Chapter 6

A Sunday in June, 2013

My alarm went off early that Sunday morning. It was just after seven. I had been awake since five, thinking about the day ahead. It both terrified and excited me. I had breakfast at the window, strong black coffee and a cinnamon bagel with cream cheese. The coffee tasted bitter and the bagel was like cardboard. I drank less coffee than normal; I wanted to be calm for our big outing. Also I wanted to avoid toilet stops – the fewer humans I encountered today the better.

It was a beautiful summer’s day; we had a magnificent day for our outing. It was the type of a day when you know why you love living by the sea.

“The only problem with these days, my little angel, is the mass exposure of Irish flesh. The sunshine brings out people who have a tangerine look. The colour is like some rare form of jaundice. When your dad first came to live here, it was a fantastic summer and he said to me: ‘Afric, why do so many women here in Ireland have an orange-ish colour? Why are they the colour of Fanta?’ I looked at him. ‘What you are talking about, Luke – how do you mean “orange”?’ I asked. ‘Their skin is orange,’ he replied. I had to explain that it was fake tan. You see, where your dad comes from it’s so hot that they don’t need fake tan, so he had never seen it before. So since that day your dad and I call them the Fanta People and we count the number of orange people that we see on a sunny day. So, Angel, will you and I do that? Count the Fanta People today? The sun is out so they will be too.”

Dublin Bay was a deep cobalt blue. There was no one on the water, only the usual grey-and-black buoys that day-trippers confuse with seals. I could see Howth Lighthouse across the bay; there it stood majestically on the end of its headland. The yellow gorse stood out in contrast to the green and sandstone-coloured sea cliffs that peered down into the Irish Sea.

A beautiful morning for a journey, I thought. My little girl will see my life in full sunshine. I double-checked my itinerary: I had the entire morning to give my daughter a guided tour of my life in Dublin. I hoped that she would enjoy it. Though it would be one of the saddest days of my life, and my heart would ache, I didn’t want my sorrow to colour the stories. My life up to now had been very privileged.

I printed out the list of destinations and of characters that I didn’t want to forget to tell Angel about. I put the list together with the green piece of paper that Mary had given me and I put the photo with them too. All the important paperwork was now together.

The plan was to visit six places in all, starting at about eight o clock; we were going to get going early before the Sunday drivers invaded the seaside roads.

I wore a black T-shirt that just about covered my bump, black trousers with an elasticated waistband, a bright pink cotton scarf and pink Converse boots. The pink, I thought, would cheer up the black.

“Now, my angel, we are going to head off on our adventure, just you and me.” I rubbed my stomach in a circular direction. “Say goodbye to the apartment – wave bye-bye – we won’t be coming back here again.”

I picked up my hand luggage, and walked slowly down the steps with their frayed carpet. I pulled the large yellow door shut firmly behind me. She kicked me softly; maybe she was telling me that she was looking forward to the outing. The display on my phone read: 08:03.

“Let’s go, darling.” There was no response. “At least there won’t be any traffic at this time of the morning.” I bleeped open the car. “Right, darling, we’re off! Our first stop on the whirlwind tour today is just down the street – in fact we could have probably walked down to the village, to the main street – well, anyway – look there, that is where she lived. Penny, that was her pet name. Penny is the lady who will look after you when you have to go from me – so it would be good if you knew a little more about her – so that when you go to her you will be able to tell her you saw her house – well, it is more of a home than a house. Penny told the best stories but sometimes you couldn’t understand what she was saying, she was laughing so much. I will always remember the sound of her laughing – it was infectious. She had long flowing dresses in different vibrant colours; she had a deep cerise one that she wore for very special occasions. She had a green one too – it was like the colour of grass in the middle of summer – it was a lush green. Another was a deep blue like the colour of Dublin Bay on a clear summer’s day, a kind of electric blue. They were all the same style, simple and elegant. She had lots of brooches, with coloured stones, and she always wore them on the left-hand side of her dress.

