Grievance. Marguerite Alexander

      Suddenly she could bear the suspense no longer. She went out into the empty hall and tracked the new voices to her parents’ bedroom, but the door was closed. She wandered into the kitchen and there was her father, standing at the kitchen counter staring at the teapot and waiting for the kettle to boil. He turned when he heard her and looked at her, not as if he had never seen her before but as if he now saw her differently and was having to make up his mind about something.

      ‘The house is full of priests and doctors and it’s all cups of tea and little snacks, though if I know Father McCaffrey there’ll be no leaving this house until he’s seen the whiskey bottle.’

      ‘I’ve a baby brother, then,’ said Nora.

      ‘That’s right,’ said Gerald. ‘And I have a son. What every man’s supposed to want. Am I not right? They do say, be careful of making a wish, it might come true. You know what’s going through my mind?’

      Nora shook her head.

      ‘There’s this book, Nineteen Eighty-four, written by this Englishman, years ago, before anybody knew what 1984 would be like, but he made it sound like the end of the world, the people not really human – not what you could call human – any more. Well, this is 1984, so we must give him the credit for getting something right.’

      He loaded the tray with tea and fruit cake, cups and saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl, and Nora realised she had never seen him perform even the smallest household task before. All that had been left to her mother. In its way, the sight of her father fussing over cups and saucers was as frightening as anything else that had happened that day, and she wondered whether that was the way it was going to be from now on.

      Lifting the tray, he said, ‘I’ll take this through to the vultures who’ve come to prey on our misery.’

      When he had left the room, Nora sat at the kitchen table, eating the cake crumbs and bits of dried fruit left in the tin. Her father hadn’t asked her if she had eaten, what kind of day she had had, how Mrs Daly had been towards her. He hadn’t said when he would be back to attend to her, whether her mother had been asking for her, or given any clue as to how life would proceed. All these concerns had to a degree displaced her fears about the baby, but she was also doing her best not to dwell on her new brother. In particular she avoided visualising him. She sat there while the telephone rang intermittently and was answered elsewhere in the house, staring at the empty blackness of the window, where nobody had thought to draw her mother’s flower-patterned curtains.

      After what seemed a very long time, she heard her parents’ bedroom door open, and then her father was with her again.

      ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘Father McCaffrey and Dr Murphy want a word with you.’

      He didn’t take her hand but led the way to the bedroom, where he waited at the door while she went inside. He didn’t go in himself, but closed the door behind her from outside. Opposite, her mother was sitting up in bed, with the cradle she had prepared for the baby beside her. She gave Nora a wan smile, as if everything was out of her hands. This in itself was not unusual since, within the family, she had always seemed the least powerful of the three, taking directions from her husband on most household matters, and resentfully acknowledging that she came after Nora in his affections.

      What was more startling was that, while she was recognisable of course, she seemed completely different, as though she had been rearranged. She looked as though something had happened to her face, though it was impossible to say what. Nora carried around with her the memory of her mother’s face that day and, years later, when she heard a woman describe herself as ‘shattered’, by what seemed to Nora a rather trivial event – she came to judge much of the substance of other people’s lives as trivial – she thought, ‘Yes, that’s it. She had been shattered, broken up and hastily put together again, but none of the pieces fitted in quite the way they had before, not any more.’

      At the foot of the bed were Father McCaffrey and Dr Murphy, one on each side, like guardians. Nora saw a look pass between them and, after a nod from the priest, the doctor cleared his throat.

      ‘Well now, Nora,’ he said. Nora had often been taken to visit him, or had received visits from him at home, and he was always brisk and reassuring. Now he was frowning with concentration, as if struggling to find a manner appropriate to the occasion. ‘We thought you should be told – it’s always best to be clear about these things from the beginning. Your little brother has what’s known as Down’s syndrome. At one time he would have been called a “mongol”, a term you might still hear people use, but now we prefer Down’s syndrome, after the man who discovered it.’

      Before he could go on with his explanation, Father McCaffrey, who appeared to think that the doctor had struck the wrong note, interrupted: ‘These are very special children, Nora. Special to God, who wants us to cherish them, so he only sends them to those families he knows will give them the love and care they need.’

      Nora said nothing, as she tried to assimilate the implications of ‘special’. She had always been led to understand that she was special, but there was evidently more than one kind of special.

      As if sensing her confusion, Dr Murphy said, ‘He won’t develop in quite the way you have, he won’t learn so quickly. But you’ll find yourself surprised at some of the things he can do and he will be a very loving brother to you.’

      ‘Exactly,’ said Father McCaffrey. ‘They’re generally very loving, and you shouldn’t bother your head too much with what he can and can’t do. Too much is made of all that in the world today. He’ll be special to God because of his innocence, and that’s a very precious gift indeed.’

      Nora nodded, feeling that something was required of her, but really her mind was elsewhere. The doctor had said ‘mongol’. That was what the word had been, not ‘gerbil’.

      ‘Now, I know we don’t need to tell you to be a really good girl, and to help your mother and your wee brother as much as you can,’ said Father McCaffrey.

      Nora glanced across at her mother. She certainly looked in need of help.

      ‘Now, why don’t we leave you here, to start getting to know your brother and to have some time with your mummy?’ the priest concluded. The doctor said something to her mother about visits and midwives, then they both turned to go. On their way to the door, however, the doctor paused briefly to catch Nora’s eye and give her a sad smile.

      Everything about that day had been strange – not just Mrs Daly and the strange woman who had come and sat in the kitchen as though it were completely natural, and her father’s changed manner towards her, and the doctor and the priest referring to her brother all the time as “they”, as though he weren’t a single baby but one of a group, all identical: the presence in their house of a priest who behaved as though he were entitled to exercise some authority was also a novelty. Her father was not a practising Catholic, and while he didn’t actively discourage priests from visiting, he liked them to know that their presence was on his terms. If they were going to drink his whiskey, he would say, then he had every right to give them his opinion of the papacy, or of the role they had played in keeping people poor and ignorant.

      Now, just as strange as anything else was the sudden silence in the room and Nora feeling instantly at a loss. Something seemed to be required of her and she didn’t know what. It didn’t seem that her mother was in a position to offer her a direction on how to behave in these changed circumstances. Tentatively, she walked along the side of the bed towards her mother and the baby. She wondered whether she ought to kiss her mother, but felt estranged and awkward. Instead she said, ‘Will I look at the baby?’

      ‘If you want,’ said her mother indifferently.

      Nora peered into the cradle and all her anxieties suddenly evaporated. He was, after all, just a baby, not unlike any other that she had seen. No, that wasn’t quite true since he had long, fair hair – hair the same colour as her mother’s, just as she had her father’s black hair – and all the other babies she had seen had been bald. She bent over and touched his hair and was