The Penance Room

by Carol Coffey

  My view would obviously be that wrongs were done to the Aboriginal people but I also feel that in recent times the Australian government has done a lot of work to redress the wrongs of the past. This perhaps doesn’t help the thousands of children taken from their families, but I think my overall point is that what is important now is to try to move forward in a way that values the rights of all people and that harbouring feelings of bitterness does no one any good, least of all the victims. It is certainly my experience that Australia is now one of the most accepting and welcoming multi-cultural countries on the world.

  7. Where did the title The Penance Room come from? What is its multilayered meaning for you?

  Each character in the book has some sort of regret or resentment that they are harbouring as they while away their remaining days in a room occupied by other people whose race, religion or class they are intolerant of or with people who are intolerant of them. I worked in nursing homes in Australia and noticed that residents often ended up sitting side by side with people whose countries they once fought against or whose religion or race they hated. I witnessed personally the difficulties this can cause for people as they near the end of their lives and this had a big impact on me at that time. I deliberately cast Emma’s father as a minister in order to create the church-like feel of the “Penance Room” with pews from his church and stained-glass windows, which are actually a regular feature of many of Australia’s older federation-style houses. The placing of these people together in such a room created the atmosphere of people waiting in limbo for a confession which would lead to an opportunity to change long-standing resentments and prejudice and offer an opportunity for reconciliation and redemption.

  8. Who are your favourite authors and why (worldwide and Irish based authors)?

  Unfortunately, I don’t get much time to read at the moment but I like Irish writers such as Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture was brilliant), John Banville, Alice Taylor and Joseph O’Connor. I enjoy reading the American authors Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx. I prefer books about the struggles of troubled or colourful characters. I also enjoy the classics such as novels by the Brontë sisters, George Elliot and F Scott Fitzgerald and I’m happy to reread these from time to time. In contrast, I like the darkness and twists and turns of Lee Child thrillers. I like a book with a fast pace and an unexpected ending!

  9. Was Christopher your starting point for writing The Penance Room or did he develop out of the material as you explored the book’s setting and themes?

  Christopher was my starting point for the book but I began to develop the rest of the characters soon after. I liked the fact that although Christopher was a very young boy who was also deaf, he was in fact more grown up than the adults in his life and took charge of the work he felt needed to be done in the nursing home. The presence of a young, innocent boy with an idealised view of the world was important against the backdrop of so many characters whose lives revolved around harbouring old grudges and feeding off the wrong that was done to them at some point in their lives.

  10. How important is the Australian setting for this book? Could you have written it using another country as a background or is Australia integral to the book?

  Australia as a setting for this book was very important and I don’t believe that I could have set the book elsewhere with such conviction. Firstly, I wanted to set the nursing home in a dry, arid environment which I hoped would reflect the parched souls living in the nursing home. Also a nursing home set in damp, dark Ireland wouldn’t have seemed so attractive to read about! I also chose Australia because of its long history of immigration and resultant multicultural identity, which was necessary to tell the stories of the characters. Finally, my time in Australia meant I could write with knowledge about the beautiful landscape and the people.

  11. Thinking of your previous book The Butterfly State and this one, you seem to have a particular insight into the thought processes of people with disabilities. Have you always has this interest /insight?

  I have worked in the field of disability for over twenty years as a special needs teacher, manager of group homes for people with challenging behaviour and in various institutions and government organisations and I feel privileged to have got to know so many people with special needs, some of whom later became my friends in adulthood. I was lucky that I knew from early on that working with people with special needs was what I was interested in although I don’t know where this interest stemmed from.

  Yes. I think that I always had an insight into the needs/thoughts of people with disabilities and that this empathy and understanding helped me in my everyday working life. I hope that by incorporating this knowledge and perception into my writing, I can bring the issues of people with disabilities into the minds and hearts of others too.

  12. Do you find it very illuminating to understand the world of the disabled? How does the theme of disability relate to this book?

  Yes, I do and as I’ve said above, I feel very lucky. In this book, Christopher has lost his hearing due to a pre-existing condition which was worsened by meningitis. This is particularly unfortunate and sad, as losing a sense that a person once had I feel is worse perhaps than being born deaf. The isolation that people with hearing impairment experience, particularly those who are deaf from childhood, is often overlooked and in a young child can affect social development, peer acceptance and as is the case with Christopher, lead to social exclusion and loneliness.

  13. Would it be correct to say the book suggests that secrecy in itself can be the most soul-destroying thing of all?

  Yes. Many of the characters in the book are harbouring secrets that are gnawing away at their very souls. For some, the secrets were too shameful to admit to those close to them. For others, keeping silent about their pasts kept them from falling apart, or so they thought. For people like Wilfred, having no one to confide in and the fear of being judged prevented him from revealing his dark past. What they all have in common is that these secrets are in themselves a prison, binding the soul in torture and preventing the characters from finding peace. Only when they reveal their sins can they free themselves from the chains of their transgressions and, in hearing each other’s confessions, realise that they have more in common with each other than they would previously have thought.