“Penny lived there, see, in that small house with the black door. See, Angel, just there next door to the pub. She used to say that one day they were going to drill a hole in the wall like a hatch, so that they could put their hand through it and a gin and tonic would magically be placed in their hands. They never did drill that hole in the wall.

“Behind that door is a home full of treasures. When I say ‘treasures’ I don’t mean expensive ones but ones that tell of a full and happy life. That house is stuffed with the happiest memories. Paintings that people have done of the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes – they were so in love, until the day she died. He is still so in love with her. You know, Angel, your dad and I were like that when we first married. Sometimes in life you get distracted and forget what is really important. They never got sidetracked – they always knew what was important: each other and other people were all that was important in the world. They have all sorts of photos – black-and-white – some in focus, some very out of focus – photos of famous and not so famous people, but mostly photos of just ordinary people. They would throw loads of parties for their friends; she would say you can never have too many parties. When we were younger they would give us jobs helping at their lunches. There were always lots of people. We would spill red wine on their beautiful outfits and we dropped twice as much food as we ever managed to serve. She would introduce us as her helpers for the day. After we had messed up people’s beautiful clothes and they had left hungry because most of it was on the floor, she would hand us wads of notes and tell us what a great help we were.

“So that’s Penny’s house. You will remember that, won’t you, the one with the black door? Right, let’s go . . .”

We drove along the sea front and on towards Bullock Harbour. The blue-and-white fishing boats were lined up in the water, waiting eagerly for people to rent them. They looked lonely bobbing around there. Each boat had a different name – most were girls’ names, painted in white against a cornflower-blue background on the outside of the boat, on the stern.

I pulled the car up closer – so we could see the names more clearly.

“Let’s have a look and see if there’s a boat with your nickname on it – maybe there’s an ‘Angel’ there, or maybe there will be a name on a boat that might suit you. If we saw a name there that we liked, it wouldn’t mean that you were called after a boat – it would just be that we got our inspiration from a boat . . .”

We found a Maria, a Patsy, an Aoife, a John Abo and others, but no Angel. They probably had an Angel boat and it was just that a keen fisherman had rented it for his early-morning fishing trip. I told her it was out in the bay.

“Oh God, Angel, look at the time! Your mum is rambling on again – I hope that I’m not boring you to death. I’m not sticking to the schedule – come on, let’s go!”

I stopped the car just beyond Joyce’s Tower in Sandycove. I decided against telling her about Joyce, because I had far more important people to tell her about, and anyway he wasn’t in the photograph with the tree.

We got out and walked down to the steps of the ‘The Forty Foot’. We were alone except for a few early-morning swimmers.

“Angel, you’ve been swimming here lots of times. See that harbour over there to the right? That is Bullock Harbour, where we just came from, just now – it’s where your dad and I often swim to. It’s beautiful here, isn’t it? So calm. You have swum to the harbour lots and lots of time – not bad for a minus-three-month old.

“Your dad wants to live there by the harbour. He says when we win the Lotto we will buy one of those houses, the tall houses – can you see them? That one there, the house that has the sea as its back garden. He says then he would get up every morning very early and go fishing. You know, Angel, I thought he was going to be just a tiny bit disappointed when we discovered you were a ‘she’ and not a ‘he’. I was quite nervous about telling him – he had said once he would like to have a little boy he could teach to fish – but I needed him to know because, well, if he was disappointed better to get it out of the way early on. So I asked him if he was disappointed about the fishing. But do you know what he said to me, Angel? He said: ‘I would love to teach my little girl to fish.’” It was only a small white lie that I had told my little girl. “I was so happy because I didn’t want him to be sad, to get that terrible deep sadness. I hope that he doesn’t get too sad when you are gone.” I rubbed my stomach in a circular motion. “He will miss you very much, Angel.

