Melissa

1995

Cormac raises his eyes to the horizon and consequently plonks abruptly onto his thickly nappied bum. His eyes widen to saucers and he emits a yelp of delight to herald the incoming seventh wave. Melissa’s mother-eyes pass this information to her mother-brain. It’s a predictable addition to the information already stored and held ready for organising imminent evasive action.  Her eyes have been watching, her brain counting: she knew the seventh wave would be bigger, would reach further up the beach, would engulf the place where Cormac now sits. Melissa’s brain tells her arms, with split second precision, when to move into action, when to swoop down with that easy, seemingly unpremeditated movement and hook hands under the baby’s oxters to swing him up, up and away from the encroaching wave. Cormac is double delighted with this turn of events. What a giggle.

Meanwhile Melissa-the-woman is thinking. She’s re-tracing the steps of her marriage. Seven years. Well not seven years of proper marriage, because Rob hadn’t believed in marriage, said it was social nonsense, just another way of tying you down to convention. So Melissa, against her better judgement, had settled for living as “partners”. At any rate they were, as Rob pointed out, common-law husband and wife in the eyes of Scottish law.

A cooling sea breeze weaves freshness through Melissa’s loose muslin dress, plays with her hair. Today is hot, too hot for her to stay indoors or even in her garden. She has to be by the sea. And Cormac loves to potter and guddle along the beach. They can pass hours of a day here without need for toys or other people. Melissa has a dream of building a beach house here, the front legs of the wooden verandah actually on the beach with wide wooden steps leading one down onto the sand. Then she could sit on the top step, just outside her imaginary kitchen, and shell peas (or whatever) while she watched her kids (there are always at least three in her mind’s eye) playing at the edge of the waves.

Rob said it was a daft idea. Building on sand! (so how come there are beach houses the world over, thought Melissa, but she didn’t speak her mind). And think of the winters! (she did and knew that she would love to watch the stormy winter beach from her kitchen window. It would be as, if not more, beautiful as the calm summer beach). She suspects that Rob just can’t be bothered with the effort and cost of building. Their rather tastelessly converted schoolhouse three miles inland is fine isn’t it? But Melissa hates it. The crass tongue-in-groove pine that has been whacked up to cover the damp old plaster walls, the varnished cork floor tiles, the plastic, wood-effect doors with their cheap aluminium handles. She finds her home surroundings profoundly depressing. 

A few months ago, in between bouts of sickness, she had ripped out half of the Formica kitchen units (there were far too many of them, they took up all the wall space for goodness sake and what was one supposed to fill them with, really?) and re-painted every room in the house. She covered the magnolia living room and the peachy bathroom with stark white and emerald green flat matt emulsion. The bedrooms went from apricot to oceanic green (theirs) and Caribbean blue (Cormac’s). From the chopped out and laminated pages of old calendars she created posters for every room. Wild images of lighthouses in the midst of stormy seas filled the bathroom and hallway. The brilliant colours of Austrian artist Hunterwasser’s mad architecture adorned the living room and kitchen. She discerned that Rob approved the changes, although his academic prowess hadn’t allowed him to comment.

The sun is beginning to lower in the sky. They will have to go home soon, within the hour at any rate. Cormac has built a sandcastle, not with bucket and spade but by collecting fistfuls of damp sand from lower down the beach then toddling back up to his patch and letting it drizzle out of his chubby hands onto the top of the growing heap. The effect is admirable, a kind of scale-model Ghormenghast, rich with toppling peaks, fallen columns and treacherous pathways. His kingdom is safe from the waves now that the tide is on the ebb.

Melissa allows her mind to indulge in some hate therapy. Her sister, trapped in motherhood and toddlerdom down in London, indulges in retail therapy, drifting along the shopping streets with her designer baby buggy. But Scottish island life doesn’t lend itself to retail therapy. There’s only one short street in the only village on this windswept Hebridean isle and the only shops it sports are the Coop, two butchers, a bakery and  “Fiona’s Hair & Fashion” shop – a brave (but lousy) attempt by a local lass to bring some Glasgow Sauchiehall Street savvy to the isles. So Melissa escapes through her mind rather than her purse.

