by Rachel Joyce
The nun smiled. ‘I’m sure you’re longing to see Queenie.’ She asked if he was ready to follow and he nodded.
Their feet marked the passage along the blue carpet in silence. There was no applause. There were no laughing nurses; no cheering patients. There was simply Harold, following the loose silhouette of a nun down a clean and empty corridor. He wondered if he could hear singing in the air, but listening again, he thought he was probably imagining it. Maybe it was the wind trapped in the Velux windows ahead, or someone calling. He realized he had forgotten to bring flowers.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
Again he nodded.
As they reached them, Harold noticed the windows to his left opened out over a garden. He looked with longing at the closely cropped lawn, and imagined his bare feet sinking into its softness. There were benches set out, and a sprinkler, whipping the air with bowing curves of water that caught the light from time to time. Ahead there stretched a series of closed doors. He was sure Queenie must be behind one of them. He fixed his gaze towards the garden and felt a powerful surge of dread.
‘How long did you say you had been walking?’
‘Oh,’ he said. The significance of his journey was reducing to nothing even as he followed her. ‘A long time.’
She said, ‘I’m afraid we didn’t invite those other pilgrims inside. We watched them on the television. We found them altogether rather noisy.’ She turned and he thought she gave a wink; though that was surely not possible.
They passed a half-open door. He wouldn’t look inside.
‘Sister Philomena!’ called a voice, frail as a whisper.
She stopped, looking into another room, her arms stretched out between the doorframe. ‘I’ll only be a moment,’ she said to whoever was inside. The nun stood, with one foot slightly lifted and pointed behind her, as if she were a dancer, but wearing trainers. Turning back to Harold, she gave a warm smile, and said they were nearly there. He was cold, or tired, or something that seemed to squeeze the life out of him.
The nun walked a few more paces and stopped to knock gently at a door. She listened a moment, with her knuckles resting on the wood and her ear flat against it, and then she opened the door a crack and peered inside.
‘We have a visitor,’ she said to the room he could not yet see.
Pushing the door to the wall, she flattened herself against it as he passed. ‘How exciting,’ she said. He took a deep breath that seemed to come from his feet, and lifted his gaze to the room ahead.
There was no more than a window, with thin curtains partially drawn, and beyond that a sky that appeared far away. There was a simple bed set under a wooden cross, with a pan beneath it and an empty chair at its side.
‘But she’s not here.’ He felt a giddying wave of unexpected relief.
Sister Philomena laughed. ‘Of course she’s here.’ She nodded in the direction of the bed, and looking at it again he found a slight form beneath the ice-white sheets. Something stretched at its side, like a long white claw, and then as Harold peered again it occurred to him that this was Queenie’s arm. He felt the blood rush to his head.
‘Harold,’ came the nun’s voice. Her face was close to his, the skin a web of fine wrinkles. ‘Queenie is confused, and in some pain. But she has waited. As you said she should.’ She withdrew to let him pass.
He took a few steps closer, and then a few more, with his heart throbbing. And as Harold Fry finally arrived at the side of the woman for whom he had travelled so many miles, his legs almost gave way. She lay, not moving, only a few feet from his touch, her face towards the light at the window. He wondered if she was sleeping, or maybe drugged, or waiting for something that wasn’t him. It was intensely private; the way she did not move, or notice his arrival. Her body made almost no shape against the sheets. She had the smallness of a child.
Harold pulled the rucksack from his shoulder and held it flat against his stomach, as if to keep the image in front of him at bay. He ventured one step closer. Two.
What was left of Queenie’s hair was thin and white like a seedhead in a hedgerow; puffed over her scalp, and pulled sideways, as if she’d been caught in a violent wind. He could see the papery thin skin of her skull. Her neck was bandaged.
Queenie Hennessy looked like someone else. Like someone he had never met. A ghost. A shell. He glanced behind him for Sister Philomena, but the doorway was empty. She had gone.