  14. Do you think the era spanned by the character’s lifetimes (roughly early to mid twentieth century) was one particularly destructive to the human spirit?

  Many previous generations have seen wars, famine, emigration and unnecessary hardship, but I believe that the generation of the characters in this book lived through a time of particular worldwide unrest. Some of the characters lived through two world wars while others endured forced economic migration to a country whose language they could not speak, often simultaneously having to cope with the fact that they were unwanted in the country they had hoped to call home. These were also the generationthat saw the most change from a technological viewpoint and as they aged the world must have seemed like a frightening place that had passed them by and no longer had any use for them or their memories. They also lived through a time when respect for the older generation was not what it had been in their parents’ time, so all in all, yes, I believe that this was a time of radical change that was difficult for these particular people to deal with.

  15. Was the writing very demanding technically, considering the book itself (like its characters) has a secret that it must protect until the end?

  Yes, it was difficult to maintain but it was necessary for the pace of the book and I hope made it more intimate. Difficulties set aside, I enjoyed writing this book immensely and I fell in love with Christopher and all of the tragic characters he was trying to help.

  16. Tell us a bit about your next book – have you started writing it?

  My third book is about the cycle of dysfunction in generations of families. The main characters are two dysfunctional sisters whose own traumatic and disrupted upbringing inadvertently results in emo
tional difficulties in their children. Only by addressing the wounded children in themselves can they become the mothers their sons really need. The book’s theme of the long-term damage of poor parenting and the difficulty in repairing the lost child runs throughout the novel.

  If you enjoyed The Penance Room by Carol Coffey,

  why not try

  The Butterfly State also published by Poolbeg?

  Here’s a sneak preview of Chapter One

  TheButterfly State

  Carol Coffey

  Tess Byrne had thought it would be a sleepless night until she awoke to the sound of the cleaners mopping the long corridor outside her room. It was a comforting sound that she had become used to over the ten years she had spent at the institution. She placed her bare feet onto the cold tiled floor and walked gingerly across her room to look out into the bright, frosty February morning. This was the first thing she did each day. Tess enjoyed the ritual of seeing the same things: traffic passing by on the road, cyclists taking a short-cut through the grounds on their way to work, nurses arriving in taxis or on foot. However, this morning was different because this was the last morning she would ever see these things, this was the last day she would ever spend in this place. Today she was going home.

  Tess dressed slowly and methodically, carefully unfolding each item of clothing separately. She took her small suitcase from beneath her bed and packed in silence. She did not have much to pack, mostly her drawings and coloured pencils along with a few clothes. When she finished she sat on the bed and stared around the sparsely decorated room. Apart from her bed and locker, the only other piece of furniture was an old wooden wardrobe that smelt of mothballs. The walls of the tiny room were painted white, which made the quiet room appear colder than it was. Apart from a few of her own drawings that she had decided to leave behind, there was nothing on the walls except for a round white plastic clock and a large wooden crucifix that she had taken a long time to get used to. What she liked most about her room was the large shuttered window, which had a deep windowsill in which she often sat and painted.

  Tess settled down to wait to be called for breakfast which was more than half an hour away. She took a small notebook from her suitcase and opened the first page. Written there in large red letters was a list with the word “Apologise” written neatly above.

  Apologise

  Seán

  Kate

  Ben

  Dr Cosgrove had asked her many times what the list meant but she would not tell him. It was her secret and you had to keep secrets. She put her list back into the suitcase and took a deep satisfying breath. Today was the first day of her new life. She was going home and she had work to do.

  Dr Martin Cosgrove lowered his large body into the black leather chair in his stuffy office overlooking the institution’s exercise yard. He leant forward, his thin blond hair falling over his dark-rimmed glasses, and watched as rows of children played under the watchful eyes of two orderlies. He sighed as he thought of the responsibilities of his job and knew that he could not say with any certainty that he had helped any of the hundreds of disturbed children who had passed through this institution’s doors.

  And Tess Byrne was no different. Looking through her file, he found it hard to believe that she could ever have hurt anyone. There had been a few small incidents in the early years which resulted in her being placed in a room on her own. Later, when her behaviour improved, none of the other children wanted to share with her, saying she was odd and stared at them. He had spent years trying to talk to the selective mute, with some success, yet in almost ten years he could count the number of times he had heard her speak at any length. Cosgrove exhaled loudly. Tess’s family, who were farming in a remote part of County Wicklow, would collect her today and for all he knew she would spend the rest of her life cut off from people, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  She was twenty-one years old and, apart from her detached personality and occasional loss of emotional control, she showed no signs of mental illness. He understood a little about her condition, autism, and knew that she had a younger brother with a more severe form of it, but he could never claim to have understood her. All of the children who passed through his office had behaviour problems, most of them due to mental illness, but he felt that Tess had never really belonged here. This saddened the weary psychiatrist and made him wish he could have done more for her over the years.

