The Girl I Used to Know

by Faith Hogan

  ‘Do you really mean that?’ Tess said. ‘You’re not just saying that because you want me to be able to take up my place in Trinity.’

  ‘No,’ Nancy smiled at her now, ‘no, I really do mean it. I’m looking forward to this, in my own way maybe as much as you are.’ She drew to a halt, for a moment, looked into Tess’s eyes. ‘The truth is, Tess, I’ve realised something…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I look at you and you’re so… alive, where as I… well, I’m just wandering through life. I’m hoping that here, in Dublin, well, it might help me find something that really means something to me.’

  ‘Like my music?’

  ‘Perhaps, but it won’t be music for me. I have a feeling that there’s something, or someone, that I have to find and I’m not going to find whatever or whoever that is in Ballycove,’ Nancy said shyly.

  ‘Oh, Nancy,’ Tess threw her arms around her sister, delighted that perhaps at last she was ready to take a brave step towards fashioning a future of her own making. That Nancy could have something that might offer more than all she’d ever known, it was all Tess could want for her sister. ‘I’m so pleased. I have a feeling that you’ll find it very easily and the future is going to hold all either of us can dream of.’

  Chapter 5

  January 1 – Thursday

  On first sight, it seemed Dr Kilker was still wearing the same shirt when he walked into the ward the next morning. Tess presumed it wasn’t the same, because he smelled of aftershave and he looked as though he was the newly pressed, fresher version of the man from hours before. He also looked as if he’d rather be anywhere but on duty for the first day of the New Year.

  ‘Morning, Tess,’ he didn’t lift his eyes from the notes before him. ‘You’ve had two nasty falls – any woman falling about the place for no reason would want to know what was the cause of it.’

  ‘Well, I feel fine now.’ There was no point mentioning the blasted cat again, he had more to tell her, blood tests and urine samples don’t lie.

  ‘I’m sure you do. I’ve always thought the benefits of a good night’s sleep are undervalued.’ He scribbled something across Tess’s notes and studied her. ‘You know when you arrived here last night, your blood pressure was dangerously low? I don’t need to tell you how serious having a stroke is, do I?’ He sighed, perhaps he thought she would ignore him not matter what he said. ‘You know, you’re coming to an age where soon it’ll be too late to change the course of your health. It’s a new year, Tess, it might be an opportunity to take your health in hand before you are arriving back here with complaints that are not so easily cured.’

  ‘Of course, I know, it’s time to start cutting down on the finer things in life and moving about more…’ Tess had heard it a million times already – indirect little comments, but all the same, she was a grown woman, she knew how to look after herself.

  ‘Tess, this is serious,’ his eyes bored into her. ‘I know some doctors shy away from mentioning the fact that it’s time to change things around. It’s amazing, in a country that’s marching towards an obesity epidemic, everyone talks around the problem. Mostly, I have a feeling that they are waiting until the patient develops diabetes or gout or take your pick of a plethora of other grim conditions.’ He dropped down onto the chair beside her bed, lowered his voice. ‘It’s very simple, Tess. You have known for some time you have low blood pressure. Your own doctor has prescribed hefty medication. If you don’t clean up your act, you are going to have a stroke and the reality is that could be any day now. And, if there’s no one there to get you to the hospital…’ He shook his head but his eyes silently conveyed more than any words could.

  It was the truth. Tess had seen too many doctors and nurses dodge saying it.

  ‘Of course, you’re right; I’ve known it for a while.’ There was no point arguing what was plain to see. Tess was a biscuit eater and a sitter. The one contributed to her high sugar levels the other to a telltale ribbon of additional belly that everyone knew was a marker for heart-related problems.

  ‘Well, it’s no good just knowing it, you have to do something about it, or mark my words, you’ll be back here much sooner than you think and a stroke isn’t as easily mended as a couple of stitches or a cast.’ Dr Kilker looked at her for a moment too long.

  ‘I can’t help but think I know you from somewhere,’ she heard her voice, soft and delicate on the sterile ward between them. It seemed so fragile, she wondered if it could be hers at all. ‘Have we met before?’ It was his eyes, they were drawing her back to the past, but she couldn’t tell to where.

