The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

by Rachel Joyce

  Sister Lucy frowned. She glanced to the door, as if she were frightened someone would come in. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Queenie. I can’t do that.’

  The duty nurse interrupted to examine my face. She cleaned the lesions and bathed my eye. She asked if I needed morphine or the pain patches, but I shook my head. I need to have a clear mind.

  With the duty nurse gone, Sister Lucy sat beside me. Her clean white robes gave a tiny creak. ‘OK, Queenie,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Sister Lucy took my hand and the pencil, and as she unrolled the length of bandage I watched her face. The scraping of dark hair above her ears, the puff of pale skin under her eyes. She looked tired. She wound the bandage round and round my hand and the pencil, carefully smoothing it so that there would not be a fold that might press hard and cause me further pain.

  ‘I wanted to understand you for so long, Queenie,’ she said. ‘Tonight I sort of wish I didn’t. Do you need your notebook?’ She passed it and turned to a fresh page.

  I wrote for her: Happy Birthday. It took a while to get used to the pencil strapped to my fingers.

  Peering at my words, Sister Lucy gave a frown. ‘But it isn’t today,’ she said. ‘It’s next week, remember?’

  I made a sign with my left hand to show her to remove the page. I folded the page and pressed it into her fingers. Sister Lucy gave a gulp and a little shake of her head, as though she were stopping something from coming to her throat.

  She asked if I would like anything else, if she could brush my hair to help me rest, but I shook my head. ‘Shall I sit with you?’ she said. ‘I can sit here as long as you like.’

  Once again, I shook my head.

  The light thickens at the window. Night is almost here. I must keep writing.

  The last confession of Miss Q Hennessy

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, Harold, you buried your son. It is not something a father should have to do. And I was to blame. I am to blame.

  Over my life, I have done many things to absolve my guilt. I saved your job. I ran away. I lived alone. I made you a sea garden. And there are times, it is true, when the pain has not been so intense. It has been dimly present, like a low-energy lightbulb in the hall. There have been many other days, other nights, however, when no matter what I do, I cannot get away from the one thing I wish to escape – and I will never get away from it because, of course, that thing is me.

  David was with me the night he died.

  You don’t know this.

  If it weren’t for me, he might—

  I can’t even write it.

  I have not been able to say it for twenty years. Why should I now? But Sister Mary Inconnue sits at my side, and every time I push away my notebook, my pencil, she smiles and whispers, ‘Go on.’ I must give you this last piece of the story, she says. It is time to put my affairs in order and let go of them.

  Forgive me, Harold Fry.

  The last confession of Miss Q Hennessy (2nd attempt)

  IT WAS late summer. David was twenty-one.

  He had made his trip to the Lake District and he had returned.

  A week passed, and there was no visit. No calls. I even wondered if he was backpacking again. I asked you once. I said, ‘How’s David?’ and you frowned at your hands and said, ‘Good. Good.’

  One early evening the phone rang in the hallway. When I answered I heard the pips, as if someone were struggling to slot coins into a public telephone box in time. About half an hour later there was a loud pummelling at the front door. He seemed to be trying to kick his way through it. I have to admit, I didn’t want to see David. I’d had a long day at work and I was tired. I am not trying to excuse what I did that evening. I am only trying very hard to explain exactly how it was. The banging came again. I twisted the key in my lock and pulled open the front door.

  David had lost more weight, but what shocked me was his hair. He had shaved it so short it looked as if there had been an assault on his head. It looked painful. There were fresh red cuts where the razor had nicked his scalp. I said it was good to see him. I was trying to be polite, trying to keep the conversation in a safe place. He asked if he could come in and talk.

  David’s hands were shaking. He had a gin bottle, but he could barely keep hold of it. I took the bottle from him. It was half empty.

  Only as David reeled into the light of the hall did I notice how bad his eyes were, so raw and sore that the skin round them was like tender bruises. He must have been crying for a long time. ‘Can I have my bottle back now?’ he said.

