The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (16 page)

‘So is it true?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue once she has finished typing. She is reading through her pages, checking for mistakes. She pulls out her correction pen and amends an error.

I give her a questioning look.

‘Was today the first time you have thought about your funeral?’

I nod. Yes.

‘And was that OK?’

It was just there. The thought. That’s all. It wasn’t anything else.

Sister Mary Inconnue smiles. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s good.’

Patience on a monument

H
AROLD
? I
SAID
.

It was your first week back at the brewery. Do you remember? I need you to think back, because it is very important that you understand.

You’d caught the sun while you were away. I tend to look sore when I tan, but your skin was honey-coloured. There were little gold flecks in your hair, and your eyes were even bluer than I remembered. It had clearly suited you, the good weather. I would have liked to throw my arms around you, just with relief. The relief of you being at work again, and Nibbs being gone, and the smell of your car, and your hands on the steering wheel. You in the driving seat, me at your side.

‘Something tickling you?’ you said.

I had to pretend I was thinking of a joke. It wasn’t a very good one. Two robbers and a pair of knickers. Oh, ha ha ha, you went. Laugh lines sprang all over your face. ‘That’s good,’ you said. ‘That’s good.’ And so even I began to see the funny side of it.

Later I asked how you’d enjoyed your holiday, and you said, ‘Yes, yes.’ Then you said, ‘Did you miss me?’ Only you said that too in a joke way, as if no one would miss you.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate and call upon my soul within the house
. ‘I have a life, Harold,’ I said with a smile.

‘So what did you get up to?’

‘Oh, the usual.’ I couldn’t look at you. I thought of David jumping at the Royal, the bouncer flexing his shoulders. I thought of the concentration on David’s face as I taught him to foxtrot.

‘You all right there?’ you asked. And I told you I needed to stop. I needed to tell you something. Maybe it was the sun, you said. And I said maybe. I just needed air—

‘There’s something worrying me,’ I said.

You pulled the car over at a Little Chef café. Try to remember this, Harold. You found me a table out of the sun and went to the counter to order me a cup of tea. I watched you tugging your wallet from your back pocket and saying something or other – I couldn’t hear what it was – to make the till girl smile.

Harold? I began.

But you interrupted. Did I want sugar?

I tried again. Harold? I said.

What about more milk?

No. Thank you. No more milk. My tea is fine as it is. Harold—?

‘My wife worries too,’ you said. It came out of the blue.

‘Oh?’

‘She worries about our son.’

‘Why?’ I felt suffocated.

‘Oh, you know. He’s just growing up, I guess. She missed him while we were away. I don’t think it was her favourite holiday.’

It was my cue to tell you I’d met David. That we’d been dancing. But now you had told me about Maureen worrying, I couldn’t find the words. It seemed cruel. And in order to tell you about the dancing, there were so many other things to say too – that, like you, I knew how to dance. That sometimes I went to the Royal in order to pretend that a stranger was you. That I had rescued David once on the High Street. That he’d asked me not to tell you about the Royal. That,
yes, Maureen could be right to worry. Your son was a handful.

All in all, this was a lot of things to say in a Little Chef.

Face to face with you across a laminated table, I felt the words dry up. I put my head in my hands.

‘Headache?’ you said.

‘I’ll be OK.’

I went to the bathroom to splash my face. Catching myself in the mirror, I was appalled to see how washed out and strained I looked.

We walked back to your car, and already your son had grown like a small dark crack between us.

I wish I had told you the truth that day.

The boy who was allergic to blue

I
N THE NIGHT
, I am woken by footsteps. Up and down the corridor.

‘Come to bed, Barbara,’ calls a nurse. ‘Let me help you.’

I try to rest, but sleep comes on and off. I am woken by three visions of David. Three separate memories. I make a note in my mind. Dancing. Smile. Gloves. I think the words over and over so that I will not forget.

The morning rituals are complicated. The duty nurse spends a long time examining my neck and jaw. ‘Do you feel any pain?’ she says, but I only point to my notebook. I want to tell you those memories, those snapshots, Harold, that came to me in the night. A father cannot see his son with the eyes of a stranger, and so he misses things. It is one of life’s small tragedies.