“See there, the other side of the steps? That’s where we’d swim towards Dun Laoghaire Harbour. That was one of our favourite swims. You and I often swam it – that was where we would swim when your dad was away. You and I, we would swim out to the yellow buoys – see the buoys over there? When you are out there in the middle of the sea, when you breathe to the left, you can see all of Dun Laoghaire with its church spires. Then when you turn around, on the way back, breathing to the left gives you views of Howth Head with its patches of different colour greens and sometimes yellow. When we were together in the water I would talk to you – were you able to hear me then, my little girl? Or were you always sick? My favourite time of the year to swim is when the bright yellow gorse is there.

“You know, sometimes the water is so cold here that your head feels like ice when you get in. I often wondered if you could ever feel the cold when I dived in.” I paused and waited as though I was expecting her to answer. “Angel, how stupid of me – of course you couldn’t feel the cold. How silly of me! You would never have felt cold with your absent cerebellum. I am relieved to know that you were never cold out there in the big blue sea.

“Look, Angel, the swimmers are swimming around the yellow buoys – that’s our swim. Your dad and I often wondered if you were going to like to swim like we both did. We had decided early on that we were not going to be parents who forced their kids to do things that we liked. But your dad read somewhere online – or maybe it was the bloody pregnancy apps that he reads at me – and anyway it said that if you do lots of outdoor activities while you are pregnant the baby will get used to the motion, sleep better, and then will love the great outdoors. God, after reading that, any time he was home, which was not too often thankfully in that respect, he had me worn out from all the activities: swimming, fishing, kayaking and hiking.

“We had better go. I am chattering on and those swimmers are on their way back in here. We wouldn’t want them to think I’m nuts, talking to you, would we?”

I sat into the driver’s seat and wrapped the seatbelt around my little girl to keep her safe.

As we motored on down the sea road, heading for Dun Laoghaire, the morning traffic both human and vehicular was picking up, hardly surprising on such a beautiful summer’s morning.

“Do you see there on the left-hand side, the park just there with the big playground? Do you see it, just there? That is where your dad and I used to go every Sunday. People often go to church as a ritual on a Sunday but we would go for a sea swim to the Forty Foot, and then we would stop off here at the Farmers’ Market.

“Back then we would hold hands. Your dad’s left hand would hold my right hand, but not the whole hand – only the first three fingers of my hand. The last two were never included – he would leave them just dangling there excluded from the intimacy. I could never understand that. I would say ‘Luke, what about the other fingers – they feel left out!’ and he would shrug and say, ‘It’s more comfortable this way.’ I would give him a half smile just so he would know that I did not approve of his favouritism. Your dad likes things a certain way – he likes when things stay the same – it makes him feel more safe like that.

“Our first stop every Sunday in the market would be at the cheesemonger. Your dad, he loves cheese, particularly blue cheeses. ‘Can I have your best big ripe Irish blue cheese?’ he would ask the Catalan cheesemonger, Fabiana. He could never remember any of the cheeses’ names. He would take half of one brand name and the end of another and stick them together, so that the names he asked for were always jumbled up, causing complete confusion at the busy cheese stand. Fabiana always seemed to think it amusing, even if she was under more pressure communicating with him, rather than selling cheese to impatient customers.

“I think that Fabiana always liked to see him coming in through the elegant silver gates of the park to the Farmers’ Market. He told me one time that she thought he was an Australian or New Zealand rugby player – I think he was kind of chuffed, but of course he would never say that. He liked the fact that she was a foreigner too – it was like their own ‘in joke’. I would leave them to it and wander off to the book stand.

“Do you know, Fabiana is so petite that her entire body is the same width as one of my thighs. She has dreadlocks in her hair and she wears them, the dreads, all bunched up and tucked up inside drab colourless ethnic-looking hair-bands. I often wonder why she bothers to hide them away – they take so much trouble to twirl, twist, plait, iron, I can never understand why she doesn’t wear them flowing around her shoulders for people to at least see, if not admire.

