Thirteen Stops

by Sandra Harris

  “But you don’t have to go, Lissy.” Crossing to her side of the bed, he took hold of her shoulders. “I know I’ve been a total prat, but we can fix this. I can marry you now, if you still want me to. Just name the day.”

  She let fly suddenly and walloped him across the face. His eyes widened in shock and surprise and he let go of her shoulders.

  “Fuck you!” She was almost spitting the words at him. “Fuck you and your precious name! How dare you offer it to me now, when it’s too late?”

  “But it needn’t be.” Eagerly, he tried to take hold of her by her shoulders again. “That’s what I’m saying to you. We’ll get married and have another baby, do things properly this time.”

  “How dare you!” she screamed. “Another baby? Replace Eugenia? That would fix it?”

  “No! I didn’t mean –”

  “Don’t you get it? I couldn’t marry you now even if I wanted to. It’s too late for Eugenia. Nothing you do or say now can fix that. She knows you didn’t want her to have your name while she was alive. How can I take it now that she’s dead? I can’t. I told you, I couldn’t do it now even if I wanted to. It would be disloyal to Eugenia and I won’t be that. Whatever else I am, I won’t be that.”

  Her voice had softened towards the end of her speech and that was when Michael understood finally that no amount of cajoling on his part would make any difference now. Defeated, he sat down on the bed, crushing a pile of her underwear that was ready to go in the suitcase.

  “But you don’t have to be the one to leave.” His voice was flat and dull. “This is your mother’s house. I should be the one to leave. I’ll move out tonight, and you can stay here.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No. I need to get away completely, or I’ll never get through this. You can stay here if you want. Mum won’t put you out on the streets, but she might have to start charging you rent.”

  He stared at her, aghast. “So you’re really leaving me? Leaving here?” His eyes began to fill up with tears.

  She nodded. “It’s for the best. Oh, and Michael?” she added softly.

  “What?” he said hopefully.

  “Don’t try to find me. I don’t ever want to see you again after today.”

  “Tickets, please,” said the Luas ticket man.

  “Right, sorry, yeah, here,” said Michael, blinking like someone coming out of a dream, or a coma.

  “Please move down the tram,” said the automated female voice. She was on fire today. That was twice now this journey he’d heard her robotic but strangely soothing tones.

  He put his ticket back in his wallet and the ticket man moved on.

  The sleazy, dark-haired Casanova was still seated across from Michael, but the Brazilian or Spanish woman was gone and had been replaced by an attractive Irishwoman, with long brown hair loosely piled on top of her head, glasses and a light sprinkling of freckles. The dude was hitting on her now and this time he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. The twat must have finally remembered to take the bloody thing off before he started chatting up women he met on the Luas.

  Michael’s thoughts slid back to when Melissa had left him. She’d gone to England to stay with an old schoolfriend until she could find a job and a place of her own. Quickly enough, she’d found a job in a publishing house and had gone back to doing the illustrations for children’s books, a job she loved. A flat of her own soon followed and she began to seriously put down roots in England. She’d come home for Christmas at first but had stopped that when her mother died. The house had been sold and the proceeds divided equally three ways between Melissa and her mother’s two sisters. Melissa had never really been that close to her aunts, so she’d stopped returning to Ireland when her mother passed away, which had been a good few years ago now. She’d had a few relationships since Michael, nothing serious, and she’d had no more children. She’d just about come around to thinking that she might at last be able to cope with having another child (although at that time she’d had no particular father in mind) when a routine cervical smear test had come back flagged as problematic.

  Funny how you could spend a lifetime in some place, Michael thought now, but when you learned you were going to die, you wanted to do it at home, in the country of your birth. After her chemo had failed and she was riddled with the cancer that would kill her, Melissa had come back to Dublin to die, in a clean comfortable hospice that tried its utmost to make the dire process somewhat bearable. She hadn’t wanted to die without being reconciled with the father of the only child she’d ever had. Michael, despite being devastated about Melissa’s cancer, had never been so happy in his whole life to hear from someone. He was glad and grateful beyond measure that he had seen Melissa again, and that she’d agreed to marry him and let him put things right at last after so many years.

  The funeral would be in a day or two. Melissa would be buried with Eugenia, who would have been fourteen years old now if she’d lived. Melissa would be buried under Michael’s surname of Redmond and, almost best of all, she’d given permission for the surname on Eugenia’s headstone to be changed from Creighton to Redmond.

  “Can I join you both, you and Eugenia, when it’s my time to go?” Michael had asked Melissa as she lay in her bed in the hospice one day.

  He’d kept his tone light just in case she took it the wrong way and he’d have to pretend he was only joking, but she’d nodded weakly and smiled and said yes, that she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. He’d been glad, oh so immeasurably glad, that he had her blessing to lie in the ground beside them both when his turn came. Some people might have considered that to be a morbid thought, but he was relieved beyond measure to have finally erased his shame. In the meantime, he was still alive and hopefully would be for a long time to come. Seeing his once vibrant and beautiful Melissa wasting away in front of his shocked eyes had somehow renewed his interest in life. ‘In the midst of death we are in life’, wasn’t that how that old quotation went? Or was it the other way around? Either way, he thought he knew what it meant now.

