The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy Read Free Page B

A medical team from the hospital is on hand to offer further support .
    ‘But I don’t want to go there,’ I tried to say to the GP. This was after my last operation, when I could still manage a few sounds that people recognized as words. I returned the leaflet to his desk.
    I knew St Bernadine’s. It was a low black flint building on the edge of town. I passed the hospice on the bus if I had to mend tools for my garden and needed the large hardware store in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I always felt a tenderness for my tools and treated them like friends. But passing the hospice, I’d turn my back on the building to look at the sea instead. I pulled out my notebook. I want to stay in my home , I wrote.
    The GP nodded. He picked up a pen and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Of course you don’t have to go to St Bernadine’s if you don’t want to, Queenie.’
    He kept his eyes fixed on that pen of his, and every once in a while a sigh slipped from his mouth as if an explosion had gone on somewhere deep inside his chest. ‘The cancer is advanced. There’s no more surgery we can do now. You know the prognosis is not—?’ he whispered. ‘You do know?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. I reached for my walking sticks, though I wasn’t going to leave. I didn’t want him to have to say any more, and holding on tomy sticks was about the best thing I could think of.
    ‘I’m not forcing you to go to St Bernadine’s. Of course I’m not. But they can make sure you’re comfortable there. I’m concerned about you in that beach house. No one else spends the winter on Embleton Bay. I know you have electricity but you don’t have proper heating. And the coastal path is almost inaccessible in this weather. We couldn’t get an ambulance to you. If we needed one.’
    I have Simon. The hospital volunteer. He comes .
    ‘But only three times a week. You need full-time care.’
    The air seemed so thick that I had to concentrate in order to breathe. I sort of didn’t hear any more, or if I did I heard only select words, like ‘complicated’ and so on.
    Nevertheless, I would have stuck to my guns. I would have stayed in my wooden home, but my whole face began to drop and shift shape. My mouth wouldn’t work, and my eye wouldn’t open. It was difficult to eat. It was difficult to speak. I stopped my daily walk and I stopped going to the shop. I didn’t want people to see me. I was so ashamed. If visitors came, I didn’t answer the door. I even avoided working in my sea garden, for fear they’d find me. I thought, I will sleep now, sleep, sleep , but it never came, the sleep. I didn’t want to trouble anyone. I just wanted to be able to let go. But every time I thought of letting go, I wanted only to hold on. I admit I cried. The rain kept coming, and so did the wind. I watched my sea garden from the door, the gales upending the driftwood figures, the rain drowning the rock pools. Winter seemed to have no end.
    When Simon, the volunteer, heard I’d chosen St Bernadine’s he said, Oh, his aunt went there. ‘It’s a very special place,’ he promised. ‘Youdon’t have to be religious. They do all sorts. Music and art and stuff. And there’s a nice garden. You’ll like that. My aunt was happy right until the—’
    And then he smiled as if he had completely forgotten how to speak.
    Simon is a bear of a person, and he wears a duffel coat with toggles that don’t quite reach. I sat very still while he packed my nightclothes, slippers, towels. We have been everywhere together, that suitcase and I. Simon asked if there was anything else I would like to take and I couldn’t think because it was too strange to think I was leaving. I had lived in that beach house for twenty years, ever since I left you and Kingsbridge. The place was a part of me in the same way that the past was a part of me and you were a part of me and so were my bones. I looked at the painted grey walls, the bare board floors, the second-hand paisley throws I had found in