My Sister's Child Read online

  Jo had studied law in university. It was one of the highest-pointed courses in the country so of course Jo had to do it because she liked a challenge. Isla knew that if you told Jo that she couldn’t do something, then she would do it to prove you wrong and then she’d do it again just because you doubted her the first time. She was determined and Isla often wished that she had her balls.

  Isla had always found it hard growing up in the shadow of an over-achiever.The teachers in school when Isla came into their class four years after they had taught Jo, would say “Your sister would have known the answer to that question, Isla” or “Your sister had no bother learning her tables when she was your age – you’re just lazy, you know”. The very worst day of the year was the day of her parent-teacher meetings. Her mother would always come home from them in a bad mood. She would stand in the kitchen with her eyes closed, massaging her temples in slow, circular movements and Isla would know that, yet again, she was in trouble. Jo’s report would have been glowing, of course, but Isla’s was always bad. Their mum had always said that Isla liked being difficult, that everyone was born with a certain disposition and Isla’s was to be troublesome.

  Isla had been born on the 27th of June 1976, one of the warmest days of the year, one of the warmest days ever recorded in Ireland. There was an extreme heat wave that summer. Their dad had said the air was hot and foetid. Everything and everyone stank. Dog-shit sat on the pavements scorched white by the sun. The rivers had dried up so shopping trolleys, broken buggies and bicycle wheels with fractured spokes lay beached in the sludge. Plants folded over on themselves, their leaves singed brown by the sun, wilting and dying of thirst. The reservoirs had started to dry up too so water was rationed and there was no water for baths or washing cars or watering plants and everywhere you went people tutted and said, ‘Isn’t it a terror? You’d think with all the rain we have in this country, from one end of the year to the other, that we’d have a drop of water left in the taps!’

  As she prepared to leave the hospital with her, Isla’s mother had only needed to dress her in a terrycloth nappy with a light sheet as a covering. It was too hot to wear the crocheted cardigans and booties that she’d had waiting for the baby. She sat into the backseat of the car with her baby in her arms and had exhaled heavily just as the news bulletin on the radio announced that it was going to hit thirty-two that day.

  “Imagine, in Ireland!” her dad had said.

  They drove the whole way home with the windows down and the blowers set to cool, to try and get some air circulating.

  It wasn’t long until they pulled up outside their house and, before her mother could even get out of the car, the neighbours who were out packing to head off to the beach for the day stopped tying their deckchairs to the roofs of their cars and stuffing cooler boxes into their boots for a few minutes and crowded around to see the new baby. Her mother finally managed to wrestle her out of their arms and brought her into the house to meet her older sister Jo who was being minded by her mother’s sister Carole. They had called Jo over and told her that it was her new baby sister, Isla, and told her that the baby had brought her a doll. Jo hadn’t been impressed and had stubbornly refused to take the doll no matter how much they tried to coax her. Their mother was upset by her reaction but their father had said to give it time, that it was a big adjustment for a four-year-old to realise that she was no longer the sole focus of her parents’ affections.

  But the cold shoulder had continued for the rest of the day and later, when her mother attempted to breastfeed Isla, Jo tried to pull her mother away. When that didn’t work, she started to claw at her, digging in with her nails so that their mum had had no choice but to take the infant Isla upstairs to her bedroom. Jo stormed up the stairs after them and again tried to prise her mum away from her new baby sister. When she realised that the baby was physically attached to her, she threw a tantrum so bad that she hurled herself onto the landing and started screaming. She kicked the backs of her small heels against the pine floorboards, rolling back and forth and, before anyone could stop her, she tumbled off the top step and fell down the stairs. Their mother had screamed in horror while their dad frantically chased after her as Jo’s small body fell all the way from the top step, right down the thirteen others below it before his eyes. She had finally come to a stop on the clear plastic runner in the middle of their hallway that their mum had bought to protect the orange shag-pile carpet. Isla was left on the bed as her mother rushed down to where Jo was splayed on the floor after knocking herself flat unconscious. They thought she was dead. Their father had called an ambulance and they prayed over her until it got there. Jo came around on the journey to the hospital but they kept her in overnight for observation as a precaution. She ended up with a small scar that cut diagonally through her right eyebrow. Their mother put Isla on the bottle after that.

