Watermelon Read online

  She was no stranger to romantic tragedy.

  We sat there in the darkening room, listening to the sound of my baby breathing contentedly.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Mum said.

  “Yes,” I said, and started to cry quietly.

  “What happened?” Mum asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought everything was fine. I thought he was as excited about the baby as I was. I know that the pregnancy wasn’t easy.

  I was always sick and I got fat and we hardly ever had sex, but I thought that he understood.”

  And my mother was so good. She didn’t give me any of that nonsense about men being…well…different from us, dear. They have…needs…dear, in the same way that animals do. She didn’t insult me by assuming that James left because we hadn’t had sex while I was pregnant.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked her, knowing that she no more had the answer to that than I did.

  “You’ve just got to live through it,” she said. “That’s all you can do. Don’t try to make sense of it, you’ll drive yourself crazy. The only person who can tell you why James left is James, and if he doesn’t want to talk to you, you can’t force him. Maybe he doesn’t understand it himself. But you can’t change the way he feels. If he says he doesn’t love you anymore and does love this other woman, you’ve got to accept it. Maybe he will come back, maybe he won’t, but either way, you’ve got to live through this.”

  “But it hurts so much,” I said helplessly.

  “I know it does,” she said sadly. “And if I could make it go away, you know I would.”

  I looked down at my little girl, asleep, so peaceful, so innocent, so safe and happy now, and felt an unbearable anguish. I wanted her to always be happy. I wanted to hug her and hug her and never let her go. I never wanted her to feel the rejection and loneliness and shock that I was feeling now.

  I wanted to protect her always from pain. But I wouldn’t be able to. Life would see to that.

  Just then the door opened, jolting us both out of the misery that we had sunk into. It was my youngest sister, Helen. (Helen, eighteen, had scraped into her first year of college by the skin of her small white even teeth to study something incredibly useful like anthropology, history of art and ancient Greek. Helen, of the long black hair, slanty cat eyes, constant laughter, extremely bad behavior, who was loved by most people, especially the men whose hearts she broke by the truckload.)

  “You’re here!” she shouted as she burst into the room. “Give me a look at my niece,” she screeched. “Isn’t it great! Imagine me being an auntie!

  Was it awful? Is it really like trying to shit a couch? Tell me, I’ve always wanted to know, what do they boil the water and tear the sheets up for?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she thrust her face right into the car seat.

  The poor child started to cry in terror. Helen picked up the baby and held her under her arm like a rugby player just about to score the winning try for Ireland.

  “Why’s she crying?” she demanded.

  What could I say?

  “What’s her name?” she asked.

  “Claire hasn’t decided on a name just yet,” said Mum.

  “No, I have,” I said, deciding to add to the general confusion.

  I looked at Mum. “I’ve decided I’m going to name her after your mother.”

  “What?” screeched Helen, in horror. “You can’t call her Granny Maguire.

  That’s no name for a baby.”

  “No, Helen,” I said wearily. “I’m going to call her Kate.”

  She started at me for a moment, wrinkling up her beautiful little nose, as understanding dawned on her.

  “Oh, I see,” she said, laughing.

  And then she muttered, not quite under her breath, “Well, that’s still no name for a baby.”

  She handed the baby back to me, rather in the manner that farmers unload sacks of potatoes from their trucks. That is, clumsily, carelessly, with scant regard to the welfare or comfort of the potatoes. Then, to my horror, she said, “Hey, is James here? Where’s James?”

  She obviously didn’t know.

  I started to cry. “Jesus,” she said, shocked.

  “Why’s she crying?” she demanded of my mother.

  My mother just stared dumbly at her. She couldn’t answer her.

  Would you believe it? She was crying.

  Helen stared in baffled disgust at three generations of Walsh women, all crying.

  “What’s wrong with all of you? What have I said? Mum, why are you crying?” she said in exasperation.

  We just looked at her, huddled together on the bed, tears rolling down our respective faces, newly christened Kate roaring like a train.

  “What’s going on?” she said in frustration.

  Still we sat there. Still we said nothing.

  “I’m going downstairs to ask Dad,” she threatened. But then she bit her lip and lingered by the door as she thought about it. “Unless he’s going to start crying too.”

  Finally Mum managed to speak. “No, don’t go anywhere, love,” she said, stretching out her hand to Helen. “Come and sit down. You haven’t done anything.”

  “Then why are you crying?” asked Helen, reluctantly returning to us weeping on the bed.

  “Yes, why are you crying?” I asked my mother. I was just as curious as Helen. Had her husband just left her? Did her diaper need changing?

  “Because I was just thinking about Granny,” she sniffed. “And how she didn’t live to see her first great-grandchild. And it’s lovely that you’ve named the baby after her. She would have been glad. And honored.”

  I felt so guilty. At least my mother was still alive. Poor Mum, Granny had only died last year and we all missed her so much. I hugged Mum and baby Kate, both of them crying.

  “It’s such a pity,” mused Helen wistfully.

  “What is?” I asked her.

  “Oh you know, that Granny wasn’t named something nice like Tamsin or Isolda or Jet,” she said.

  I don’t know why I didn’t kill her there and then.