He could drop the presents and go. Maybe with a card. The idea of writing seemed by far the best idea; he could say something comforting. A burst of energy shot through him. He was about to retreat when Queenie’s head began a slow and steady journey from the window, and he was struck still again, watching. First came the left eye, then the nose, then the right side of her cheek, until she was facing him, and they met for the first time in twenty years. Harold’s breath stopped.
Her head was all wrong. It was two heads in one, the second growing out of the first. It began somewhere above her cheekbone and protruded over the jaw. It was so big, this growth, this second face without features, it looked as if it would erupt through her skin at any moment. It had forced the right eye to close and was tugging it towards her ear. The lower half of her mouth was jammed sideways and sliding towards her jaw. It was inhuman. She lifted her claw fingers, as if to hide, but there was no not seeing. Harold groaned.
The noise was out of him before he was aware of making it. Her hand groped for something she didn’t find.
He wished he could pretend it wasn’t horrible to look at. But he couldn’t. His mouth opened and two words shuffled out. ‘Hello, Queenie.’ Over six hundred miles, and that was all he could come up with.
She said nothing.
‘It’s Harold,’ he said. ‘Harold Fry.’ He was aware he was nodding, and shaping the words with exaggeration, and directing them not at her disfigured face but at her claw hand. ‘We worked together a long time ago. Do you remember?’
He snatched one more glance at the gargantuan tumour. It was a shining bulbous mass of thread-like veins and bruising, as if it hurt the skin to contain it. Queenie’s one open eye blinked at him. From the other slid a trail of something wet towards her pillow.
‘Did you get my letter?’
The look was naked, like an animal trapped inside a box.
‘My postcards?’
Am I dying? said her marble eye. Will it hurt?
He couldn’t look. Pulling open the rucksack, he rooted through its contents, although it was dark inside the bag and his fingers were trembling, and he was so aware of Queenie watching him he kept forgetting what he was looking for. ‘I have some small souvenirs. I picked them up as I walked. There’s a hanging quartz that will look nice at your window. I just have to find it. And some honey somewhere.’ It dawned on him that with a growth that size she probably couldn’t eat. ‘You may not like honey, of course. But the pot is nice. For putting pens in, maybe. It’s from Buckfast Abbey.’
He pulled out the paper bag containing the rose pendant, and offered it to her. She didn’t move. He laid it a little way from her clawed hand. He patted it twice. When he looked up, his skin froze. Queenie Hennessy was slipping down the pillow, as if the weight of her terrible face was dragging her earthwards.
He didn’t know what to do. He knew he should help, but he didn’t know how. He was afraid that underneath her bandaged neck there would be more. More butchery. More brutal evidence of her human frailty. He couldn’t bear that. Harold called for help. He tried to do it quietly at first, so as not to alarm her. But then he called again, getting louder and louder.
‘Hello, Queenie,’ called the nun entering the room; only it seemed this was not the same one as before. Her voice was younger, her body fuller and her manner more bold. ‘Let’s get some light. It’s like a morgue in here.’ She walked to the curtains and tugged them back with a yank so that the rings screamed on the metal pole. ‘How nice to have a visitor.’ Everything about her struck Harold as too alive for the room
, and for Queenie’s fragile condition. It made him angry they had let her look after someone so delicate as Queenie, although he was relieved she was able to take over.
‘She’s—’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. He pointed.
‘Not again,’ said the nun, all bright, as if Queenie was a child and had spilt food down her blouse.
From the other side of the bed, she adjusted Queenie’s pillows and pulled her upright, hooking under the armpits and lifting. Queenie submitted like a rag doll, and that was how Harold thought he would always remember her; enduring and enduring, while someone hoicked her against a pillow and made funny comments that he hated.
‘Apparently Henry has walked. All the way from— Where are you from, Henry?’
Harold opened his mouth to explain that he wasn’t Henry, and that he lived in Kingsbridge, but the will to say either disappeared. It didn’t seem worth the effort of correcting her. At that moment it didn’t even seem worth being himself.