Come.

This first memory is taken three weeks after David first followed me to the Royal. I haven’t been back since then and I think it should be safe now. But David’s waiting for me at the bus stop.

‘What happened to you?’

I make a limp excuse. He gets on the bus with me. He doesn’t even ask. My heart sinks.

He wears his big coat. I wear my ball dress. I have my shoes. He’s swapped his Dr Martens boots for a pair of trainers. At the Royal, he follows me on to the dance floor and asks if we can do the foxtrot. Slow, slow, quick quick slow, slow. It astonishes me how fast he is to learn. He has only to watch and he can do it.

The usual bandleader is on holiday, and his replacement has a mischievous look. He speeds up the pace. I can’t tell whose idea it is to go with the music, mine or David’s, but we speed up too. It isn’t slow, slow, quick quick slow, slow any more. It’s quick quick run run quick quick. David and I are moving around the floor as if we don’t have feet. I wonder how it is there hasn’t been a collision, and this is when it occurs to me that everyone else has stopped dancing and cleared the floor for us. David swings me away from him. He pulls me back. He spins me hard and grips me in his arms and then he throws me out and catches my hand. I think, Where did you learn all this? But he hasn’t. He’s making it up as we go. My lungs hurt. My skin is dripping. I’ve never danced like this in my life. When the music comes to a stop, I am trembling.

David laughs all the way home. ‘They clapped, did you see?’

Yes, David. A few did.

‘They noticed.’

They certainly did.

‘There was this dance competition once. We were on holiday, me and the parents. I wanted to win. But I was a kid. I didn’t know how to dance. I just, you know, I threw my body all around. I thought people were laughing because it was good, but then I saw they weren’t. They were laughing because I was strange. I searched for the father and guess what? He was laughing too. And Mum. Well, she just had her head in her hands. Like she had no idea what to do. I look at them, Q. And it’s like I don’t belong.’

The story moves me. I feel for David. I know how bewildering it is as a teenager to watch your parents and find little trace of yourself. But I know too how much you love your son. I want to protect you. ‘Maybe
your father was laughing at something else. A joke or something.’

‘He wasn’t,’ says David. ‘He doesn’t know how to deal with me.’

‘It gets easier as you grow older,’ I tell him.

He scoffs and turns away.

David gazes out of the window at the blackness. His blue thin face sails in the dark. He closes his eyes and falls asleep. I watch him with his forehead against the glass, and I see the two of you in one person. There is David who wants to be noticed, and there is you who wants to disappear. You and your son are polar opposites of the same man, and here am I in the middle. Maybe I can be a bridge. Maybe I can join you and David back together.

There is no need, I tell myself, to mention that your son and I have been dancing. After all, I’m doing repair work here. I will tell you another time.

The next memory is taken on the bus to Totnes. David has turned up a third time, and I am happy to see him. I tell him about you. How you are respected at the brewery. How well you deal with the landlords. To be honest, I’m enjoying myself. I like talking about you – I don’t have anyone else to say it to.

‘Yeah, yeah, right,’ says David. He sticks his feet on the seat opposite.

‘Your father likes to give people pleasure.’

‘Pleasure?’ he repeats. He has a way of making very average words sound inadequate or, at least, in bad taste.

‘Yes. He likes to see them smile. He’s a good man.’

His face twists.

‘That’s better,’ I say. ‘You’re smiling too now.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says.

David clearly keeps thinking about what I have said, though, because on the way home I catch him scowling into the dark window of the bus. He screws up his face, moving his mouth up and down, even nudging it into a half-moon shape with his fingertips. When he notices me watching he says, ‘It never looks right.’

‘What doesn’t look right?’

‘When I smile. It never looks like me.’

‘And how do you think you look?’

He pulls an odd face. It’s childish. He sticks out his tongue and pops his eyes at me, like some sort of ghoul, as if he wants to shock me, and then even as he does so, he laughs. I offer him a mint, and he says, ‘Give over with the sweets and crap. Say something real, Q. Do you have a boyfriend?’