  But for some reason it was very hard to get angry with her.

  And then she turned her attention to me. “And why are you crying?”

  she demanded of me. “Oh, God, I know, I bet you’ve got that postnatal depression thing. There was a thing in the paper about a woman who had that and she threw her baby out of a twelfth-story window and then she wouldn’t open the door when the police came and they had to break the door down and she hadn’t taken the trash out for weeks and the place was disgusting and then she tried to kill herself and they had to put her in an electric chair. Or something.” Helen spoke with relish, never one to let annoying little details like hard facts interfere with the telling of a good blood-thirsty tale.

  “Or maybe they just locked her up, or something,” she admitted reluctantly, trailing off.

  “Anyway, is that what’s wrong with you?” she demanded cheerfully of me, back on track. “Just as well we don’t live on the twelfth floor, isn’t it, Mum? Otherwise it’d be splatted baby all over the patio. And Michael would go crazy about the mess.”

  Michael was our ill-tempered, work-shy, superstitious octogenarian gardener. The wrath of Michael was a fearful thing to behold, as was Michael’s gardening. My father was far too frightened of him to fire him. In fact, the whole family was terrified of Michael. Even Helen was quite sub-dued around him.

  I remembered the afternoon the year before when my poor mother stood, freezing, in her apron (which she wore purely for the sake of appearances) in the garden, nodding desperately, smiling tightly, far too afraid to leave, as Michael explained, in great detail, with inarticulate grunts and frighteningly wide-sweeping gestures with the shears, how, for example, if the hedge was trimmed the wall would fall down. (“You see, it needs the hedge for the support, missus.”) Or how if the lawn was cut all the grass would wither and die.
(“The germs gets into the grass, in through the cut bits, and it all just ups and dies on you.”)

  My mother finally made her way back into the kitchen, where she tearfully banged utensils as she boiled the kettle for Michael’s tea.

  “The lazy old bastard,” she sobbed to myself and Helen. “He never does anything. And he made me miss The Flying Doctor and Countdown. And the grass is up to our knees. I’m ashamed of my life of it. We’re the only house in the neighborhood with a jungle of a garden. I’ve a good mind to spit into his tea!”

  A tearful pause. A count of three.

  “May God forgive me,” she quavered. “Helen, leave those cookies alone!

  They’re for Michael’s tea.”

  Michael was at the back door at this stage, conspicuously holding his back, as if it ached from the rigors of his labor.

  “Can I pour your tea?” my mother asked him obsequiously.

  But later that evening I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen.

  “Jack, you’ll have to say something to him.”

  “Look, Mary, I’ll cut the grass myself.”

  “No, Jack, we pay him to do it. So he should do it. Giving me all that nonsense about grass catching germs! He must take me for a right bloody idiot.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll talk to him!”

  But Dad never “talked” to Michael. And I happened to know for a fact that he cut the grass himself—the day Mum went to Limerick to see Auntie Kitty—and told my mother a barefaced lie about it.

  Helen was right. If a baby was “splatted” (is there such a word?) all over the patio, Michael would indeed go crazy about the mess.

  But it wasn’t going to happen.

  Although if Kate didn’t stop crying soon, I’d have to reconsider that.

  “No, Helen,” I explained to her. “I don’t have postnatal depression. Well, I don’t think I do. Not yet, anyway.”

  Christ! That was all I needed.

  But before I could tell her about James’s leaving me, my dad came into the bedroom.

  We were going to have to start moving some of the furniture out into the hall if the visitors continued to arrive at this rate.

  “Hijack,” we all chorused.

  My father acknowledged this greeting with a smile and a bow of his head. You see, my father’s name was Jack, and in the early seventies when hijacking was the popular news item (since overshadowed by child abuse), an uncle from America greeted my father with the words “Hi Jack.” My sisters and I nearly did ourselves an injury with mirth. It never failed to raise a smile.

  Well, perhaps you needed to be there. “I’ve come to see my first grandchild,” announced my dad. “Can I hold her?”

  I handed Kate over to Dad and he held her expertly. Immediately Kate stopped crying. She lay placidly in his arms, clenching and unclenching her little starfish hands.

  Just like her mother, I thought sadly—putty in men’s hands.

  I really would have to nip this in the bud with Kate. Get some self-respect, girl! You don’t need a man for your happiness! Every other mother would be reading her little girl stories about engines that could talk and wolves that meet their comeuppance. I would read my child feminist diatribes instead, I decided.

  Out with The Little Mermaid and in with The Female Eunuch.

  “When are you going to give her a name?” asked Dad.

  “Oh, I just have,” I told him. “I’m going to call her after Granny.”

  “Lovely,” beamed Dad.

  “Hello, little Nora,” he said to the pink bundle in a singsong baby voice.

  Helen, Mum and I exchanged stricken looks.

  Wrong granny!

  “Er, no Dad,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve called her Kate.”

  “But my mother isn’t called Kate.” He frowned in confusion.

  “I know, Dad,” I faltered. (Oh Christ, why was life so fraught with pit-falls?) “But I’ve called her after Granny Maguire, not Granny Walsh.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said a bit coldly.