“Angel, are you listening, can you follow the story that I am telling you about the girl that sells cheese? Don’t mind me, my little angel – you won’t need to listen to your mum’s crazy stories for more than forty-eight hours – this you can be sure of . . . The girl, the Catalan girl, wears those trousers that look like they can’t decide whether they are trousers or a skirt. The resulting garment is a baggy oversized crotch that makes up most of her outfit and hides her tiny figure from the world. Her nose is pierced, her lip and her left eyelid too, but not her ears.

“I wonder, if you had made it to this world – when you were big would you too have liked to have all those piercings? I wouldn’t mind if you did, if it made you happy, but your dad, I’m not so sure he would approve of it. I would say that he might feel that all the rings in different places would make you imperfect . . . what do you think?

“I always wanted to ask Fabiana why she didn’t pierce all those bits that people would normally decorate, like ears. I did think about asking her a few times, but your dad said that she might be insulted by my curiosity, that she might misunderstand me, so I never asked her. He said that she struggled with words as if they, the words, were always fighting with each other.

“Yes, we always enjoyed our trips to the market. We would walk hand in hand back to the apartment with our produce, past the old Georgian tea rooms with their faded blue eaves.

“Fabiana – such a nice name. Angel, now you need to help me choose a name for you. Have you got any idea what kind of a name you would like? What do you think would suit you? What about Lucy, Lucy with or without an ‘e’? Would Lucy suit you – are you a Lucy? Or a Lucey? What do you think?”

I looked down at my rotund belly as if hoping it might answer.

“What about Minnie? What do you think? Might that work well, given that you are going to be so tiny when you are born? Do you think that your dad might like it – Minnie Lynch, Minnie Lynch, Ms Minnie Lynch . . . no, I don’t think that really works, does it?”

I used inflection in my voice, to test the name. I spoke it aloud and looked at how my lips said the word in the rear-view mirror. Then I used a different intonation, a sterner one, as if I was reprimanding her. I tried a lower one, as if I was trying to persuade her to do something that she didn’t want to do. Then I finished the exercise by using another variation, a whisper. No, it did not sound quite right. It wouldn’t do.

Nor could I keep calling her Angel forever. She was an angel, of course, but that was not her name; she needed to be honoured with a name that we had chosen that suited her.

I switched on the radio, low. It was EASY FM. They were still celebrating the Rolling Stones. And they were playing it again, that song.

And I was struck for the first time by the line where Mick Jagger asks who could hang a name on the girl who comes and goes. Hang a name . . . a girl who comes and goes . . .

“Angel! What do you think of ‘Ruby’?” I said in great excitement. “Ruby like the colour of the tree in front of the desk at the window in the bedroom where you were conceived – that tree that your dad calls the ‘ruby blossom’ or the ‘ruby tree’ even though I have told him tons of times it’s called a cherry blossom. Ruby Lynch . . . will that work . . . will it suit you? Afric, Luke and Ruby Lynch? I think it sounds great. Let’s try Ruby for a while and see does it suit you. Right . . . Ruby . . . on we go with our tour! Our next stop will be the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire!”

In the distance there were flashes of colour on the pier, early-morning joggers bouncing up and down on the sea wall.

“Can you see the pier, out there to the right? The East Pier is the one with the bright red lighthouse and the West Pier has the faded green one. If you were ever going to be big, which they say you really don’t have much chance of being, you would love the East Pier because right at the end of the pier, just by the lighthouse, is an ice-cream kiosk, and it sells the best ice cream in Ireland. Parents bribe their kids to walk to the end of the pier to get ice cream – it must seem so far for little kids with tiny legs. Then the lovely creamy ice cream is finished, the tears start, and the little legs have to walk all the way back up the pier but without the promise of a special treat at the top.

