The Lost Souls' Reunion by Suzanne Power

only the previous evening.
    â€˜One more plane, one coat of wood oil. No varnish for the child. Let the child feel the wood proper, wood is good stuff to be felt. We know that.’ Eddie was more in a hurry now than before. His desire for neatness overtaken by the desire to be done in time.
    â€˜Don’t worry, Eddie,’ Carmel tried to rub his shoulders but they were knotted now with intent. ‘The baby can sleep with us in the big bed for a few days.’
    â€˜That’s no place for a baby – a big bed. The child will be lost in the bigness of it. The child needs its own place, to start off in the world knowing where and what it is.’
    Carmel had watched, without words, until the pains began.
    They did not expect either Carmel or me to live. But my cry grew stronger and I was calling for Carmel. My mother did not hear it. She had slid down the long passageway up which I had just travelled. How and why she came back into her body is a mystery. Perhaps the heron still held her.
    When she recovered I was already two months old, had been held by her only a handful of times. The voices had returned to her and my mother fought with them this time, for the sake of the child that I was.
    The voices wore habits and said, ‘Do what is best for the child.’
    Carmel could write her name, but she would not sign the papers that would have given me away. When my mother had me in her arms she knew she would not let this child of dark skin and unknown parentage go.
    â€˜This child will be a liability to your life,’ the old sister in charge said gently, ‘but a blessing to others. Leave her with us and find a life of your own.’
    My mother called me Sive. It came to her from a time in Scarna when a theatre company had come to the town and brought with them a woman more fine and free than any other woman had seemed.
    Sive was not the name on my certificates. The nuns who ran the home we had been placed in chose that name. They changed my name just as they changed the young woman’s name from Carmen to Carmel when she first came to them.
    The certificates that made me known to the world said, Mary Moriarty. Father unknown. Mother: Carmel Moriarty. Place of Birth: St Margaret’s Home, Ealing.
    She was asked to leave. The nuns bid us both farewell with a heavy heart, but their conscience intact, for they could not offer her anything while she remained a woman with a child and no wedding ring.
    Where else was there for us to go?

8 ∼ Back to the Streets
    B ACK TO THE STREETS Carmel went, back to Carmen.
    Carmen’s madness protected her. The ponces did not want the woman who it was said had started a fire in Brewer Street in which one man lost his life. They did not want a woman with a child, who walked the streets now talking to herself.
    â€˜Will you write a letter for me?’ she would ask the world.
    Only the poorest and most desperate would pay for her now and since she had no place they would have her in back alleys.
    We lived in a basement room, far away from the sky, with leaking pipes and a view of feet moving in the world above, unaware that eyes watched below. There was no bathroom. There was a sink from which no water ran. There was a two ring stove with one ring working. The walls were salted with damp and Carmel would stop me from putting my tongue against them. To touch anything was to be part of rot and damp – even when you did not touch, the smell came to you until you became one with it.
    I was fed when Carmen remembered. Dreams came when Carmen left me tied to the cot at night and dreams untied me. In them a long thin woman, tall as life, with grey hair and black eyes watched over me as if I was her own.
    In all, I should have died, but life wanted me as it had once wanted my mother. I was kept in a room below the world for the first two years of my life, except for the times when Carmen would strap me to her and walk, sometimes for miles. We sat in Soho