  He wanted to live what was left of his life to the fullest. He was tired to death of the cut-throat nature of the medical advertising business. And it didn’t make him feel as if he was achieving anything – designing logos and coming up with yet another annoying slogan or jingle for laxatives, support stockings or flu remedies. He wanted to leave something behind him that would last, and somehow he didn’t think that any of the advertising campaigns he’d worked so hard on would cut it in that way. What he really wanted to do was to write. He had a dozen ideas kicking around in his head for a short horror novel or even a filmscript for a horror movie, and what he dearly wanted was the time and energy to commit his ideas to paper. He wasn’t saying that he’d be the next Stephen King or James Herbert (his heroes) or anything like that, but what he desired most was the chance to try, to really try, just to see if he had it in him. If he failed, well shure, what harm? At least he’d have had a go at it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

  And then there was Philippa. Oh God, and then there was Philippa. He had yet to tell her about Melissa, that she’d been the one big love of his life whom he’d never forgotten, that he’d had his one and only child with her and that now they were both dead – oh, and he was looking forward to lying beside them both in the soft earth when it was his own turn to bite the big one. He knew that it wouldn’t go down well with Philippa, however modern-minded and easy-going she tried to be. What woman wanted to be told that she was competing with not one but two ghosts for her man’s affections? Wouldn’t most women say ‘to hell with that’ and walk away? He wouldn’t blame Philippa if that was exactly what she did say when she heard his story. He somehow didn’t think she would leave him, though. Yes, Philippa was every inch the modern woman with her numerous social-media accounts and her fancy job on a glossy magazine writing about modern relationships, but he had a strong feeling that she was just a regular woman underneath her polished exterior, an ordinary woman who wanted nothi
ng more than a home, a husband and babies. Especially now that she was nearly in her mid-thirties like Michael, and her biological clock was probably ticking loud enough to wake the dead.

  Michael was beginning to think that he would like to settle down with Philippa, to maybe even marry her and have a child with her, but he was also inclined to believe that he’d had his one shot at happiness with Melissa and Eugenia. He could try, of course he could, but he was scared. Scared of what Philippa might say when she found out that he’d kept something so huge from her. He had a dead wife and a dead child to his name and his wife, who he’d only just married, had just died and he’d never mentioned a word about any of it to Philippa. What the hell was she supposed to make of that? And then there was the fact that, when he died, regardless of whatever woman he was with, if he was in a relationship with a woman when he passed away, he fully intended to be buried with Eugenia and Melissa. How much of a turn-off would that be for Philippa or for any woman? It was a good job that Philippa liked him so much, Michael thought now as he got off the Luas at Charlemont, or their relationship wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving this major blow.

  He began to walk along the canal up to Portobello, carrying Melissa’s package in his work briefcase. He’d be putting in an appearance at work later on today, after he’d delivered the package as per her instructions. He was on compassionate leave from the agency at the moment, which was just as well because, if his colleagues hadn’t known the real reason for his absence, he’d probably have been hearing sarcastic remarks from his co-workers any time now along the lines of: “Soooooo nice of you to drop in,” and “Oh, now, don’t tell me, I recognise the face but I just can’t think of the name!” Advertising may not have been what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, but for the moment he had no other options lined up and he needed the regular pay cheques and the bonuses.

  It was a decent enough day, if a bit chilly, and he sat down on a bench by the canal for five minutes, his briefcase with the package in it carefully tucked under his arm. All around him, life was going on. A mother duck was gliding gracefully down the canal, followed by no fewer than six of her offspring. Michael smiled and remembered that the four-year-old Eugenia had liked nothing better than a trip to the park or canal to feed a bag of stale bread to the grateful ducks. The Grateful Ducks, good name for a band, that, he thought. A couple of cyclists whizzed past him on the pedestrian path (Bloody cyclists! Use the fucking road like you’re meant to!), followed more sedately by a sweating jogger. A lady dog-walker went by with several small yappy dogs on leashes, and two elderly ladies trundled by with their shopping trollies, gossiping nineteen to the dozen without once stopping for breath. My God, didn’t that Bridget one have some brass neck on her!

  Michael’s mind returned to the first time he’d met Philippa. The magazine she worked for had held a Christmas party a couple of years before for their staff and all their advertisers, of which Michael’s agency was one, and he’d gone because he was hungry and fed-up after a long, frustrating day at the drawing-board. Might as well let someone else feed him for a change, and if there was booze there, well, so much the better. He’d seen a gorgeous girl on her own in a corner with a huge glass of wine in one hand and her phone in the other. She was wearing a short black leather skirt and a sort of loose-fitting blouse thing that had the exact same chestnutty glints in it as her mane of long, gloriously coloured hair. He’d found himself a drink, commandeered a plate of peanuts and gone over to casually offer her some before he lost his nerve.

  “Peanut?” he’d said politely, instantly appreciating how she was even better-looking at close quarters.

  “Smooth move, Romeo,” she’d said with a giggle, and that one giggle had been his undoing.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s my best line,” he said solemnly, hoping that she would giggle once more so that he could hear it again, and she did.