“Do you know why one pier has a green lighthouse and the other one has a bright red one? Guess why. You don’t know? Well, they’re not the only red and green lighthouses in Dublin Bay – I bet you thought they were – well, they aren’t. The different-coloured lighthouses are to tell the ship where to dock, to park. You see, port means the left side on a ship, starboard means the right side – red is for port and green is for starboard – so as you enter Dun Laoghaire Harbour, if you were a ship, the East Pier and its red lighthouse and red light would be on your left and on the right would be the West Pier with its green lighthouse and light – so the captain would know he was on track. Isn’t that cool?

“You know, I don’t think I’ll go to the East Pier with all its perfect babies any more; it might make me too sad. I’ll go to the West Pier in future – anyway the West Pier is better and anyway I prefer green to red.”

The water was still like glass. A faint sea mist hung over Seapoint Beach. The tide was going out, so the yellow buoys were tilted on their sides in the water – they looked like drunken old men slumped over.

“The next stop, Ruby, is Sandymount – see there, that is Sandymount.” I pointed enthusiastically to the beach.

The tide was so far out you could hardly see any water at all, just an expanse of soggy sand with early Sunday-morning dog walkers that looked like tiny spots on the sand.

I hummed “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday”. “I am gonna miss you, Ruby, like it says in the song. That’s your song. Your mum is so silly she didn’t make the connection between the song and you until now . . . silly silly Mum.”

We stopped outside a dusty pink house. It had steps up to a navy-blue door. The house was surrounded by black railings, which badly needed a lick of paint. In the front garden peach and white roses swayed in the wind. In the corner by the stone wall were the forget-me-not flowers.

“Look, Ruby, the little blue-and-white flowers, the ones with the yellow centres – don’t they look like a print from an elegant tea-party set? They are called ‘Forget-me-nots’. They are my favourite flower because they are so tiny and so perfect. Henry used to live there in the pink house. He loved travelling and when we were very young he used to go to exotic places like Cairo to sell them seeds for something or other. When I was little I could never understand why he had to take seeds to other countries, why he could not send the seeds on the boat on their own. He explained to me that he had to meet people and tell them how great the seeds were, but I didn’t understand that either because wouldn’t they see for themselves how good the seeds were when the plants grew? Henry just chuckled to himself when I said that. On a work day he had a lunch box for his sandwiches. When I was little, I always thought it strange that a grown-up had a lunchbox. I thought lunchboxes were only for kids not for big people. Henry’s lunch box didn’t have any pictures, like Thomas the Tank Engine or Superman, and he didn’t have his name on it – he told me he didn’t need to put his name on it because he knew what it looked like. Every day, he would sit in Merrion Square on a bench, eat his lunch and read the newspaper. Once he told me that he always sat on the same wooden bench. It has a gold plaque on it, he said, with black writing. He told me it was dedicated to someone, but I didn’t really understand what he meant, but I nodded and smiled anyway. I asked him once what would happen if someone was sitting on his bench when he came to eat his lunch. He opened his eyes wide like they might pop out of his head. He said that he would glare at them until they left, but I didn’t believe him. He was too kind to glare at strangers so I think he would just smile at them and then go and sit on a different bench.

“When he went on his travels he would bring us back lovely jewelry, like gold rosebud earrings from Cairo – I thought those people in that country must have tiny fingers to be able to make the delicate gold leaves. Another time he brought moonstone rings from exotic Greek Islands and Egyptian bracelets with beautiful intricate designs from old manuscripts.

“He loved good wine and adored great wine – his wife says he spent most of his salary in the wine shop in the village. Henry was a great cook and every Sunday he would cook us all a delicious dinner and serve us plenty of wine. He would phone and say: ‘Will I throw you into the pot?’ Of course he didn’t literally mean that he would throw me into the pot – he was asking me to come to Sunday dinner. He taught me how to pour wine and how to twist the bottle after pouring it – he didn’t want to waste a single drop down the side of the bottle.”

Early-morning risers were beginning to make their way toward the Sandymount Dart Station; it was after nine thirty on a beautiful summer morning.

