My beautiful, shy, identical, save for our hair, twin Grace clings to the edge of the inflatable blue water bath, the knuckles on her slim fingers as white as marble, the veins on the side of her pipe neck ridged up high, pronounced, exhausted, huge for her, half-submerged in an imaginary sea, as if she’s a beached whale about to give birth.
She closes her aquamarine eyes, grimaces, inhales deep, and screams at me, ‘I can’t do this, Ruth!’
Being her occasional obs-gyn specialist, midwife, and guinea pig associate from Berenden, I mop my sister’s perspiring forehead with a rough pink flannel (pink for a girl), smile, then shout at her.
‘You must try, Grace. This might be your last chance at our age. Come on, woman. Push!’
Our age: fast approaching forty-six. So far, Grace has managed to lose all four of her babies, all twins, all of them lost at childbirth. I am not about to let her lose these ones. Not if I can help it. She braces herself, gripping her forearm, screaming blue murder. Burns?! The childbirth trust maternity class told her mate to grip her forearms and give her burns, to hurt her as much as he could, simulating the acute level of pain a pregnant woman can expect to endure during the act of giving birth. Fine lot of good that did her.
Unlike the classes in the village hall on Tuesday nights, this excruciating pain is for real, and her man is nowhere to be seen. I can feel her pain, like a red hot poker, stabbing my abdomen. I feel her fear swell up inside my heart. I’m torn to shreds for her, I really am. I share her exhausted will.
But she must try.
‘Come on, girl,’ I say encouraging, getting excited for her, ‘I can see baby’s head. One last push!’
My sister throws her head back, fills her lungs with air, arches her body upwards and pushes with all the incredible might of a woman possessed, obsessed, crazed, mad with giving birth to the only beings in the world she will ever truly love, a love that must end. She screams one last time, and the first baby bursts out. I hold the girl in my caring hands, cut the cord, pat baby’s back then slap her on Grace’s belly avoiding her pearl navel stud, so’s her mother can suckle her newborn child.
A second baby’s head appears…
After the birth, we lie shoaled up in the water, like fish, in love’s tender embrace: the loving sister, the surrogate mother, her babies, all of us. Grace is crying. Is it with happiness, despair – or guilt?
She makes an intimate request, ‘Cook my afterbirth for me, Ruth. I want to eat it while it’s fresh.’
‘Of course, sweet,’ I answer, gathering up the placenta her womb has just expelled, ‘Is it alright for me to leave you on your own for a while to feed your little babies while I cook you breakfast?’
She shuts her eyes and sighs with relief, ‘It is.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be okay on your own with them?’
‘I will,’ she maffles.
I’ve given birth to three illegitimate children myself: two of them co-joined twins, one a survivor: her twin sister being stillborn. On every occasion, my twin fried my afterbirth for me to eat fresh immediately after I gave birth. Like thousands of other women, from tribal women to glamourous celebrities, we sisters practise placentophagy, the act of eating our own placenta after giving birth, believing that consuming our own flesh replenishes essential nutrients such as iron, protein and hormones, and aids faster recovery. Moreover, we fervently believe the ritual of eating our own afterbirths bonds us with our newborn babies and honours the act of childbirth.
That’s until they’re taken away from us.
I seal my sister’s organ in the hygienic lidded ceramic pot I ordered on the internet from Berenden, lean over the edge of the bath and stand it on a towel. I climb out the bath in my black bikini, take the pot in my shrivelled hands, treating it safely, like a human gem, then pad across the cheap red bedroom rug to the door.
‘I’ll be back in ten minutes with breakfast, then,’ I say, rotating to face Grace, who’s breastfeeding her hungry identical baby twins, looking all rosy-cheeked and motherly. How will she ever cope with their loss? She looks exhausted from her ordeal, really needs to get some sleep, but she still manages to utter her heartfelt thanks to me, for all I’ve done for her tonight.
