No Way to Say Goodbye
ANNA McPARTLIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Ireland as Apart from the Crowd by Poolbeg Press 2006
This edition published in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Anna McPartlin, 2006, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-104534-4
Contents
1. Only twenty miles
2. Who is who?
3. The new neighbour
4. New town, new man?
5. Looking down
6. Meeting the people
7. Past and Present
8. Sunday, bloody Sunday
9. All is forgiven, Brinkerhoffs
10. Back to back
11. Knowing me, knowing you
12. A diamond day
13. Rear window, hard ground
14. Every day is like Sunday
15. A kiss is just a kiss
16. Digging for digging’s sake
17. I hate to say I told you so
18. Beauty and the Beast
19. People in glasshouses
20. Facing up to those who would look down
21. My, oh, Mia
22. Holding on, letting go
23. Sacrificed
24. Clean up, clean out
25. To know you is to love you
26. Down but not out
27. Those left behind
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
To Mom
I remember the days when the power in your legs and arms had gone, all hope for a bright future was lost and you in a home with your radio playing on.
I remember your face and the smile in your eyes.
I remember your faith and the lesson that hope never dies.
To my godchildren, Conor O’Shea and Laura Kerins.
For you I wish the best this world has to offer but when the shit hits the fan, and it will, Bannie will be there.
1. Only twenty miles
It was a rainy afternoon in south Kerry – driving rain reminiscent of the opening credits of a Hollywood action or end-of-the-world movie when, if given to fantasy, one might have expected a muscular, sinewy and scantily dressed male to power through the deluge with a damp and distressed girl in his arms and a gun in his back pocket. What he would do with the girl or the gun, and what the girl and the gun had to do with the rain, would be left up to the imagination of the fantasist. Still, Mary thought, there’s nothing like the image of a wet man with a purpose to brighten up an otherwise boring indoor day.
She sat on the window-seat and pulled back the curtains to watch water hit water and slide from the decks of the boats bobbing fiercely by the pier. Mr Monkels, her large yellow Labrador, lay with his head on her lap. He was peeved because rain meant no walk and he loved his walks, even though his advanced years meant that they were little more than a series of rests. Mary smiled at her hefty old friend. “It’s not the end of the world, Mr Monkels – there’s always tomorrow.”
Mr Monkels was unimpressed. He sighed, and the sigh turned to a grunt, which was followed by the low wheezing that often made Mary wonder whether he had a form of dog asthma. Then again, as his age in dog years was the equivalent to eighty-one in humans, it was a miracle that he could breathe unaided, never mind go for a walk. Mary stroked his left ear, which, although deaf, still retained sensitivity to touch – the right, although in perfect working order, had been partly missing since a nasty fishing accident some years before.
Mary’s father had given her Mr Monkels, and he had been only two months old at the time of the accident, running around the deck of her uncle’s boat while she had concentrated on taking a black-and-white photo of a dead mackerel. Her cousin Ivan was practising casting. Accidentally and inexplicably the hook had found itself embedded in Mr Monkels’s ear. Mr Monkels yelped and Mary raised her head in time to see her puppy sail through the air like a furry missile. Ivan shouted, “Jesus on a jet-ski! Watch him go!” before the pup plummeted paws first into the water. He rose to the surface quickly, splashing and yelping. Ivan rescued him. Unfortunately, a large part of his ear had become what Ivan would later term “a casualty of the sea”.
Now she stroked his good ear, smiling at the memory of her puppy wagging his tail despite his near-death experience. She had thought back then that he either possessed Herculean bravery, or was Daffy-Duck stupid, and as it turned out, it was a little of both. She lost herself in his big brown cloudy eyes for a minute or two. His nose was dryer than she’d like. She picked up his head and moved it onto a waiting pillow. Mr Monkels moaned a little and briefly she wondered if, in promising him “tomorrow”, she’d led him up the proverbial garden path.
The cottage was old and quaint, well insulated and warm, with a homely smell of log fires and home cooking. This had been her primary reason for buying it. She liked its feel. The kitchen had been refurbished two years ago to Mary’s taste but in keeping with its old-worldliness. She liked pottery and had indulged herself with lamps, vases, plates and cups.
The walls were painted a deep purple but the colour was only partially visible under the multitude of black-framed photographs that lined them. As a teenager Mary had been consumed by photography, taking workshops after school and saving for a decent camera and darkroom equipment. Initially, she had shown a flair for black-and-white shots, injecting even the most mundane subject with mystique and beauty. In her late teens she had turned to portraits and hounded her friends for their faces and time. It had been her son who had inspired her to use colour, with his jet-black hair, pink cheeks and blue, blue eyes. A boy like Ben just didn’t belong in black-and-white.