‘Dorset, did you say?’ said the sister.
‘Yes. That’s right,’ said Harold, adopting the same tone, so that it sounded for a moment as if they were both shouting over the sea wind. ‘Down south.’
‘Shall we offer him tea?’ she asked Queenie, without looking at her. ‘You sit yourself down, Henry, and catch up while I make us all a cuppa. It’s been pretty busy for us, hasn’t it? There have been so many letters and cards. Last week a lady even wrote from Perth.’ She turned to Harold as she left. ‘She can hear you,’ she said. He thought that if Queenie could really hear, it wasn’t considerate to go talking about it. But he didn’t say that. They were down to basics now.
Harold took the chair at Queenie’s bedside. He scraped it back a few inches, so as not to be in the way. He slotted his hands between his knees.
‘Hello,’ he said again, as if they were meeting for the first time. ‘I must say, you’re doing very well. My wife – do you remember Maureen? – my wife sends her best regards.’ It felt safer now that he had conjured Maureen into the conversation. He wished Queenie would say something to break the ice, but she didn’t.
‘Yes, you’re doing well.’ And then: ‘Really, really well.’ He looked behind to see if the nun was on her way with the tea, but they were still alone. He gave a long yawn, although he felt wide awake. ‘I walked a long time,’ he said weakly. ‘Shall I hang up your quartz? In the shop, they had it at the window. I think you’ll like it. It’s supposed to have healing powers.’ Her opened eye met his. ‘But I don’t know about that.’
He wondered how much longer he was going to have to go through this. He got up, with the quartz swinging on its thread between his fingers, and pretended to look for a suitable place to hang it. The sky beyond the window was so white he couldn’t tell if it was cloud or bright sun. Down in the garden, a nun in a straw hat pushed a patient in a wheelchair across the grass, talking gently. He wondered if she was praying. He envied her certainty.
Harold felt the stir of old emotions and images from the past, buried for all this time, because living with them every day was more than a human being could bear. He gripped the windowsill, taking deep breaths, but the air was hot too and brought no relief.
He lived again the afternoon he had driven Maureen to the funeral director’s to see David one last time in the coffin. She had packed a few things: a red rose, a teddy bear, and a pillow to go beneath his head. In the car, she had asked Harold what he was going to give, knowing he had nothing. The sun had shone very low, torching his eye as he drove. They both wore sunglasses. Even at home, she didn’t take them off.
At the funeral director’s she had surprised him by saying she wanted to say goodbye to David alone. He had sat outside with his head in his hands, waiting his turn, until a passer-by had stopped to offer a cigarette and Harold had taken it, although he had not smoked since the days on the buses. He tried to imagine what a father said to his dead son. His fingers shook so hard on the cigarette the passer-by used three matches to light it.
The thick nicotine caught in his throat and wound through his insides, causing them to tip upwards. As he stood and bent over a rubbish bin, he was met with the bitter stench of decay. Then, from behind him, the air was pierced with a harsh, deep sobbing cry, so animal in its intensity he was struck still, braced over the contents of the bin.
‘No!’ Maureen screamed from inside the funeral parlour. ‘No! No! No!’ The words seemed to reverberate through him and beat against the metal sky.
Harold had heaved a white spume of foam into the bin.
When she came out, she caught his eye once, and then her hand shot to her sunshades. She had been crying so hard her whole being seemed liquid. He realized with shock how thin she’d grown; her shoulders were like a hanger inside her black dress. He wanted to walk to her, to hold her, and be held, but he smelt of the cigarette and his vomit. He hovered beside the bin, pretending he had not seen her, and she walked straight past him to the car. The space that set them apart shone against the sun like glass. He wiped his face and his hands, and eventually he went after her.
