The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (30 page)

I didn’t know what to say. Telling you the story now, I see Maureen didn’t expect or even want me to reply. She only needed to voice the
words and for someone, anyone, to hear them. She wasn’t expecting me to help, because there was no help to be had. It could have been me standing there, it could have been a neighbour; we were all the same because the person we were not was David.

She straightened the T-shirt sleeves. ‘My son went to the Lake District. It was OK then. I had a picture of where he was. When it was night, I could say to myself, It’s night with him too. The same with the day. But this time I haven’t a clue. I’ve no idea where he is. All I know is that I’ll never see him again.’ She began to cry. It was small at first but quickly it became angular, furious bursts, like shouts. She stood beneath the pale blue sky, her slight figure giving spasmodic judders. It felt wrong to stay, it was too private. But equally it would be an abandonment to walk away. So I simply stood at your garden gate, trying not to bow my head and weep with her. When she had done with her crying, she wiped her face angrily.

She said, ‘So if you think you want my husband, take him. But if you don’t, clear out of our lives.’

Maureen stooped to her washing basket. This time she hung out a selection of men’s socks. They belonged to you. Gone was the gentleness with which she had hung David’s T-shirt. She whipped each sock out and flipped it over the line, leaving a long space between them, so that they looked like a row of separate flattened feet. There was something so barren and solitary about that laundry. She glanced down at what was now presumably an empty washing basket with a bunch of chrysanthemums inside it. And even though she had only just finished hanging her washing out, she began snapping off the pegs and ripping off each sock and chucking them, one by one, back in her washing
basket. After a few minutes the line was empty once more. I wondered if she’d explain what she’d done but she didn’t, she only narrowed her eyes and stared at that basket of wet washing with my flowers somewhere inside it, as if she hated the whole bloody lot.

‘Will you remember? To tell him I said goodbye?’ I called. My heart was in my mouth.

She spun her head towards me. Eyes blazing. ‘Haven’t you gone yet?’ she shouted.

I backed away at speed. I walked so fast down Fossebridge Road I could feel my legs trembling and I still wasn’t quick enough. Only when I was near the bottom of the hill did I stop and glance back. There she was, up by that washing line, pegging out her washing all over again. It dawned on me that she could have been doing it for hours. She might continue for days. And even though she had told me that in effect she did not love you, that I could take you if I wanted, I saw the heavy weight that clung to her and I knew that no matter what happened, she was right. I did not want to take you away from her. I’d never wanted that.

I had set out to love you quietly, from the sidelines. Instead I had put myself in the middle of your life, and look what terrible damage I had gone and done.

I took one last look at Maureen. She wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. Then she lifted up her empty basket. She carried it on her hip towards the back door of the house, carefully stepping over the wilderness of broken glass and wooden slats. She did not turn back.

I let you go, Harold, because you were not mine and you never would be. You belonged to your wife.

The last one to go

I
N THE NIGHT
, my door opened and a needle of light crossed the room. A tiny silhouette emerged, so slight that at first I thought a child was visiting.

‘I need to find my bed.’

It was Finty.

She darted into the room like a luminous scrap and I realized she was naked. She kept pacing. She looked in my cupboard and behind my curtains. She didn’t seem to know I was there.

‘Where has it gone? Where the fuck have they put it?’

No, no, I called. I tried to voice her name, but that didn’t stop her. She checked behind the door, and not finding her bed there, she got on all fours and peered under my chair. Her bare buttocks were two pointed knuckles.

Turning, she appeared to notice my bed for the first time. Only she didn’t see me in it. She pulled back the covers and jumped in beside me. Her body was white and cold. Her teeth were chattering.

‘I’m so fucking hot,’ she said. Even though she was lying down now, she couldn’t keep still. She kept flapping at the sheets and batting them with her feet and hands.

‘Finty?’ I said. ‘Be the heat.’

I don’t know how, but she heard.

Finty turned her face to mine, and it was as though it were the first time she’d spotted me, because she smiled. She had on no lipstick, no painted eyebrows. Her face had the look of a mask.