‘I honestly couldn`t have managed all this without you, Ruth.’
‘That’s what sisters are for, isn’t it?’ I say, comforting her, ‘Managing things like birthing babies.’
I have the ability to manage things extremely well when it comes to birthing, and change. Already planning their move, their transference, I walk out on to the landing to confront the babies’ father.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ I ask, boiling mad at him for letting down my sullied twin.
‘Hit a pothole in the road, got a flat tyre, had to get it changed. Sorry. You know I wouldn’t miss a moment like this if I could help it,’ he says, staring at another exposed hole in the landing carpet.
I wait until he has the bloody balls to look me right in the face.
‘I really am sorry.’
This time he seems to mean it, so, I calm a bit, ‘I should bloody well hope so. You might, at least, have called.’
‘Battery’s flat on my mobile. Forgot to charge it, didn’t I?’
I stare up at the flaking caramel cream emulsion hanging off the mouldy ceiling, my mood softens.
‘Well, you’re here now. I suppose that’s all that matters. She’ll surely be needing you to help her look after the twins while I’m away downstairs cooking her special breakfast.’
There’s no need for me to explain the word ‘special’. He knows the ritual Grace must go through.
O’Shea’s still wearing his dusty work overalls after his gruelling day’s toil spent building an ochre house extension in the pretty little village of Kintale, a village renowned for all its multi-coloured residences, its waterfront location at the start of Wild Atlantic Way, not to mention our incredible seafood. Bob employs a couple of navvies, his distant cousins Pat and Sean. Pat mans the hod, ferrying bricks precariously up a ladder for him to lay, and stews the tea. Sean mixes the pug and spreads cement. Neither of them are essential workers but the boss is getting on for sixty: he needs their support if he’s to keep up laying two thousand bricks a day. More than that, he enjoys their company on the building site. They give poor O’Shea the will to carry on living. As much as I do.
The bloody closure on all our lives, as he described lockdown, meant laying off his casuals, living off his life savings for months, reducing his families to poverty, near starvation for Pat and Sean’s families, until normal life resumed. Except, life didn’t resume as normal. The local tourist trade suffered as hordes of visitors were forced to stay indoors. Demand for O’Shea’s expensive house extensions fell off dramatically, and was painfully slow to recover. If truth be told, he considered selling up, finding a job with a major construction company, and moving to a new life in England, with Grace. Only my outrageous proposal prevented him from doing so.
‘You can go in now, darling,’ I tell him, my voice faltering a little, ‘You’re our father, once more.’
When we enter the bedroom, Grace is cradling her babies in both arms, crying softly to herself.
She looks to the father for some words of comforting reassurance, ‘Aren’t they beautiful, Bobby?’
Her breeder fluffs it, as usual, ‘Know you can’t keep them, don’t you Grace?’
‘I do,’ she says, sniffing, ‘Please, let me love them with all my heart before they take them away.’
We bow our heads out of a revered respect for her. The torment she must be going through inside. The utter shame and regret, her heartfelt remorse at her decision to sell her babies to the scientists.
O’Shea goes quiet and loving towards her, ‘They are, Grace, beautiful. Can I hold them, please?’
‘Not in those dirty things. Why don’t you take them off and join us in the bath? I’ll put on a wash.’
A biological father for the fifth time, he strips off and climbs into the water to be with mother and babies. They lie still in the water, like rare manatees, embracing: the lying father, an honest mother and her little baby girls. Father and mother share a private moment of intimacy: kissing, hugging, touching, holding each other, making each other blush while the deceitful man struggles to contain his true feelings – for me.
I flush a bit as I stand over the bath, watching him with their babies, as naked as the day he was born. Presently, I lift the lidded urn off the floor, go downstairs to the kitchen and cook my Grace her breakfast.
