I’ve pinned the ultrasound images of the coming baby to the corkboard in our kitchen. It’s the first thing we’ve pinned there for a while. We got it shortly after we moved in, thinking it would be a place for us to keep lists, or vouchers or important notices.
Once it got filled up, we just stopped using it because we are deeply unserious people masquerading as adults and, in fairness, when our son was born we surrendered to chaos a little more freely than before. Now it stands as a fossilised relic of the concerns and appointments we were faced with between April and September, 2018.
There are inscrutable notes, written with great haste about important things, now indecipherable. There is the EKG printout from that time I called 111 about my bad back and they managed to convince me I was having a heart attack and sent some rather unimpressed paramedics to our house. There is a gift voucher, itself three years out of date, for a Spanish restaurant that went out of business during the first lockdown. Looking at all these things now provokes the same melancholy tinge of those site photos from Pompeii; whole streets excavated to find people locked in an arbitrary moment in time, buried under volcanic ash, but still sitting upright at desks, or churning butter, or inspecting the use-by date on their tapas vouchers.
Beneath that is the ultrasound we got for our son, four years ago. It has decayed over those years, blown out by exposure to the kitchen window, so that his tiny, spongy form, once clear, is now scribbled and scratched beyond all recognition. Its edges have curled up like a Cornetto wrapper, as if melted by creeping lava.
Beside them, the ultrasounds of his sister, which are sharp and clean and brand new, seem like they are from a future age. It’s a stark, slightly bittersweet marker of how much time has passed. At a glance, it looks as if we ordered our first baby on VHS, but switched to Blu-ray for the next.
And just to the left of that there is an even more striking artefact. A single sheet of notepaper marked GRAB LIST, which details everything we were supposed to bring to the hospital four years ago. On it I’ve written READY, as if this list is in its final, perfect form and proves our preparedness for everything that came after.
It is a touchingly naive document of the moment just before our son was born, since its contents speak to a more innocent idea of what those few days in hospital would be like. I clearly presumed listening to music would be a big concern, as I’ve written speakers twice. This time we have no grab list, and the Bluetooth speakers will likely stay at home. We know that the volcano is coming, at least. We just no longer pretend to be ready.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
