I was beginning to feel movement just below my belly button. I checked the time on the clock: 10.38 a.m.
“That should be my aim, to get our relationship back on track – aim for him to call me his Irish mermaid once more. Oh Ruby, you must not worry about your mum and dad – we are fine – well, what I mean is we will be fine – we’re just going through a rocky patch. I guess the secret is for the rocky patch to be just short term, to get over it, identify why it was rocky and move on. That is what I am going to do the next time he is home. When he gets back from China, we will sit down together, the two of us, just Luke and me, and work it out – find out what the problem is and we’ll find a solution. We’re only slightly derailed, that’s all. We’ll sort it out, we’ll get back on track, move on and relearn how to love each other, relearn how to make each other laugh, laugh out loud. That is what I’ll do when he comes home, when you are gone. I couldn’t bear to lose you both, to lose both people I love so dearly. How terrible would that be? Yes, it is up to me to fix it, to rekindle our love. It just needs a bit more attention; we need to pay our relationship more attention. Otherwise he might become very sad again; the deep sadness might return. I need to make him the most important thing in my life, like before. Maybe I can just replace you with him, do a kind of a swop, swop you for your dad.
“Oh, Ruby, sometimes I say the silliest things that are totally inappropriate. Nothing, of course, my darling, will ever replace you – nothing. What I am trying to say is if I bundle up all the love that I have for you and just transfer it directly on to your dad, then maybe that might fix our relationship. What do you think? Would that work? Probably I’m not paying him enough attention – you know how high maintenance men are – well, you don’t really, and you never will. God, maybe you’re lucky to be saved that trouble – men are like cats – they need loads of attention and love. They need to be told how fantastic they are every single day.”
My phone blipped. It read: 1 New Message.
I checked it.
Morning, Afric, love you, miss you, safe journey today, call me when you arrive in Liverpool Xx
I responded with an ‘X’. Now was not a time for a Yes-No conversation. I was busy on our outing which I thought was going very well.
“Yes, my angel, we both worked hard at our jobs. Our careers – they became our lives, our focus. Your dad travelled and I moulded my own life around his absence. We sort of forgot about our marriage and that is when we started to drift apart. We were both hoping that when you were born it would somehow make it all okay – you would arrive like a miracle cure and it all would be okay. Silly, I know, my little angel. That is a lot of pressure to put on a newborn baby, isn’t it? I mean, you just arrive into the world, and you are not even well and already you’re supposed to fix your parents’ marriage. Crazy, I know, Ruby, just crazy. But you know one thing: I know we can fix it because deep down we are still in love with each other – it’s just that the love is a little too deep down to access on a daily basis. We need to bring it closer to the surface so that it can become something that we can touch every day and always and not just for special occasions.
“When you get up there in the sky, in a couple of days, you might help us with that, would you? As your first job it’s not that bad a job, is it?”
I felt a slight sensation, like a mini-cramp on the right-hand side of my stomach. She was on the move again, or else she was acknowledging that she had heard her mum. I looked down at her.
“I am sorry that you will never have the chance to fall in love, for someone to hold you really tight, that feeling of holding someone really close to you. I am so sorry that you will never know that gushing feeling, butterflies in your stomach, that intense love. Your dad and I once had it, but now it feels like so long ago. We were so in love, we were each other’s world. Definitely, my little girl, that is your first job up in heaven: please give us a hand to get back on track.
“Your dad wanted a bigger house – the cottage started to annoy him. He kept saying it was too small for modern living. For a while I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but in hindsight he meant he wanted to have a home for better dinner parties, for kids and a dog, more of everything. He wanted it not just for him – he wanted it for us, for you and me. He wanted to give his wife and kids a good life with the best of everything. Every man wants to provide the best he can for his family and your dad is no different. You see, in his head there is this perfect world that he is striving every day to attain. Every new international client, every overseas conference is getting him one step closer to his dream.”
Chapter 8
“Ruby, we need to get moving – we have to say a last goodbye to the cottage, and we have one more stop to make.”
I indicated and pulled out on to Canal Road. Cars, bikes, motorbikes and power-walking commuters hurried down the canal – like a herd of cows, they all moved in the same direction, only at different speeds.
“I would say that it is entirely my fault that he is insecure – maybe because I don’t tell him how wonderful he is. Girly magazines always have articles about how the modern man feels less valued in the world today, that he is no longer sure of what his role is. They say he feels confused, undervalued. I always thought those articles were total trash, but maybe they are correct, perhaps the modern man is in crisis, maybe your dad is just longing for me to say: ‘You know what, Luke, I don’t need a flashy car, a big house or a posh school for our child.’ Should I say that to him? Yes, Ruby, when he comes back, I will tell him just that.
