by Cathy Kelly
Star’s eyes shot open. Open mind and close eyes at the same time? Confusing.
‘Some people call it the sixth sense,’ her mother went on. ‘There’s no word for that in the old Irish language, but my mother used to call it féth, the magic lore. It’s about getting in touch with what all people once had. That sixth sense–we’re born able to do it.’
There was huge joy and comfort in being a true part of the earth, in sensing that a terrible storm was going to lash the coast before it came, or waking up into a golden September morning with a feeling that it was going to be a glorious Indian summer day where nothing would go wrong. But it could be horrible too. Star remembered the times women would creep to their door, pleading for help, and just by taking their hand to lead them to her mother, Star would instantly know there was a good-for-nothing wife-beater at home. Eliza Bluestone would do what she could, going to Sergeant Maguire or Father Hely and telling them something needed to be done soon before the husband ended up killing the woman. Sometimes the wife would come running back down the path a few days later, furious that the police had hauled her beloved away when really all he needed was someone to understand him.
When they’d gone, Eliza would sit on the verandah murmuring about responsibilities coming with gifts and how it was easier to be good at sewing or cooking–anything, rather than this. But she’d apologise afterwards, sorry lest her words had upset Star.
‘It’s a great gift,’ she’d say, ‘a great gift. We’re blessed to have it.’
Their abilities in the realms of magic were different–Star’s was a pure gift of touch; when she took somebody’s hand, it came to her in a rush. Sometimes she saw high-speed footage of their lives, crammed into two seconds; other times, it was just one thing, one bright, shining pinpoint in their life: the birth of a child, or touching the cheek of a loved one. And then there were moments when she touched a hand and sensed darkness, as if somebody had pulled the shutters down, plunging her into gloom. Those feelings were the worst. She could see the hurt of the other person and, as it passed through her, she felt it too–her whole body aching as the other person’s pain bounced out of their soul into hers.
Eliza’s gift had been less immediate; she could read the lines of someone’s hand the way other people read a map, seeing lessons learned and lessons to be learned in every tiny crevice. She could read tea leaves too, although she only did that for fun, with friends who she knew could take it.
According to Eliza, Star’s gift of seeing by touch was the most intense any Bluestone woman had had in the three hundred years they had lived on this bit of coast. Passing on tales of these gifts was part of the legacy; each woman revealing to her daughters and granddaughters the special abilities of all the Bluestone ancestors. Bluestone Cottage was a part of it, too: a creaking, living wooden receptacle of all the knowledge and wisdom of those who’d lived and loved there over the years.
Unfortunately, their magic could be somewhat blurry around the edges when it came their own lives. Or else Star would never have fallen in love with Danny or even with David, and she’d have been spared a broken heart.
‘Your heart has to break before it can open up properly,’ her mother told her.
It sounded so wise in speech but it hurt so much in reality.
Now, thirty-five years after David had gone from her life, Star wanted to feel something of him, to touch his spirit wherever he was, and she couldn’t.
His death had left its mark on her.
The day after she heard the news, she’d looked in the bathroom mirror and discovered that her blonde hair had turned entirely white. Without any lightening golden threads, the effect was stark. Her face looked very pale, too, as if the frost of old age had crept up on her in the night.
For years she’d lived without David Kenny, at peace knowing that he was happy, and content with her own life. People might think she was eccentric, yes, but her life suited her: the almost monastic seclusion of her home, the solitude of her work, the silence that came from living alone. She’d loved it.
And now, she didn’t. She felt uneasy, unsettled. And she didn’t know why.
Charlie woke at dawn on the morning of David Kenny’s funeral, jolted awake by a hideous dream where Brendan and Mikey were being swept away from her in a raging river. She was in a tiny boat, screaming their names, reaching for them, but the torrents were carrying them further away every second, she was losing them…
She sat bolt upright in the bed, heart pounding, covered in a film of cold sweat.