Mary’s sitting room was like a gallery, with photos of the objects and people in her life, living and dead, on all sides. Her favourite image, for no particular reason, was of a crystal bowl in front of a window with light streaming through it, but there were others, too, of which she was fond: her father bent forwa
rd in deep concentration, his glasses on the tip of his nose and the paper in his hand; her auntie Sheila, apron on, hair pinned back, stirring a stew with a grin on her face that suggested she’d just heard a dirty joke; her cousin Ivan, tanned, lean and boyish in shorts and an old fishing cap, casting his line; her old boyfriend Robert, with his shining black hair and smiling eyes, linking arms with Ivan, who was pulling her friend Penny’s blonde hair; and Adam, Penny’s giant footballer boyfriend, laughing. Mary liked the photo of a black cart laden with freshly cut white lilies because it reminded her of the day that she and Robert, her first and perhaps only love, had gatecrashed a gypsy funeral to get drunk on generosity and free beer. These were only some of the photos she surrounded herself with.
Ben had a wall to himself. It wasn’t a shrine but a gallery of her son’s laughter, his tears, tantrums, joy and sadness, all captured in twelve eight-by-ten photos that represented the five years of his life.
There were only two bedrooms, but Mary didn’t need any more. She lived alone and had done so for five years. She gazed now at her son grasping a wriggling Mr Monkels, and smiled at him, now dead as long as he had lived. He beamed back at her, for ever a five-year-old, and for ever smiling.
She checked the time, realized that the hair dye had been on for well over half an hour – it smelt like shit in sunshine, and she wasn’t sure if it was that or the onset of glaucoma that was bringing tears to Mr Monkels’s right eye – and went upstairs to wash it out. Later she combed her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, slapped moisturizer on her face and tried fruitlessly to rub out the black rings around her eyes. Great – I look like a red-haired panda. She had been dyeing it red since she was fifteen, and few remembered her natural mousy-brown: fire-engine fake set off her pale skin and emerald eyes, even when they were tired and betrayed her twenty-nine years.
Mary emptied the fridge of the food that had gone off during the four days she had been sequestered in her room with a migraine. The rain continued to pour, rattling the windows. Rain always reminded her of Ben – not because he had liked it or any great memories featured it. Perhaps it was just that a lazy indoor day allowed her the time to remember him. Or maybe it was the sound – as though the world was weeping – or the way it crept down the window like tears.
She went into the sitting room, intending to play some music, but instead found herself staring at a framed black-and-white photo of Robert, then a sixteen-year-old boy, standing by a lake holding up a large fish and grinning, his eyes so like his son’s. Now as she looked at him she felt more like his mother than his teenage girlfriend. She often wondered what he would have been like if he had lived past seventeen.
“Cheer up, Panda Face,” she said, when she glimpsed herself in the mirror.
Mr Monkels groaned. She laughed a little and put on the Scissor Sisters. “After all, Mr M, no one does happy like homos!” She chuckled at her joke but her dog didn’t share either her sense of humour or her taste in music, because he buried his head under his big paws, reminding her that she needed to get his claws clipped.
Mary went back into the kitchen and boiled the kettle to make a pot of tea, then pulled out the biscuit tin. It was definitely a day for tea and biscuits. Ivan had dropped in a DVD earlier and she was looking forward to a pleasant evening in front of the TV. But first she’d empty the washing-machine, despite encroaching exhaustion. Mary hadn’t slept well the previous night – she’d been woken by a strange dream in which a teenage boy, with a hood pulled tight and covering his face, had been running. She had heard his feet pounding the street and watched his pursuers coming around a corner. His feet moved faster and faster but his steps became shorter and shorter until he was running to stand still. She had woken with a start, her heart racing. Morphine hangover, she’d thought, which made sense: the severe migraine had necessitated two morphine injections each day for four days.
After a shower, a glass of water and a gargle with mouth-wash, she had returned to bed with an uneasy feeling that had guaranteed she would lie awake. She often had “feelings” and sometimes they had forecast something terrible but mostly they came to nothing. Around three thirty, weary yet alert, she wondered if the cryptic dream had foretold something bad, as when she had dreamed of Tina “The Hill” Murphy, trapped inside a large, angry-looking egg. At the time she had dismissed it as nothing more than her own propensity for weirdness, but the following week Tina had collapsed at WeightWatchers with a ruptured ovary. Or, indeed, when she had dreamed of Jimmy Jaw frantically searching for something in what appeared to be a large medical wastebin: later that week he’d lost his little finger in a freak sawing accident. And there had been the time when she’d woken to an image of Sheena Shaw’s cat, Johnson, on a flying carpet, passing through clouds in the company of a sickly miniature pig, only to hear the very next day that he had been throwing up bacon. The cat had survived but Sheena’s six-month-old carpet stank to high heaven and required replacing.