“Then in 2010 your dad got a great job in Ireland. It was the middle of the recession, so there were not too many jobs to choose from. When we read the job spec we both agreed that it was far too much travelling, but we convinced each other that as soon as he got the job we could change that, we could change the way a soulless multinational operated. We were so naïve – because once he was in there, there was no escaping. The trips got more frequent and longer and longer – trips to China and Dubai that the more senior consultants didn’t want. You see, part of the problem was that for the first six months he was on probation, so he had no choice but to travel. Then, because he was so successful and won new lucrative Asian and Middle Eastern clients, the demanding new customers wanted to deal only with him, and it became a vicious circle. As the international clients grew, so too did the profits from the honey-pots of Asia. Then it became a cycle of winning more clients; days of being away from home became weeks. Your dad travelled for work a lot more than we both had expected. He either spent weekends away, or at the end of the week he was recovering from jet lag, or sleeping in an effort to help him make it through the next gruelling and demanding week that lay ahead. You see, Ruby, China was now the world’s power house and that was where Sheppard Consulting – that is who your dad works for – that was where they wanted their muscle, there at the coalface, minding and growing their international consultancy business. A successful stint in the ferocious Chinese market place could later be rewarded with an easier number in the domestic market. Or so they had told him. So that is how it happened, how we started to grow apart, ever so slowly. I went into default position and very simply went back to my single days – all the girls still hung out together and welcomed me back with open arms.”
The early-morning traffic on the canal this morning didn’t seem as frantic as normal, but of course I had forgotten it was a Sunday and most commuters were safely tucked under their duvets.
“Yes, I missed your dad a lot at the beginning, an awful lot in fact, but then I just got used to it. Funny how you can train yourself to adapt to anything. I wonder, Ruby, how long it will take me to train myself to forget you. Will I ever forget you? I wonder how long it will take for me not to rub my stomach and realise that it is empty and you are gone, and with you all our dreams and hopes of the future. How long will it take for my swollen empty stomach to recede and hopefully with it some of the pain? My little angel, I dread the pain and the hurt so much.
Will I ever be happy again after you have gone, will I ever laugh out loud? How will I carry on?”
My eyelids began to tremble and I could feel my eyes filling with tears. No, I told myself, no tears on our outing. I swallowed hard and tried to dismiss the morbid thoughts.
When an old person dies, you mourn the past, the loss of their life. But I was mourning the future, because I was losing my vision of the future. Was I going to be stuck in this moment of my life forever because there was no future any more? It had been robbed from me, the future, and nothing, absolutely nothing could ever bring it back. It was as though my own body had betrayed me, had sold me out. How was it possible that Luke’s and my flesh could allow us to create something that was incompatible with life?
I was angry at my own being, it had betrayed me, and it had created this present and future pain. I felt scared about what was to come.
“I’m losing your dad, but hopefully not to that awful sadness, and now I am losing you – tomorrow you will be gone.” I swallowed very hard and scolded myself: “Afric, stop that, stop being so selfish! You will upset the child with that self-pity. Get a grip.”
I opened all the windows of the car to let the words and pain escape and to let the fresh air in. I took big deep breaths, the type that I should have learnt at ante-natal classes.
Ruby was kicking. I looked down at my swollen stomach. “Please, darling, don’t kick me so hard – shh, my baby, just wait for ten minutes and we’ll be at the Great South Wall. We’ll go for a walk along the wall and then you’ll drift off to sleep again. Just a few more minutes, my darling. Look there!” I pointed directly ahead of me. “Can you see the towers over there? See the white-and-red ones stretching towards the clouds. Please stop moving so much, it makes me very uncomfortable. Soon you won’t be kicking. In fact you will never kick again. Is that why you’re using your legs right now, is it? To show me that they work, to prove to me that you have two legs? Are you trying to tell me that you’re fine? I wish you were fine, little girl, but you are not. You are a very sick girl.”
With one hand I guided the car towards the Pigeon House, the other hand on my bump.
“See it there – the old generating station. We are nearly there. The Poolbeg Lighthouse is at the end of the Great South Wall – that is where we’re going, did I tell you that? Did you know that the lighthouse was lit by candles once upon a time? Imagine how big those candles must have been for the ships to be able to see them. They must have been huge, really huge, for the boats to be able to see the flame. Now we are nearly there – shh, my little angel, just two more minutes.” I rubbed my belly in clockwise circles to try to calm my baby. “Shh, baby, it’s sleepy time.”
Ruby’s response was to just kick harder and harder. I didn’t want to correct her again because, after all, it was her day out too. Maybe she was telling me that she was enjoying it.
“The girls, you know, us girlfriends, we would text each other: Want to walk the wall? It was kind of a secret code for ‘I have something to tell you’, or a bit of gossip, or ‘I need to talk’. I have walked this wall so often – it must be a few hundred times. Funny, it is one of the walks that I never did on my own. Strange how some walks are just your walks, like the West Pier in Dun Laoghaire is just my walk – I don’t like sharing that walk really with anyone else – it’s a place of solitude for just me and my thoughts, a place to get my head clear, to organise my thinking. Here is different. It’s a walk that I always associate with my girlfriends, and that is why I brought you here because you are my little girlfriend, so I wanted to walk it just once with you. So it is good that I’m not walking it alone, that we are together. Ruby, are you listening to your mother? Do you hear me? Your mother is talking to you. This wall has heard lots of my stories. It’s a place where you can tell a secret, or make a confession, because here on the wall you know that your confession or secret is safe, you know that it will be swept away by the Irish sea air. So now I have walked this wall on the saddest day of my life. And on the happiest or nearly the happiest. The second happiest day of my life was the day I got engaged to your dad, the happiest the day I married him. After he proposed to me in Seapoint, we got into the car, drove here and walked the wall.
