The morning after, he’d headed off pretty much straight after breakfast, promising to call Philippa when he had the chance. She and Nicola had been giggling and whispering together like schoolgirls and seemingly they hadn’t at all minded his nipping off early. Clearly they had stuff to talk about that didn’t concern him, which was fair enough. After all, he had some business of his own to take care of.
Michael had gone straight back across town to the hospice, only to find that Melissa had died in the night, barely an hour or two after he’d left her, in fact. They hadn’t called him because they’d known he was going home to sleep and they hadn’t wanted to disturb him. The single roar of pain he’d let out at the bitter irony of this piece of spectacular mistiming said it all. For the last two or three weeks, he’d spent every moment he could at Melissa’s bedside. He’d taken special leave from work ‘on compassionate grounds’ and he’d messed Philippa about a fair bit too, seeing her for only a few hours at a time but not being able to explain to her the real reason why. He’d pleaded tiredness, stress, pressure of work, everything he could think of, just to keep on juggling his relationship with Philippa on top of everything else, and so far it seemed to be working. She’d noticed he was absent more, that he was distracted and constantly yawning, and once, to his eternal shame, he’d been so tired and emotional he’d even become tearful. He’d had to lie through his teeth that time and say he had a toothache. He’d been ashamed about having to tell her an outright lie, but what was he supposed to do? Tell her the truth? He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t just sit down beside her and take her hand in his and say, ‘Oh, by the way, Philippa honey, the reason I’ve been missing so much over the last few days is because Melissa, the real love of my life and I really do mean that, has come home to Ireland to die of cervical cancer and I’ve got to be there for her as much as I can because I let her down once and I can’t ever do that again.’ Oh yeah. That would go down really well with Philippa. Wouldn’t it just.
He sat on the Luas now and wondered what Philippa would say if she knew that three days before, he, Michael Redmond, had married Melissa Creighton while she lay in her bed in the hospice, a brightly coloured scarf wrapped round her delicate naked head. The priest, to give him his due, had performed the service quickly and efficiently so as not to overtax the patient and, even though Melissa had drifted off to sleep towards the end of it, she had done so with Michael’s ring finally on her finger and a quiet smile on her face. She’d looked happy and, to Michael, that was worth the price of a thousand wedding rings. He’d been glad he’d asked her to marry him, and that he’d finally done the right thing after all these years. It made the situation somewhat more bearable, that at least she’d died as his wife. But why, oh why, had he left her the other night to go and check on Philippa? Because he’d felt sure that Melissa had a few more days left, that’s why, he reflected bitterly now. And he’d been wrong, as he’d been wrong about so many things before. Well, he was a gobshite, that much he’d always known. He’d been a gobshite even as far back as those days with Melissa, when he’d refused to marry her because he was a stupid cowardly prick who was afraid of commitment. He’d give anything now for the chance to commit to her for life. Strange that he wanted that now, when all chances of achieving it were long past. Life was funny like that. Yeah, he thought angrily now, it was funny like a hole in the head was funny.
“Please move down the tram,” said the automated female voice.
He closed his eyes as the Luas chugged softly onwards and thought back to the time it had all first gone wrong for them.
They’d been together only about a year when Melissa told him that she was pregnant. They already both knew they loved each other and so it wasn’t a problem. In fact, at the time it was the icing on the cake. Together, they moved into a grotty little flat in Rathmines where they had to share a bathroom with another couple who lived across the hall. It wasn’t ideal, but they were young, fresh out of college, and they made the best of it. The landlord had specifically stated that no children or pets were allowed, so they kept Melissa’s pregnancy from him when he called in for the rent. Michael would arrange to be there to give him the money or Melissa, if she had no choice but to meet him on rent-day, would wear a big heavy jumper to conceal her burgeoning bump. Michael had an internship at an advertising agency, the exact way he’d been hoping to start his career in advertising, and Melissa worked as an illustrator for a small but extremely popular and busy publisher of children’s books. They were both doing what they wanted to do, they were in love and they were having a baby together. The world was theirs for the taking.
