The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe

by Carol Coffey

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1 Winter Flowers

  Chapter 2 Winter Flowers

  Chapter 3 Winter Flowers

  While several institutions, towns, cities and street names used in this

  book are real, the characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of

  the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to events or actual persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook Published 2013

  by Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: poolbeg@poolbeg.com

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Carol Coffey 2013

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781781991237

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold 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.

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the author

  Carol Coffey was born in Dublin and now lives in County Wicklow. She holds a Master’s degree in Education and has taught in the area of special education in both Australia and Ireland. This is her fourth novel. Her previous novels The Butterfly State, The Penance RoomandWinter Flowersare also published by Poolbeg.

  Also by Carol Coffey

  The Butterfly State

  The Penance Room

  Winter Flowers

  Published by Poolbeg

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, I’d like to sincerely thank Laura Trigo Sanroman-Lyster for her meticulous Spanish translations and for generously offering her valuable time to this book.

  Thanks also to Paula Campbell, Kieran Devlin, Sarah Ormston and David Prendergast for their on-going support. Thanks also to all of the accounts and warehouse staff of Poolbeg Press for the important part they played in getting this novel from my laptop to the bookshelves.

  As always, a heartfelt thanks to Gaye Shortland for her expert editing, generous guidance and seemingly endless patience.

  For my late parents,

  Catherine and Michael

  Chapter 1

  Brendan Martin rose from his bed and looked through bleary eyes at the view of Dover town, which fell steeply away from the small hill where his uncle’s house stood. He turned on his radio and looked back through the window, from where he could make out the neat town grid and the picturesque steeples of the many churches. He could see the park at the edge of town, the red tiled roof of its pretty gazeboand the expanse of pink cherry blossoms that trailed along the river’s edge each May. From this height, he could not hear any of the town’s traffic or the voices of the children in the school that stood three blocks below him. He took in the tranquil panorama, knowing it would be the only serenity he would enjoy that day.

  Brendan looked at his watch. It was almost twelve and he knew his Uncle Frank would, at any moment, come bellowing down the narrow pathway to the small granny flat Brendan had come to live in only six days previously, although to him it seemed like a lifetime ago. It was hard to believe that New York City, where he had lived and worked in blissful isolation for the past twelve years, was less than forty miles from the New Jersey town in which he stood and where he had been born. That was before his mother decided to pack up and return to the dead-end Irish midland villagehe had grown up in. When he lost his job and his licence following his second Driving While Intoxicated, his Uncle Frank had travelled to New York for the court hearing. Even though his retired cop uncle still had a few friends in the New York police force, he couldn’t save his nephew from doing eight days’ jail time and receiving a six-hundred-hour community-service order. Brendan knew the sentence could have been much longer and that the judge had only agreed to a more lenient sentence on the condition that Brendan was released into his uncle’s care and that Frank would oversee Brendan’s community service until a New Jersey probation officer had been assigned to him. With his savings gone, Brendan had no option but to accept his mother’s brother’s help and to return with his uncle to Dover where he’d at least have a roof over his head.

  Brendan heard the squeak of the screen door of the main house and quickly pulled on his jeans. He smoothed down the white T-shirt he had slept in the night before and, after throwing water onto his thick, wiry black hair and washing the sleep out of his deep brown eyes, glanced quickly into the mirror. His dark looks and Irish accent got him a lot of attention from American women, who told him he looked like that Irish movie star whose name he could never remember.

  Brendan heard a knock on his door and immediately began to finger the mole on the left side of his face, a nervous habit he had developed in childhood which resurfaced sometimes when he felt anxious. He rubbed his hand over his unshaven face and rushed to open the door. Instead of his uncle, his meek-mannered cousin Eileen stood before him, her small eyes trained on her shoes. She looked up at him for a second then loweredher gaze again to study her footwear. Brendan glanced over his cousin. She was the eldest of Frank’s five daughters and the only one to have remained at home. Eileen, who was only two years older than Brendan and just shy of her thirty-seventh birthday, was also the only one of his cousins that he liked, even if she did remind him of his mother. She had the same pale grey eyes and thin brown hair that took on a reddish hue in the sunlight. She was also about the same height as his mother, about five foot he assumed, as he stood almost a foot over her. Unlike most American womenhe knew, Eileen dressed like a woman twenty years older. Despite the warm spring air, his cousin wore a heavy green winter coat, buttoned up to the neck, small black court shoes like the ones he had often seen his mother wear and an oversized canvas shoulder bag that looked too heavy for her slight frame to carry.

