Good Girl
Catherine is at the back of the church, high up in the rear
gallery. It is thronged with people, standing-room only here at the top of
the stairs, where there is barely a toehold. She can see right down the length
of the nave to where the coffin stands in front of the altar, covered in white flowers.The height of her vantage-point puzzles her; she rifles back
through the compartments of her memory. Is she with her father, a three-year-old
in his arms, at Sunday Mass, the day he turned on his heel and carried her out
again, for being noisy, and she, for the most part, being such a good girl? No,
higher again. Perhaps she is sitting on his shoulders? But he would never do
that in church, surely.
Her eyes scan the crowd below; she recognises people from
the village where she lives, friends. She realises with a start that she is
looking down on the heads of the folk in the back gallery, as if she is, in
fact, somewhere higher again, close to the timber roof. Suspiciously, she scans
the row of mourners in the front right-hand pew. She counts off her three
siblings, one by one; her husband. Perhaps it is the funeral of one of her
parents. Her father, maybe? But her mother is not there either, among the bent
and sorrowing heads. But where is she? With a jolt, she realises that she is
absent.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she thinks. ‘It’s my own funeral. I'm out of
here’.
And with that, she comes to, in the delivery room.
She has blacked out momentarily from the primal pain of the
contraction, the effort of the push.
‘Is the baby born yet?’ she asks, desperately hoping that,
in the time she was absent, it is all over and done with, for she fears that
she could not endure that terrible pain again, and wonders, panicked, if she might
not return should she depart a second time.
‘No’ replies the kindly midwife. ‘But you’re nearly there. Good
girl’.
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