“What will we call her?” Melissa had said to him one night, when they were snuggled up in bed together after a frugal couples-starting-out-together dinner of instant noodles cooked on the hotplate and a few straggly-looking green vegetables, purchased at half-price because they were past their best.
“I think you mean what will we call him, surely?” Michael replied with a smug grin.
“Well, him or her. I have a name in mind if it’s a girl, but only if you like it too, of course.”
“Come on, then, out with it.” He stroked her bump under her peach-coloured nightie. “What is it? Let me have it.”
“It’s not a bomb, silly! It’s a name for a baby,” Melissa giggled. “If you must know, it’s Eugenia. After my grandmother who died when I was four. You know, my mum’s mum?”
Michael considered it for a minute. “Eugenia Redmond, I like it. Of course, you do know that the other kids in school will knock seven shades of shite out of her for having such a posh fancy name?”
But Melissa was staring at him now. “You said Eugenia Redmond,” she said quietly.
“Did I?” Michael sounded surprised. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s your name,” Melissa said. “Does that mean that you want her to have your name?”
Michael, in a hole now and playing for time, stretched, pretended to yawn and idly scratched his armpits. “Well, I don’t mind what name she has,” he said casually. “What does it matter whether it’s Redmond or Creighton on the birth certificate? That’s only a piece of paper, isn’t it? We’ll know she’s ours and that’s all that matters. And anyway,” he added lightly, “we don’t even know what sex it is yet. It could be a boy for all we know, and then where would you be with your Eugenia, huh? Huh? Where would you be then, huh?”
He tickled her under her arms because he knew that that was where she was the most ticklish. She giggled as a natural reflex, but he could sense the disappointment washing off her in waves. She wanted the baby to have Michael’s name and, by extension, she wanted to have it for herself too. Michael wasn’t thick. He’d known what she meant all right. She wanted them to get married. An awkward silence ensued after the giggling and tickling, during which Michael yawned theatrically, stretched again and turned over, mumbling something about having an early start in the morning.
“Night-night then, honey,” he said with his back to her, in a jollier tone than he was feeling. In fact, he felt like a total heel but he also knew that he was unwilling to do anything to rectify the situation. In that case, what was left to do but go to sleep?
After a short hesitation, she whispered in the dark: “Goodnight, then.”
And that had been that, for the moment at least.
The baby was born, and it was a girl, so they called her Eugenia. She was a beautiful, happy sunny-tempered baby, seeming to combine the best of her two parents’ personality traits. They moved in with Melissa’s mother, May, because they could no longer hide from their landlord the fact that they were parents. Melissa’s mother, a widow, was glad of the company. Melissa gave up her job at the publisher’s to look after Eugenia full-time, but when the child was about six months old she began accepting commissions from them to work on book illustrations from home. Michael, who was himself busy at that time Getting Ahead In Advertising, said he didn’t mind her taking on the work if she thought she could manage
it. Melissa said she was sure that she could manage it as well as all the baby stuff and so that was what happened. When Eugenia was two-going-on-three and it was time to start putting her name down for various schools in the area of Dublin where they lived, the subject of marriage came up again. Both parents had put their names down on the child’s birth certificate but, since they weren’t married, Eugenia had her mother’s surname.
“I feel awkward about the two of us, you and me, having different surnames on these school application forms,” Melissa said carefully one night. “It looks, well, kind of bad.”
Both Eugenia and Melissa’s mother had gone up to bed, and Melissa and Michael were alone in the kitchen drinking steaming mugs of hot chocolate before going up to bed themselves. Michael was working on an advertising campaign for a brand of washing powder and he had a few pages of scribbled notes, which he was inclined to dismiss as rubbish, laid out in front of him on the kitchen table. Melissa was standing at the ironing board, pressing his work shirts and a few little things of Eugenia’s.
