Your husband is in an office wearing clean clothes and you are on a bus to Donegal wearing a nappy

Here’s what you are going to do. You’re going to get on a bus. There’s one that leaves Parnell Square for a small town in Donegal at 9.30am. There are longer journeys, but they have more stops and changes, and the motion must be continuous. If you tell your husband what you are planning to do, he will get a worried look. He will offer to drive the baby around, but he can only ever manage an hour or two before he hands her back. No. The only way to solve this problem is to get on a bus so you can both sleep. And it’s best not to speak of the plan to anyone. Except maybe to Baby. Nappies for you. Nappies for me. We’ll see Daddy in a few days. The bus is busy. But you are a different person now. One that would push and shove and growl and bark. A man with a tattoo that says Frank wordlessly moves his bag. He shoves it under the seat in front and lets you into the window. You’d like to know if Frank is his own name and, if so, why he needs to confirm it to the world. Maybe no one can hear him either.You thought it would be miles. Until you were over the Border maybe, but the relief is immediate. The seat smells like wet dog and Frank’s pink flesh rolls over the armrest, but the pain in your chest lightens a fraction and you hug Baby.Even Baby seems to sense a stretch of rest ahead of you. She nuzzles further into the sling, and both of you are asleep before the bus leaves the stop. And, finally, there is nothing.No bleary eyes at red lights, no nervous tic to the rear-view mirror, no last-minute erratic turns to avoid traffic. No head falling forward, opening the window for the cold air to wake you, closing it again for fear it might wake Baby.You are just the other side of Monaghan when the women from the hospital come back to you.One woman, she was on the floor. Not. Going. In. She panted, pointing at Unit 3. She had slid down the wood-panelled wall, her waters seeping into the grout between the rust-coloured tiles. There was a big furore but, in the end, they couldn’t move her. She said she’d have the baby in the hallway if she had to, but she wasn’t going back into the holding pen. Eventually people began to move around her like she wasn’t there.It was worse at night, when you couldn’t see anyone. When you only heard the shrieks and groans and thought you’d never be like that. But, of course, you were. In the end. Like cows, you must have said out loud, because a voice from another curtain responded: heifers. Heifers are cows that haven’t had a calf or have only borne one, the voice explained. We’ll be cows after.Now your husband is in an office wearing clean clothes and you are on a bus to Donegal wearing a nappyThe birthing partner in the cubicle on the other side of you was watching a rugby match on this phone. He oohed and ahed through the curtain. His partner was wiping amniotic fluid off her legs with a facecloth. The pressure in the antiquated shower was poor, and there was a queue of five women down the hallway to wash. Their giant bumps protruded from old-fashioned nightdresses. With little bows and patterned flowers, you all looked the same; straight out of 1952. You wondered if they’d been allowed to smoke in the wards back then. You haven’t smoked a day in your life, but in that moment it seemed an appropriate course of action.The woman with the facecloth nodded to the rugby match on her husband’s phone, said she bet the showers in the Aviva Stadium were like power hoses. That Johnny Sexton never had to queue to wash. The husband was so engrossed in the match that for a long time it didn’t seem like he was going to respond. A woman further down the ward was humming the theme tune from a 1990s TV show, and you wondered if this was what psychiatric facilities were like.“These guys are professional athletes, Shauna.”There was a stirring then. Despite the whirring of machines and the intermittent screams, you could feel the whole ward strain to listen.“The players have to have top-quality facilities.”“And I’m what, John?”An awful contraction seemed to take her then, and she shrieked down the hallway. “AN AMATEUR FUCKING BREEDER?”The railings clattered, and John’s phone skidded under the bed of the woman humming theme tunes. Midwives arrived, and Shauna got the green light to go to delivery. Other birthing partners converged on the nurses’ station to beg for their heifers to go become cows, but you were distracted by your own contraction. By the polite little tightening that you’d found so exciting at first, which now you could see there was no way out of. Your husband gripped your hand, and there, in the before, you were together in a way that you didn’t know you’d never be again. You used to go to Barcelona and take pottery classes. You read books and walked without destination. Now he is in an office wearing clean clothes and you are on a bus to Donegal wearing a nappy.At Kilmacrenan you wake properly. You know each stop from the late nights you spent planning the journey. On the website each town was accompanied by a description of the exact location of where the bus would stop. Already you have missed Ballygawley– Omagh side of roundabout and Letterkenny – Bus stop at Mr Chippy’s. You are sad that you were asleep for somewhere called Aughnacloy. The website said that the bus stopped there outside a place called Salley’s Restaurant. This sounded warm and familiar. Salley, you had thought, would understand.You think of the woman on the floor in the hospital. You’d been embarrassed for her. Now you see how wrong you wereOut the window there are fields and walls and animals. You imagine the cows with cigarettes in their mouths, the heifers looking on