The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (7 page)

‘A single, please,’ I said. ‘I’m never coming back.’

In which not much happens

I
HEARD
that the Pearly King felt too unwell to visit the dayroom today and so did Mr Henderson. There was a patient who sat with her family in a circle around her, all holding hands. Sister Philomena asked if they would like to join her for prayers and they said yes, they would. They closed their eyes as Sister Philomena whispered the words and I thought this must be the nearest humans get to whatever God is, when they hold hands and listen.

A volunteer showed Finty how to make a tissue-paper flower. They made one for Barbara too, but she mistook it for a hat and put it on her head.

She wore it all morning.

The buds on the tree outside my window have popped open to leaves. The tree shakes them every now and then, as if to say, Are you happy up there?

So I was wrong. Something has happened, after all.

Do you see leaves too?

Hang on, would you like my handkerchief?

W
HEN YOU FOUND
me in the stationery cupboard, Harold, I’d been at the brewery a full month. It was early February. I’d eaten your sandwiches and sniffed around your desk, but we hadn’t spoken since the canteen. I waited for you at my window, though. Nearly every day you were there with your empties, and sometimes I willed you to dance but you never obliged me. Maybe snow was your thing. We never had that weather again, not in all the time we worked together.

So picture this. I’m crying in a cupboard. I hear someone approach and pull at the door, and I try to hide. Or, more specifically, I behave like my father and I try to not be there. But it is difficult to not be somewhere when you are a small woman in a brown wool suit and you have nothing around you but typing paper and manila envelopes.

‘I do beg your pardon,’ you said. You clearly had no idea where to look. You chose my feet.

I didn’t know how to explain. I straightened my skirt and lowered my head. I blamed my anguish on the way Napier and the other reps laughed at me. I said I couldn’t take any more, I was going to hand in my notice. I was saying anything that came into my head. What I didn’t mention was that I’d been pregnant when I came to Kingsbridge. What I didn’t mention was that I’d lost my baby only the previous weekend. What with the stomach cramps and my grief, I could barely stand.

You clearly wished two things: that you hadn’t opened the door to the stationery cupboard and that you hadn’t found me inside it. I also
wished two things: that you would close the door to the stationery cupboard and that I’d never see you again. It seemed best all round. You kept glancing up and down the corridor. Left. Right. Left.

Help didn’t come from either direction.

And so you made another small decision. I read it in your face and body. You carefully placed your feet a little apart, just as you had done with Sheila. You caught your hands behind your back and your brow crumpled with concentration while you shifted your weight from side to side, finding your correct balance. It was like watching a tree take root. You were not going to move until you had helped me. And then you spoke.

‘Don’t resign.’ Your voice was soft. I looked up at you and found you were shining your eyes straight into mine. ‘I found it hard at the beginning too. I felt out of place. But it will get better.’

It was like another spell of yours. I couldn’t reply. For a moment I believed everything would turn out all right for me because you clearly desired that too. It was simple. And I had lost a lot at this point, Harold. More than anything, I’d wanted to keep my baby.

You said, ‘Hang on a mo, would you like my handkerchief?’ I said no, no, I couldn’t possibly, but you didn’t hear. You tugged it from your pocket like a magician’s scarf and you folded it several times over, very carefully, until it was the size of a small pincushion. ‘Please,’ you said gently. ‘Take it.’ I lifted it to my face, and the smell of you tipped me sideways.

Perhaps it was the hormones. I don’t know. I still get that smell sometimes. Imperial Leather soap, milky coffee and lemon-scented aftershave. The mix has to be just right. A stranger could pass my sea
garden and I’d want to drop my tools and run after him along the coastal path. I wouldn’t even wish to speak or touch. I’d need the scent, the feeling of stomach-fluttering warmth that accompanied it. I have tried to find the smell in a plant, but I have never been able to get it. I grew lemon thyme once. When the sun shone, that came close. I’d sit beside it with my mug of coffee, although I had to shut my eyes to imagine the Imperial Leather part.

We were in the stationery cupboard. You asked if I would care to come out and I said, ‘Thank you,’ and really I could have been saying anything. I wobbled a little with the pain inside me and you held out your hand.