  “But I’ll give her Nora for her second name,” I promised cringingly.

  “No way!” interrupted Helen. “Call her something nice. I know! How about Elena? Elena is Greek for Helen, you know.”

  “Shush, Helen,” admonished Mum. “It’s Claire’s baby.”

  Really, Helen was exhausting.

  However, as she had the attention span of a saucepan— that is, absolutely none whatsoever—she soon turned her attention to other things.

  “Hey, Dad, can I have a lift to Linda’s?”

  “Helen, I’m not a chauffeur,” replied Dad, evenly and tightly.

  “Dad, I didn’t ask you what you do for a living. I know what you do for a living. I simply asked you for a lift,” Helen said in a very “I’m prepared to be reasonable about this” voice.

  “No, Helen, you can bloody well walk!” exclaimed Dad. “I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with all you young people. Laziness, that’s what it is. Now, when I—”

  “Dad,” Helen interrupted him sharply, “please don’t tell me again how you had to walk three miles to school in your bare feet. I really couldn’t bear it. Just give me a lift.” And she gave him a little cat smile from under her long black fringe.

  He stared at her in exasperation for a moment and then he started to laugh. “Oh, all right then,” he said, jingling his car keys. “Come on.”

  He handed Kate back to me.

  The way a baby should be handed back.

  “Night, night, Kate Nora,” he said.

  Dad and Helen left.

  Mum, Kate Nora, and I remained on the bed, savoring the silence occasioned by Helen’s departure.

  “Now,” I said sternly to Kate, “that was your first lesson on how to treat a man, courtesy of your Auntie Helen. I hope you took lots of notice. Treat them like slaves and, sure enough, they’ll behave like slaves.”

  Kate stared wide-eyed up at me.

  My mother just smiled inscrutably.

  A smug, secret smile.

  A knowing kind of a smile.

  The smile of a woman whose husband has done the vacuuming for the past fifteen years.

  five

  And so to bed.

  It felt very odd to be going to sleep in the bed in which I had spent my teenage years. And it was kind of weird to be kissed good-night by my mother when I had my own child in a bassinet beside me.

  I was a mother, but I didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell me that I still felt like a child myself.

  Kate stared open-eyed at the ceiling. She was probably still in shock from her encounter with Helen. I was a bit anxious about her but, to my surprise, I actually felt quite tired. I went to sleep quickly. Although I’d thought that I really wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.

  Ever again, I mean.

  Kate gently roused me at about two A.M. by crying at about a million decibels. I wondered if she had gone to sleep at all. I fed her. Then I went back to bed.

  I went back to sleep but, a few hours later, I jolted awake again, filled with horror. Horror that had nothing to do with the exuberantly flowery Laura Ashleyesque wallpaper, curtains and duvet cover that surrounded me and that I could dimly see through the darkness.

  Horror that I was in Dublin and not in my apartment in London with my beloved James.

  I looked at the clock and it was (yes, you guessed it) four A.M. I should have taken comfort from the fact that approximately a quarter of the Greenwich Mean Time world had just jolted awake also and were lying, staring miserably into the darkness, worrying about everything from “Will I be laid off?” to “Will I ever meet someone who really loves me?” to “Am I pregnant?”

  But it was no comfort.

  Because I felt as if I was in Hell.

  And comparing it to someone else’s Hell didn’t make the pain of mine any less.

  I sat up in bed in the dark.

  Kate slept peaceful
ly beside me.

  We were like night watchmen, staying awake in shifts. Although the resemblance ended there, because I couldn’t say—well, at least not with any sincerity—“Four o’clock and all is well.”

  My stomach lurched with the horror of it all. I couldn’t believe that I was in my parents’ house in Dublin and not in my apartment in London with my husband. I felt that I must have been out of my mind to have left London and abandoned James to another woman! Had I gone completely mad? I had to go back. I had to fight for him! I had to get him back!

  I couldn’t be without James.

  He was part of me.

  If my arm had fallen off I wouldn’t have said, “Oh, leave it there for the moment. It’ll come back if it’s meant to be. No point in forcing it. It might only drive it away.” After all, it was my arm, and James was much more a part of me than any old arm.

  I needed him a lot more.

  I loved him a lot more.

  I simply couldn’t be without him.

  I wanted him back. I wanted my life with him back. And I was going to get him back. (And get him on his back.)

  (Sorry, that was flippant and vulgar.)

  I was panic-stricken: I should never have left.

  I should have stood my ground and just told him that he and I would be able to work things out. That he couldn’t possibly love Denise. That he loved me. That I was too much a part of him for him not to love me. But I had admitted defeat and delivered him into Denise’s cellulitey (but they were!) arms without any kind of protest.

  I had to speak to him now.

  He wouldn’t mind my calling him at four in the morning. I mean, this was James we were talking about here. He was my best friend. I could do anything and James didn’t mind. He understood me. He knew me.

  And I would fly back to London with Kate in the morning. And my life would be fixed.

  The last week would be forgotten. The break in our lives would be mended seamlessly. The scar would fade. Only if you looked very closely would you ever see it.

  I know what you’re thinking.