The Better Woman by Ber Carroll Read Free Book Online

little under the weather, love.’
    â€˜Why are you off to England?’
    â€˜Any friends over there to meet you?’
    â€˜Will you be staying long?’
    Sarah’s answers were weak, unconvincing.
    The woman stuffed a leaflet into her hand. It read,
Pro Life
.
    â€˜Please don’t do it,’ she whispered in an imploring voice.
    Sarah realised that the woman was a regular on the boat, on the watch for pale worried young women, with small talk targeted to establish the purpose of their trip, all in the hope of saving unborn babies.
    â€˜It’s none of your business,’ she muttered and threw the leaflet in the bin.
    A girl Sarah met at the clinic, whose name she didn’t know, told her that it was a nurse’s full-time job to reassemble the parts ofthe babies to ensure they had been fully removed. Sarah couldn’t get the image out of her mind. Was it true?
    She was given Panadol and antibiotics on leaving the clinic and reminded that she had to go for a check-up in six weeks. The drugs didn’t work. The cramps were excruciating. Were they normal? Or were they pangs of guilt?
    Bus to Pembroke, rocky crossing on the ferry, bus to Cork. Almost home. How could she look Peggy in the eye? The girl in the clinic had also said that whilst the mother was given an anaesthetic, the baby wasn’t given anything. Was that true? Did the baby feel itself being taken out bit by bit?
    Sarah turned her head towards the bus window so that the other passengers wouldn’t see her tears. Why had this feeling of horror taken so long to surface? Why hadn’t it made its presence felt when she had been on the bus leaving Cork? Why hadn’t she met that girl somewhere else, before it was too late for both of them?
    Icy rain dashed against the window. Sarah was overcome with bleakness. Those last few weeks of summer, the happiness of being with John, the headiness of their illicit love-making, all that seemed a world away now. John was lost to her. She was lost to herself.
    She cried the whole way back to Cork. For the baby. For John. For Peggy, who would be devastated if she knew the truth. For the nurse, if there was one, who had to piece the babies back together. For her mother, because if she’d been alive there might have been some other way forward.

Chapter 5
    Sarah went through the motions of everyday life. She attended lectures, drank the awful coffee at the college canteen and made small talk with her classmates. At home she picked at her dinner, helped in the shop and tried, mostly in vain, to finish the day with some study. But her daily routine was an act, a farce. Inside she was dead.
    Nuala was the only one who had any inkling of how bad she felt.
    â€˜You need to talk about it,’ she urged.
    â€˜No,’ Sarah shook her head vehemently. ‘Talking makes it worse.’
    At night, in her bed, she wept and wept, her knuckles pressed against her mouth, muffling the sound so it wouldn’t travel to Peggy’s room. She hated herself for being so stupid as to get pregnant. She hated herself for being so spineless as to have an abortion. She hated herself, period. By the time morning camearound, the skin around her eyes was taut with dried tears, and her insides were hollowed out by self-hatred.
    She thought a lot about her mother, particularly late at night, as she wept. Kathleen Ryan: mother at twenty, dead at twenty-three. Had she ever made a mistake of this proportion? Had she ever felt that she’d totally and irrevocably screwed up her life?
    Sarah had known from a young age that her mother had died from kidney failure. She’d accepted it at face value. Mother: kidney failure. Father: motorbike accident. Was it that cut and dried?
    â€˜Why did her kidneys fail?’
    Peggy, knitting by the fireside, stalled over her stitch.
    â€˜Because her health was bad,’ she replied. ‘She hardly ate.’
    â€˜Why? Was she anorexic?’
    â€˜Not