Landing with a crash on the ground below, she lay on her back for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, gasping for breath. Inside her belly, I protested strongly at the insult and decided that my time had come, and my mother let out a ferocious scream as I broke free of the womb and began my first journey.
Pulling herself to her feet, she looked around. Another woman in her position might have opened the front door and thrown herself out onto Chatham Street, roaring for help. But not Catherine Goggin. Seán was dead, she was certain of that, but Smoot was still up there and she could hear him pleading for his life and then the sounds of violence, the screams of pain, the curses that lashed down on the boy’s head as Seán’s father attacked him too.
Crying out with every movement, she dragged herself up the first step, up another and another until she had ascended halfway. She screamed as I made my presence felt and there was something in her mind, she told me later, that said I had waited nine months, I could wait another nine minutes. She continued her climb, entering the flat with perspiration running down her face, water and blood seeping down her legs, frightened by the image of the madwoman in the mirror opposite with the bedraggled hair, split lip and torn dress. From the room beyond, Smoot’s cries were growing less pronounced as the kicks and the whips of the stick continued, and she stepped over Seán’s body, glancing quickly at the open eyes on his once-beautiful face, and had to stop herself from crying out in grief.
I’m on my way, I thought as she moved forward purposefully, looking around the room for a weapon before her eyes landed on the hurley that Smoot had dropped on the floor. Are you ready for me?
One swift swing was all it took, God love her, and Peadar MacIntyre lay knocked out. Not dead—he would live for eight more years, in fact, eventually choking on a fishbone in his local pub, the jury having set him free, finding that his crime had been committed under the extreme provocation of having a mentally disordered son—but unconscious, and my mother and I threw ourselves down on Smoot’s body, the poor lad’s face muddled with the beating, his breath disordered, close enough to death now too.
“Jack,” she cried, cradling his face in her lap and then letting out a blood-curdling shriek as everything in her being told her to push, to push now, and my head began to emerge from between her legs. “Jack, stay with me. Don’t die; do you hear me, Jack? Don’t die!”
“Kitty,” said Smoot, the word muffled as it emerged from his mouth along with a couple of broken teeth.
“And don’t fucking call me Kitty!” she roared, screaming once again as more of my body squeezed itself out into the August night.
“Kitty,” he whispered, his eyes beginning to close, and she shook him as the pain racked through her body.
“You have to live, Jack,” she cried. “You have to live!”
And then she must have passed out, for silence was restored to the room until a minute later, when I took advantage of the peace and quiet to push the rest of my tiny body onto the filthy carpet of the upstairs flat on Chatham Street in a bundle of blood and placenta and slime. I waited a few moments to gather my thoughts before opening my lungs for the first time and with an almighty roar, one that must have been heard by the men in the pub below who came running up the staircase to discover the cause of such a racket, announced to the world that I had arrived, that I was born, that I was part of it all at last.
1952 The Vulgarity of Popularity
One Little Girl in a Pale-Pink Coat