Falling Suns

by J. A. Corrigan

  It was Mrs Xú.

  ‘You ok?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mrs Xú, fine.’

  ‘Do not think you fine. Can see. See from moment saw you. Recognise something in you. I don’t know what happening in your life ...’ again, a gentle halt, ‘but terrible things happen to many people.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ I said.

  ‘Have tea if you like some.’

  ‘Maybe later?’ I smiled towards her.

  She nodded and walked away, disappointed.

  She had been gone less than half an hour when I slipped on my shoes, wrapped a thick cardigan around my body and went out to post the envelope.

  —

  I spent the next few hours organising my few belongings and thinking about Mrs Xú. She’d wanted to talk and I hadn’t given her the time. This saddened me. I had blocked everything out for the last five years, becoming a person I disliked. A selfish person. Liam had alluded to this trait after Joe’s death and I’d been angry with him, angry because I knew he was right. It is what my dad thought too, that I was selfish, that’s what he’d said, so many times. I felt as if I was living up to it.

  I would go back to Cambri one more time to say goodbye to everyone. I had to do this thing and then allow Amanda to leave, and I only hoped she would. Afterwards.

  —

  The next day I arrived at the school early. Stanley was sitting drinking herbal tea in the small recreational room.

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  ‘You’re leaving? Still a few days to go,’ he said.

  ‘I have to leave.’

  ‘I’m sad to hear that.’ He sipped the strong-smelling liquid. ‘But you’ll be here all day today?’

  ‘I leave after lunch. I can stay for the morning; that was my plan.’

  ‘Then we’ll do this morning what I’d planned for this afternoon.’

  I lifted an eyebrow in question.

  ‘The last character you played. I think we should go through that one more time. Thinking, “Why do I want it?” Go through the scene, where the abused woman kills the abuser.’ He looked at me and Albert Einstein the philosopher, not the scientist, came to mind. Stanley thought I’d been abused. Did Mrs Xú think the same? I’d changed the way I looked and behaved, but could not change what was written into the fabric of my soul, and what was obvious behind my weary eyes. A memory of scalding hot water flitted through my brain.

  ‘OK, Stanley. Let’s do that.’

  ‘Half an hour in the big room,’ he said, gulping down the tea and swilling the mug in the sink. He smiled and was gone.

  —

  The persona and voice of the woman I played became a part of me that morning. I felt her pain, thought her thoughts. Grief can destroy you, or focus you...

  The scene took only ten minutes; it felt like ten hours. I hardly noticed the other students.

  Stanley clapped. ‘Bravo, Amanda. You have it.’

  —

  Outside, the sky was heavy with slate clouds; it had been drizzling all day and was threatening to turn into a less benign rain. I pulled my coat collar around my neck and began making my way to Regent’s Park. I wanted to think, although I’d been thinking non-stop about Joe all morning, only distracted with Stanley’s piece. Joe was stuck inside my mind, in limbo. Was it me who was holding him back?

  As I walked aimlessly around the park, around the still lake, the rain beginning to pour; I convinced myself that Joe could leave when I had taken my revenge on his murderer. Then he would be free.

  I love you, Mum...

  ‘And I love you Joe,’ I said to the wet air surrounding me.

  More than the universe, more than infinity.

  —

  Almost without thinking, I found myself at the post office near King’s Cross where I picked up correspondence. Two letters waited for me. One from Charlotte. Small talk about Jacob, about her work (she had begun writing TV scripts and had recently found success in finding an agent for them). Then she mentioned Liam. Something she had to tell me about Liam, and I felt myself stiffen.

  Coldness that was about more than about being soaked through by London rain raged through me. She didn’t say what it was; she had to speak to me in person. When are you returning? She’d asked. I think it’s time to come home from wherever you are. I reread the words. She believed I’d return. I would not and had no intention of doing so. That was never part of the plan.

  What did she have to tell me about Liam?

  The other letter was from Michael Hemmings. I pushed that into the bottom of my bag, unable deal with it now.

