sparse white hair was coming out in clumps. Her eyes were sunk into their sockets and her lips were drawn tightly back over orange, toothless gums. All that identified her as Catherine was her huge, swollen belly.

“Oh Jesus,” Vincent whispered. “Oh Jesus, tell me this is a nightmare.”

The old woman tried to scream again, but all she managed this time was a thick gargle. She lifted one of her bony arms, and clawed feebly at Vincent's shoulder, but Vincent pushed her away. She was collapsing in front of his eyes. Her face was tightening over her cheekbones and her breasts were shriveling. Her collarbone broke through her skin, and her chin dropped on to her chest.

“Catherine!” Vincent quivered. “Catherine!”

He lifted her head, but it dropped sideways on to the pillow and it was obvious that she was dead. Vincent climbed off the bed, wiping his hands on the sheet. He was trembling so much that he had to hold on to the wall for support.

It was then that he thought:
the baby – what about the baby? Even if Catherine's dead, maybe I can save the baby!

He thought for one moment of calling for an ambulance – but how the hell was he going to explain an old, dead woman in his bed –
an old, dead
pregnant
woman? He approached Catherine cautiously, and laid his hand on her stomach, and, yes, he could still feel the baby kicking inside her. But how long could it survive if he didn't get it out?

He went to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out a carving-knife. He returned to the bedroom and stood beside Catherine gray-faced. He nearly decided to do nothing, to let the baby die, but then he saw Catherine's stomach shift again, and he knew that he had to give it a chance.

He inserted the point of the knife into her wrinkled skin, just above her pubic bone. Then, slowly, he pushed it in through the muscle, until he felt something more yielding. He was terrified of cutting the baby as well, but he kept on slicing her stomach open, and she was so decayed and dry and papery that it was more like cutting open a rotten old hessian sack. At last he had her stomach wide open, and he drew aside the two flaps of flesh to reveal her womb.

Shaking and dripping with sweat, he cut the baby out of her. One foot emerged, and then a hand. Miraculously, it was still alive. It was purple and slithery and it smelled strongly of amniotic fluid. He turned it over so that he could cut the umbilical cord, and then he lifted it up in both hands. It was so tiny, so frail. A baby girl. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she clasped and unclasped its fingers. She snuffled, and then she let out two or three pathetic little cries.

Vincent was overwhelmed. He started to sob out loud. Tears ran down his cheeks and dripped from his chin. He couldn't understand what had happened to Catherine, but he knew that he had saved the baby's life. He carried her through to the living-room, laid her on the couch, and then went to the bathroom to find some towels.

He sped to St Michel-des-Monts through driving, sunlit rain. At times his speedometer needle wavered over 110kph. He managed to reach the house just after eleven o'clock. He ran to the front porch, vaulted up the steps and banged furiously on the knocker.

Mme Leduc appeared, with Baubay close behind her. “You came back,” she said. “I'm amazed that you had the nerve.”

“Well … I don't think I had any choice.”

“Catherine?”

He lowered his head. “You were telling me the truth. Catherine's gone. But I managed to save her child. I wanted to bring her back here before it was too late.”

He went back to the car, and opened the door. Very hesitantly, like somebody who has never felt rain on their skin before, or had sunlight shining in their eyes, a young girl climbed out, barefoot, but wrapped up in green bath towels. Vincent took her hand and led her toward the house. Violette and Baubay watched in silence as she came up the steps. She looked at least seventeen or eighteen years old, with long brunette hair, like Catherine's, and she was almost as pretty, although her features were a little sharper.

“There,” said Vincent, as he led her into the house. “You'll be safe here.”

There were tears in Mme Leduc's eyes. “I wish that I had never wished,” she told Vincent.

“Well,” Vincent told her. “Sometimes we all think that.”

They drove away from the house just as the rain was beginning to clear. Baubay said, “Where are you going? Montreal's back that way.”

Vincent handed him a folded route map. “Lac du Sang,” he said. “There's one more thing I have to do.”

In the woods, he dug a shallow grave and buried Catherine's dessicated body. He filled her face with earth and leaves. “I'm sorry,” was all he could think of to say. Afterward he stood by the edge of the water under a clear blue sky.

“They came here and they wished,” he told Baubay. “God, they couldn't have known what they were wishing for, could they?”

“All I wish for is a new Mercedes,” said Baubay.

“I just wish that I could have woken up every night and found Catherine lying next to me.”

“You can go back to Violette's and try out her daughter.”

“Forget it. I feel like her father. I brought her into the world, didn't I? I watched her grow up.”

“In three hours? That's not fatherhood.”

“All the same, it was incredible. She just grew bigger and bigger, like one of those speeded-up movies.”

“Sure she did.”

“She did, I swear it.”

“Sure.”

They climbed back into the car and drove away, leaving the waters of Lac du Sang as still as ever.

Six weeks later, Baubay phoned to tell him that he had been promoted and given a metallic gold 500SL as a company car. After that, Vincent awoke two or three times every night, and fearfully reached out to make sure that there was nobody lying on the other side of the bed.