We headed down the Grand Canal towards Harold’s Cross. The vegetation on either side of the water was lush. People pushed buggies and pulled dogs along the wobbly path that runs alongside the murky brown water of the canal. The water in the canal was low so the riverbed looked like the contents of a skip, with buggies, bikes, shopping trolleys, beer cans and other debris on view from the road.

I was taking my daughter to see the house where I spent ten happy years of life.

“Normally, the canal looks much better than this, Ruby. In its own way it is beautiful, but it is an urban beauty. Sorry you can’t see it at a better time,” I twittered on.

“There it is, Ruby – see the cottage there with the solid brown door and windows with brown frames – that is our house. I used to live there with my best friend Sue. Imagine having a best friend from the age of four until now! That’s thirty-six years – that’s a really good return on investment, isn’t it? That is a best best friend, isn’t it? We lived there in that cottage, the two of us. She is a singer and an actress – she’s really talented, my little angel, and it’s a pity you will never get to meet her, or hear her sing. You would love her. She has eyes the colour of light-blue topaz. I think that she has the most beautiful eyes of any person I have ever met. When you look at her eyes you float away, you get lost – they’re like a drug, and they make you dreamy. She’s funny too in a really understated way – witty, but without ever being the centre of attention.

“Once she broke her leg. Because she couldn’t walk she decided that while the leg was healing she would cycle so that she could get around. So on the street just here, right here where we’re parked, we road-tested her cycling with a broken leg. The actual cycling was not the problem – it was getting on and off a man’s bike with a crossbar that was the challenge. It was quite an operation to get going. She rested the pedal of the bike on the kerb and then she got on the bike with her good leg still on the pavement so as to balance herself. She took the crutches, pushed in their buttons, shortened them, and then fixed them with an elasticated rope along the bar of the bike, onto the back carrier and over the back mudguard. They stuck out the back of the bike, like fierce artillery. We had tried putting them on the handlebars of the bike but they were too long. We were terrified that they would catch in some granny’s Opel Corsa as she drove along the canal looking at the view on a sunny summer afternoon.

“She was fine when she got going; the difficult part was stopping and starting so we had a few dry runs, right here on the road. Twice she fell off the bike, once because we were laughing so hard. The tears ran down my face as I watched her go up and down the road. But she was so determined that she could do it – you could see it in her focused deep-blue eyes. She was determined to ride that bicycle with a broken leg.

“Then it was time to cycle into town where she was singing at a gig. I offered to drive her, but she was determined to cycle. She was a bit wobbly on the bike, and she decided it safest to stay close to the kerb in the bus lanes. Traffic lights were also a bit of a problem as they involved stopping and starting. Obviously it was best for her to stop at as few sets of lights as possible.

“On the way into town she was weaving in and out of the bus lanes and everything went okay. Then, just near where she was playing her gig, she began to cycle slower so that she wouldn’t have to stop at the traffic lights, but the slower pace meant the bike began to wobble. A bus full of passengers swerved to avoid her, and with one big wobble she fell to the ground and the bike fell on top of her.

The bus stopped. All the passengers peered out the window at her on the ground. The alarmed bus driver came running over to her to see if she was okay.

‘You okay?’ he asked. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘Yes, I’m fine – just a bit shocked and I have a broken leg.’

‘Ah Jaysus! Not a broken leg! Let me call you an ambulance, love,’ and he started to fuss around her.

‘No – no need to call an ambulance. I broke my leg weeks ago. I’m fine.’

The intrigued passengers watched from the bus as he helped her to get back up and onto her good foot. She perched herself on the kerb and remounted, with the assistance of the bus driver.

‘Jaysus, love, I can’t believe you’re cycling with a broken leg! Why don’t you get the bus?’

‘Hadn’t thought of it – maybe next time.’

The people on the bus watched the girl with a broken leg cycle off. Sue said she wondered how many people on that bus were at her gig. She hoped a few so that they could say that they’d been properly entertained.”