  Leaving behind the warmth of the post office I took a step onto the pavement, deciding I didn’t care what Charlotte had to say about Liam.

  The rain had finally stopped and I walked back to Mrs Xú’s. I planned to have tea with her at last, and tell her that soon I would be gone.

  I found her sitting behind the counter but I suspected the shop door was locked.

  ‘You come for tea, before you leave?’

  How did she know? I’d said nothing, only making up my mind that morning. But I had the strongest urge to recount everything to Mrs Xú. Not only about Joe, but about my mother, Hemmings and my dad. About my life and what I didn’t know, about the memories I was constantly pushing away, but which now were jamming in on me like people crowding through an inadequately sized gate. Jostling to enter.

  The desire to share with Mrs Xú brimmed with an intensity that took me by surprise.

  I sat on the stool next to her behind the counter.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said finally. ‘We will need a lot of tea.’

  ‘Thought might be.’ She looked at me, really looked.

  ‘You’re perceptive,’ I said.

  ‘Come with age, attempting not to become bitter. To comprehend others is to maintain own personal compassion for world. Compassion for others, real compassion, is what saves all us.’

  She unpinned her long dark hair streaked with salt and pepper, and folded both arms underneath her tiny bust.

  ‘Tell me about your son,’ I said.

  The Xús had moved from Beijing thirty years before. Set up their shop, and had their son. A son who had won a scholarship to Cambridge University and gone on to work at the biggest investment bank in New York. How proud of him they’d been; how perfect was the marriage between her and her husband. How everything had been so, so perfect. Until someone hatched a premeditated plan to slaughter so many. Mrs Xú and her husband had left China to escape oppression and potential bloodshed.

  ‘But you cannot lose your destiny. And this was ours,’ she said.

  I allowed her to talk and said nothing about Joe. I decided that Mrs Xú had enough to deal with without taking on board the madness of my unravelled life.

  She did not pursue; she had done enough.

  —

  I packed away my things; it didn’t take me long as I had so little. I placed everything in my suitcase and checked inside the lining for my passports. Still there. I pushed my hand further down into the corner and felt at the glossy finish of a photograph; I pulled out the picture of Joe. This should have been in the safe deposit box too, but I couldn’t leave it.

  I looked and the breath caught deep inside my lungs, the strange hunger surfaced, and the never-ending fatigue overcame me. Joe in bright red swimming trunks on a holiday in Spain, the year before he died. Blond hair caught flowing in a freak Spanish beach wind, a big smile. A white T-shirt, with his name emblazoned across the front. So naff, Liam had said. ‘Joe’s in España’.

  —

  As I sat on a coach at Victoria Station, ready to leave for Birmingham, I tried to gather myself and shake off the feeling that Mrs Xú, Stanley, Joe, even part of myself, had left me with, that what I was doing was wrong. I had to focus. Sitting in the cocoon of the bus I was determined to become more the person I needed to be: more like Amanda.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I worried how safe it would
be to stay in Birmingham before my journey up to Merseyside. However, it had to be safe and I saw staying there as an experiment.

  No one could realise who I was. I knew from the letter Charlotte had sent me that she was in California, and the chances of bumping into Liam were infinitesimally small. As I’d locked myself away in a new identity and obsession, Liam had padlocked himself away in his new den. As the thought of confronting Hemmings moved me on, Liam’s work, his art, consumed him, sucking out part of the grief that devoured both of us.

  What did Charlotte have to tell me about Liam? That he had a girlfriend? Was she the same one he’d been seeing before Joe died? Whenever I thought of Liam, I thought of Joe. And whenever I thought of Joe, I thought of Liam. Like a missing piece of a jigsaw, it bothered me, nagged at me, plagued me.

  Hemmings’ letter lay crumpled inside my bag. I made my way to a pub near the bus station. The beer garden was half-full and, finding a seat in the shade, with a large glass of lemonade held in an unsteady hand, I read the letter and felt the bile bubble upwards from an empty stomach.