‘Flames in my head, Queenie,’ she said.

‘I know, I know. You must be the flames.’

‘I don’t feel so good.’

I said, ‘Don’t fight the heat, Finty. Do you hear me? Be a part of it.’

Suddenly she became so still I thought she must have fallen asleep. Perhaps she did briefly. I turned my head to check and the whites of her eyes were shining through the dark as large as ping-pong balls. She gave a smile. No teeth, of course. Even so, I wondered if she was getting better. Certainly her hand no longer felt cold. I could feel the warmth from her feet.

‘Hold me, gal,’ she said.

I put my arm over her. She was as small as bone.

‘Sing, gal,’ she said.

I didn’t know what else to do so I began to hum. ‘Three Blind Mice’. I couldn’t think of anything else. There was only the rattling inside her chest.

She said, ‘I’ve had the best time of my life in this place.’ She became very still in order to draw up a new breath. It was like something heavy being pulled across the floor. In the silence that followed, I feared I had heard her last breath and I felt her loss inside me and thought I would howl, but then another breath came from her, as long and heavy as the first. I held her closer.

I listened to the rhythm of her broken breathing until mine followed hers and we were at last the same. After that my mind began to drift. I thought back to the morning when your first letter came and everything changed. I remembered the day Finty made me take the nutritional drink. I thought about the other things we’d done together. The funeral
plan and the banner. I thought of all Finty’s hats. The green turban, the sou’wester, the pink cowboy hat. She smiled. Did she? I don’t know. Maybe it was pain. Whatever it was, she closed her eyes. I kept her hand in mine and I slept too.

When I woke, Sister Lucy was carrying me down the corridor. She didn’t need the wheelchair. Morning light fell into the corridor in bright pools. I mustn’t take it too hard, she kept saying.

I didn’t have to ask why.

It is 22 June.

The undertaker arrived in time for morning coffee.

A postcard

T
HREE DAYS
have gone by since I last wrote to you. Even though I was not well enough to leave my room, I gave Finty a good woman’s burial in my mind. I pictured bright hollyhocks from my garden on her coffin. There was rosemary for remembrance and gillyflowers too. I gave her a gospel choir, singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Céline Dion. There were alcopops in glasses with straws, and everyone wore red and yellow and danced in the car park, exactly as she’d wished. A poor state of health has kept me since then from writing to you in a quiet, good way.

My pilgrims have slipped free and gone on without me. I think of Finty dying at my side, and it is not frightening, but there are so many things I wish I had said to her instead of grunting ‘Three Blind Mice’. Things don’t so much end as disappear. They don’t so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don’t just mean the dying.

I rarely visit the dayroom, and when I do, I sit apart from the others in a chair near the window. I do not learn the names of the new patients. I do not go to music therapy or allow Sister Lucy to paint my nails. I sit here and I wait, and every day that I sit I wonder where you are and if you will get here and sometimes it is too much, all this looking ahead, all this wondering.

‘Harold Fry has sent a postcard,’ said Sister Lucy. ‘He’s left Newcastle. He completed a detour via Hexham. Now he is heading for
Cambo. He is almost here, Queenie. Almost here now. Do you want to look at the picture?’

I look, but I confess it is only a blur and I don’t see.

I see only the pink of Sister Lucy’s hand and it is full of life.

The dog like a leaf

A
DOG
has turned up. It’s a scrappy thing, with wiry hair and a curled tail, the colour of an autumn leaf. It keeps bringing me stones. It places them on my bed and waits for me to throw them. Go away, I tell it. I’m not playing. But then I move and the stone tumbles off the bed, drops to the floor and rolls across the room. The dog trots off to fetch it. The dog picks the stone up in its mouth and returns to my bed. It lifts itself on its back legs and places the stone very carefully beside my fingers. It sits again and watches my hand, its mouth panting a little, its head cocked to one side, as if waiting for a stone also requires careful listening.

‘You see, you like my game,’ says the dog. ‘It’s so much fun once you get the hang of it.’ The dog lifts a paw.