The question unbalances me, but I don’t flinch. ‘I’m in love with a man who doesn’t love me.’

There is a small silence.

‘That’s too bad,’ he says softly. He pats my hand. I say nothing. ‘Who is he, Q?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Does he know?’

‘God, no.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘Yes.’ I laugh. ‘Very.’

David stares at me for a while, trying to see inside my head and find the man I will not name. This time it is me who does the looking away.

*

Memory number three. We are down by the quay. Your son has beer. We are in coats and I wear gloves because we have just got back from Totnes and it’s late. We can’t see the water, but we can hear the creak of the boats against their moorings. It is taken, this memory, in October just before David leaves for Cambridge. Perhaps it’s the smell of decay in the night air that makes me sad. We have danced together only four times, but having David in my life has been like looking after another part of you.

And so I am surprised when he asks for my textbooks. He reminds me that I’d told you once that I would lend them. I hadn’t realized you had mentioned the idea to David. I wonder what else you have told him about me. Meanwhile, David says he could drop round at the weekend and collect the books before he goes to Cambridge. He asks me for my address. I write it on the back of my bus ticket.

He pockets the address without looking and then he says, ‘I think I’m allergic to my gloves.’

I laugh. It’s the sort of thing you would do: pop up with a remark that seems little to do with anything that came before. ‘How can you be allergic to your gloves? They’re not even wool.’

‘It’s the colour. Blue makes me sneeze. I had a blue scarf once. Mother gave it to me. That made me sneeze as well. It was like having a cold all the time. I had to pretend I’d lost it.’

‘But that’s ridiculous, David. A colour can’t make you sneeze.’

‘You mean a colour can’t make
you
sneeze. People always assume that just because something is true for them, it must be true for everyone else. It’s a very narrow way of looking at life.’

I rip off my red wool mittens and offer them. David wriggles them
over his fingers, although they are so small on him they barely cover his knuckles. He studies his hands with interest, tilting them over and back again, as if he hasn’t seen them before. I have to rub my palms against the cold.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I’ll keep those, Q.’

And he does. He keeps them.

‘Do you think I’ll be OK at Cambridge?’ he says to the dark.

In the dayroom, Finty interrupts my writing to ask if I heard Barbara in the night. I am focused on finishing the three memories of David, so at first I don’t look up.

‘Oi, gal,’ she says. ‘Put down your notebook. I’m talking here.’

When I turn to Finty, she has an anxious look. She comes and takes the chair beside mine and sits with her arms pulled around her, tight, and her knees poked high. She straightens her pink cowboy hat, pulls the cord tight up to her neck. She says, ‘It’s what happens to some of them. Right at the end. They get restless. They can’t let go, see. I’ve seen it before.’ She rubs her nose with her knuckle, and I wonder if she’s crying.

We watch Barbara sleeping in her chair. She is pale as a primrose. Sister Philomena holds her hand.

Finty says, ‘But she looks better today. I reckon she’ll be OK. She’ll pull through. I really reckon that. Don’t you?’

Outside, the nuns help patients walk in the morning sun. The wet grass shines silver. The blossom is almost gone. A cobweb hangs from a corner of the window and it is so wet it looks made of felt. Finty shakes my arm. Her face is close to mine. Her eyes brim.

‘Fucking shoot me,’ she whispers, ‘if I get restless.’

A letter to David

‘Y
OUR SON
will be OK,’ I told you in the car. ‘I am sure he will be OK. University is fantastic.’

It was just before David left home. You hadn’t told me you were anxious about him going. It was nothing so direct as that. As far as you were concerned, I didn’t even know your son. What you’d told me was that your wife had been preparing food parcels for David. Fruitcakes wrapped in greaseproof paper. Bottled fruit. Jars of pickled onions. (His favourite, apparently.) Things that would keep a long time in his room. She was worried that, left to his own devices, David would forget to eat. She had also made a special trip to Plymouth to buy him dress shirts and a jacket because she wasn’t sure that students at Cambridge could wear black T-shirts.

‘But students can be very scruffy,’ I said.

‘Really?’