“What do you mean, it looks bad?” Michael barely looked up from his scribbling. The warning bells were ringing in his head loud and clear. He knew that she could tell by his voice and the way his hackles had seemed to rise suddenly, like a cat’s, that he was on his guard, on the defensive. He always was when this subject came up. It made her tentative around him, the way she was being now. It made her tiptoe around him like he could go off at any moment, like an explosion waiting to happen. Though he knew he was possibly being unreasonable, this irritated the hell out of him.
“I just mean, it looks like Eugenia, well, it kind of looks like she doesn’t come from a . . . a proper family.”
“A proper family?” echoed Michael, annoyed. “What do you mean by that? She’s got a mother and a father and three grandparents who love her. If that’s not a proper family, I don’t know what is.”
“I don’t mean she’s not loved. Of course I don’t mean that,” Melissa said, flustered. “I just mean that . . . that it would be so much easier, all this school stuff, if . . . if we all had the same name. That’s all I mean.”
“Easier for whom?” Michael really sounded cross now and he could see that Melissa was nervous. This was such a touchy subject with him.
“For, well, for Eugenia when she goes to school,” she said lightly.
“How is it going to make a difference to a four-year-old what her last name is?”
“I don’t know,” said Melissa, close to tears. “I just mean it would be handier from . . . from the point of view of all these school application forms if we . . . if we all had the same surname.”
“Look, Melissa,” he said wearily, running his fingers through his hair until it stood on end, “my parents got married and had the same name, and now they’re split up and my mother’s back to calling herself by her bloody maiden name. Your parents were married and now your dad’s dead and your mum’s on her own. How has it made a blind bit of difference to any one of them what their bloody last names are? How will it make a blind bit of difference to Eugenia?”
“It . . . it won’t, I suppose,” whispered Melissa, her face wet with tears.
“Exactly,” snapped Michael. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a logo and a slogan to come up with by tomorrow for a stupid fucking washing powder that’ll probably make people come out in fucking hives when they wash their clothes in it, and your constant wittering on is doing my head in. Call Eugenia whatever you want on those bloody forms. Call her Redmond, Creighton or fucking McGillycuddy’s Reeks-Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for all I care, but just leave me out of it and give me five minutes of bloody peace and quiet to work in, will you?”
Melissa unplugged the iron, picked up her little bundle of clothes and fled.
When Eugenia Creighton was four years old, two or three months before she was due to start at the local primary school, Michael received a rare phone call from his child’s mother in work.
“I think it’s your, erm – Melissa,” said the secretary he shared with four other advertising executives. She transferred the call to Michael’s line. “I think she’s upset or something,” she added, before turning back to her work.
Michael picked up his phone. “Honey?” he said, his mind still on the account he was currently working on. There was only a noise that sounded like crying on the line. “Honey?” he said again. “Melissa, is that you? Lissy?”
He could only make out the words ‘Eugenia’, ‘rash’ and ‘hospital’.
“Hospital? For a rash? Don’t be ridiculous, Lissy. You don’t take a kid to hospital just because she has a rash. What are you talking about? Slow down now. I can’t make you out properly. What is it? What exactly’s happened?”
Then she said a word that made his blood run cold.
He listened intently for a moment or two, then he said, “Right. I’m leaving now. I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay?”
He put the phone down, had a quick word with his colleague at the desk next to him and left the office. He arrived at the hospital to find his daughter critically ill with meningitis. Melissa was in a state of shock, her widowed mother May in tears beside her, holding her hand.