  “You ready?” she asked quietly.

  Brendan nodded and followed her down the path towards the side entrance, relieved not to have to go into the house this morning. He could avoid his uncle for the one-hour round trip it would take to walk his cousin to her volunteerwork. Why she couldn’t walk there alone, in broad daylight, he wasn’t sure, but until he had arrived his elderly uncle had walked her there a
nd had returned to collect her when she’d finished. Brendan had heard whispers from Eileen’s younger sister Orlaofan incident at college which had happened almost twenty years before. Orlahad told him that after “it” happened, Frank drove all the way to Philadelphia and broughtEileenhome where until recently she had spent her days doing nothing. What she hadn’t told him was what exactly the incident was. He couldn’t imagine his docile cousin getting herself into any trouble but he didn’t really care enough to query the matter further. It had nothing to do with him. All he wanted was to get enough money together to return to his life in New York where he would be free from his disapproving uncle and needy cousin.

  As theywalked down the driveway, Brendan looked at the polished silver car that Eileen owned and which he had never seen her drive. The homeless shelter where she volunteered was about a twenty-five-minute walk and he wondered why she didn’t just drive there, especially if her father wouldn’t allow her to walk there alone.

  He briefly thought about asking her but, as if she read his thoughts, she said, “I always wanted a car. Just so if I wanted to go somewhere, I could.”

  Brendan looked at her, an expression of confusion spread across his lightly tanned face.

  “I’m going to take lessons . . . some day. If I can get someone to teach me.”

  “You can’t drive?” he asked incredulously.

  Eileen blushed and looked away. Brendan took himself by surprise when he laughed out loud at the irony. He didn’t mean to be cruel – it wasn’t in his nature – but he didn’t know which of them was more pathetic. He, who wasn’t allowed to drive for one whole year, or his cousin, who spent Saturday afternoons polishing a car she didn’t even know how to drive.

  He shook his head and caught up with his cousin who had walked on ahead of him. When she struggled to keep up with his long strides, he slowed his pace and wondered if today she might actually talk to him.

  From their house on Watson Drive, the pair turned left onto Salem Street and left again onto East Blackwell, the town’s main boulevard, which reminded Brendan of a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart runs down the picturesque parade waving at friends and passers-by. He took in the quaint surroundings. On either side of the main street, brightly coloured awnings adorned the town’s many shops whose names portrayed the town’s long history of migration: DiBartolo’s and Nardoni’s, Fitzgerald’s and Rodriquez’. Locals sat comfortably at the lunch counter of the five and dime, having an early lunch or queuing for a coffee to go. Older people sat on wooden benches reading the day’s news and catching up with friends in the small, tightly-knit community. A group of pre-school children crossed the road with their teacher, each carrying a small bag of breadcrumbs, presumably to feed the multitude of ducks and pigeons in the park.

  Brendan liked this townand often wished his mother had stayed here. In the years since he’d come to live in New York, he hadn’t visited his relatives often. He preferred city living and wasn’t especially close to his uncle anyway. Even before his traffic violations, Brendan had sensed Frank’s disapproval of him and believed that the less time they spent together the better it was for both of them. He had been twenty-three when he’d finished college and returned to the country of his birth. He had instantly fallen in love with the huge city, happy to lose himself among its noise and confusion. His love of books had led to him taking a degree in literature, which his mother only agreed to fund on the promise that he would get a job as an English teacher when he’d finished. But Brendan knew even back then that he could not see himself discussing his beloved books with spotty teenagers who couldn’t care less about the work of Joyce or Wilde. Instead, he had found work labouring on building sites for an older Irish man, Colm Mooney, who taught him everything he needed to know about carpentry. Brendan hadn’t ever realised that he could work with his hands and he really enjoyed it. At Colm’s insistence, he went to night classes to complete his carpentry qualification. He loved the solitude the job offered while he worked alongside others, rarely speaking but listening to the banter among his workmates. He knew that when he wasn’t around they would talk about how odd he was but he didn’t care. The city offered him a life which was the opposite of the one he had known living above his mother’s grocery shop in a small hamlet outside Mullingar. The old-fashioned store had been left to his mother from a maiden aunt he did not remember and sold basic provisions to the small population of the dying midlands village.