  He was very quiet for most of that evening, almost inaudible, like a person shuffling through words. He sat in the armchair by the heater, hunched up inside his coat. He didn’t take it off. He said he was hoping to join the army, hence the haircut. It seemed unlikely. He could hardly walk in a straight line.

  David told me he’d got some pills from the doctor. The doctor? I asked. Yeah, he said. The doctor. And when he told me to stop watching him, it was giving him the creeps, I said I was relieved, that was all. I was glad he’d seen a doctor.

  At one point I was talking about music – I had just borrowed the record of Purcell songs from the library – and he said, ‘Do you mind if I take my pills now? I get the depression.’ And the way he said it, simply like that, made it sound like a cold. He asked if I knew about the depression, and I said yes, I felt low too sometimes. Everyone does, I told him. Did I have pills? he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t like that for me.’ I didn’t want him coming too close. I was trying to protect myself. And the truth is, I’ve never needed pills. We are all wired differently. Sometimes I think that depression must be like a dance in your head and anything can trigger it, if you know that dance.

  David tugged three pill bottles out of his coat pocket. He read out the labels and told me what they were for. He emptied the pills on to his lap, then swallowed them back with gin.

  ‘Don’t you need water?’ I said.

  He laughed. I was concerned at the number of pills.

  ‘Do your parents know you’re taking all these?’

  He told me that Maureen had accompanied him to the doctor, though he’d asked her not to go inside. ‘Mother likes it when I’m happy,’ he said. He tried to slip the pills back into his pocket, but he couldn’t seem to find the opening and in the end I did it for him.

  A little later he asked again what I knew about depression and how I thought he should deal with it and I said something like, ‘Well, you know, it always passes.’ I hope I didn’t say, What goes up must come down, but I was in that area.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He had clearly stopped listening. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just sat in the chair while I tidied up and washed the dishes, and every time I went past him, he was drinking from the bottle he’d brought in with him. I put on a record.

  David jerked up his head like a dog when it’s heard something outside. ‘What’s that music?’

  It was the song ‘O Solitude’. He made me play the track again. Then again and again. Until that point I hadn’t really listened to it. I’d just had it as a nice, elegant sound in the background.

  David pulled up his knees and sank his head. ‘How can the guy make loneliness sound so neat?’ he said. ‘For me, it’s just this vacuum. It’s everywhere.’

  ‘Do you want anything else?’ I asked because I wanted him gone now.

  But David rose to his feet. He began to sway to the music. When he asked me to join him, I said no, I didn’t know how to dance to that sort of music. It was a Baroque song, I said, not a waltz. Well, you just listen to the tune and you move, he shouted. He had passed from apathy to something more jagged. He wagged his head as if he still had proper long hair and could swing it from side to side. As he moved he drank from the bottle, only now that he was on his feet he was swaying and throwing the alcohol in spills over his coat and my carpet.

  ‘I think you ought to stop drinking,’ I said.

  I tried to take the bottle but he li
fted it over my head and laughed, just as he had done before he left for university when he read my letter and took, among other things, my poems and my egg whisk. Then he stopped laughing and curled his lip. ‘Just dance,’ he shouted.

  I stood back. I was frightened. I did a small waltz on the opposite side of the room. In my confusion, in my need for you, I lifted up my arms, as if you were there. I rested them on your shoulders. I looked into your blue, blue eyes.

  When the record stopped, I realized I was still standing like that, looking up at you.

  The noise that came from David was a high-pitched yelp. I twisted to face him. He was pointing at me. He was snorting with laughter. His body was all screwed up with it.

  ‘You sad old bitch,’ he howled. ‘Father will never love you.’

  Everything seemed to melt. The floor, the walls. I threw out both my hands to steady myself on the frame of the kitchen door.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You do. You love him. You always did.’ He spat those words.