  My dear Amanda,

  It was great to get your letter. I’m very sorry to hear that your friend died and in such a terrible way. It seems you felt a lot for him – your sympathy for a person in such a position is encouraging for me, as you would guess.

  I read with interest your plan to visit England, and it would be great if you were able to come and see me. I have a good relationship with the nurses who take care I don’t escape! They read my letters, Amanda, so I’m unable to say everything I’d like to say. But I’m sure that you visiting will only be seen as a positive experience for me, so I hope to be welcoming you soon.

  You mention your children. How wonderful that you have them to help you through such a terrible time – his death, losing your home. And, of course, the awful treatment you received from your late husband. I look forwards to hearing about this and hope that you might come to view me as a friend and someone who you can talk to. Really talk to.

  There are things inside me that I’ve never been able to tell anyone; I think though, dearest Amanda, that I might be able to tell you. One day, after we have become proper friends.

  My best wishes for now.

  Love, Michael.

  A roiling sensation began in the depths of my stomach, spreading through my body. The thing that hit me was the faultless handwriting and the politeness, as if he’d written the letter from an armchair in the local vicarage. The almost perfect grammar taught to him by Margaret. The use of ‘love’ at the end of the letter. The cloying friendliness that shone from the page. I’d always questioned his supposed insanity and what no one seemed to comprehend was his cleverness – as Margaret had gone to great pains to point out. I folded up the paper.

  As I pushed it back into my bag I realised there was another letter from him in the same envelope. A hastily scribbled one, and one which robbed me of breath.

  Hemmings was awaiting his second tribunal, he told me, and it was highly likely he would soon be moved to a step-down unit. Less secure than Littleworth and the beginnings of freedom. I sat forwards on the pub bench. This is what had spurred me towards Poland and Marek; to London and Stanley.

  Hemmings in a less secure unit would make the success of my final aim more achievable. I had to ensure Hemmings’ move worked for me.

  —

  I took a bus to Coventry to post the letter back to Hemmings, deciding that was where Amanda was staying. In the letter I told Hemmings the plan for my first visit, and that I was now in England. I wondered if it was enough time for him to respond, but respond he did, hinting that the relationship he had with one of the institution’s nurses had made it easy for him to reply quickly. He was expecting Amanda.

  After returning from Coventry I spent days perfecting everything Stanley had taught me, honing my accent. Nearly every shop worker asked me if I was on holiday, and why in Birmingham. I was even brave enough to go into my old internet café. Veronica didn’t flick an eyelid. She had no idea it was me, although I did wonder if she’d have remembered Rachel, anyway.

  Inside my head I spent a lot of time in Ohio, in the farmhouse with a broken door and dilapidated sheep enclosures. The smell that Mary Lou had evoked so simply in her letter would stay with me forever. It was the antithesis of the popcorn smell but both, disturbingly, brought images of Joe.

  I walked around the city, and every so often caught my reflection sideways in the mirror of shop glass; watching my posture, knowing my height was unusual, and noticing the large breasts that helped with my forming stoop. As Stanley had assured me I could, I lost a good two inches as I developed a curve in my back. The pain after days of doing this was dull, aching and annoying. The weather remained unusually hot for the time of year and the heat caused my bra to rub uncomfortably on my ribcage, causing an angry rash. My breasts were too big; Marek had been right, and I smiled grimly. Added to this was the ache in my neck. As I wasn’t continually staring at the chewing-gum-covered pavements, my head poked forwards at a strange and alien angle, enabling me to look only downwards at people’s knees, and I found out that a stooped posture together with big breasts leads to neck pain. I went for several torturous runs. I could keep up with my pre-surgery times but everything hurt. Inside and out.

  I made myself live with it. It was the least I could do for my son.

  And Joe didn’t come to see me.