When Eugenia died the next day, Melissa went into hysterics and had to be sedated. The days before the funeral were the worst of Michael’s life. Friends and family came and went and even stayed overnight at Melissa’s mother’s house, but nothing any of them said or did could ease the feeling that he was wading through a nightmare. Melissa refused point-blank to speak to him, but then she was zoned out on the sedatives they were giving her, so he couldn’t blame her for that. On the day of the funeral, she stood on the opposite side of the grave from Michael, heavily drugged and propped up on either side by two of her mother’s sisters, small bird-like women who were the spitting image of May Creighton, with twin expressions of grim determination on their faces. He was glad that they were there for Melissa and her mother, since he realised he had little enough to offer them himself at the moment. When his eyes met Melissa’s across their daughter’s newly dug grave, she looked right through him as if he wasn’t there. It gave him a weird feeling, but he still put it down to the fact that she was medicated up to the eyeballs. She wasn’t herself; not that anyone was likely to be themselves after what had happened. Their beautiful good-natured little daughter dead of a dreadful disease, just weeks before she was due to embark on the first leg of her school journey? It made no sense to Michael. How could it? It was wrong, a terrible mistake, a wrong thing that wasn’t meant to happen, that shouldn’t have happened. No, it was no wonder that Melissa wasn’t herself, that she was looking at him, looking through him, like he wasn’t even there.
But, a week or two after the funeral, a horrible couple of weeks of strained or non-existent conversations, during which he’d felt uncomfortably unwelcome in the house, he arrived home from work to find Melissa packing her things in the bedroom she shared with him. He couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d found her packing his things.
“What’s going on, Lissy?” he asked nervously.
“What does it look like?” she said in a tone of artificial brightness.
“Erm, it looks like you’re packing your, erm, things.”
“Got it in one, Michael Redmond.” There was no mistaking the savage sarcasm in her voice. “Go to the top of the class. Give that man a fucking medal.”
“Lissy, what’s wrong?” She glared at him. “Apart from the obvious,” he added hurriedly.
“Nothing’s wrong, Michael Redmond.” She continued to haphazardly cram her clothes, books and bits-and-bobs into a suitcase. “What could possibly be wrong? Our daughter, yours and mine, Eugenia Creighton, is dead and buried and nothing will bring her back. Oh, and guess what?” she went on, still with the same manic, rather frightening brightness to her tone.
“What?” he whispered, his heart sinking.
“Our daughter’s headstone is ready.” She beamed at him. “A
nd guess what else? And this is the really brilliant part. Guess what’s going to be engraved on it for all eternity?”
Michael stood stock-still, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting for what he now knew was to come.
“That’s right,” went on Melissa, just as if he’d spoken. “‘Eugenia Creighton, beloved daughter of Melissa Creighton! Till we meet again in Heaven.’ That’s it now for all eternity. Doesn’t it have a lovely ring to it?”
“You – you left my name off the headstone?” His hands were beginning to shake uncontrollably.
“Well, of course, Michael Redmond.” She still had that terrifying grin plastered on her face, the grin that frightened Michael and made him wish he’d done certain things differently. “I mean, you didn’t want our baby daughter to have your name when she was alive, so naturally I assumed you wouldn’t want her to have it when she was dead either. After all, you’re dead a long time, Michael, aren’t you? Of course you wouldn’t have wanted your precious name on our daughter’s headstone for all to see for all eternity. That would be way too much of a commitment for the ever-cautious Michael Redmond.”
Her manic grin was almost a snarl now. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d jumped over the bed like a wolf to bite him right through his jugular. Michael went cold all over. He felt his former fear of commitment coming back now to boot him viciously on the arse. It was his own fault. He’d had this coming, hadn’t he? He’d refused to marry Lissy because he was afraid, like a pathetic spineless coward, of taking that last step, that final step on the road to commitment, just because his own parents’ marriage hadn’t worked out. He had deliberately kept an escape route open for himself, just in case the strain of having a girlfriend and a child ever became too much for him. He’d been a wimp, a gutless wonder. Instead of manning up and meeting his responsibilities head-on, he’d done a half-assed job. It would almost have been better not to have been there at all, rather than being present in that inexcusable one-foot-on-the-running-board way he’d been there. No wonder Lissy felt angry now, and embittered. He didn’t blame her. She had every right to feel like this, to have a great big fat go at him. Christ alone knew he deserved it. He’d let down both her and Eugenia.
Thirteen Stops Page 24