  Brendan had been a dreamer as a boy and spent lonely hours sitting alone in a field at the side of their shop, reading the adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. When his mother was annoyed at him, which was very often, he would climb over the wire fence and run as fast as his legs could take him to the other side of the field where he would lie down in the grass and escape from her disapproving eyes and her tight, angry mouth. He was not allowed to roam the countryside during the long summer like other village children were. His mother always wanted to keep him where she could see him. When lunch was ready she would close the shop and open the back door for him to come in. She rarely called him. In fact, she rarely spoke to him at all and he had grown up under the weight of her oppressive silence. He knew that this was the reason he could not bear the quiet and he kept a radio on in his apartment all the time. In those years he often lost himself inside those adventure stories and imagined himself wandering the expansive prairies during the day and then returning home to a mother who told stories and hugged him at bedtime.He had not known his father, but had never given much thought to the man who had separated from his mother shortly before his birth in America.

  Brendan glanced at Eileen who, as usual, had said little since they’d left the house. From Blackwell they had turned right onto Mercer Street and had walked several blocks downhill before turning right again onto Locust and then onto Oak. When they finally turned left ontoMaple Street, Brendan felt like he was in a scene from the movie Groundhog Day. Each dayhe would try to walk Eileen all the way to the shelter as per his uncle’s strict instructions but each dayshe would quietly refuse. She would stop about a block from her destination and thank him for walking her there, following which she would look at her shoes and wait patiently for him to turn and walk away. On the second day, he had walked behind her for a few paces but she stopped moving andleaned against the wall, staring out at nothing in particular until he gave up and walked away. Each day he had returned to his uncle’s house and lied to him, telling Frank he had walked Eileen up the path and had waited for her to go inside the house before turning around. Yesterday he had promised himself that today he would walk her all the way no matter how much she refused. For now, he had nowhere else to live and he couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of his uncle.

  Eileen tilted her slim back into the garden wall of a house and looked at the ground. He could see her swallow hard, as if she instinctively knew this was the day he would insist on following her father’s instructions. He saw her chest rise as she took a deep breath in.

  He sighed heavily and said, “Look, Eileen . . .”

  He thought he saw her chin tremble and he cowered a little.Oh God, please don’t cry, he thought to himself.

  “It’s just a few more steps –” he started but she turned to face him and he could see tears in her eyes.“Jesus!” he said aloud as he looked away from her. “Why . . . why do you . . . why can’t I?”

  Heavy tears had begun to roll down her narrow face. He wondered how often this scene had occurred between his cousin and her father and if it occurred on this very spot. He looked at her and peered down the street. On each side, mature oak trees shaded it and large, well-manicured gardens led up to well-maintained clapboard houses. It was a good neighbourhood where he felt nothing could really happen to her. He briefly wondered if his retired cop uncle was being over-protective of Eileen. He relaxed a little and nodded.

  “Okay . . . but . . . if Uncle . . .”

  “I’ll tell him you walked me to the door,” she
said flatly, recovering so suddenly from her tears that he wondered if they had been real.

  Brendan watched as Eileen walked away. He stood for a moment until she sensed him watching her and turned to look at him. Her eyes were now dry and her face wore its usual serious expression. He looked at her for a moment longer and knew that there was more to his shy cousin than she pretended. He turned and walked back towards the house, wondering what it was that she was hiding and also wondering what work Uncle Frank had in store for him that day. Whatever it was, he knew he’d spend the time thinking how to get himself out of his job baby-sitting his cousin and back to his life in the city he used to call home.

  Frank Dalton’s house on Watson Drive was one of the few remaining old houses in Dover. It was an old two-storey clapboard that was in a state of complete disrepair when he bought it over forty years before. Over the years he had restored the house to its former glory. It was a labour of love, with Frank doing as much of the work as he could, only paying contractors whenever he could afford them or for work he could not do himself. He had almost driven his Irish-American wife Coleen to distraction in the process, spending much of their paltry savingsand putting off starting a family until the house was suitable to bring a baby home to. Coleen had been born in the town and had met Frank while he was a young policeman in New York. As soon as they married, he secured a transfer to the Dover policeforce in the hope that they could raise a family in a safer environment.

  Frank’s then-teenage sister, Patricia, who had come to America with him, moved to Dover with them at his insistence. He had promised his mother he would look out for his wayward sister and couldn’t do that if she remained in New York. Frank now realised he had been a fool to think that he could control his sibling. As soon as they’d arrived in Dover sherebelled against him at every opportunity, including mixing with people he did not approve of. He had been lucky to spot the same traits in his eldest daughter early and was thankful that she was now living under his watchful eye where she could come to no harm.His other daughters had turned out well. They had all married good men, hardworking lads with Irish backgrounds. But Eileen was different. She needed to be protected from herself.