‘Steady on,’ you told me. ‘No need to rush.’

It was the first time a man had touched me since the Shit in Corby. (I don’t include the young doctor who examined me while I lay on a stretcher in the hospital.) The thrill of your fingers round mine sent prickles of electricity shooting up my spine and towards my hairline. Your hand was large and warm and unwavering. If only I could have stayed like that, my hand in yours. Another time, another place, another life, I might have made a small sashay to the left and swung into your arms. But you were Harold Fry. I was Queenie Hennessy. I pulled myself free and walked away from you as fast as I could. I was almost running.

If only I’d kept going, you might say. I could have saved us all a lot of sorrow.

That night I compiled a letter to the Shit. I enclosed the money he’d pressed on me to have an abortion. There was no child, I wrote. His reputation was safe. (‘Come back,’ he’d moaned. He was slippery-faced
with tears. ‘Come back when it’s all sorted. I can’t live without you, dearest.’) I added that I never wanted to see him again. He would probably discover that he could live after all.

I lifted your handkerchief to my face and breathed in the smell of you. I felt healed again.

Can’t write any more. Hand tired. Head too. The night nurse asked if I was in pain and fetched liquid morphine in a shot glass to help me sleep.

The two blue birds wake up and take flight out of the framed print. I watch the sky at the window fill with ink. Then I see the stars and they are fizzing out there. Even the slim moon keeps shattering into splinters.

Sister Mary Inconnue says, ‘I need to replace my ribbon spool, dear one.’

That is enough for one ni—

An ultimatum

T
HERE WAS NO
post for me again today. I confess I was a little downhearted. The Pearly King had another of his parcels, but he didn’t open it.

‘Maybe you will get a card from Harold Fry tomorrow?’ said Sister Catherine.

‘There is no such word as tomorrow,’ said Mr Henderson.

I felt hot and weak.

Could you really walk? From Kingsbridge to Berwick-upon-Tweed? I tried to picture you strolling down a country lane, and all I could get was a man in fawn, giving hand signals to passing cars.

‘Do you have to do that?’ I asked once. You looked confused. ‘Do what?’ you said. ‘Winding down your window and waving your hand whenever you turn left or right. Isn’t that what indicators are for?’ ‘Are you suggesting I’m an old-fashioned driver?’ you said. And I did think that, only not in a critical way, so I dressed the thought up as something more anodyne and said no, you were just a very thorough driver. ‘I thought that was what Napier required,’ you said. ‘He wants me to take care of you. You’re a good accountant.’ And I felt a little burst of pleasure, because when you said those things I believed you, in the same way I felt safe when you put on your driving gloves and turned the key in the ignition. ‘Also,’ you said, still flapping your hand at oncoming traffic, ‘it helps us go faster. To be honest, Miss Hennessy, I wish you would stop sitting there like a lemon and help.’ When I stuck my hand out of the window and laughed, you suddenly smiled and I
got the impression it gave you happiness, to make another person laugh. I remember wondering whether it was the same with your wife.

But that was long ago.

In the dayroom, I imagined your arrival at the hospice. I imagined you approaching the inpatient doors. (Don’t be scared of them, Harold. It turns out they are only ordinary doors.) I imagined the nuns fetching you tea and asking about your journey. I imagined you reading my letter. But when I got to the part where you walked into the room, where I saw your face and you saw mine, I turned to the window. I had to concentrate very hard on the sky or the evergreens or anything that was not inside my mind.

I have searched for you, Harold, in the years I have lived without you. Not a day has gone by when I have not thought of you. There was a time when I wished it would stop, when I tried to forget, but forgetting took such strength it was easier to accept you were a missing part of me and get on with life. Sometimes, yes, I have spotted a tall man down by the sea, throwing stones, and with a jolt of excitement that leaves me trembling I have said to myself, That’s him. That’s Harold Fry. Other times I have heard a car draw up behind me as I walk to the village, or I have passed a man heading towards the castle ruins, a hiker perhaps, or I have stood behind a stranger at the shop. And something about the rumbling of the car engine, or the way the man carries his shoulders, or asks for stamps at the counter with a southern softness to his voice, has allowed me for one moment to pretend it is you. It is a fantasy, a daydream. Even as I indulge the idea, I know it cannot be true. Embleton Bay is a sprinkling of clifftop summer beach houses in the north-east of England, and I never sent you my address.
But pretending you are near, for a few moments, I have felt complete again. Only when my illness came did I give up looking for you.

