The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe

by Carol Coffey

  “Those are some of the bedrooms,” said Eileen. “They’re in a complete state of disrepair. The heating doesn’t work properly here so we only use the ground-floor rooms for the older clients who can’t use the stairs. The house is the exact same on the other side. The large dorms, they’re upstairs . . . and then . . . Jonathan . . .Jonathan sleeps in the attic.” She lowered her face, raising her eyes slowly up to meet his.

  A door at the end of the hallway led into a corridor that ran across the back of the house.

  Eileen opened a door facing them. It led into a dining area. Five large round wooden tables, each with about eight chairs, were placed around the brightly painted room. Two large plain windows faced out onto the back garden, revealing a mixture of large oaks and young apple trees full of white blossoms. From the left of the dining room he could hear the banging of pots and pans and could smell food being cooked in what he assumed was the kitchen.

  “That’s the laundry,” said Eileen, indicating a door to the right of the dining room. “That’s mostly where I am all day, washing and drying the sheets. Sometimes cooking in the kitchen, whatever Alice asks me to do.”

  “Where is . . . are the homeless people?” he asked. Save for the noise from the kitchen, the house was eerily quiet.

  “They come back from seven onwards. Have dinner and a bed for the night. Next morning, they eat and leave for the day. Except Jonathan. He stays here.”

  She sounded nervous. He could tell shehad no interest in making small talk with him. She wanted to know what her cousin was going to do.

  Eileen made them both a coffee and they sat down at one of the wooden tables. Her hands shook as they wrapped around her steaming cup.

  “Sometimes . . .” she said hesitantly, “sometimes, when there is no work to do I sit with Jonathan outside. Sometimes we go to the library or to the bookshop or sit in the park by the river and talk.”

  She looked up at him and there was an expression of pleading in her eyes.

  “We talk about books and our lives . . . his life before he came here. Sometimes he might hold my hand . . . or he might kiss my cheek . . . and that’s all, Brendan. That’s all there ever will be. He is stuck here and I . . . I am stuck with my father. I . . . I need Jonathan . . . because . . . because he understands.”

  Hot tears welled in her eyes and she looked away from him. She moved her gaze to the garden where she had experienced so much happiness since John Doe came to the shelter over fifteen years ago and she had fallen in love with him. It had been her secret. Until now. She knew that when her father found out, she would be taken from here for fear she would make the same mistakes she had made in college. Mistakes that to her, even now, did not seem like they were so very bad. She remained silent and waited for Brendan to speak.

  He looked out the window at the empty swing that twirled around in the spring breeze, and thought about how lonely it looked swinging around there on its own.

  “I won’t tell,” he said resignedly.

  Eileen raised her hands to her face and sobbed into her closed fingers. Brendan reached out and touched her hand but dropped it when a large lump formed in his throat. He stood quickly and turned away from her in case she saw that he was overcome by her sadness, her desperation.

  When she had recovered her composure he walked her to the front door and this time took her huge bag from her, slinging it easily over his broad shoulder.

  As he opened the front door, he heard a voice calling him.

  “Brendan!”

  He turned to find Alice rushing down the hallway after them. He could hear the sound of pots banging so he assumed she had come from the kitchen and had left the doors open behind her.

  “I’d . . . we’d like you to come back and visit. Would you do that?” she asked.

  He turned to look at his cousin. He wanted to say no. What reason would he have to visit there? But Eileen’s mouth was smiling weakly beneath her teary eyes.

  “I think it would be good for Jonathan,” she said.

  He shrugged and wondered why she’d think he’d care what was good for John Doe. The man was obviously very disturbed.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said and ushered Eileen out, closing the door gently behind them.

  On the way home, Brendan tried to raise his concerns about her feelings for such a troubled man but, when she looked up at him, her expression was so innocent, so childlike, that he couldn’t go through with it. Instead, he asked her why John Doe was so afraid of him and was disappointed when she couldn’t shed any light on her friend’s strange behaviour, except to say he sometimes reacted to situations like that.

  When they reached the house, he excused himself at the front door and walked down the side entrance to his apartment. Knowing what he now knew, he didn’t feel that he could sit at the dinner table and look his uncle in the eye.

  He was worried about his cousin’s infatuation with a man who could never offer her a life. His head began to hurt and for the first time in days he missed his life in New York City. At around this time most evenings he would be sitting in the pub on the ground floor of his apartment block, drinking and hopefully hooking up with one of the girls who wasn’t annoyed with him for not ringing her back. They were getting fewer. And, if total abstinence hadn’t been a condition of his probation, he would have found anew place to drink by now. Brendan lay on his bed and rubbed his temples to ease them from the deep throb that had settled in during the walk home.

  Letting Eileen into his life had eased aloneliness that he didn’t even know he’d felt until he’d come here. But it had also complicated what had been, until now, an easy existence. Until now he’d thought that they were alike, that like him Eileen found fulfilment in the pages of great prose which was dampened only by the disturbance of other people. He hadn’t expected her to be so passionate about another human being and a small part of him felt deceived, cheated. As the silence settled around him, he realised that he hadn’t turned on his radio. He lifted himself off the bed and, despite his headache, turned the dial up to as loud as his head could bear it.