As they drove home in silence, Harold knew that something had passed between them which could never be undone. He had not said goodbye to his son. Maureen had; but Harold had not. There would always be this difference. There followed a small cremation, but she wanted no mourners. She hung up net curtains to stop people prying, although sometimes he felt it was more to stop herself from seeing out. For a while she railed, and blamed Harold, and then even that stopped. They passed one another on the stairs and were no more than strangers.
Harold thought of the day when she came out of the funeral director’s and looked at him before snapping down her sunglasses, and he felt that in that one glance they had made a pact that would oblige them for the rest of their lives to say only what they did not mean, and to wrench apart what they most loved.
Remembering all this in the hospice where Queenie lay dying, Harold trembled with pain.
He had believed that when he saw her he could say thank you and even goodbye. That there would be a meeting of a kind, and that somehow it would absolve the terrible mistakes of the past. But there could not be a meeting, or even a goodbye, because the woman he had once known had already left. Harold thought he should stay, leaning on the windowsill, until he could accept this. He wondered if he should sit again; if being in the chair would make a difference. But even before he sat, he knew it wouldn’t. Sitting or standing, he knew that it would take a long while before he could sew into the fabric of his life the knowledge that Queenie was reduced to this. David was dead too; there was no bringing him back. Harold tied the quartz to a curtain ring with a quick knot. It hung against the light, and twisted, so slight it was barely noticeable.
He remembered fiddling with his laces the day David almost drowned. He remembered driving from the funeral parlour with Maureen, knowing everything was over. There was more. He saw himself as a boy, after his mother had left, prostrate on his bed, and wondering if the stiller you kept, the greater the chances might be of dying. And yet here, years later, was a woman he had known briefly, but tenderly, fighting to keep the small amount of life that was left. It was not enough. It was not enough to stay on the sidelines.
In silence, he walked to Queenie’s bedside. And as her head turned, and her eye found his, he sat in the space beside her. He reached for her hand. Her fingers were fragile, barely flesh at all. They curled imperceptibly and touched his. He smiled.
‘It seems a long time since I found you in the stationery cupboard,’ he said. At least he wanted to say that; but maybe it was only a thought. The air remained still and empty for a long time, until her hand slipped out of his, and her breathing grew slow.
A rattle of china caused him to start. ‘Are you all right, Henry?’ asked the young sister, jollying into the room with a tray.
Harold looked again at Queenie. She was dozing.
‘Do you mind if I leave the tea?’ he said. ‘I have to go now.’
; And Harold did.
30
Maureen and Harold
ALONE, A BROKEN figure sat on a bench, hunched against the wind, and looking out towards the water’s edge as if he had been there all his life. The sky was so grey and heavy, and the sea so grey and heavy, that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.
Maureen paused. Her heart hammered inside her ribs. She walked towards Harold, and then she stopped again, standing right beside him, although he didn’t look up or speak. His hair touched the collar of his waterproof jacket in soft curls that she ached to reach out and stroke.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I sit with you?’
He didn’t answer, but he tucked his jacket close to his hips and shunted along the bench to make space. Waves came at the beach and broke in white fringes of foam, flinging forward small stones and broken pieces of shell, and then leaving them behind. The tide was coming in.
She took her place beside him but a little way apart. ‘How far do you think those waves have travelled?’ she said.
He shrugged and shook his head, as if to say, That is a very good question, and I really don’t know. His profile was so hollow it looked eaten away, and shadows hung beneath his eyes, dark as bruises. He was a different man yet again. He seemed to have aged years. What was left of his beard was pitiful.
‘How was it?’ she said. ‘Did you visit Queenie?’
Harold kept his hands slotted between his knees. He nodded. He didn’t speak.
She said, ‘Did she have any idea you were arriving today? Was she pleased?’
He gave a sigh like something cracking.
‘You did – see her?’
He nodded, but the nod kept moving up and down, as if he had omitted to send his brain the message to stop.
‘So did you talk? What did you say? Did Queenie laugh?’
‘Laugh?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. Was she pleased?’
‘No.’ His voice was weak. ‘She didn’t say anything.’