Ruminating further on the current topic in her head, Melissa decides she hates her house enough to need to leave it. She wants to live closer to the sea, that’s all. Within sight of the waves, within range of the smell and sounds of the ocean. In something more aesthetically pleasing. A house full of light and space, fresh yet warm and full of glowingly rich colour. She has planned it all out, has drawn it a hundred times on scraps of paper; even done scale-perfect versions on graph paper.

Distant barking rouses Melissa from her reverie. She’d forgotten about Tobes, their new puppy. She shades her eyes to scan the beach and spots his wee brown body hurtling toward her and away from the larger silhouettes of the two local farm dogs, who have stopped at the edge of their territory, but are still barking, just to make sure the intruder does not think of returning. Then Tobes is upon her and leaping up onto her baby bump. Cormac pauses in his castle building and toddles over to join in the squirmy hug.

A few weeks ago Melissa and Cormac had gone visiting friends on the mainland and had returned home with this happy bundle, a miniature sausage dog and the only tan boy among a litter of black and tan girls. Cormac – who had recently discovered the utter delight of scoffing Toblerone while hiding in his Granny’s larder – had chosen and named the dog before Melissa had time to even think through the ramifications of taking on a puppy at this late stage in her pregnancy. It was a done deal.

Another favourite theme runs through her head. She hates her name. Melissa Wilde. Or rather, she hates the diminutives people seem determined to derive from Melissa. Her family call her Lisa, but to her this conjures up images of her namesake at kindergarten all those years ago in Edinburgh. The other Lisa had been one of those little girls who wore frilly white socks and patent leather shoes and who somehow couldn’t run and jump and turn somersaults like the popular girls could. She cried easily and wet her knickers quite often, through a seeming inability to let the teacher know that she needed to “go”. Pathetic, thought Melissa. Yet somehow, because they had the same name, this silly and smelly (as Melissa thought of her) Lisa was always being paired up with her. “We’ll have the two Lisa’s together” or “Hold hands you two Lisa’s” the teacher would smile indulgently and dare Melissa, with a hard stare, to disagree.

When they met and fell in love, Rob had agreed that Lisa was a silly name. To him it was a hairdresser’s name and therefore not suitable for his academic partner. So he called her Mel. She didn’t like that either but couldn’t explain why (“something Antipodean-brash about it” wasn’t good enough) so he continues to call her Mel. She would like everyone to call her by her full name, Melissa, but she doesn’t voice this wish, it doesn’t seem important enough. She can hear Rob’s derisive laugh.

Melissa opens her mind to another hate. She hates the music that Rob likes to play. He favours jazz. Not Dixieland or big band stuff but the kind of arrhythmic improvised noise (she can’t describe it any other way) currently in vogue in Glasgow and Edinburgh. He tootles on a saxophone that he brought home from a trip to Glasgow last year and thinks his improvisory bursts of noise rather clever (never mind that they wake Cormac from his afternoon nap). He disdains (ugh!) vocals, especially female vocals – God forbid (not that he believes in God). There are types of music that Melissa likes – or remembers liking, for nothing but instrumental jazz has been heard in their house for seven years. But her aural memory of them is fading and if asked she can never come up with any particular musician or musical genre that she could honestly say she enjoyed.

Most of all Melissa likes the sound of the ocean waves pummelling the shore, the sound of rain battering on her kitchen windows, the sound of birdsong on a perfect, blue-sky Spring morning.

Melissa takes a big deep breath of the salty air. She scans the horizon as if searching for the truth, or perhaps just the courage to voice it. Then, finally, after many months of shoving the awful thought firmly away, she decides to admit to herself, today, here and now, on this beach, that she hates Rob. Shock, horror and…relief. Yes, she hates him for his lack of love for her, his failure to cherish her, his belittling of her thoughts and ideas, his carelessness of her feelings. She hates his inability to become the family man, the husband, the father, that she and Cormac and this unborn child in her belly so need him to be. She hates his single-minded, to the exclusion of all else, focus on academia. His emotional capabilities seem to have shrunk in inverse proportion to his rise up the scientific career ladder (he has just been offered a much coveted university fellowship).