  For Isla’s entire life their mother had said that she brought trouble, that it followed her around and lingered wherever she went. Just like what happened on the day she came home from hospital. Their mother used to blame it on the heat wave that she was born into. She reckoned that the extreme weather did funny things to people’s heads. It brewed tempers and stewed restlessness. Like their neighbour Mrs McCarthy who left Mr McCarthy that August after thirty-six years of marriage – she just up and left one day, collected her pension in the post-office, stopped off to say a prayer in the church and never came home again. Just as the characters in a Shakespearian tragedy are mercurial with the heat, their mother had said, the same thing had happened to Mrs McCarthy.

  Jo was born in the February of ’72. But of course she wasn’t a Leap Day baby – no, well-timed as always, she had missed that by three days. And nothing remarkable had happened weather-wise that year either; it wasn’t exceptionally hot or cold, in fact it was “mild” their father had said.

  The heat wave was her mother’s explanation for everything that Isla did. She said that it had irreparably affected her. But Isla didn’t mean to be troublesome – she wasn’t doing it on purpose as her mother seemed to think – she just found school really difficult.

  Jo, in her defence, seemed to be just as uncomfortable with the comparisons as Isla was. “Just ignore them, Isla,” she would say. “Everyone knows that your teacher, Mrs Wallace, goes into the toilet to drink whiskey during class.”

  Having Jo there to show her up was like when you painted the skirting boards of a room and then all the other white woodwork looked dull and worn by comparison and you ended up having to paint the window frames, ceilings and doors too. That was what it was like having Jo around. Isla would have been fine as she was but once Jo was there she always contrasted badly.

  The only person who never compared them was their dad. He would pull Isla up onto his lap where he was sitting reading his broadsheet newspaper. “Come up here, mo ghrá, and tell me what you have been up to today?” he would say and Isla would climb up and point at the photos that sometimes accompanied the news pieces and ask him what they were about. There was the picture of the woman that her father didn’t like because he called her “that Thatcher wan” and his face would grimace like even having her name on his lips tasted badly. There was the athlete Carl Lewis being presented with his fourth gold medal of the 1984 Olympics. Another photograph showed mounds of rubble lining a street after a bomb had ripped it apart in Belfast. There were men running out of buildings with masks over their faces: Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four had exploded.

  There were a lot of pictures of babies with swollen stomachs. Bluebottle flies swarmed around their heads and their chocolate-brown eyes stared back at them from the pages.

  “Why do they look like that, Dad?” she had asked.

  “They live in Ethiopia, Isla, love. They’ve had no rain there in months and their crops can’t grow so they’ve no food to eat. They’re starving.”

  She had thought back guiltily to the uneaten sandwiches in her lunchbox at school earlier that day. “But can’t we just give them so
me of ours?” she had asked.

  “You’d think it would be that simple, wouldn’t you?” he had said, nodding in agreement with her. “They should have you in talking sense to those government big-wigs! Oh, the world is a strange place, mo ghrá.”

  Isla was content like that. She didn’t feel stupid. With her father she could say things without the fear of being laughed at. He had a way of making her questions sound interesting. If she told him said that her teachers said she was stupid, he would say “Never mind them – we all have our own talents and we just have to find them.”

  When she was a child, she would spend hours drawing and doodling, concentrating on getting it just right and rubbing out with her eraser if she had gone slightly wrong and going back to the start again. She knew that that was what her dad had meant when he had said that we each have our own talents. Isla could sketch people in better likeness than anyone in her class and she knew that she had found her own talent just like her dad had said she would.

  Ironically, it was the only thing that Isla could think of that Jo wasn’t good at. She could not draw. When Réiltín was small, she would ask Jo to draw her a picture of a cat or something and Isla could see Jo tensing up with the need to get it right and make it perfect like everything else she did in her life, but inevitably the cat would look more like a pig and then they would all explode with laughter.