  It worried him that he had never met Tess’s siblings. This had spurred him to contact the local GP, who informed him that while Tess’s older brother had a drink problem, her sister was a strong, capable woman who would take good care of Tess. Cosgrove wanted to talk to Tess’s siblings in person so he phoned. He found Kate Byrne to be a soft-spoken woman whose voice gave the impression of a mildly depressed person and not the strong woman Dr Doyle described her to be and this concerned him a little. This was a big move for Tess and he had to be sure he was doing the best for her. Cosgrove decided to organise for the local community nurse to check in on Tess when she arrived home. That way he would have a pair of eyes within the house to be absolutely sure that she was okay.

  When he had told Tess the news, the young woman had stared back at him, absorbing the information and fidgeting with her jumper. Tess had turned into a beautiful woman with porcelain skin framed by thick black hair, her expressionless face making her seem almost doll-like.

  “Are you pleased, Tess?” he had asked, smiling at the girl, whose expression had not changed and who continued to stand staring as usual over his shoulder. She did not answer but simply nodded and walked away.

  Cosgrove raised his body slowly from his chair and stood there, holding Tess’s file tightly in both hands, lost in thought until awakened by the sharp shrill of the exercise yard’s bell. He lowered the file slowly into the tall metal filing cabinet. He gently shut the drawer, picked up files on the two new children who had arrived today from his desk and prepared for his rounds.

  Dermot Lynch was a serious man who at age thirty had found himself not only landless but also homeless following a dispute between him and his headstrong, domineering father. Despite being long past retirement, Dan Lynch had still been interfering in how his eldest son ran the farm and Dermot had finally had enough.

  Dermot thought of going to London or New York or even as far as Sydney. He had family in all those places, but he knew he was not cut out for the building game and definitely not cut out to be cooped up in a factory. Instead he had come here to Wicklow, where he worked in his aunt and uncle’s pub and also worked part-time as a farmhand for the Byrne family. That farm would never be his but at least it kept him in the work he loved. Like his own family farm in Galway, it was a livestock farm. The climate was milder over here in the east with much less rain. He liked it, worked hard, and generally kept out of the way of his employers – not that they bothered him much. The brother, Seán, had a drink problem as far as he could see and rarely helped out. The sister Kate wasn’t a bad-looking woman and ran the house, caring for a younger brother, Ben, who never spoke and rocked and hummed to imaginary music. The silence in the house was always palpable and Dermot usually kept his visits to a minimum, eating whatever meal was put in front of him and trying to ignore the boy’s staring eyes before darting back out to his work. He couldn’t actually say he minded the strange atmosphere at the farm. No one asked him any questions, which suited him fine. The last thing he needed was small-town gossip about how he lost his own farm to a younger brother. It may have been 1981 but things changed slowly in Ireland and he had no wish to be the focus of gossip in the small County Wicklow community that he now called home.

  Dermot spent each day in the same way, tending to the livestock, cleaning out barns and going to marts with Seán Byrne whenever he was sober enough to go. This morning, however, was different. Dermot thought it strange that the family did not drive to Dublin themselves to pick up their sister who a little local gossip had informed him “was not all there”. He felt unea
sy about this task and uncharacteristically wished one of the Byrnes would accompany him. Why weren’t they collecting her themselves? Why was she living in an institution? Would she be some kind of nutcase that might attack him on the way back to the farm?

  All these questions clouded Dermot’s usually calm mind until he arrived at the institution with a throbbing headache and sick stomach. His father would be laughing his head off if he knew what he was doing this morning and the thought of this made Dermot angry.

  In the waiting area of the hospital, he shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Eventually a large official-looking man approached him with a smile that looked more nervous than happy.

  “Hello, I’m Dr Cosgrove,” the man said, shaking Dermot’s hand a little too enthusiastically. “I’m a psychiatrist. You must be Seán, Tess’s brother?”

  Dermot could feel himself turning bright red. He was not used to speaking to educated men like this psychiatrist and the man seemed to be expecting his employer instead.

  “Eh, no, I’m – I mean – I work for the Byrnes – they sent me to collect her – Tess, I mean.” Dermot recognised the look of shock on the doctor’s face and had no idea what else to say.

  Eventually, after what seemed like hours, the doctor spoke. “Are they ill, the family – is something wrong?”

  “No,” Dermot replied, not knowing what answer would cast his employers in a kind light when he himself thought it downright bad manners not to have come here themselves. “They just asked me to come. I’m Dermot Lynch, I work at the farm . . .” His voice trailed off as he could see the look of disbelief deepening on the doctor’s face.