She fully realises that the reason she has been vehemently denying this diminishing of love, this encroaching hatred for so long is that, once out, the confession cannot be put back into its box. Like a cat escaping a bag, this thought is all claws and teeth and will not lie quiet again. Not at all, not ever. She has always known that once this emotion is allowed space and credibility she will have to leave Rob, go it alone. She has never yet had the courage to do that.

But now, too, she knows him to be an infidel. So this, finally, after seven years, is the straw. (an affair! how boringly predictable, how banal, what a cliché! she had thought that morning when he told her, but she hadn’t said anything).

What had happened over the seven years? They had met at university, two keen Biology students who could knock the socks off anyone else’s grades without so much as one late night sweating over their notes and text books. Together they went on every field trip available, took summer jobs at their university, staring down microscopes at mud samples and telescopes at birds, completed every assignment, project and thesis with flying colours. At the end of the four years they took the only two first class honours degrees of their year. “To Robert and Melissa, a toast!” exclaimed their over-excited department Professor, raising his umpteenth glass of the hot afternoon. Graduation Day could have doubled as a wedding reception for them, so much were they the golden couple.

Golden light shines in Melissa’s eyes now, golden reflections of the sun on the sparkling sea, golden flecks of sunshine rippling across the pale gold shell sand, golden highlights in her son’s bleached blonde hair.

At the back of her mind Melissa always knew she wasn’t particularly academic, not especially interested in the sciences. Even way back at school, in the gently rolling hills of rural lowland Scotland, when prompted to choose between the sciences and the arts subjects she had wanted to do woodwork and art, not maths and physics. Even while correctly answering some question on the Periodic Table or calculus, her head would be full of colours and shapes and music. But she never mentioned this to anyone and, as she was deemed intelligent and got top marks she therefore could not be “wasted” on the arty subjects. Striving to keep everyone happy was one of the virtues she was brought up with, so she went along with her teachers’ ideas for her and proved them right by producing excellent results, coming top of the class and even passing the Oxbridge entrance exams. What an accolade for her school.

After graduation the happy couple had each accepted plum PhD research posts and immersed themselves in the detailed study of otters (Rob) and starfish (Melissa). The Hebridean islands, off the west coast of Scotland were the ideal place to carry out the fieldwork (or seabed work in Melissa’s case) for both of these projects. Working hard and single-mindedly they lived together in equable parallel but ceased, incrementally, to touch souls – if ever they really had. But they touched bodies often enough for Melissa to wake up one morning, some two years into her fieldwork, convinced that she was pregnant. Her theory was based upon the following symptoms – puking up for no apparent reason, the morning milk smelling weirdly metallic, a mask of pallor across her usually ruddy complexion, her wetsuit being suddenly too tight to zip up and the realisation that she hadn’t bled for ages (how many weeks? enquired Rob rather sharply. Melissa wasn’t sure).

At 29 years old Melissa’s psyche suddenly cried out for motherhood. Female hormones coursed frantically around her body. Her breasts (hitherto less than cup size AA) and belly (hitherto flat to the point of concave) had already swelled up and rounded out, screaming to be put to the use for which they were intended. With hindsight, Melissa-the-thirty-something-woman, sitting on the beach watching Cormac (the life force who gave her all those maternal instincts) can see that her life path veered away from Rob’s in that moment of conception: the creation of a dependent third party exposed their differing expectations of the future.

Melissa-the-mother looks down at Cormac, her adorable baby boy, now decorating his grand pile of a castle with gently coloured shells and off-white gulls’ feathers, rounded pebbles and streamers of seaweed gathered laboriously from the strand line to either side of his base. The evening sunlight gives his brown wee body a rosy glow, the onshore breeze lifts wisps of baby-blonde hair from the crown of his handsome head. She acknowledges for the first time that she is in love with him now, not with his father, not with Rob.

Melissa-the-injured-party pulls her cardigan up over her shoulders to compensate a sudden shiver. She builds a small sand bank around the now sleeping puppy, to shelter him from the breeze. The farm dogs have gone quiet, but she can still see them up on the hill, watching over their domain, keeping an eye on her and her little family. Melissa briefly wonders how the new girl up at the farm is getting on. It’s an odd situation, such a young thing and a girl at that, taking on a big farm all on her own. 