The room was still murky in the morning dark and Brendan was a duvet-covered lump beside her. With relief, she reached out and touched him, barely resting her hand on his body in case she woke him up. It had been a nightmare, that was all. But it had felt so real.
Knowing it was crazy but needing to do it anyway, she slipped out of bed and tiptoed into Mikey’s room. The normal musky, old-sock smell of teenage boy was like perfume to her, and she felt the ripple of relief again as she saw her son sprawled in his bed, his marine camouflage duvet barely covering him. Gently, she fixed it, making sure he was warm, for it was a cold morning and the heating hadn’t come on yet.
Asleep, he looked even more like Brendan, the same gentleness in his face, the same freckles, the same dark hair that stuck up at all angles no matter how it was brushed.
She wondered what he looked like to other people, because to her, he was so infinitely precious that she could only see beauty. Everything about him was right, perfect. He was so gentle, so kind. Even the teachers said so.
That appalling nightmare she’d just had…Charlie shivered, as much from the cold on her damp skin as from her dream. It must have been brought on by the thought of today, David’s funeral.
Charlie, along with everyone else in Kenny’s, had talked of nothing else since his death a few days before.
How devastated Ingrid must be. At least she still had her children, but still…
With the empathy that Brendan loved in her, Charlie found herself trying to imagine the pain Ingrid was feeling: not in a voyeuristic way, but as if by doing so she could somehow send love and light Ingrid’s way.
Kitty Nelson had laughed like a drain when, as a teenager, Charlie had tried to explain her theory about empathy and human beings.
‘Empathy,’ said Charlie, ‘is like coils of smoke reaching blue tendrils into the air. If they’re let go, they can fly wherever they want, reach people, touch them and help. It’s a type of global love: the great unconscious doing good.’
Kitty had arched an eyebrow, shaded to perfection with her Dior pencil–Only Dior, darling, nothing else will do.
‘Global love?’ she’d enunciated, as though Charlie had been talking about cockroach love. ‘What a load of utter twaddle. The only global love I’ve heard of involved lots of drink, drugs and very loud Jimi Hendrix music. Where do you get your ideas from, Charlotte? That is the most awful nonsense I’ve ever heard.’
Charlie had been careful to keep her notions about love and earthly frequencies to herself after that. She would have gone on to explain that being kind had a ripple effect, with one act of kindness creating another, and another, until there were waves and waves of them. But she said nothing.
Another unbearable thing about David’s funeral was that Kitty was determined to come. She’d known David, she said, from years back.
Charlie had been hearing this since she’d started working at Kenny’s, and had lived in fear that her mother might march into work one day and demand to see her old friend, David. It was just the sort of thing she would do, but luckily it had never happened. Today, though, she was convinced that the world should see she’d been a friend of David’s, even though she hadn’t seen him for years.
‘I knew his old girlfriend too–Star. Very full of herself,’ Kitty sniffed.
Charlie took this to mean that the unknown Star hadn’t been a fan of Kitty’s, and made no comment.
Purple would work: one of those full-length she
arling coats that screamed the owner was filthy rich and oblivious to funeral etiquette.
Or pink, Schiaparelli pink, making her look wildly glamorous amid the dowdy hens in their black.
Once, Kitty Nelson would have painted her lips pink to match, but those days were gone.
It wasn’t so much that her lips had shrunk–although, to be honest, they had. It was the furrows around her mouth that made vibrant-pink-wearing a no-no.
Cigarette lines or life?
Kitty had met David in the early seventies, when he was still going out with that Bluestone girl. They’d moved in different social circles: David and Star had hung around with artists and poets, while Kitty was pals with the feminists of the day. But sometimes the two circles overlapped. David had been considered a catch then, heir to Kenny’s, for all that he seemed to be turning his back on the family firm to be with Star.
Kitty had never taken to Star: she looked through you, Kitty felt. As if she could see exactly what you were thinking, particularly when it wasn’t a nice thought. Star had given Kitty one of those serene, knowing looks when Kitty had been flirting with David. Not that he’d responded, the idiot.