  ‘You tell me,’ he said and set off upon his rounds again with an infuriating smile that had not been there before.

  *

  The first day of the New Year might have been any other day, apart from the fluttery feeling in her stomach, when Tess left the hospital. They organised a taxi to bring her back to Swift Square. Moving determinedly, she decided that she would do something today. Something to mark out the first day of a New Year, make a list or a resolution, or maybe both, if the painkillers didn’t kick in soon.

  Someone had boarded up the glass that shattered the evening before. They’d even swept up all the smithereens that she was certain must have spilled across the cobbles Mrs Snooty had insisted on laying right up to her front door. Tess looked about the square. She couldn’t imagine Amanda or Richard King down here boarding up her windows, even less could she see them, hands clad in marigolds, sweeping up the shards of glass. Perhaps she had a guardian angel? She scoffed at that, must be the tablets – she decided. Sure they say painkillers can do mad things to the most sane minds.

  The porch, when she let herself in, held that heavy air of home, the kind of aroma that marks out where you belong, mixed with a seasoning of neglect, because she’d left so abruptly. Her eyes were drawn upstairs, towards the Kings’ above. They’d bloody love it if she went and died. That would be just so flipping convenient for la-di-dah Amanda, wouldn’t it? She’d be in here in a flash, a one-woman decoration team, measuring up and ripping out before Tess had a chance to cool in her coffin. Well, damn that for a dozen tea scones – she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of dying yet. No, she flipping wouldn’t, she would start walking, crawling if she had to. She would be a model of good health in no time. She’d see the pair of them out, if it was her last piece of lovely revenge, she’d out-blasted-live those two yuppies.

  In the little porch, she stopped for a moment before the faded mirror that hung there long before she had arrived to live here. She looked terrible, the mad stepsister, Frankenstein forgot to introduce to the world. Her face was a swollen mass of yellow, purple, blue and black bruises from her fall the night before. Across her forehead, they had placed a large gauze bandage to keep an oozing bruise in check. Her hair stood grey, white and brittle high from her scalp as though she had just been electrically shocked. Her icy blue eyes had the watery sad look that she remembered in her aunt Beatrice’s. She was what her mother would have called a fine strong woman; towering and straight-backed, hard to believe, but she had been elegant, once. It was only in the last two decades that her frame had widened. She had settled into herself, lost the lanky look of her youth. She looked at her mouth, set in a determined line. She was not a smiler – perhaps she should try it, at this stage she had nothing to lose. She gave it a go. Just quivers at the corners, pulled her lips up further either side. It felt strange. It looked strange. Maybe, if she practised, a little. She peered closer. God – this smiling lark could be wearing. No. She would try something else. In that moment, Tess remembered she had smiled once. It seemed, suddenly that in her youth, she smiled all the time – perhaps she had used up her quota.

  The day dragged and by half past three, because she had nothing better to do, Tess took down a writing set she never used and held her pen above the page to start.

  She hadn’t made a New Year’s Resolution, in… probably fifty years. The very idea had always seemed so absurd. Tess
was not the kind of woman to think of turning over new leaves, pulling up socks or sweeping clean with new brooms. Her life just ambled along, some might say spiralled downwards, but she was still here. She sighed now, she had to start somewhere, that annoying Dr Kilker suggested exercise.

  So, number one… God, this was harder than she’d thought.

  Now, no dithering…

  Tess got up from her chair, walked around the little flat, she felt a cold sweat film on her hands. What was wrong with her? It was just a piece of paper. She wrote things down every day, well, other people’s words, typed and printed off, but still. Damn it, the harder it was, the more it seemed she had to make some effort. Did she want to make a change or not?

  Yes, she most certainly did. Right, and so she wrote:

  I will go for a walk each day. I will not miss my walk, even if it means getting wet or having to put up with irritating over-friendly news-bags who may assume I wish to keep them company. I will tell them to go away. Even if I am tired or hungry or in dire need of resuscitation, I will go for a walk around the square garden just so I can outlive the pair of them upstairs and pay my ten-bob rent to their surely awful offspring!