  Isla had taken Jo’s advice a few years back and enrolled in a night course in animation but she had to drop out after a few weeks because she wasn’t able for it. Looking back, she was stupid to have even thought that she could do something like that. The drawing part itself was fine, but after the first class she had known that she was in over her head. She wasn’t able to keep up with everyone when it came to the theory side of things. She had naïvely thought animation was just drawing but there was a lot more to it than that. It was all 3D modelling software and storyboarding. Their tutor would give the class a project to research but Isla couldn’t get her head around the books she was supposed to read, when it seemed so easy to everyone else. She would sit with hot palms and beads of sweat would break out across her back as she prayed that the tutor wasn’t going to ask her for her opinion next. She would panic if she had to read out loud because she couldn’t concentrate on the jumbling letters in front of her. She would go home exhausted from the class, with a pounding tension headache. She wasn’t enjoying the course; it was just pressure and stress. She had lain awake in bed at night, imagining all kinds of horrible scenarios that could happen in the next week’s class, like the one where she would go to draw but suddenly find that she had lost the ability and then the teacher would pronounce her stupid in front of everyone and tell her to go back to the café and stop dreaming stupid dreams. Isla felt as though the fun was gone once you added rules to something.

  Anyway she was quite happy with the way her life was. She knew exactly how much money she would take home at the end of the week, plus a little extra surprise when they divided up the tip jar between them all. She knew what her rent cost, how much she needed to put aside for food and bills and then everything else was hers to spend as she wished. She would have hated to have what Jo had. The pressure of having a mortgage, bills, membership fees and all that increased the higher up the corporate ladder you went. She had seen Jo’s bills and, although she knew that her sister earned a lot of money, it made her come out in a cold sweat at the thought of having all that responsibility. It was like a treadmill you couldn’t get off because you had so many anchors tying you down. Isla liked to keep it simple. Her ESB and Gas contracts were as tied down as she could get. She even had a pay-as-you-go phone, which Jo laughed at because she said that it was probably costing her twice as much doing it that way – but at least Isla knew where she stood with it. The higher up you ascended in the world, the more anchors you gathered – that was the way Isla saw it.

  Chapter 11

  The Fertility Clinic

  The buses always turned right onto King’s Road. They stopped in front of the supermarket and then beside the library, before finally getting to the stop at the cinema where that day Isla was standing in the lashing rain underneath her umbrella. Finally she saw the bus approaching in the distance. As it pulled up, the wheels dipped into a large puddle at the side of the path and she had to jump backwards to avoid the splash. The hydraulic doors hissed as they parted. She climbed up and slotted her coins into the machine. Tearing off her ticket, she made her way down the swaying aisle and slotted into a seat behind a woman with a toddler. The child kneeled up on the seat, facing backwards, and stared at her. She tried smiling at him but his face remained expressionless.

  The day had come for her first appointment in the fertility clinic. She had marked the appointment time on her calendar with a large black ‘X’ and then she had asked Greg for the time off in work.

  “I hope there’s nothing wrong, Isla?” he had asked over her shoulder as she lowered a tray of scones into the oven, the heat hitting her like a wall. “You’ve had a few appointments lately – you’re okay, aren’t you?”

  She shut the oven door and turned around to him. She could see the concern in his face.

  “Nah, it’s just a dentist appointment,” she said.

  “Oh well, in that case rather you than me!” The sides of his mouth had moved up into a grin.

  It had crossed her mind that she could still just bin the appointment and forget about the whole thing and nobody need ever know what she had been contemplating – but then she had dreamt of the baby again and the longing felt more powerful than ever. She needed to hold him in her arms and she knew that this was the only way.

