Free In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan Page A

It hung loosely on her finger but that didn’t matter, because the answer was yes. Having spent a childhood so sheltered from all the world’s cruel vagaries, she easily missed, or else chose to overlook as insignificant, the first corrupting signs of a dream shifting into the realms of nightmare.
    She’d been foolish, but all in the name of love, and plenty had made that irrevocable mistake. The first time he hit her he’d been drunk, had stumbled in late from celebrating a great Douglas hurling victory over the Rockies. He hit her the same way that he hit men outside Daisy Forde’s pub and only the fact that she had been rising from the chair and was therefore off balance at the moment of impact saved her from a broken nose or possibly worse. Still, the blow had been enough to streak the late hour with flames of pale light, and her sinuses flushed so quickly with the cloying tang of blood that she was certain she’d choke. She cried out and cupped her hands beneath her face in a futile effort to staunch the spill and protect her blouse from staining. He followed her as she stumbled through to the bedroom, his lumbering gait careening off walls and furniture, slurring threats about someone named Burke and that next time he’d kill her stone dead if he caught her so much as looking crooked at anyone. When he fell on her there was nothing to do but let him finish and try not to annoy him too much by crying. And when, the following day, he apologised for what had happened, he sounded so sincere and so strangled with guilt and self-loathing that she really wanted to believe it was the influence of the drink which had caused him to hit her. Many before her had made that mistake too. Love was stupid as well as blind.
    Years passed slowly and there was no salvation to be found in anything except retreat. She learned to sleepwalk through her days, to pack away her grief and to take the bruises and the broken bones as penance for her foolishness in walking so blindly into this life. On the single occasion that she tried to seek solace by confiding in her mother, she was told that she had made her bed and there was nothing to be done. That day, seated at the kitchen table of the farmhouse in which she had been reared, she sobbed while her mother looked on without sympathy for her predicament. When her father came in from the fields she had wanted to tell him too, but even when her mother went outside to the well for water to make tea the necessary words just refused to offer themselves.
    Less than a fortnight later, she suffered a miscarriage. She was thirteen weeks into her pregnancy when she collapsed in the garden and the new life that she was carrying flushed out onto the dirt of the yard. Lying in bed during the days and nights immediately after, she let her mind vie between competing lines of thought: the fantasy of how her child would have been, how beautiful and perfect once born and fully grown, and the reality of precisely which punch or kick had committed the heinous act of murder. Neighbours who visited told her that no one was to blame. She did her best to smile because she understood that they meant well, but there was blame here and everyone knew it. This was all her fault. She had married a brute, too stupid to know better, stupid for believing the notion that love was not the world’s biggest and filthiest lie. In her hunger to be wanted, she had looked at yellow and saw only blue. Paudie had led her on a merry dance, had filled her head with nonsense and had made her feel alive. Now it was Paudie’s hands that had dragged her by the hair from her place at the table, Paudie’s feet which had kicked her unborn baby to death as she lay curled in a protective ball on the cold flagstone floor. But it was she herself who had embraced a life sentence. Unaware of the damage that had been caused to her insides, the neighbours patted her gently on the shoulder as she lay in the bed that