  He made himself a coffee and thought about John Doe and the fear the man had shown when he had seen him. When John had first spoken to him on the porch, his accent was definitely Southern States American and that, combined with his appearance, indicated the man was not Hispanic. He knew many white people spoke fluent Spanish but what he wondered was how, when afraid, John had retreated into it as though it was his first language. More than anything else, he wondered how a grown man did not know his own name. Surely someone knew who he was? Surely there was someone out there looking for Jonathan Doe?

  Chapter 5

  The following morning Brendan awoke with a hollow feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten any dinner the previous evening and was starving. He pulled on the crumpled pair of jeans lying at the bottom of his bed and an old pair of sneakers. He walked down the narrow pathway to the main house and peeped in through the window, hoping that no one would be there. Then heopened the patio door quietly and steppedinside. He saw that Coleen had left the usual small plate of his favourite pastries on the table. He lifted the lukewarm jug from the coffee maker and poured himself a cup before sitting down. He could see dishes piled up at the sink and knew the others had all eaten which meant he could probably enjoy his breakfast alone, the way he preferred it. Upstairs he could hear the hum of an electric shower running and hoped that no one would bother him until it was time to take Eileen to the shelter.

  As he shoved the last piece of pastry into his mouth, Frank appeared at the door with Eileen close behind him.

  “Oh, look what the cat brought in!” Frank said sarcastically, an obvious jibe at Brendan’s failure to come inside for dinner when Coleen called him the previous evening. He had pulled a pillow over his head, ignoring her shrill cries until she gave up and left him alone.

  Brendan looked away from his uncle. He had no intention of arguing with the old man. He poured himself another small co
ffee and stood at the counter to drink it. He didn’t know why but he always felt uneasy in his aunt’s kitchen and preferred to stand when others came into the room. The large space spanned the width of the house and was furnished with an antique oak dining table beside which Coleen’s old wooden dresser stood wearily under the weight of her Waterford crystal collection. On the far side of the room, an odd collection of easy chairs was strewn about the large brick fireplace, giving the room an intimate ambience. It was where Frank and Coleen’s family gathered during get-togethers but Brendan didn’t feel like family. He felt like an imposter, someone who was pretending to fit in when it was clear that he didn’t.

  “You do anything about your community service? Robert Hensen phoned looking for you this morning.”

  Brendan frowned.“Who?”

  “Your probation officer!” Frank yelled as he raised his eyes to heaven. “Brendan, listen to me. Hensen and I go back a long way. He’ll cut you some slack if you get on with this. Said he’ll be happy to keep in the distance, not embarrass you or me for that matter by visiting your community-service placement too often. He said if I prefer he’ll drop by here and check in with me from time to time. He’s gone out on a limb to keep this private, Brendan, so for Christ’s sake do your bit. Bert Ingalls, he said for you to come down to help out with the kids at the community centre. Brendan, are you listening to me? Can you get this done or do I have to take you down there myself?”

  “I’ll do it today,” Brendan answered meekly, dreading the thought of doing his community service under the watchful eye of his uncle’s old police partner and bowling buddy.

  When they left the house, Eileen and Brendan walked in silence, both absorbing yesterday’s events, both wondering if the friendship they shared had been damaged by the previous evening’s revelations.

  At the shelter, John was not standing in the garden where Brendan suspected he usually stood waiting each day. He could see Eileen raise her face slightly, looking for him on the deep-green lawn.

  “See you at six,” he said as he walked abruptly away.

  “Brendan?” Eileen called after him.

  He turned to face her, his hands dug deeply into the pockets of his worn jeans.

  “Are you upset with me?” she said, sounding childlike.

  He shook his headbut it was true that he was. Even though he knew he was being childish, he could not shake off the feeling that Eileen had somehow betrayed him.

  “Then . . . everything’s alright?”

  He nodded and offered her a half smile.

  “See you at six,” he repeated as he turned away.

  Instead of calling to the community hall as he’d promised, Brendan walked to the other side of town to look in the job centres. He didn’t really want to stay long enough in Dover to do his community service but knew that if he could find work in the small town, he could get a place of his own and could get out from under his uncle’s feet. He knew his uncle thought that his procrastination was down to sheer laziness but the real reason he had put off starting his community work was because, as far as he could see, it would involve working with other people which was something he hated. Sartre’s expression “Hell is other people” had become a sort of mantra to him over the years. He had tried the local animal shelter a couple of days after he’d first arrived in Dover and it was no surprise to him that they had more volunteers than any of the other charities in town. He had also considered cleaning up the motorways but the nearest stretch was five miles from Uncle Frank’s house and he had no way of getting there without forking out for taxis he could not afford.

  When he got tired of looking at adverts for jobs that he had no experience in, Brendan struggled to order a late lunch in one of the town’s Mexican restaurants whose waiter insisted on speaking Spanish to him.

  “No hablo español,”he said, which for some unknown reason sent the waiter into fits of laughter.