  As I hung there, my heart wild, my head spinning, I tried to work out what I felt. Anger, yes. Betrayed, that too. Stupid. So, so stupid. But most of all what I felt was intense pain. David knew my secret. Of course he knew. He’d known all along. When he’d asked about my poems and I’d replied that they were written for a man from my past, he was only playing with me. He was an intelligent young man. For all his selfishness, he was astute as a knife. Of course he’d guessed the truth. My answer and my discomfort had only confirmed what he suspected. I thought I had seen David for what he was. But David had seen me too.

  And he was right. He was right when he said you’d never love me. No matter what I did, no matter how many years I kept silent, I would always be the woman who sat in your car and told riddles from Christmas crackers and sang backwards and offered you mints. I’d told myself for nearly four years that this was enough, that I could live with it. That I could remain at your side and ask for nothing in return, but as your son laughed I saw myself through his eyes, I saw myself through your eyes, the woman in a brown wool suit, and I knew I couldn’t keep going. Not any more. It came as a shock. A terrible, painful shock. I had hoped to find safety in loving you, and look at me. I was a joke.

  I groped my way through the kitchen door to the sink, where I poured water into a glass. I had to get away from him. Sometimes we reject the people who tell the truth and it is not because they are wrong. It is because we can’t bear to hear.

  I let the tap run. I watched the water cascade over the rim of my glass and bubble over my hands. The water became colder and colder. Ice. My fingers burned with the cold of it. But nothing topped the pain inside me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ David was at the doorway, blocking me in. He pulled out a cigarette. He lit it, and two snorts of tobacco smoke shot from his nose. He was like a storm, pressing in on me. I have watched the storms since, when I worked in my sea garden. I have noticed the rain clouds drawing over the earth like a slate tablecloth and the wind beating at the black sea and tossing the gulls up and down like twists of white paper. I have stood in those storms, drenched, and I have thought of David.

  I said, ‘Please leave me now, David. I don’t feel so good.’

  But he didn’t. He moved closer. He reached for me and clung on to my shoulder and bowed his head. His fingers squeezed my skin. I did not want him gripping my shoulder and stinking of pain. I had no idea what he would do next.

  ‘David?’ I said. ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘I don’t feel good either.’ His voice was low.

  I took a deep breath. I said gently, ‘It’s because you’re drunk. You need to go home. You probably shouldn’t drink at all. Not with those pills you’re taking.’

  ‘Oh, quit that. You sound like the parents.’ David swung away from me, crashing once into the table, then he righted himself and lurched out of the kitchen.

  I followed because I was frightened for him. He ran at my wall and thumped it with his hand, then he threw out his booted foot and kicked my chair so violently that it jumped up and fell, its little legs pointing up into the air like a beast on its back. His eyes were dark and wide, as if he were standing on the edge of something and peering down. My handbag was open on the table; he had gone through my purse again.

  ‘I want to stay the night,’ he said.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Can I sleep on that chair?’

  I could have said yes. It would have cost me nothing. I could have gone to bed and let him sleep in the chair and then another day would have happened. It’s twenty years since he asked that question, and you have no idea how many times I have relived it in my head and played my answer differently. I have seen him asleep in my chair and I have put a blanket over him in case he is cold, and he has grown old like me, but I have kept him safe. Yes, David, I have shouted in my dreams. Yes, yes, yes.

  Not knowing all that would follow, however, this is what I did:

  I looked at your son, swaying in my sitting room. I looked at my open handbag, my upturned chair. My blood boiled.

  I shouted, ‘No!’ I shouted, ‘Go away!’ I shouted, ‘I’ve had enough!’ My head was thumping. My throat felt cut. The sentences kept coming, all the things I had never said to David. The words were like holes inside me. I couldn’t stop.

  ‘You lie. You lie all the time. You take. You take. You only take. You take from me. You take from your father. You drive your mother mad with worry. And what do you do exactly? What are you for?’ I could hardly breathe.