  When she’d got out of bed that morning she’d thought she was going to be sick. She hadn’t been able to stomach breakfast so she had just showered, dressed, put on her parka and left the house. She really wasn’t sure if she was doing the right thing but it was like some unknown force was propelling her forward, making her take the next step. She had read about predestination a while ago, the belief that our lives are already predetermined and that, even when we make a decision, it is the decision we were always going to make anyway. And that was how she felt at that moment, like this was the path her life was to go down, this was where all the decisions and choices that she had made in the past had now led her and this was her fate. She was going along with it like a seed carried on the wind.

  She scanned the numbers above the door and eventually she came upon the clinic. It was located in a redbrick Georgian townhouse on Fitzwilliam Square where people hurried up and down steps into the offices of architects and solicitors and language schools. Isla climbed the steps and went into a bright, modernly decorated reception area. Immediately the place made her feel nervous – everything about it oozed money and she wasn’t sure she belonged there or even if she could afford it. She had heard that they offered payment plans and this was what she was relying on. The receptionist took her details, before showing her into the waiting room. She looked around her and noticed that all of the other seats were taken up with couples – she was the only singleton. Some spoke in whispered tones to each other while others sat silently, almost like strangers sitting beside each other. Glossy fashion magazines sat neatly on the coffee table in front of her. She declined the offer of tea or coffee. She rooted out an old National Geographic with well-thumbed pages from the bottom of the pile and flicked through it. She watched as the people before her were called until finally she was shown in to see the consultant, Dr Harvey.

  Dr Harvey was a tall man and he greeted Isla with an almost vice-like handshake, gesturing for her to sit down at his desk. It was one of those eerily clean desks with nothing on it bar a photo frame of three red-haired children with white-blonde eyebrows. Isla noticed the eldest child, a boy, had the same sloping forehead as his father.

  “So, Isla, you’re very welcome. I’m going to start by asking you a few questions to allow me to learn some more about you and then I can give you more information about our ser
vices.”

  Isla nodded.

  “So are you married or do you have a partner?”

  “I’m single actually.”

  “Okay, I’m seeing more and more women just like you who are choosing to go down this route, because life hasn’t presented them with the partner they thought they’d have at this stage of their lives, so they have to make the decision to go it alone. So just to reassure you, you are not the first woman and you certainly won’t be the last woman that comes into my clinic like this.”

  She nodded anxiously.

  He continued on reading down through his questionnaire. He stopped when he came to the questions about her menstrual cycle. She had told him that her cycle was irregular.

  “How irregular?” he asked. He had an annoying habit of clearing his throat repeatedly.

  “Well, I can’t remember when I last had my period – maybe a few months back?”

  He made a note of something on her file.

  “And you’re almost forty, right?”

  “Well, I’m nearly thirty-nine actually.”

  “Okay, well, the first thing I need to do is to make sure you are fully aware of the implications of gamete donation.”

  “I already am, I –”

  “Well, I still need to make sure. I wouldn’t be doing my job properly otherwise.” He cleared his throat again. “The first step in any donor programme is counselling. We need to be sure that you are aware of the legal and ethical issues of what you are undertaking.” He paused for a moment. “We would also need to talk to you about your plans for caring for a child on your own.”

  She swallowed back a lump that seemed to have lodged in her throat. Suddenly it all seemed very real.

  “There is another matter,” he went on. “In the past donors could elect to be either anonymous or identifiable, but under the new Child and Family Relationships Act that will soon be enacted a national donor-conceived child register is being established and the right to anonymity will be removed. Whereas in the past, prior to this new law, anonymous donors were given explicit assurance of anonymity, when this legislation is changed we in this clinic will be obliged to seek personal information from the donor to allow for tracing. So under the new legislation children born using a donor will, at the age of consent, be entitled to the donor’s identifying information if they so wish. Now this does not mean that you as a parent will automatically receive the donor’s identifying information nor is the donor allowed to receive information about the identity of the recipient couple or the child – but any donor-conceived child will be entitled to the information down the line. So this is something that I would ask you to give a lot of thought to. Once the register comes into effect, the right to use an anonymous donor will no longer be allowed so you need to think about how comfortable you would feel if any resulting child from the treatment wanted to be able to get in touch with the donor in the future.”