  When Brendan left the restaurant, it was still only four o’clock,so he bought the New York Timesand walked into the park. Hemoved through the regular group of dog-walkers and ball-players and found an empty bench in a popular spot beside the river. Engrossed in news from the Big Apple, he did not notice the clouds moving across the sky, blocking out the spring sunshine and releasing tiny drops of rain. Neither did he notice as park-goers ran for cover, until the weight of the quiet bore down on him. He looked up, troubled by the unexpected stillness, and focused on a woman pushing her baby in a pram through the rain. He wondered if his mother had ever brought him here. He couldn’t imagine her sitting by the gazebo making small talk with other mothers but, according to Frank and Coleen, his mother was a different person then. He wondered if he would ever have the courage to ask her what had happened to change her into the bitter person she was today and had been throughout his dismal childhood.

  He looked at his watch. Only an hour had passed and the Domus Shelter was only about a fifteen-minute walk from this part of town. He stood and walked slowly to the shelter where he’d wait until his cousin had finished whatever it was that she was doing there . . . he didn’t like to think too much about it.

  When he arrived, he stood by the neat picket fence and stared up at the magnificent house. He could see Alice standing by the door, talking toa tall, white-haired man in a sky-blue suit. She appeared to glance down towards him but continued to talk to the visitor. He watched as she pointed to various parts of the house while the man stood nodding. Brendanhoped she hadn’t spotted him and sighed when she finished her conversation and waved for him to come on up the driveway. As he sauntered up the steep incline, the man drove past him in a new Mercedes which was almost the same colour as his suit. Brendan waved at the passing car, a tradition in rural Ireland that he had not grown out of. The man glanced at Brendan through the open window, his cool blue eyes taking in the stranger. He raised his hand reservedly as though he was the Queen of England and nodded at Brendan who decided to take an instant dislike to him.

  Brendan glanced around the front yard nervously, hoping he wouldn’t have a recurrence of yesterday’s incident but John Doe was nowhere to be seen.

  “He’s friendly!” he said sarcastically to Alice, gesturing towards the departing Mercedes.

  “Well, that’s contractors for you!” she said in her drawling accent.

  “He must be doing pretty well,” Brendan added.

  Alice chuckled loudly. “Lord!” she said for no apparent reason.

  He glanced at her and tried to figure out her age. Close up, she had small tufts of curly grey hair about her temples but there was hardly a line on her round, smiling face. Her dark brown eyes shone with the sort of contentment he knew very few people had in life.

  He looked on either side of the wooden porch to check again for John.

  “Oh, don’t worry! John’s usually in his tower at this time of day,” she laughed, glancing up at the solitary round window on the third floor.

  He liked the way the woman drawled the word “tow-wer”.

  “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Georgia originally but I’ve been here a long time. Most my whole life.”

  “You getting work done?” he asked, looking up at the windows that she had been pointing out to the visitor only moments before.

  “Thinking on it. It’s expensive. Costs a lot to run this house. The historical society helps us with some of the upkeep, mostly to protect what’s classed as heritage, but there’s plenty of ordinary things that we just don’t ever have the money to pay for.”

  Brendan followed Alice into the house and walked gingerly into the tiled hallway. She beckoned for him to follow her up the impressive staircase to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, the door to a small room that looked out onto the back of the house stood open. He glanced inside the open door and saw a worn wooden desk and two tall filing-cabinets crammed into the tiny space.

  “I only use this when I have to – I hate paperwork. Much prefer to be downstairs with the people,” she s
aid.

  “These are the dorms,” she added. She threw open the doors of two large rooms on either side of the landing.

  Brendan followed Alice inside the one on the right. Beds covered by thin grey blankets lined both sides of the long room. Beside each bed stood a tiny wooden locker, most of which appeared to be in need of repair. Some stood on three rickety legs while others had missing doors or drawers. He looked up at the ceiling. An ornamental cornice that ran the length of the huge ceiling had been repaired at set points, revealing the room’s past as several smaller rooms which were broken through when the house became a shelter. The door of the room hung badly on its hinges and there was a large hole in the wall over one of the beds.

  “That was Zeb. He comes in some nights all calm and then gets crazy on us,” she smiled, shaking her curly hair around her head.

  “Why don’t you just throw him out?”

  “From a shelter? Lord, no! Zeb has his problems but nobody gets sent out of here. That was always Mr Thompson’s philosophy.”

  She walked slowly from the room and Brendan followed.

  As they descended the stairs he looked around the beautiful old house. Even though it was a little rundown upstairs, it was impressive. He ran his eyes admiringly over the crystal chandeliers in the hallway and smoothed his hands over the oak banisters. It annoyed him that someone who had come looking for help would then cause damage to such a beautiful building.

  “You don’t get wood like this anymore,” he said to himself rather than to Alice.

  Then he glanced at her. “How old is the house?”

  “Well over a hundred and fifty years old,” she replied slowly in her Georgian twang.“It belonged to Walter Thompson. It was his home and his father’s and grandfather’s before him. Long history to this house.” She looked about the hallway appreciatively.“I never get tired of looking round me. Even when I’m chasing my tail around, which is most of the time.”