  Gosh, she was getting into the swing of things. Of course, you had to do three, didn’t you? Just two more to go and that thought filled her with the kind of dread an alcoholic must have surely felt on all Good Fridays when the pubs were closed.

  The second one was much easier than the first.

  Number two:

  I will try to eat healthier foods and give up on biscuits with my tea.

  Only one to go, she thought as she drifted off into a lovely afternoon snooze.

  *

  It was evening when she woke, the darkness of the square outside seeping in through windows a little too high for their lowered rooms. It wasn’t the darkness that woke her though, and it took a second to get her bearings. Outside, it was the sound of a tin being lightly tapped, a murmuring as though someone was creeping about just beyond the porch.

  Tess got to her feet as quickly as her dizzy brain would allow. Her legs were extra heavy, her body still catching up on her common sense.

  ‘Here, puss, puss.’ Near one of the large winter shrubs, Robyn King was scrabbling in the dark.

  ‘What on earth are you doing there?’ Tess hissed at her. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t call the bloody guards.’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Cuffe,’ the girl said and she made her way towards the porch.

  ‘Is that bloody cat yours?’ Tess pointed at the object of all her recent troubles. ‘You’re only lucky I’m not the litigious type. I could sue you for that thing. I’m lucky to be alive, he’s a menace.’ She began to close the door, then saw something in the girl’s eye.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cuffe, he’s not my cat, but…’ She put down a bowl of stinking cat meat and, for a moment, when Tess looked closely, she thought, that furry nuisance is probably eating better than I am. ‘He belongs to the O’Hara’s, I can’t think how he’s here on the square, they always book him into a cattery when they go on holidays, but this time…’ She looked up towards the austere King residence overhead.

  ‘Your mother isn’t a cat person, is she?’ It was too good – this girl, Robyn was babysitting a cat and trying to hide it from her mother. Tess loved the idea of getting one over on Amanda, even if she could have happily throttled this cat when he’d landed her in an ambulance only yesterday.

  ‘Well, not my mother, but my father hates them and I suppose, by extension, that means my mother isn’t going to be keen either – united front and all that.’ Robyn shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘So, you’ve taken him on, until the O’Hara’s come back?’

  ‘Well, he’s a house cat. I don’t know how he’d survive if someone didn’t look out for him.’ She looked down now at the cat, then muttered something that Tess didn’t quite catch.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘How’s your arm?’ Robyn asked.

  ‘How does it look?’ Tess eyed her now.

  ‘Mummified?

  ‘Nobody likes a smarty-pants, young lady,’ Tess shot at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ the girl said, studying the pavement. ‘I’m sorry about your fall. I told mum, about the glass, you know, but it’ll take a few days to get it replaced.’

  ‘Did you…’ Tess looked at the girl now. ‘Is it you I have to thank for cleaning up the mess?’ Of course, it stood to reason, it wouldn’t be the mother. That kind of work would be beneath Amanda King.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Cuffe, you don’t have to thank me.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it was decent of you all the same,’ Tess harrumphed, oddly touched by an act of kindness that there would be no payment for.

  ‘To be honest, I figured we wouldn’t see you for a few days and I was afraid that Margaret might cut her feet.’

  ‘Margaret?’

  ‘Margaret, well, I should say, she might cut her paws.’

  ‘Well, if it’s that cat I’ve fallen over twice,’ Tess pointed at her bruised face, ‘she’s a bloody scourge; it might be considered just desserts.’ Of course she didn’t mean it, the poor cat couldn’t help being from the big house next door.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Mrs Cuffe, I think she’s adorable.’ Robyn looked out into the traffic before turning her innocent face towards Tess. ‘I’d give anything to take her in, but...’

  ‘No, well, they don’t really go with fancy finery like you have in your house. I’ve never seen a deep-pile carpet yet that was improved with cat spray.’ Although, for ten cents, Tess thought, she’d love to lock the cat inside Amanda King’s pristine home and let her loose on her expensive carpets and curtains.

