Authors: Scott Hunter
Long Goodbyes (12 page)
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? I’m all of ‘em. All the kids.’
‘Well, then. Tell me about Orla Benjamin. Please.’
‘I saw what happened. Jenny MacLennan killed her. With the stick. Called her a whore. Said she’d always had her eye on her husband. Said that’s why she was on th’ road to the cottage in the middle of the night - lookin’ for him, even tho’ he’d gone away with the auld witch. Ye can’t help y’self, Orla, can ye? says Jenny Mac. Yous’re
obsessed
with my Jack, right enough, she says. The woman Benjamin says no, you’re wrong, but MacLennan hits her. Again and again.’
The boy laughed, slapped his hand on the rock. ‘Then she runs off ter the grand house, after she’s stopped her hittin’. Leaves the woman bleedin’. I saw it all. I been in your cottage before, right enough. Sure, it’s warm, and I ate what I found.
He
left meat, didn’t he? So I was going to eat it all but you came back. It was rank, but I still ate some.’
‘
My
cottage?’
‘Jenny MacLennan’s; Malachi’s Jenny’s. All of youse. When a woman’s with child they need t’eat, right? It’s all the same ter him. Understand?’
Jean was drawn to the boy’s eyes again. So wise, so old. Yet now there was something else, something evil beginning to overshadow the openness of the boy’s expression…
She mouthed the name.
Sir William
… and felt his proprietorial grip on her mind, her soul…
‘Youse can’t ‘ave her’, the boy’s voice said firmly, although she gathered that the words were not directed at her. ‘
Never
havin’ her.’
Jean backed away from the pull of the eyes, stumbled on the uneven ground, almost fell.
‘Out. Out of me! Away now!’ The boy’s voice rang in her head. She had a sense of some old conflict reignited, timeworn wounds reopened. She clamped her eyes tightly shut. Now she knew why she was drawn to this place, why she felt so…connected…
Oh God, no, no…
When she looked again the boy was gone and she was alone.
The wind gusted and brought with it a fine mist of rain. A fulmar called from its cliffside nest, a harsh summons for her to return to her ordered and measurable world. She leaned upon the boy’s rock for a few moments, ran her fingers across its smooth contours, allowed her eyes to linger on the space where he had sat. A fragment of Dickens rose and bobbed upon the ebb and flow of her thoughts and she found herself speaking the lines aloud:
‘“
People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr Peggotty, ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood…’”
Not properly born…
She looked beyond the restless movement of the ocean to the horizon, where the infinite began. Her feet left a line of shallow indentations in the wet sand, temporary traces of her visit, until they were overrun and eventually obscured by the encroaching sea.
From the archives of St Judith’s Sanatorium,
upon closure of the institution, February 1958
Photocopy (enhanced) of original document
follows:
Header reads: St Judith’s hospital - Birth record,
confidential
Child/Gender: fem. (female) /
Un(n)amed [misspelt]
Date of Birth:
[Feb 23
rd
1918 ~ Manual alteration/clerical error?
- V=verified?,
auth. poss. ward sister?)
Dest. (Foster-Parents)
[Brady, James, Co. Cork. (Occ. Schoolmaster)]
Last entry ‘Rate of Payment’
[manually scored out]
Birth record follow up notes:
Mother, dec’d - 12/12/1949, St Judith’s
Fr William O’Leary, dec’d
- 05/06/27
Brady, James - dec’d, 03/02/1942
Spouse? [No record]
Subject (child) - schoolmistress, Co. Kerry?
[
Corca Dhuibhne?]
The
Jean Brady Memorial Trust
invites you - if you have a mind to put pen to paper - to submit an epilogue of your own via
[email protected]
. If the trust and the publishers are agreed that your epilogue is a suitable fit, your work will be included in an updated version of
‘Long Goodbyes’.
The publishers reserve the right to determine whether or not submitted material is suitable for publication.
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