Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin

luck, who knows?’ Gloria gives an elaborate shrug.

      They stare at her a moment before laughing aloud – nervous peals, admittedly, but better than none at all.

      ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ they repeat, mimicking the shrug.

      It’s their mantra, the three have parroted it for years when one of them has a setback. Unbelievably it does cheer them up.

      Gloria is almost enjoying their visit. Perhaps that’s an over-statement, since she’ll never rejoice in anything again, but they do distract her from her misery – and from Kate’s atomic conversational gambit of a few hours earlier.

      ‘How’d you end up with a private room?’ asks Kate, as she rips the cover off Eimear’s chocolates. ‘You could fly from Dublin to Florida and back for the price of a couple of nights.’

      ‘Mick’s job at the bank gives us free health cover.’

      Gloria is vague, she’s scrutinising the contents with the due gravity such an outsized package of cocoa solids deserves. Chinese farmers could probably grow enough rice to feed a family of eight on a patch of land the size of this box. The chocolates are called Inspirational Irish Women and they make their selection from such luminaries of Hibernian womanhood as Lady Gregory and Countess Markievicz. Kate chooses Maud Gonne so she can tell her Belfast hospital story again.

      ‘Remember the summer you worked as a domestic in the Royal?’ Gloria prompts her and she’s in like Flynn with the rest of the story.

      ‘One of the regular domestics was called Maud and if anyone asked for her when her shift was finished, I used to tell them, “Maud’s gone,” and then double over,’ she recalls. ‘None of them ever seemed to get the joke, they just thought it was a mistake to take on light-headed students.’

      ‘Which it was,’ interjects Eimear.

      ‘Which it was,’ agrees Kate. ‘The amount of pinching that went on was serious. I still have a conscience about the breast pump I stuffed into my holdall – I didn’t even know anyone who was breastfeeding. I ended up dumping it in the Lagan one night.’

      ‘You were young and stupid,’ consoles Eimear. ‘Weren’t we all.’

      ‘What’s my excuse now,’ Kate responds.

      It jolts Gloria back into a recollection of her friend’s transgression. How can she giggle with Eimear about student high-jinks when she’s behaving like a low life with her husband? This needs sorting – only not just yet. She aches too much to concentrate on anything but her own hurt.

      She watches her friends as they chatter, flicking through magazines and reading her get-well cards. Kate’s guessing who they’re from by the pictures on the front. She lifts one that reads ‘To My Darling Wife’ in gold lettering and says: ‘Next-door neighbour? The boss? No, it has to be from the cat.’

      ‘You fool,’ Eimear slaps her playfully.

      If only she knew, frowns Gloria, there’d be nothing light-hearted about that blow. But she can’t be the one to tell her. Can she? She sucks on a ragged fingernail and tunes out of their conversation, content simply to have them there in the room with her. Her two best friends. They interpreted it as a sign when they were chosen for the nativity play: they’d been singled out to become a troika.

      Ostensibly the roles went to the girls because they were the tallest in the class and the likeliest males, providing curls and dimples could be overlooked. But they knew better – it was meant to be. When three girls have been through the Loreto Convent school play together, wearing scratchy cotton-wool beards, it forms a bond. How they swanned about in their cornflake-box crowns.

      Gloria is six again and decked out in her mother’s ruby quilted dressing gown, trailing sleeves and trailing hem. Eimear was the black wise man and wore not just a crown but a turban too. Of course you’re only meant to have one or the other but when Eimear saw her friends’ gilded concoctions she threw a tantrum until the nuns gave in to her. And that took some scene because nuns aren’t ones for giving in: it sets a damaging precedent.

      Eimear carried the gold, Kate the frankincense and she had the mirror. That’s what they called it, initially by mistake and then as their first private joke. Gloria still has a photo of the three of them, looking bashfully exotic in their cobbled together finery, with Sister Thaddeus – the play’s director, casting manager and costumier – exposing an excessive quantity of gum alongside. She came from Dublin, the finest city in the world she claimed, and none of them could contradict her. At six you don’t tend to be well-travelled.

      ‘How far is Dublin from Omagh?’ they asked.

      ‘A hundred and twelve miles,’ she said – an immeasurable distance.

      After the nativity play they became a trinity. Three was their lucky number: there were three of them, that’s one trio; they were the three wise men, that’s another; each of them was six, that’s two threes; and they were all born in September, the ninth month, three threes.

      As teenagers they fantasised about forming one of those all-girl singing trios and taking on the pop world: Eimear as their lead singer, the blonde one that everyone could fancy. Kate and Gloria mopping up the stragglers – Kate with her copper hair and Gloria with her nearly black. Something for everyone in the audience. It never went beyond a few rehearsals of ‘Leader of the Pack’, with the girls cooing about meeting a biker in the candy store in dire American accents. Everyone sings in brutal American accents in Irish country towns, it’s the rule. They had their name picked out before the first rehearsal: The Unholy Trinity.

      They were inseparable all through school, then diverged to colleges in Belfast, Dublin and London – but it was only a trial separation because they all ended up together in Dublin. That was down to Eimear’s machinations because she kept sending the others ads for jobs cut out of the Dublin papers.

      ‘We might as well have conceded defeat the first time she mentioned us moving to Dublin because Eimear always gets what she wants, she’s one of life’s winners,’ reflects Gloria. ‘I’m one of life’s runners-up and Kate doesn’t even bother going under starter’s orders because she’s not in the same race.’

      Being stuck in hospital is an example of how she always falls at some hurdle or other. She wants a baby and becomes pregnant – so far so good. But it’s not a viable pregnancy, to use that delightful medical term fielded by Dr Hughes, so instead of a baby she ends up with an ambulance ride at 3 a.m., an operation and a chunk out of a fallopian tube. She thinks she’ll have a slash of a scar too, from the peek she took when Imelda was changing her dressing, although she doesn’t like looking at it. The place where they cut her baby out.

      Mick was throwing up while they operated on her. Hospitals have that effect on him.

      Mick’s her husband of eight years, the man she’s loved since a teenager. Wouldn’t you think they could take Dr Hughes’ advice, crassly expressed though it is, and push on with rupturing her other fallopian tube or planting a baby in the right spot? Not if her Michael has anything to do with it. He’s saying they have to take a break from babymaking, a proper break, until she mends – and Gloria has the distinct impression he means from sex as well as procreation. Not that she necessarily wants him to climb on her here and now in the hospital bed but she’d like to think there’d be some cavorting this side of the menopause.

      ‘The trouble is,’ she broods, I’m dealing with a man who looks relieved at the idea he’s under doctor’s orders to tuck his wife into the far end of the bed and drop a chaste kiss on her forehead.’

      To add insult to injury she has a nun who tells her what’s happened is God’s will, a doctor who predicts she’ll go on to produce a brood of seven and, the final ignominy, a bedpan below her backside. Which she’s actually grateful for. But at least the nurses are human and there’s always Kate and Eimear to bring her chocolates and set her laughing. Although it hurts her right side when she does, the missing-tube side where her baby clung fleetingly to life.