R
ain came dredging down the street in misty gray curtains as we drew up outside the narrow terraced house in the middle of Ballyhooly. All of the houses in the row were painted different colors: sunflower yellows, crimsons, pinks and greens. In sullen contrast, Number 15 was painted as brown as peat.

Mr Fearon switched off the engine of his eight-year-old Rover and peered at the house through his circular James Joyce glasses. “I'll admit it doesn't look much. But prices have been very buoyant lately. You could get eighty-five thousand for it easy, if you put it on the market today.”

I took in the peeling front door, the darkened and dusty front windows, the sagging net curtains in one of the upstairs rooms. I guessed that I
could
sell it straight away; but then it might be worth smartening it up a little. A coat of paint and a new bathroom suite from Hickey's could make all the difference between £85,000 and £125,000.

I climbed out of the car, tugging up my collar against the rain. A small brindled dog barked at me for invading its territory without asking. I shaded my eyes and looked in through the front window. It was too grimy to see much, but I could just make out a black fireplace and a tipped-over chair. The living-room was very small, but that didn't matter. I might redecorate Number 15, but I certainly wouldn't be living in it. Not here in Ballyhooly, which was little more than a crossroads ten miles north of Cork, with two pubs and a shop and a continuous supply of rain.

Mr Fearon made a fuss of finding the right key and unlocked the front door. He had to kick the weatherboard to open it; and it gave
a convulsive shudder, like a donkey, when it's kicked. The doormat was heaped with letters and free newspapers and circulars. Inside the hallway, there was a strong smell of damp, and the brown wallpaper was peppered with black specks of mold.

“It'll need some airing-out, of course, but the roof's quite sound, and that's your main thing.”

I stepped over the letters and looked around. Next to the front door stood a Victorian coat and umbrella-stand, with a blotchy, yellowed mirror, in which Mr Fearon and I looked as if we had both contracted leprosy. On the opposite wall hung a damp-faded print of a dark back street in some unidentifiable European city, with a cathedral in the background, and hooded figures concealed in its Gothic doorways. The green-and-brown diamond-patterned linoleum on the floor must have dated from the 1930s.

The sitting-room was empty of furniture except for that single overturned wheelback chair. A broken glass lampshade hung in the center of the room.

“No water penetration,” Mr Fearon remarked, pointing to the ceiling. But in one corner, there were six or seven deep scratchmarks close to the coving.

“What do you think caused those?” I asked him.

He stared at them for a long time and then shrugged.

We went through to the kitchen, which was cold as a mortuary. Which
felt
like a mortuary. Under the window there was a thick, old-fashioned sink, with rusty streaks in it. A gas cooker stood against the opposite wall. All of the glass in the cream-painted kitchen cabinets had been broken, and some of the frames had dark brown drips running down them, as if somebody had smashed the glass on purpose, in a rage, and cut their hands open.

Outside, I could see a small yard crowded with old sacks of cement and bricks and half a bicycle, and thistles that grew almost chest-high. And the rain, gushing from the clogged-up guttering, so that the wall below it was stained with green.

“I still can't imagine why your woman wanted to give me this place,” I said, as we climbed the precipitous staircase. Halfway up, there was a stained-glass window, in amber, with a small picture in
the center of a winding river, and a dark castle, with rooks flying around its turrets.

“You'll be watching for the stair-carpet,” Mr Fearon warned me. “It's ripped at the top.”

Upstairs, there were two bedrooms, one of them overlooking the street and a smaller bedroom at the back. In the smaller bedroom, against the wall, stood a single bed with a plain oak bedhead. It was covered with a yellowing sheet. Above it hung a damp-rippled picture of the Cork hurling team, 1976. I went to the window and looked down into the yard. For some reason I didn't like this room. There was a sour, unpleasant smell in it, boiled vegetables and Dettol. It reminded me of nursing-homes, and old, pale people seen through rainy windows. It was the smell of hopelessness.

“Mrs Devlin wasn't a woman to explain herself,” said Mr Fearon. “Her estate didn't amount to much, and she left most of it to her husband. But she insisted that this house should come to you. She said she was frightened of what would happen to her if it didn't.”

I turned away from the window. “But she wouldn't explain why?”

Mr Fearon shook his head. “If I had any inkling, I'd tell you.”

I still found it difficult to believe. Up until yesterday morning, when Mr Fearon had first called me, I had never heard of Mrs Margaret Devlin. Now I found myself to be one of the beneficiaries of her will, and the owner of a shabby terraced property in the rear end nowhere in particular.

Not that I was looking a gift horse in the mouth. My Italian-style café in Academy Street in Cork hadn't been doing too well lately. Only three weeks ago I had lost my best chef Carlo, and I had always been badly under-financed. I had tried to recoup some of my losses by buying a £1,000 share in a promising-looking yearling called Satan's Pleasure, but it had fallen last weekend at Galway and broken its leg. No wonder Satan was pleased. He was probably laughing all the way back to hell.