by Rachel Joyce
I pressed Neville’s flower between the pages of my notebook because I could not look after it, you see, in my garden.
An important message and a basket of washing
I WAS HOLDING a bunch of flowers in my hand. White chrysanthemums in a plastic wrapping.
‘Excuse me,’ I called out. I remained at the gate to your garden. On the other side, your wife was hanging out the washing. At first she didn’t notice me. She snatched items, one by one, from her basket and pegged them up on the line. She was wearing a housecoat, I remember that, and standing in weak sunlight. Behind her was a wreckage of splintered wooden planks, and smashed glass scattered every which way over the overgrown grass. I understood then that you had torn down your garden shed. I cast a glance at the windows of the house, wondering if you had heard me and were staring out, but they were hung with new net curtains. There was no sign of you.
Had you ripped down your shed before or after you smashed Napier’s glass clowns? One act of violence had clearly not been enough. It looked as if you wanted that wreckage in your garden, you and Maureen. Or maybe I should say, it looked as if you needed it. You needed to see the devastation inside you. To look out of your back window and see not a lawn and a fence, but chaos.
I’d known that facing Napier would be hard but I had also known, even at the outset, that the conversation with him could only end in one place, and that would be my resignation. But this was entirely different. Seeing your wife with her washing, the devastation around her, the nets blanking the windows, I had no idea any more what would come next. I turned to go and then I thought again of what I’d done. I had to find you and tell the truth.
‘Excuse me,’ I repeated. This time Maureen lifted her head. She furrowed her brow against the light and compressed her mouth, as if trying to understand whether or not she was supposed to know me. ‘My name is Queenie Hennessy. I work at the brewery.’ She made no reply. She pulled a pillowcase from her basket and, as before, she slung it over the line and trapped it beneath two pegs.
Maureen’s hair had been cut short, like a boy’s, though it looked a hatchet job to me. I wondered if she’d done it herself and I thought of David’s hair, the last time I’d seen him. Her face was thin, very pale.
I held out my chrysanthemums. I had no idea whether I intended to leave them for you or give them to her or perhaps they were really in some strange way for David. I still don’t know the truth about why I’d bought those flowers on my way to your house.
‘Is Harold home?’ I called. There was a path of crazy paving between us. I wondered if she would invite me beyond the gate. She didn’t.
‘Harold?’ She repeated your name as though there were something strange about the way I’d said it.
I told her I had something to say to her husband. It was very important, I told her.
‘But he isn’t here.’
This was not the answer I was expecting. It hadn’t occurred to me I would not find you. ‘Where is he?’
‘I’ve no idea. Out. At work. I haven’t a clue.’
Maureen returned to her washing. She pulled a towel from the basket, and maybe it got stuck in with the other items because her face twisted in annoyance as she gave it a hard yank. She threw it over the line and slipped two pegs from her pocket, snapping them over the towel.
‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’
‘No.’ She replied without looking at me. ‘I haven’t a clue.’
Overhead a flock of gulls soared past, making a racket. One of them had something large in its beak – a heel of bread, I think – and it made a wild noise that sounded like Go away, go away. The others spun and twisted around the gull with the bread, shouting, Haw haw haw. We both glanced up, Maureen and I. ‘Bloody birds,’ said Maureen. ‘They’re vermin, really.’ She looked very pointedly at me. The eyes that held mine were wide and fierce, not wearied by grief, as I had expected, but spiked and charged with it. It was late summer, but my spine gave a shiver. I found I couldn’t return her gaze. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
In a rush, I asked if she could give you a message. I told her that you’d been involved in some trouble at the brewery. It was all dealt with now, I said. No need for her concern. I hadn’t intended to tell the whole story, but as she was not speaking, as she was only watching me with that detached expression of anger, I blurted out everything. I was hoping to touch her in some way, I was hoping for her sympathy, and the more she didn’t say, the more I told her. I explained that you’d shattered Napier’s prize possessions and that I had taken the blame and would have to leave Kingsbridge. Grief did terrible things to people, I said. And even as I spoke, I felt ridiculous. Who was I, to offer platitudes about the appalling loss she was suffering?
She kept staring at me, hard-eyed. I noticed her hands were tightly curled in fists.
I held out the flowers. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘They’re for you.’
‘For me?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ And saying those words, I began to cry. It was the last thing she needed, I was sure. I tried to blow my nose and make light of my tears but I could feel her watching me and I would say that something in her softened. Maybe she needed a person to cry in order to have any sort of real conversation.
Maureen came forward. She stopped on one side of the gate while I remained on the other. Now that we were close, I could see the red rims of her eyes. Obviously she hadn’t slept. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why are you sorry? It wasn’t your fault.’
I was about ready to scream. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Take them.’
Maureen took the flowers. Briefly she touched the shaggy white petals. ‘Dead man’s flowers,’ she murmured. She gave a bitter laugh as though the joke were meant only for herself. ‘You’re Queenie Hennessy, aren’t you?’
I wondered if she’d taken in anything of what I’d told her. I said, ‘Will you tell your husband I said goodbye?’
She made no reply at first, she only caught me with her moss-green eyes. ‘I suppose you’re in love with him.’ Her voice was quiet, restrained. I felt the opposite: my face was on fire.
Maureen did not flinch or look away from me. ‘Does he even know?’
‘No. Not at all. I would never—’ I didn’t get any further. I couldn’t say it.
‘Oh,’ she murmured, as if despite myself I had told her the whole story. ‘Well, take him. If you want him. Go inside the house. Pack his bag. Go on.’ She threw a look over her shoulder, back at those white-bleached windows. And then she returned to me with her wild, angry eyes. ‘Go on,’ she spat. ‘Just go.’
I was completely thrown. I had a picture of you and me, side by side, you with your driving gloves and me in the passenger seat, and I couldn’t help myself, I started to shake. Even though the leaves were beginning to turn, we were standing in sunlight, Maureen and I. Nevertheless I felt nothing but the cold. It was in my hands, my skin, my hair. It shot through and through me. ‘Or maybe I’ll go,’ she said with a bitter laugh. ‘How about that? Would that suit you better?’
She turned and marched back to her washing. She threw my flowers on top of the basket, then something caught her eye and she stooped and gently eased out a T-shirt. I knew it at once. It was one of David’s. For the second time her face softened while she hung it on the line, while she straightened the T-shirt and smoothed it down, as if he were inside it and she was checking him for creases.
I realized, then, that her grief was as boundless as the sky. It was a form of insanity, and yet it wasn’t because it was all there was. No matter where Maureen went, what she did, what she said, what she looked at, her loss was everywhere. There could be no getting away from it.
‘I don’t have any decent photographs of him,’ she said. For a stupid moment I thought we were still talking about you, then I understood, of course, that we weren’t. David was all that there was in her mind. ‘And now I’m beginning to forget what he looked like. It’s only a few weeks since I lost him but when I try to see him in my head, litt
le parts of him already sort of blur and I can’t get him right. How can my head do that to me?’ She spoke with unconcealed bewilderment.
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
IN 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
THREE 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.