  He was lost. He never left her side for the rest of the party and, when the revelries were all winding down for the night, he took her home to Beechwood in a taxi, stifling the urge to jump on her once he realised that she was falling asleep with all the wine she’d drunk. He’d walked her to her front door, kissed her chastely on her forehead while slipping his phone number into her handbag and waited in the taxi until he saw a light go on upstairs in the darkened house. She’d texted him the very next day to thank him for minding her and seeing her home without ‘trying anything’ (her words), and they’d been an item ever since.

  Michael got to his feet now, stretched and yawned and recommenced walking slowly up the canal towards Portobello, the parcel’s destination. Now he knew so much more about Philippa than he’d done at the beginning, and it only made him like her all the more. He’d learned that she was confident and polished on the outside but an insecure bag of nerves on the inside. He’d learned that she was passionate about animal welfare and that she added the chestnutty glints to her naturally mousy-brown hair herself. It had taken him a while to find out that last secret thing of hers about her hair, and even then she’d sworn him to silence about it. On pain of death, she’d said with another of those giggles he loved, and naturally he’d promised to keep her secret till his dying day. He thought he’d reached the root – no pun intended – of Philippa’s insecurity. It started at home (didn’t everything?), with cold-fish parents who never praised her or gave her any encouragement. The fact that they’d emotionally neglected their four daughters equally didn’t really cut any ice with Philippa. She was possibly the most conscious of all four siblings of having been cheated in the parental love department. Her sister Nicola had found love and babies and a smashing big old house with a pleasant enough guy called Shane, but Philippa and her two other sisters, Coco (christened Christine) and Geraldine, were still laboriously negotiating the dating wilderness.

  Michael was aware that, with those four little words ‘Will you marry me?’ he could make Philippa happy and whole again in her own eyes, into a complete (and completed) woman and fully functioning human being. She seemed to need it badly, and he’d been nearly inclined to give in to the impulse he was feeling to just bite the bullet and propose marriage to her, when Melissa had contacted him literally out of the blue. Now he was going to have to wait and see how Philippa reacted to the news about Melissa dying as his legal wife before he could do anything crazy like propose marriage to her. She’d probably point out to him angrily that he was already married, wasn’t he, so how the feck could he marry her, Philippa, and what could he say to that but that he was now widowed and, after a decent interval had elapsed, he’d be honoured if she would wear his ring and consent to be his wife? All he could do now was wait and see. Life was so bloody complicated.

  Michael reached the main shopping street of Portobello. Well, there were only a few shops but enough to qualify as a shopping street, if a minor one. The swans on this part of the Grand Canal were out in force today, preening themselves and graciously accepting bread and bits of food from enthusiastic passers-by, which Michael wasn’t sure was good for them but there was certainly no stopping them, anyway, either the swans or the bread donors. (They’d come out with their stale breadcrusts in plastic bags – the donors, that is – and the swans were damn well going to get them, come hell or high water. And the donors were damned well not taking the crusts back home again!) The air was clear and bright and the clock on the college wall was showing the time as a quarter to one, give or take a minute. He might just catch this guy in before everyone buggered off for lunch. He found Linklater’s Publishing Company sandwiched (no pun intended) between two takeaways, from which the smell of Chinese food and pizza wafted out tantalisingly, making him realise for the first time in a long while that he was hungry and could, in fact, eat a horse if one were available. He’d definitely be stopping off for lunch in one of these take-out places once he’d safely delivered his package.

  He took the package out of his briefcase and looked at it. On the front, it had been addressed in his
own hand, at Melissa’s dictation, to Mr. Edmund Linklater, Publisher, and on the back was Melissa’s name. Michael had put down his own address there as she’d asked him to. There’d be no point in sending anything to her old flat in London. She wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t be anywhere any more. This bleak thought made Michael feel as if a knife was twisting in his gut. He stood outside Linklater’s for a minute trying to calm his breathing, then he stepped inside the publisher’s office and a bell immediately jangled somewhere over his head. It was a bit like stepping back into Dickensian times, coming in here, Michael thought as his eyes registered the big old-fashioned oak reception desk and the two smaller oak desks on either side of it. Michael half-expected to see Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit seated shivering at one of the desks, quill in hand and saying meekly, “Yes, Mister Scrooge, sir, but tomorrow’s Christmas Day! There won’t be anywhere open to do business with!” Instead, a pretty young woman with a long light-brown ponytail hopped down from one of the desks – they were ridiculously high-up from the ground, those old heavy wooden desks – and slipped swiftly behind the main reception desk.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she said brightly.

  “Erm, I have a package for Mr. Edmund Linklater. From . . .” Here he paused.

  “From whom, sir?” The girl behind the desk was looking at him now with mild interest, just as a stooped-over elderly man with horn-rimmed spectacles on a chain round his neck and a shock of white hair emerged from a back room.

  Courteously and with a twinkly smile that made Michael warm to him immediately, he said, “I’m Edmund Linklater. I’m the proprietor here. And may I be so bold as to inquire who is kind enough to send me hand-delivered mail?”