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“Well,” Mam asked once she’d sat herself down on the hospital chair, “any names?”
“Fáinne,” I said without hesitation.
“What?” Mam’s jaw dropped. “What sort of a name is that – a makey up one is it?”
“It means ‘ring’ in Irish,” I explained. I looked down at my new sleeping daughter and a rush of emotion went right up through me. For the first time, in a long time, I didn’t care what my Mam thought. “I think she looks like a Fáinne.”
“I think she looks like she doesn’t want to be saddled with a makey up name,” Mam pronounced. “And what’s the point in calling a child ‘ring’? D’you think you’re like a pop star or something that you can go about inventing silly names -”
“Now Dora,” Dad, who’d spent his time gazing at his new granddaughter and trying to ignore the building tension between me and my mother, patted her on the back. “It’s Lucy’s baby, she can call her what she wants.”
“Thank you, Dad,” I said back.
He coughed and turned away again.
Mam shot him an annoyed look, which was nothing new. Though surprisingly, she didn’t attack him. “I’ll never get my tongue around it,” she puffed herself up. “Huh, I’ll probably end up calling her Phone-ya or something because that’s what it sounds like.”
“It sounds like Fawn-ya,” I said back. Jesus, I thought, why couldn’t she just give it a rest? There she went spoiling my lovely baby’s name. “Fawn-ya,” I said again.
Fáinne cried a little then, just a short sort of a moan but the three of us turned to look at her and just for an instant I saw my mother’s face soften. It was as if all the hard lines disappeared, just for one tiny instant. She reached out and rubbed my baby’s face and then spoiled it all by saying, “God love you child, being saddled with a name like that.”