  I was so shaken, I had to retreat into the kitchen. No glass of water this time. I poured myself a brandy. By the time I returned, the chair was back in its place by the fire. It was empty, save for my red wool mittens, not thrown down, but placed carefully side by side. There was so much stillness, the room roared.

  ‘David?’

  He had gone. I hadn’t even heard the front door.

  And even now I can picture that chair, without him in it, and it is as though he has melted and left me with nothing except the paltry thing that had once been mine.

  The following day I was at my desk when I heard one of the secretaries mention your name. Mr Fry had rung in sick was what I heard. You’d never rung in sick in your life.

  David had walked from my flat and hanged himself in your garden shed.

  Final absolution

  SIP, SIP.

  Are you all right, Queenie? Can you hear us? Can you lift your hand if you’re in pain?

  Sip, sip.

  I slept.

  The horse is back. So is the lady with the grapefruit. The dog has his stone but he has given up bringing it to me. The dog just watches the stone, with his head tilted, one ear poised, eternally patient.

  Once I had a pair of ballroom (?) Ballroom (?) What are the things that go on your feet? I can’t remember. I had them anyway.

  Little beauties. I loved those things.

  Sister Mary Inconnue glances up from her typewriter.

  ‘You know it was not your fault?’

  I have no clue what she is talking about.

  ‘All those years you blamed yourself, but David’s death was not your fault. You couldn’t have stopped him. People do as they want.’

  I begin to cry. It is not with pain. It is a sort of relief. Now that I have shaped the songs in my head and placed them on the page, now that my pencil has turned them into lines and tails and curls, I can let them go. My head is silent. The sorrow has not gone but it no longer hurts.

  Sister Mary Inconnue smiles. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s very good.’

  Beyond the window, light flows through the leaves in the tree and sends silver ripples that lap the whitened wall. It is a new day.

  Exit pursued by a nun

  ‘WE HAVE a visitor,’ announced Sister Philomena, opening my door wide and appearing to wish to flatten herself against it. ‘How exciting.’

  Twenty years of waiting. Twelve and a half weeks in a hospice. And when
you finally arrive, what do I do? First I almost fall out of the bed and then, just at the climax of the scene, I nod off.

  You hovered at the threshold to the room, peering in beside Sister Philomena. Your face was so wind-weathered that your eyes shone. (I was wrong about the irises, Harold. The blue poppies caught you.) No hint of the beard apart from a paler stain to the skin around your mouth, and one or two stray tufts. On your feet there were no yachting shoes, there were only socks, and through one of them your big toe appeared, swollen and bruised. The straps of your rucksack hung loose around your stooped shoulders. There was no sign of my letter in your hands. The sight of you was too much. I had to look away before your eyes found mine.

  I kept my head towards the window, hoping you would not see me. I wondered if Sister Mary Inconnue had showed you my letter. I wondered if you hated me. My heart was banging inside the bone basket of my ribcage.

  ‘But she’s not here,’ I heard you say. And from the quick, light tone in your voice, I could tell you were relieved. I thought, Go now. It was enough to see you at the door. It was enough to know that you would do this for me.

  Sister Philomena laughed. ‘Of course she’s here.’ She said something else but I did not catch it. I heard only the rattle of my breathing.

  I remembered the opening words of my letter and the promise to tell you everything. No lies.

  As Sister Philomena’s footsteps receded down the corridor, you began to creep forward. I could sense your progress even without looking. I was too afraid to move. One soft footstep, another. Then your eyes must have hit my face, and despite yourself, perhaps, you gave a low groan: ‘No.’

  I turned my face to meet yours but I tried to keep the worst of me away from you.

  Oh, and I saw it all, Harold. The look of shock. Horror. Pity too. And the guilt that the sight of me aroused such feelings. You walked all that way and you believed I’d be pretty? I am sorry, Harold, for the way the truth lies. By now you had tugged your rucksack from your back and were holding it against your stomach as if it might protect you. I tried to move my hand to spare you any more, but I’m sorry, with all the writing, I couldn’t lift it.