disgusted. I’ll never be like that, Daisy says to Bessie.You lift Baby’s bum and bounce it gently. Baby smells like Sudocrem. Frank smells like processed meat.Your phone lights up intermittently. The best thing now seems to be to turn it off. You suppose there is some law against taking your baby over the Border without a father’s consent. You imagine men in wigs in courtrooms bandying around the word “postpartum”. Postpartum, postpartum, postpartum, you whisper over and over until it sounds like a funny ditty you might sing to Baby. The woman in the hospital with the bovine knowledge had continued speaking long into the night. Colostrum, she had explained, or beestings; it comes out first. We have to get it into the calves immediately. If we have a cow who dies giving birth, we might run to a neighbour. The dairy farmers, they can’t use the colostrum, so sometimes they freeze a bag for us, and we spend the night at the Aga trying to defrost it to get it into the calf with a bottle. We wipe the mucus off its nostrils and rub its body to try to get it to breathe. But it’s all about the colostrum. If we don’t get it into them in the first 12 hours, they are 50 times more likely to die in the first three weeks of life. You never saw her face, but you imagine her still; her back to you, stirring a watery-grey liquid at an Aga.The bus stops and you get off. You sit on a bench. Frank is gone, you tell Baby. Baby stares up at you silently. She knows this is no time to cause a scene. Bye-bye, Frank.You wonder if they sensed your hesitation when they handed Baby backYou had expected to see the sea. Instead, there is a flower bed and a petrol station. There must have been people earlier, men and women who got off the bus, a driver, but they are gone now. You manoeuvre Baby so you can lie down on your side. The bench is cold on your cheek. There is wind and light flecks of rain. It’s possible then that you sleep for a while, because Baby is crying when you hear voices. They move closer, and you are aware now that people are standing over you, but you won’t open your eyes. You think of the woman on the floor in the hospital. You’d been embarrassed for her. Now you see how wrong you were. She knew something you didn’t.The voices above you are louder now, and you want to tell them that Baby understands. Baby knows that Mummy was doing all the wrong things. Mummy was doing master’s degrees and going on protest marches. Nobody told Mummy about pelvic organ prolapse, placenta praevia, mastitis, wanting to drive into a wall; how when you put on a nightdress you go back in time.“Should we call someone?”Their northern accents make you smile; you are so far away. There is a very soft touch on your elbow. You want to tell this person that Baby understands. It’s nothing to do with Baby. Baby has done nothing wrong. You love Baby.“The next bus back is in three hours. We live right across the road.”Frank’s wife or his sister, or whoever he has returned with, handles you with great care, like you are a vase their mother-in-law gave them as a wedding present. For a second you think it’s the woman from the floor of the hospital and think to say hello. Instead you let this other woman guide you past the flower bed. The door of their house has a yellow glass panel like in a pub from the olden days. No one they need to call.Yes, they can take the baby. She’ll be just in the next room, yes. There is a hot-water bottle where baby was and a blanket over you. The couch smells like lint and fire, and you have the sensation that you are falling too far into the couch.Charles, she calls him. Then who is Frank?You can hear Baby and then you can’t. You list the names of babies that have been abducted. The men in wigs in the Four Courts will say that you gave Baby away willingly. The other men will sing their ditty; postpartum, postpartum, postpartum. You think of Husband and how far you have travelled. When you couldn’t sleep on warm nights in the before, he would narrate the plot of obscure movies to you. Now you wonder what he eats for lunch.A glimmer of terror at what you have done strikes you. So you sing Christmas songs until you fall asleep.This time when the women from the hospital enter your dreams, it’s only their feet you see. Neat bright pedicures that give you a pain in your chest. Girlish pink and purple nails like they were readying for a holiday to the Canary Islands.When the time comes. When Frank and the woman ready you to leave, Frank doesn’t know what your eyes are saying. But the woman does. You beg her with your eyes. She gives you a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. There is no one in the seat beside you on the way back. Instead, there is a pillow with faded birds where you put your head. Frank/Charles has words with the driver.You wonder if they sensed your hesitation when they handed Baby back. If Baby is sucking harder than normal to punish you for your betrayal. You picture a limpet.You think this is the beginning, that you will be on many buses, but you won’t. You will look up endless routes and pack countless bags. But there will only ever be this day.You won’t go to Barcelona ever again, but you will enjoy a stay at a reasonably priced hotel in Wexford. You will give presentations at work. You will have conversations at dinner parties. For the first few years you will cry when you hear the name Frank. At the smell of ham, making it. And when Donegal is mentioned, your chest will seize. But at least in the after, you won’t care what people think. You are the woman in the hallway now. She was no heifer. She was some cow. Alice Ryan is author of There’s Been a Little Incident, for which she was named newcomer of the year at the Irish Book Awards in 2022