Mary began listing some of the endless possibilities. Was the hooded boy a metaphor for a death? Poor Mr Monkels! She worried about her dog until approximately three fifty at which time, having accepted that the link between a hooded boy and an ancient dog was tenuous, she considered whether or not the dream might have related to Penny’s disastrous love life. Then again, this disaster was on-going. That might explain the running. Poor Penny! But the kid was definitely a boy, not a girl, and after all, Penny’s love life might not have been the stuff of fairytales but at least she had one. It was just after four fifteen when she had begun to contemplate why she was alone. Am I frigid? No, I like to get laid just as much as the next person. It’s very relaxing. Am I scared? Yes? No? Maybe. OK, this is getting too heavy. Change the subject. Am I a lunatic? Has grief driven me to the edge of sanity? She smiled – in her head she was humming “She’s A Maniac”.
Although her ramblings distracted her, they had no effect on her elevated pulse or sense of dread so she refocused. Her dad had just had his heart checked and was healthier than a fourteen-year-old. Ivan seemed happy and healthy, although he was still adjusting to life after an acrimonious separation. It had been more than a year ago, but he hadn’t even attempted to find himself a girlfriend. It seemed a great waste to Mary as her cousin was kind, loving and not an ugly man. At around five she vowed to watch over him, knowing that he wasn’t built to be alone.
At six she was still uneasy. Maybe it was down to the rain that had started to fall just after she had woken from the dream. The pier had flooded last year and some of the cottages had been badly damaged. She had miraculously escaped for no other reason than sheer luck and there was no way she would be lucky twice. It was extraordinary that she’d been lucky once. Maybe fear of flooding was niggling in her. Yeah, it must be that.
Despite her outward appearance, which suggested a calm, cool nature to those who loved her, and possibly an impenetrable, cold one to others, Mary often worried about things that most people didn’t. She would often daydream about terrible events that she would undoubtedly survive while those around her didn’t. The end of the world was her recurring nightmare – she’d be left to stand in the centre of the universe alone, with nothing but thousands of miles of bodies and destruction around her. She wasn’t depressive or paranoid; she wasn’t insane or morbid. She was just aware that bad things happened and that they could and did happen to her. She didn’t have the comfort of viewing death and disaster as some faraway notion to be skipped over in favour of a conversation about shoes.
It was a belief long held by Mary and many of the towns-people of Kenmare that she was a curse to those who loved her. She had long ago become used to being called “Mary of the Sorrows”. Of course, it was used mostly behind her back but sometimes an individual slipped and more often than not she responded to the truncated version: “Mary of the…”.
People around her had died – her mother, her boyfriend and her son – and she had long ago accepted that her place in the world would be apart from the crowd. Her
father had often attempted to disprove her theory – after all, he had survived – and she would smile at him, but it didn’t help that she would most likely survive him too, and that one day he would be a picture for her to lose herself in on a rainy day.
Mary put a basket of neatly folded clean clothes under the stairs: a four-day headache culminating in a sleepless night meant she was too jaded to iron. The phone rang and she considered ignoring it but curiosity was her downfall.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, have you seen the rain?” It was Penny.
“Yeah,” she agreed, relieved to hear her friend’s voice. “Mr Monkels is like a pig.”
“Mr Monkels smells like a pig,” Penny retorted, and Mary laughed because she was right – his farts brought tears to your eyes.
“Are you better?” Penny asked.
“Yeah.”
“No blind spots, facial paralysis or partial blindness?”
“Nope, I’m back in black.”
“Excellent,” her friend noted. “Why don’t we celebrate and head over to Killarney to see a movie?”
Mary looked out of the window again. “It’s horrible out there. I was planning on a night in with a DVD, the rain at the window, the dog on my lap and a pot of tea at my elbow.”
Penny’s heart was set on the new George Clooney film. “I swear you’re such an old lady, Mary – how the hell are you ever going to meet someone if your idea of a great night is sitting in with a dog?”
“Oh, and going to the Killarney Cineplex is a great way to meet men?” Mary countered. “Besides, there’s a lot to be said for staying in,” she continued, while attempting to remove a chocolate stain from her cardigan, armed with saliva and her thumb. At the same time she realized that the cardigan gave Penny’s previous statement some credence so she took it off. She might be unwilling to look for love in a Cineplex but she wasn’t inclined to turn into Miss Marple. “Why don’t you come over?” she asked.
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