The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy Read Free Page A

she wasn’t looking, retrieving what could be fixed and slipping the pieces out to his workshop. Somehow it rarely happened, the fixing, and when it did my mother would only gaze accusingly at a glued-back-together plate as if to say, ‘You? I thought I was done with you.’
    Perhaps I took my mother more literally than she intended, but I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring. So when I failed adance exam, I refused to continue. It was simpler to walk away than face my teacher’s disappointment. When a friend badly hurt my feelings at holiday camp, I did the same: I insisted on returning home. Years later I applied for Oxford University, and I suppose you could say that in this way I escaped from my parents. Being their sole child had become too complicated.
    Since Corby, I’d been travelling for days. A night here. A night there. Sometimes only hours. Nowhere long enough to know anyone. Nowhere long enough to become known. I barely unpacked my suitcase. I just kept moving and moving until the little bus stopped and I saw the sea. It was the last stop, said the driver. He switched off the lights. He switched off the engine.
    And what happens at the last stop? I thought.
    I made my way past the sand dunes and tall spikes of marram grass. A battering wind blew up from the Channel, and I had to bow my head in order to push forward, gripping my collar to my throat with one hand and dragging my tartan suitcase with the other. The case contained everything I owned. My books, my clothes. My dance shoes. I reached the water’s edge and I felt the terrible despair of someone who is used to running because that is what she has always done, and now she faces a brick wall.
    I still remember the winter sky that evening. Whenever I worked in my sea garden and I saw a sunset like that, I’d think back to Bantham Beach. It was as if the sun had been torn open. Everything was scarlet. The clouds were flames, so wild and vibrant that blue didn’t look like a colour any more. The sea and land served as a mirror. The ribbed sand was on fire. So were the stones and maroon rock pools. The pink crestsof the waves. The burning hump of Burgh Island. The red even shone in my hands.
    Why didn’t I keep walking forward? I had little money. No job. No place to stay. The water tipped my toes. In very little time it could be as high as my ankles. Once a thing is broken—
    And then I felt a small flutter in my belly.
    I turned my back on the sea and dragged my suitcase towards the sand dunes. By the time I was up at the road, the wind had dropped and the sun was gone. The sky was a chalky mauve, almost silver, and so was the land. The first of the evening stars pierced the dusk.
    I am starting again, I thought. Because that is what you do when you reach the last stop. You make a new beginning.
    Sister Mary Inconnue clasps her fingertips above her head and performs a short series of stretches for her neck. My pages are spread at her feet. The light has gone from the window, and the moon is back, a white cuticle.
    ‘Look how much you’ve done, Queenie. It’s only your second day of writing, and see how many pages you’ve filled. There is so much to tell. You remember so much.’
    Of course I remember. Songs from the past fill my head. I will confess everything. I will not be afraid.
    ‘How’s the hand?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘Not too sore?’
    I try to smile, only it comes out as something else and I need a tissue.
    I turn to a fresh page.

Let’s get this bit over and done with, shall we?
    S T B ERNADINE’S H OSPICE is a charitable nursing home that offers skilled and compassionate care to patients with any life-limiting illness , said the leaflet. The nuns who live and work here are trained nurses and volunteers.