  ‘Well, someone has to look after her, while they’ve gone.’ Robyn held up a small shopping bag, ‘Cat food,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘Well I must say, you’re doing a fine job. He’s probably got more in his bowl than I have in my fridge.’

  ‘I don’t mind running to the shop for you. You know, if you need to rest over the holidays.’

  ‘Hmph,’ Tess said, because of all the things she’d expected at this stage in life, Robyn King caring that she was okay was probably the furthest down the list. Tess cleared her throat, she wasn’t going to let on that it meant anything, though, not to a King, that was for sure. ‘So, where are you feeding her exactly, anywhere near my front door, by any chance?’ It would explain how the blessed thing was always in the way.

  ‘Not now. No, I’m going to have to put out her food somewhere else.’ Robyn looked at her again, the penny suddenly dropping, ‘Because I’m afraid of dogs swooping on her when she’s having her lunch.’

  ‘Oh, right, that’d be just tragic all together,’ Tess said, not even trying to hide her sarcasm.

  ‘Maybe…’ Robyn stopped still, looked at Tess, ‘maybe I could feed her in your flat?’ She began to smile.

  ‘Oh, really? No. No, that wouldn’t work at all.’

  ‘But why ever not? You like her, I can tell you do. And you’d be doing me an enormous favour, because if my mum finds out that I’ve been looking after her, well, to say she’d be furious would be an understatement.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t know.’ Of course, there was no, ‘don’t know,’ about it. Except… God, but she’d love to put one over on Amanda King. ‘Are you sure your mother wouldn’t be keen on you looking after her?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mum is funny that way, supporting Daddy – it’s her way of being a good wife. No, there are no pets allowed in our house. To be honest, I’d say if she realised that the O’Hara’s had left Margaret behind she’d have called the cat refuge days ago.’

  ‘Oh, well. I suppose we can’t have Margaret going to the refuge, not this week at any rate,’ Tess said seriously, although, when she fell over that damn cat, she’d have happily shot and skinned it herself given half a chance. ‘You can feed her on my windowsill, if that suits you?’

  ‘Well, it’s not as good as inside, but it’s better than in the garden where m
y mum could spot her dish and put two and two together.’ Robyn shook her head solemnly and then smiled. ‘Thanks, Mrs Cuffe, who’d have thought we’d be in cahoots over Margaret?’

  ‘Who’d have thought, indeed?’ Tess murmured a little surprised at herself as much as the turn of events while the cat furled itself about her legs. In the distance she heard church bells call out the hour, it was time to go shopping. Of course, Robyn wouldn’t hear of it and offered to pick up what she needed, at least while the holidays lasted and she could rest after her recent fall.

  ‘Really, I’d like to help,’ she said and, in some way, Tess thought it made her New Year’s resolution of healthy eating doubly satisfying. She was putting the temptation a little further down the road by handing the girl a shopping list with fresh produce and nothing that Dr Kilker could possibly disapprove. Best of all, she had Amanda King’s daughter helping her to live a longer life, even if it was just to spite her mother, the irony of it tickled Tess in a wry way that made her lips almost curl into a smile.

  Robyn returned quickly with the shopping, but Tess blocked her before she could make it any further into her flat. No doubt, the girl would have put away her shopping if she got a chance. Tess wasn’t one for visitors, even if she delighted in the notion of getting up Amanda King’s nose, the walls around her heart were too thick to allow for any kind of invader. It was a relief to close her door on the city and settle into what remained of the first day of her new life.

  Tess put a match to the little fire she’d set earlier. She pulled out a knife and fork and poured herself a good three fingers of Irish whiskey – it was the one vice she had no intention of letting go. By the time she was ready to sit, the chill was just about deserting her sitting room, but she pulled on her drab old dressing gown anyway. There was something comforting in having it about her, like the contentment of being in the arms of a lover for many years. She sat on her battered couch, her dinner on her knees, the musical highlights of the previous year washing over her. Tonight, she could only think of one thing and it warmed her heart. Someone had swept up outside her door for her. Well, for her and Margaret that horrible cat, but it was an act of kindness, the likes of which she hadn’t seen in a very long time. In a little while, she’d write her third resolution for the New Year.