Few men resisted her in those days.
But David had taken Kitty’s purred, ‘You could buy me a drink some day, on our own,’ and gently batted it back to her:
‘That’s kind of you, Kitty, but no thanks.’
Kitty had been furious, but she’d got over it. Men were strange, there was no doubt about it.
She reached for her cigarettes, extracted one from the pack and lit it in a single fluid movement. Sitting at her dressing table, ignoring the film of dust illuminated by the February sun, she admired the way she looked in the mirror as she smoked. Who cared what all the bloody medics said? Smoking was sexy. What could be more erotic than a mouth circling a smooth column, inhaling, and then blowing out a wisp of smoky promise at the man in front of you?
What man could resist that?
Few of them, that’s who. Except for David, and only because he’d been in thrall to Star at the time. Oh, and Anthony. Bloody Anthony. Always her mind ran back to her ex-husband.
Kitty stopped admiring herself in her triple mirror and took a long pull on her Dunhill, wanting her beloved nicotine to wipe him out of her mind.
Yes, it if had been his damn funeral, she’d be wearing pink or purple, or even pillar-box red with a fur collar for sheer extravagance. Anything to show the world that she was still there even if he wasn’t.
I’m still here.
She could picture how shocked Charlie would be if she knew what her mother was thinking.
‘Mum!’ she’d say, dragging one syllable into three.
Charlie was so naïve, really.
Iseult, her older daughter, would say nothing. Very little got Iseult going. She was well able for the world and its pain. Like herself.
Poor Charlie, alas, wasn’t. Hadn’t a clue, Charlie. Not a clue. No idea whatsoever how it had been for Kitty. Didn’t understand, never would.
Had it been Anthony’s funeral instead of David Kenny’s, Kitty would be throwing a massive party afterwards with unending booze, jazz musicians and food only available at breakfast for the hardy souls who’d lasted the course.
The house would have been perfect for a wake. Her house, that is. The house that went in the divorce settlement and left her living in this box.
Though it hadn’t been a particularly big house, it was detached, with a conservatory. Perfect for parties.
A hint of heat in her hand made her realise her cigarette had burned right down.
‘Shit!’ She let the tendril of ash fall into the crystal ashtray and automatically reached for a fresh cigarette.
The momentary sexiness she’d felt admiring herself had gone. That brunette bombshell who made a moue with her full lips had been gone some twenty years. Low-angled sunshine lit up the room and cast a harsh light on her face. Kitty knew that with the right lighting–candles, preferably–and when she’d had her skin freshly lasered and her fillers in, she could pass for late fifties. Today, in the dark burgundy suit she’d dragged from her closet for the funeral, with her hair still dark against the paleness of her skull, she looked every inch her sixty-nine years.
Suitably deathly for a funeral, she grinned at herself. At least she still had her sense of humour. If you could laugh at life, you had one weapon left. This morning was going to be short on laughs, so Kitty wanted to get them when she could.
Charlie would be weeping beside her and Kitty hated crying. She’d tried hard to teach her daughters that crying got you nowhere. Anger, determination and feral hunger for survival: now those worked. Nobody taught you that in college.
‘It’s going to be such an awful funeral,’ Charlie had said. ‘He wasn’t even sixty, Mum. Poor Ingrid. And the children are in shock. OK, they’re grown up, but still, he’s their dad. Everyone says Ingrid is very strong, but I don’t know how she’s going to cope.’
‘She’ll cope just fine.’
Kitty picked up a coral lip pencil and began to draw her mouth on. Men leave. Better get it over with now rather than later. Better to have your husband drop dead of a heart attack and be able to mourn him, than to have him run off because he ‘isn’t happy’. Isn’t happy? In some ways, Kitty would have preferred it if he’d run off with some little madam twenty years younger. At least she’d have been able to bitch about young trollops out to steal other women’s husbands. But for a man to leave without there being someone else, for a man to leave because he simply couldn’t live with you? The humiliation had been epic. Try mourning that.