  —

  At New Street train station I boarded the 8.55 to Lime Street in Liverpool. My gait was transformed. Not only did I look a few inches shorter; I also looked a few years older. Although I guessed that Michael Hemmings wouldn’t care about my appearance. In the last letter he had sent he alluded to the question I knew wouldn’t be far from his lips. Had any of my ‘children’ accompanied me (Amanda) on my visit to England? In my reply I didn’t answer that. I was still working out that line of my tale during semi-conscious moments in the bland Birmingham hotel, often becoming confused with the delineation between Amanda and Rachel.

  After this, after Hemmings, I would lose Amanda but remember her for the pain she had suffered, the mental anguish she’d endured.

  Just under two hours later, I arrived at Lime Street.

  Two hours after that I was inside Littleworth, waiting for the hospital security guard to search me.

  I chewed gum and tried not to smudge the heavy black mascara I’d applied. I’d left my dark hair greasy and managed to scrape it into a ponytail. When I’d checked the mirror in the Ladies at the station I looked like a woman with truly nothing to lose.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to check you for weapons. Anything that might be construed as harmful. And anything else that shouldn’t be in here.’ The security man searched my face. ‘You haven’t visited before, have you?’ He glanced at his computer-printed sheet. ‘Amanda McCarthy. American? You’re lucky your visit was okayed, I can tell you that.’ He grinned and a small amount of saliva made its way down the crease on the left side of his lower lip and chin. ‘Hemmings should be in a good mood today – you’ll meet him for the first time at his best.’

  I took the gum from my mouth and held it out towards him. ‘Don’t suppose you could get rid of this?’

  He attempted to gather up the spit from his mouth with a loud sucking sound. ‘Disgusting habit.’

  I smiled. ‘You think? So why’s ma future boyfriend in such a good mood today?’

  ‘Well, that’s confidential, that is,’ he said.

  Mr Saliva was around fifty. And, apart from having a problem controlling his oral secretions, it was also evident as he felt my crotch in the search for a hidden weapon or drugs, that he had a problem controlling most things. He was too close, and I barely stopped myself from reeling away from his alligator breath.

  He watched me with both hope and scorn. I pulled at the front of my blouse, revealing a red bra. ‘They’re new.’ I touched my left breast. ‘Had them done for Michael...’

  I am not Rachel.

  He looked
towards the door furtively. ‘Hemmings won’t give a fuck about your tits, love.’

  I nodded, buttoning up my blouse. With the uncertainty of what I was about to face, cramps began in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘You’re free to go into the visitors’ room,’ he said. ‘A Mr Abbs will be taking care of you from now on.’ He rubbed his groin. ‘I hope you get to visit again, before Hemmings’s shipped off.’

  I turned away, not wanting to look at his face.

  I sat in the visitors’ room with four others. Three women and one man. The room was too hot. The male visitor fixated on my breasts, the red bra acting like a beacon for sex, underneath the blouse I’d purposely washed with something black at the laundrette to give it a tinge of un-housewifely-like grey.

  A small-framed man appeared in the doorway. Greasy hair, a slim adolescent physique. It also looked like he’d spent the previous ten minutes squeezing the spots that covered his forehead and chin. He looked around the room, and his eyes found me quickly. I wondered if this was the nurse who was helping Hemmings. My guess was yes. I knew he’d read my letters. Amanda’s letters.

  He looked at the male visitor. ‘Here to see Gerald?’ he asked.

  The man nodded. ‘I am, Mr Abbs.’

  ‘You three go through, another nurse will take care of you,’ he said to the man. Finally, he looked towards me. ‘I take it you’re Amanda McCarthy? Alone, no minors with you?’

  ‘Yep, just little ol’ me.’ I stood and Abbs took me by the elbow.

  ‘You’ve come at a good time as far as Hemmings is concerned.’

  I nodded, waiting for the information that Mr Saliva hadn’t imparted.

  ‘What d’ya mean?’ I said.

  ‘He’s had some good news. I can’t say, but if he likes you he might well tell you himself.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I’ll take you through to Montford ward. You can see him there.’ He looked me over. ‘If I think it’s OK, the two of you can take a walk in the garden, go and look at the new gazebo, Mrs McCarthy.’ He seemed pleased with this.