Two years ago, when Wee Georgie had died, the island had been awash with rumour and gossip about what had gone before and what might transpire in the future. But the girl, Georgia, had come home from Australia and doggedly got on with tidying up and mending the mess that her father had left for her, and she now ran a herd of prime Aberdeen Angus cattle where her forebears had run sheep. Melissa was intrigued and not a little envious of Georgia’s life although, to her own shame, she had not yet gone as far as to go and get to know the girl, not beyond the customary island nod and wave when passing on the single track road, and the ‘how’r you doing’ ‘I’m fine’ type of exchange when meeting head on in the narrow aisles of the co-op. She felt too taken up with her own life story, just at the moment, to take on board another’s.

Through her first pregnancy Rob had grown remote from her, had stopped touching her, had needed to be away a lot and when home had taken long, quiet phone calls behind closed doors. When she eventually broached the subject he admitted that he found her pregnant body unappealing, her conversation boring and the whole concept of family life frankly tedious. He was brutally honest; she had to give him that. 

Undaunted and still single-minded (the multi-faceted focuses of motherhood take a while to fully kick in) Melissa had resolutely tucked baby Cormac under her arm and got on with her PhD. She determined to show Rob that their academic lives need not be disrupted by this turn of events. And she succeeded. They both finished their three years of fieldwork and settled down for the long stretch of “write-up”. They played jazz in the evenings, entertained friends, travelled to far-flung destinations, and all with a baby tucked under Melissa’s now muscled up arms. 

And then, last November, the milk had smelt metallic again and this time Melissa didn’t need a testing kit to know that she was pregnant. Now, there is something about a second pregnancy that really turns a woman’s brain to mush. Having a toddler in tow denies the mother-to-be the chance for that quick, but essential-to-sanity, rejuvenatory nap of an afternoon. It denies her the complete night’s sleep she so needs. Poor, harassed, exhausted Melissa could barely string two words together never mind complete her PhD thesis. Rob, meanwhile, was busy with his thesis in Glasgow (he said he needed to be near a library) and was rarely home. 

This weekend is one of those rare occasions. Rob is home right now. Melissa imagines that, as she sits on and on, nestled among the sand dunes, he will be sitting in his upstairs office going through an overflowing in-tray, quite unaffected by their conversation of this morning. 

What happened? Melissa had collected Rob off the inter-island plane that morning and they had travelled home in virtual silence – a silence only broken by Cormac’s delightful (to Melissa) and irritating (to Rob) baby babble. Mid-morning. A phone call for Rob and suddenly Melissa hears the warm, sexy voice of the Rob she first met. For a moment she is lured into comfort by this. Ah, that’s the voice of the man she loves. But wait, he’s speaking to someone else, someone on the other end of the telephone. And suddenly it all falls into place. Of course! How could she have missed all the signs and symptoms? 

He admits it immediately. She’s a fellow academic and he’s in love. (He uses the term as if it’s a statistically significant certainty, not a tender emotion of the heart.) They have so much in common. Melissa wouldn’t understand (does he have such a short memory that he forgets their academic life together? thinks Melissa, but she doesn’t say). He pities Melissa. That’s the word he uses – pity. No, he doesn’t want to split up, or leave, thank you very much. The babies were her idea so she can bring them up while he continues to lead life as he always intended. He can see that her focus is now on her babies rather than on him. He needs, therefore, to seek love elsewhere. Of course he’ll be the breadwinner. All very logical. What’s the problem? Monogamy, he asserts, is another artefact of social convention designed to artificially tie one down. Merely another nonsensical rule. He effectively ends the discussion by striding up the stairs, two at a time, to his office, closing the door firmly behind him, excluding her.

The sun dips quietly, apologetically, below the horizon. Cormac instinctively climbs the dune to where his mother, his world, is lying curled protectively around her bump. He nestles in to the meagre space between her belly and her head, squashing her tender breasts in his effort to get as close as possible. For a while they all lie in companiable silence then the cooling breeze compels Melissa to rise, gather up her son onto one hip and scoop her puppy under her other arm and walk back to their old, sun-faded, blue Landrover. 

©Julia Welstead