You must have changed, just as I have changed. Where my skin once showed the faintest of lines, there are now ridges and indentations. Where my hair was thick and brown and shoulder-length, it is soft and white as the tufts of old man’s beard that fleck my sea garden in winter. My waist that was once plump and beskirted is a hollowing curve between the knobs of my hipbones. Maybe you don’t even wear fawn any more. Maybe you have moved on to blue.

I laid aside my notebook and tried to picture you in blue. You looked made of water. I had to dress you quickly back in fawn again. And then I remembered there was no postcard and I felt stupid for thinking all this.

Sister Lucy asked if I’d like to help with her British Isles jigsaw, but I only shrugged. Sister Catherine suggested a visit to the Well-being Garden. ‘It’s a nice day. A spell outside might do you good. You like plants and things, don’t you, Queenie?’ I shook my head.

When Sister Philomena came in with the trolley of nutritional milkshakes, I said no to those as well.

‘Listen here,’ said Finty. ‘I’ve been watching you, missy. You sit in that chair over there and you write away in your notebook. Then it comes to mealtimes and you hardly eat. Sometimes you don’t even show your face in the dining room. If you’re going to keep living, you have to come here and take the nutritional milkshakes with the rest of us.’

‘No,’ I groaned. ‘Please.’ I had them in hospital. They made me sick.

‘It seems like you’ve got a man walking the length of England. There
are some of us here that haven’t even had a visitor. So the least you can do is not kick the bucket. Now, I know you think you look like a monster, but this is hardly a beauty pageant. Look at Barbara here. The Pearly King has a plastic arm, and I’m carrying the contents of my bowel in my handbag. Either you take the drinks like we do or you’ll end up on a drip feed. Which is it going be?’

‘Don’t push her,’ said Sister Catherine. ‘It’s different for everyone.’

‘Excuse me, sister, but I’m talking to Queenie Hennessy.’ Finty fixed me with a look that was like being pinned to the wall by two orange eyebrows.

I opened my mouth. I could sense them all watching, the patients, the nuns. I didn’t think for a moment they’d understand. ‘The drinks,’ I grunted.

‘Excellent,’ said Finty. ‘Come on, everyone. Gather up. We’ll get in a round.’

Sister Catherine helped me out of my chair by the window. It was only a small distance to the other patients, but I was so slow, it was like climbing a hill. She settled me in a reclining chair by the coffee table. I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t look at anyone. I just had to pretend I was very preoccupied by the swirly pattern of the dayroom carpet.

Sister Lucy offered a choice of flavours. Barbara and Finty chose strawberry. Mr Henderson asked for vanilla. The patient with the monster slippers pointed at butterscotch. The Pearly King went for chocolate. I put my hand up for vanilla.

‘It makes no difference anyway,’ said Finty. ‘They all taste like wet cardboard.’

Sister Lucy unscrewed the lids from the bottles and served the
shakes in glasses with straws. They were all a colour halfway between beige and pink that has no name except possibly ‘blush taupe’.

We drank slowly. Half mine spilled out the side of my mouth. Nobody spoke or moved until the glasses were empty. I was the last to finish. Mr Henderson got up to hand out tissues.

‘Thank fuck that’s over,’ said Finty, rubbing at her mouth and her sweatshirt. ‘Let’s have a game of Scrabble.’

‘Are you laughing?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue.

I am happy. I had a nice time in the dayroom. And also at tea
.

She laughs. Her sandals swing, she is laughing so much. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s good.’

She murmurs something and it sounds like a blessing until I hear the words ‘tuna fish’ and wonder whether she’s recounting her shopping list.

I will not give up hope.

I will wait for you, Harold Fry.

A different perspective

T
HIS MORNING
I asked Sister Lucy if I could borrow a dictionary and a thesaurus. She fetched Pictionary and a throat lozenge.

‘Also a glass of water,’ she said helpfully.