‘You’re better off without him, Kitty,’ all her friends had said at the time.
‘At least you have your career.’
‘You’re gorgeous, you’ll meet someone else like a shot.’
Wrong! Wrong on all counts.
Red, Kitty decided: she’d wear red for Anthony’s funeral. Red lips and nails; and she’d get more fillers done around her mouth and nose. Pity she couldn’t afford another eye lift. Still, one of her old red suits–the vintage ones from the 1950s, when corsetry could give any woman a siren’s figure, regardless of middle-aged spread. All his old girlfriends would be there. Not that he’d had many, and mousy creatures the lot of them. None like herself. And he’d not married any of them. So she’d be the prominent one at his funeral; the ex-wife commanded respect, no matter what had gone before. She’d be the one people would offer their sympathies to. And she’d smile graciously and never let on that she was glad he was dead. Serve him right, the coward!
Kitty layered on the second coat of lipstick. The great thing about funerals, she thought, was that they gave her a chance to show people that she was still here. No matter what had happened in her life, Kitty Nelson was still here and still fighting. That had to count for something, didn’t it?
Star sat down the back of the church and looked around her with interest. She’d been in so few churches in her life and she adored them: the exquisite architecture and the beauty of the images around. There was such a sense of holiness here, and she respected the faith she’d grown up alongside. Her best friends had worshipped in churches like this one, and Star had often been shocked when they spoke disrespectfully about their religion yet remained a part of it all. If you couldn’t give yourself totally, you were being a hypocrite, she felt.
But still, it wasn’t her place to comment.
Goodness and kindness were paramount in her faith: being good to humankind and being grateful for what you had were the main tenets. Not much different from what was preached here.
Only the words and the rules were different, she decided. Religions run by men were always very keen on lots of rules. Rules about behaviour in church, behaviour out of church, rules about sex–what was it about sex that fascinated them so? Surely the main thrust of any religion should be about kindness and spirituality, not about what people did in the privacy of their own beds?
She watched the con
gregation file into the church, some sombre in black and others clearly making a statement about celebrating David’s life by wearing bright colours. Star approved of that. She herself had worn white; the only splash of colour a red silk corsage pinned to her breast. It was a subtle tribute to her long-lost love.
A tall woman with glossy dark hair and a dramatic black coat swept into the church on the arm of an older man who seemed to be holding on to her in a bid to calm her down. The woman’s eyes were red and her face was drawn. Obviously somebody close to David. A friend of Ingrid’s, too, Star decided. Good, Ingrid would need friends now. Star closed her eyes and sent healing and light towards the tall woman.
As she stalked up the aisle with Harry by her side, Marcella ran an expert eye over the funeral guests. Under normal circumstances, she’d have been able to gauge what they were like by their demeanour and their dress. Today, she felt too shocked by the fact that it was dear David’s funeral to be professionally distant about it all. He was her friend, he was darling Ingrid’s husband. Today, it was personal, and she glared at anyone who didn’t look suitably devastated.
Her usual rule of thumb was that people in perfect make-up, exquisite tailoring and shades were either members of the family determined to put the best side forward despite their pain, or media-savvy types who liked the sight of themselves in the inevitable newspaper photographs of the funeral.
There were some of that latter tribe present, sunglasses on and not a hint of a tear ruining their faces, chattering happily as if they were at a cocktail party where most of the people just happened to be clad in black. Marcella scowled at them.
‘Settle,’ murmured Harry, who was at her side and knew without being told what was upsetting her.
‘That bitch has never had a good word to say about Ingrid or David,’ hissed Marcella, gesturing to a woman in a leather ensemble with a hint of an Hermès scarf peeping out from her collar and just-blow-dried hair tumbling about her shoulders. ‘She shouldn’t even be here. Why are people so hypocritical that they’ll turn up at the funeral of a person they had no time for in life?’