“It was a cold spring day, there was not a cloud in the sky, and cherry blossom was just appearing on the trees. Like I told you before, he could never remember the correct name – he always got it wrong and called it ‘ruby blossom’ or the ‘ruby tree’ – he always said that the colour was nearer to ruby than cherry and anyway he preferred the name. So from then on we always called it ‘ruby blossom’. He said that one day when we got our own house we would have a huge ruby-blossom tree in the garden. It was a clear cool day in April, and he held my hand tight as we walked the wall. So I think that Luke will like the name Ruby – I think he will be pleased with the name: Ruby . . . Ruby Lynch.
“It was right here that we planned to swim every inch of Dublin Bay – that is a lot of swimming, you know, because Dublin Bay is a C-shaped bay – it’s ten kilometres at its widest and seven kilometres in length. I told him that if that was true we were going to be in the water for a long time. See, Ruby, from here, standing on the wall, is the only place in Dublin that you can see every inch of Dublin Bay, this spot right here.”
A breeze blew over the pier, sending ripples down the sea like a shiver.
“Are you warm enough, darling? I will zip up my jacket to keep you snug. It’s not so warm out of the sun, is it? You okay now? Warm enough? That’s a good girl now, time for bed, time for your morning nap.
“Before I met your dad, the girls and your mum would trawl the holiday websites for late offers. We would spend hours online, eating pistachios and sipping white wine, looking for the most exotic and adventurous holidays at rock-bottom prices. We had the process down to a fine art. We signed up for alerts from holiday websites, asking them to only send us information when the holiday price fell below five hundred euros. We would call up cruise companies and enquire for last-minutes deals, availing of inside cabins that often remained unsold. Nearer holiday time, on Friday lunchtimes we would call tour operators that had package holidays departing that Saturday, and haggle and try to buy the last-minute departures at knockdown prices. ‘We don’t care where we go,’ we would tell the travel agents. ‘Bed and beach is all we need: Turkey, Greece, Spain or Portugal.’ We would tell them that we would get the culture from the local yoghurt.”
I touched my belly very softly. She had drifted off to sleep. I would get to walk the wall, together with her, but alone with my memories.
“Ruby, the thrill was to try to find the most luxurious holiday at the cheapest price. Just after 9/11 struck, your mum did in-depth research into Greek Islands that wealthy Americans visited. Patmos, I discovered, was a favourite with Yanks from the East Coast of the States. For seven days we whizzed around an almost deserted and idyllic Greek island on battered old mopeds. By day we swam in the crystal-clear waters of the Aegean Sea and in hidden white sandy coves. By night we partied in the local town of Skala and drank ouzo and the local white wine by the gallon. The wine we nicknamed ‘Ratsemen’ because of its foul taste and the horrific hangover.” I rubbed my black fleece. “That’s my girl, stay asleep now. In our empty luxury boutique hotel, we enjoyed long liquid lunches munching on unidentifiable seafood. Late in the afternoon, sun-kissed and exhausted, we would float to the swim-up bar, perch ourselves on the edge of the pool and drink cocktails. Every day a different-coloured cocktail until we had reached the bottom of the cocktails menu, then we started at the top again. When the sun had set and our skin was wrinkled from the water we would haul ourselves reluctantly from the pool. Then came ‘girly hour’ as we called it. It involved getting ready to go out on the town for the night. But, as Aoife pointed out, ‘Who are we getting ready for? There’s no chance of landing a rich Yank! There’s no one on the island but ourselves and the locals! We’re here because the wealthy Americans aren’t!’ But that didn’t matte
r; we all agreed that ‘girly hour’ was far too therapeutic to get rid of. Skin soothed with one-hundred-per-cent aloe vera, we would convince each other that we deserved a full body massage followed by a make-up session sipping early-evening gin and tonics.”
We had almost reached the end of the sea wall. From here the sea cliffs looked much more sheer and the fields on the headland were a deeper green. Today, the lighthouse and the sea were best friends.
“Do you see the red lighthouse there, Ruby? It’s much bigger than the one near where we live, isn’t it? This one is really fancy; it even has steps that wind the whole way to the top.”
I had forgotten, distracted by my own stories – I had forgotten she was sleeping.
Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked hard to hold them back. I dug my nails firmly into the palms of my hands and looked straight ahead of me, out on the calm blue sea. It was beautiful June morning. The sea was flat, the sky cloudless. But even the tranquil sea was not enough to calm me.
“Today, my little angel, is the saddest day of my life. What could be more heartbreaking than taking my sick little girl on a whirlwind tour of my life, visiting very special places and memories of people? It’s devastating to know that it is only your poor deformed body and your racing heart that are with me.”
I struggled to control my feelings. I must not spoil the tour for her.
Ruby's Tuesday Page 9
