My Notorious Life by Kate Manning Page A

Don’t look.
    I promised I wouldn’t, but already I seen the coverlet beneath her was covered with dark clots of matter. Her legs was flashes of white in the dark room, smudged with swipes of blood. —Get away! she said, and I went back to the kitchen where I listened with clamped ears to my mother’s noises, such cries as a banshee’s keening, till after a long while there came some terrible last effort like dying, and a sudden new silence. My mother’s deep breaths came shuddering and occasional. After a time, she called to me in a whisper. When I went to the corner I saw her lying spent, with her one solitary arm flung over her head, the legs straight out before her again, the tent collapsed.
    —The blanket, she whispered. —Lift it but only a little.
    With mortal fear that I might see my mother’s naked bum, I raised a corner. There in the dimness, between her stained white knees and lying in a puddle of gore, appeared the form of my half sibling. Strings of hair were clotted on the scalp and a live rope of milky blue throbbed from the midsection, threaded with vessels and veins. It was a terrible sight to behold, my sister red and steaming in the cold air, like a coney freshly skinned.
    —Lift the child up now, my mother instructed, so weak.
    —But Mam.
    —Do as I tell you, she said, very grim. —Mind the cord and don’t pull.
    And so I lifted the wee slippery creature, my hands on the warm bare skin. The blue rope hung off, pulsing and alive, and I stared at it dumbfounded to see it was attached somewhere to my mother. She now ordered me to hold the ankles in the one hand like you do a stew rabbit and pat the child on the back to start it breathing, so I done as she said, with one finger between the ankle bones, and swatted the baby’s back. The pelt on it was wrinkled and white with matter. My sister coughed then and splayed her miniature fingers in the air. Her toes were small as kernels of corn.
    —A wee girl, I said.
    —God help her, whispered my exhausted mother. —Give her over to me now.
    I placed her gingerly on Mam’s middle and covered her with a piece of muslin of the type we used to strain curds. The baby cried a small mew. Mam lay there wrecked. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead, and her eyes closed. Without opening them, she ordered me to find a bit of string or a bootlace.
    We had a string left off a bread packet and she instructed me to tie the umbilicus in two places, close to the baby’s little belly, then saw between the two strings with the knife. I followed her directions with as steady a hand as I could, despite the rebellions of my stomach. My mother praised me. —Good girl, Axie, there’s a good girl. What would I do without you? she said, so I felt some desperate love well up in my tonsils. Her face was ghastly pale and I feared death had come into her and nested in the place where my sister had resided.
    I sat on the bed. Mam rested on my shoulder, and the two of us looked down at the wee girl yawping now in the crook of my elbow. Her miniature mouth groped sideways in the air like a blind thing, yearning. She cried her small cat noise and wobbled against the stump of our mother’s missing arm.
    —Oh how will I nurse her? Mam said, suddenly weeping.
    —Same as us others, I said.
    Mam stared down at her new daughter, a raw look so helpless in her eyes.
    —What shall we name her? I asked.
    My mother did not reply.
    —Call her Kathleen, I said. —For the song you like, Kathleen Mavourneen.
    —Fine. Take her then.
    I took Kathleen and cleaned her according to Mam’s instructions and wrapped her again in a blanket and the bunting I sewed.
    —Shh there now. I will not let you go at all, at all, little scrap, I whispered, and she looked back at me so serene. A chemist had mixed an elixir in her gaze to smite me, for I loved her very fierce already, and she loved me.
    Late in the evening, Mr. Duffy came home bringing sausage and tea and a hangdog look of dread,