Shoo, I say. Go home. Or play with the horse over there. She’s only eating the curtains. I don’t want you.

The dog wags its tail.

‘I can wait as long as you like,’ he says. ‘Waiting is such fun, once you get the hang of it. It’s all part of the game in the end.’

A lot of fuss and bother

I
WAS
napping in the sun when I was woken by chanting and a brass band. It didn’t sound like the nuns and neither did it sound like a music therapy session. Other patients began to notice the noise and they peered in the direction of the gates to the hospice. Their friends and families crossed the grass towards the drive, in order to get a better look. Beyond the gates, there seemed to be a group of people massing on the pavement, with banners, flags and poster boards. There were many bright colours, theatrical costumes and musical instruments. There also seemed to be a hot dog stand and a gorilla dancing with a woman in a swimsuit.

I assumed it must be the drugs again.

‘Whatever is going on out there?’ asked Sister Philomena, glancing up from her reading book. I lifted my hands to my eye in order to shield it from the sun.

On the pavement outside a man in a hat called into a megaphone for silence. I couldn’t hear much of what he said after that because a wind took up in the garden and all the trees rattled. Mostly what I heard was ‘We’ve done it, folks. We got here.’ I heard that several times.

Then, of all the strange things, they began chanting my name. ‘Queen-ie. Queen-ie.’

‘Excuse me a moment,’ said Sister Philomena. She removed her reading glasses and rose from her deck chair.

I watched her walking briskly along the drive to the gates. As the crowd caught sight of her, they turned to her in the way that waiting
family members greet a doctor in the anticipation of life-changing news, putting on best smiles as if that will affect the verdict. There was further applause, though she lifted her hand for silence and shook her head in a no-messing way. She buzzed the gates open and stepped through, carefully shutting them behind her. A sudden flash of cameras met her.

I have no idea what she said to the group, but I could see the tall man take her hand in his and give a sombre nod. He led a slow handclap, and I can’t think how but it seemed to become a round of applause for himself. There were further camera flashes, further voices in the megaphone, further rounds of applause. The group began to disband, some moving down towards the seafront, others heading in the direction of town. I saw them waving to one another as they left, clapping one another on the shoulders, high-fiving, wishing one another a safe homeward journey. Others drifted with their arms clasped above their heads in a gesture of victory.

When Sister Philomena rejoined us in the garden, she was carrying another gift basket of muffins and a bunch of lilies. Her face was flushed, as if she had just run a long distance.

‘What an arrogant shit that man is,’ she said. She glanced at me and winked. ‘I didn’t say that, of course.’

This evening Sister Lucy wheeled me into the dayroom to watch the television news. We all assembled, the patients and their families and friends, the volunteers and nuns. There was a speech to the camera from the man in the hat, followed by footage of Sister Philomena at the gates.

‘It’s you!’ said one of the patients. ‘You’re famous!’

‘I do hope not,’ said Sister Philomena quietly.

Behind her the camera showed a view of the garden and a man watering the grass.

‘That’s me!’ shouted a volunteer.

Someone cheered, and an image of you flashed on to the screen. Now there was only silence. You were walking down a busy road but your shoulders were stooped as if you were bearing an invisible heavy load and you seemed so terribly tired. Cars swerved to avoid you.

The man with the hat was back and he was telling the interviewer it was a shame. It was a shame Harold Fry had had to give up, ‘due to fatigue and like, complicated emotional reasons. But Queenie is alive, that’s the main thing. It was lucky that me and the guys were there to step in.’ Two boys swung from his hands, and the man stooped to lift them into the air like human trophies.

‘Oh, enough of this nonsense.’ Sister Philomena snapped off the television with the remote control.

No one spoke. We got very busy, studying our hands, the view from the window, that sort of thing. Gradually the patients began to peel away with their loved ones. Even the nuns and volunteers turned their attention to other things. It was only me left in the middle of the room, staring at the black empty screen of the television. I could still see your face, the pained look in your eyes, your cheeks like hollows, your wild sprouting beard.