Minutes later, I serve my sister’s dish of thinly sliced placenta fried in vegetable oil, baked beans, scrambled eggs and wild mushrooms, some orange juice with bits from a carton, and a milky cup of tea with three sugars, on the pine dressing table, grab a clean fluffy white bath towel and hold it out for her to step into, transfixed by her reduced appearance, her slim body, appreciating my sister’s shapely figure now her belly has been emptied of its treasured contents, of our new lives.
I cast my mind back to when, as young, sylph, unsullied women, we swam wild in the lough, she held me, and I held her, and we kissed and touched and loved, and stand and stare at her naked in the bath…
‘Bobby, let go of me. Ruth’s watching us!’
O`Shea lets his woman drift out of his open arms. Grace passes him their babies to hold while she climbs out the water, takes her little girls back, and wraps them in clean white shrouds. She lays her girls to rest in simple wooden woven cradles, dries herself from top to toe, sits at the dressing table. Then she eats herself, coated in thick dollops of honeyed barbecue sauce, her twin’s chosen relish, to take the unpleasant coppery taste away.
‘This tastes delicious,’ she remarks with a mouthful of her afterbirth, chewing on a gristly morsel.
Distracted, I admire her man’s physique as he reaches for a bath towel, climbs out the bath, and dries his pot belly, his sturdy Greco-Roman thighs, his ripped chest, his bulging shoulders, his…
‘Glad you like it,’ I say, stooping, gathering my bra, briefs, surfing club sweatshirt, skinny jeans, anklets and deck shoes, which are lying in the driest corner of the room. I make for the doorway.
‘I’d best be going, sweet. Mind if I make myself some toast, tea, and have a shower before I go?’
Grace smiles: both of us were reared on toast and tea, ‘Not at all, sweet. Make yourself at home.’
O`Shea grins, amused at how we twins are so alike in speech, not just form.
‘I’ll be seeing you both, then.’
‘Be seeing you, as well. Oh, Ruth darling?’
I eyeball her, admiring herself in the dressing table mirror, gesturing to me with her greasy knife and fork that her indigestible ritual will soon be over. I confess, I’ve never seen my sister look so well, so emotionally fulfilled or beautiful. I want to be like her again soon blooming like a summer red rose, ‘Yes?’
She nods at her baby girls, sound asleep in their cradles, holy in their silence, then she nods at me, ‘I’d like to call this sweet angel Mary. And this cherub Annie. If that’s alright with you, that is?’
I give her my permission to name her girls Mary and Annie, ‘Only for their identification, mind.’
She can’t look me in the face, the influence, the power I exert over her life scares her, ‘Of course.’
Neither of us seek the father’s assent. His role in the creation of the twins as sperm donor is over.
He watches me as I exit the room, then turns his attention to my sister who has just finished eating. I stand in the bedroom doorway listening, watching him smooch and fawn over the tired mother.
‘You look all in, love. Why don’t you get yourself some rest? I’ll tend to the washing and laundry.’
‘You’re a good man, Bob,’ she admits, grinning, ‘You made a great father. Don’t know how you put up with me, what with my strangeness and all.’
He takes her in his arms and leads her to the nuptial bed, the bed where her beings were conceived, turns down the blanket, fluffs the pillow, holds her tight, then, kissing her lips, he lays her down to rest.
‘Don’t be daft. I’m proud of you,’ he says, pecking at her widow`s peak, ‘Sleep well. I love you.’
‘Love you, too,’ she shuts her eyes, drowsy, content at last: her need to have her babies fulfilled.
After what seems like an eternity to the both of us, our Grace falls into a deep, love-filled, slumber.
O’Shea sighs with relief.
Careful not to wake her up, since we can never really be sure whether she really is asleep or just pretending to be asleep, he climbs out the bed, walks past me without speaking, and crosses the landing to visit the bathroom.
Deep in thought, I clear the dirty dishes in silence, then I go downstairs to make myself breakfast.
There’s a lot on my mind at the moment. I’ve plans to put in motion for the babies. Calls to make.
