The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy Read Free

two of them left only when Sister Mary Inconnue arrived with her typewriter.
    I wrote for her that I’d had strange guests who belonged to a circus, not a hospice, and she smiled. ‘People pay good money for drugs like yours.’ Her eyes went crooked behind her reading glasses.
    Do you have a problem with your vision? I spelled out the words.
    ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I was winking at you. How do you feel today?’
    The starched cornette on her head shone milk white, as did her habit beneath her belted black tabard apron. She wore sandals over white socks, and the socks bunched a little under the Velcro straps. She pulled a fresh packet of A4 paper from her bag, and also a correction pen. ‘I see you have another message,’ she said, pointing at a postcard propped beside your letter on the bedside table. I had no idea what she was talking about.
    I’d gone and forgotten again, you see. I had forgotten in the night about the walking.
    ‘Oh, Queenie. You’re not going to cry?’ Sister Mary Inconnue laughed, and I knocked back my head to show I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. ‘Let’s see what Harold Fry has to tell us,’ she said.
    There was a picture of Bantham Beach. One of the nuns must have left the postcard while I was sleeping. Sister Mary Inconnue showed methe writing on the back. ‘Keep faith, Harold Fry.’ You may not know this, Harold, but I’m not a religious person. I hear the nuns pray, their songs from the chapel, but I do not join in. And since when did you know about faith? So far as I remember, you never entered a church. The last time I saw you, well … you did not look like a man who’d found God.
    So far as I remember, you never walked very far, either. I can think of only one occasion. But maybe now is not the time.
    ‘We’d better get back to your letter,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue.
    She opened my notebook and passed the pencil. Cramp. I could barely move my right arm. My hand poked solid from the wrist. It must have been all the writing I did yesterday. I’m not used to working with my hands any more. My fingers trembled like anemones in the rock pools of my garden in Embleton Bay. I made it on a clifftop by the sea, and so I called it a sea garden.
    ‘Help me,’ I honked. ‘I can’t write.’
    Sister Mary Inconnue put down her typewriter and took my hands in hers. She rubbed my fingers and lifted them to her mouth. Then she blew on them as if she expected them to inflate. ‘Look at you, Queenie,’ she said. ‘With your nails all sparkly now.’ She laughed.
    Sometimes a person can smile when you are feeling only the difficulty of a thing and the problem unravels before your eyes and becomes straightforward.
    ‘Let’s try again,’ she said.
    She slotted the pencil into my hand. She curled my fingers round it, one by one.
    ‘What do you want to tell Harold Fry?’
*
    I remember Bantham Beach. I went there when I first arrived in Devon. This was nearly twenty-four years ago. It was before you and I met. It was also Christmas, and I had a lot to think about.
    I hadn’t intended to come to Kingsbridge. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in Corby. Things had gone wrong for me there, and so I was doing what I always did when something went wrong. I was running away.
    ‘Once a thing is kaput,’ my mother used to say as she snatched up a cracked piece of china and dumped it in the bin, ‘it can never look the same. Get rid of it.’ I can still hear the words, her throaty accent. Chipped plates and glassware, ripped stockings, buttonless cardigans, plaster ornaments lacking heads or feet – nothing met her mercy. My parents were never wealthy – we lived on my father’s salary as a carpenter in a small rented house at the end of a Kent village – and my mother was a large Austrian woman with chunky hands that seemed permanently smeared with goose fat. She was constantly dropping things. It was a wonder we had anything left. My father checked the bin when