The Carmel Sheehan Story

by Jean Grainger

  ‘Carmel, are you okay? Please ring, we’re all worried about you. Dad especially.’

  One from Julia. ‘You are a ridiculous woman, you came from nothing and you’ll go back to nothing. Bill foolishly thought he could normalize you, but it proved impossible, we are all better off without you.’

  And the one just a moment ago from Niamh again. ‘Carmel, do not attempt to enter our home again, you’re no longer welcome there. You have broken my father’s heart, you horrible ungrateful cow.’

  She could hear Julia on the phone, weaving her tale of woe to the girls. Painting Carmel as the villain of the piece, no doubt.

  Carmel sighed and deleted each text in turn. Nothing from Bill; he hadn’t tried to phone or send a text. He didn’t have a mobile phone, possibly the last person on earth to hold out against the newfangled technology, and she knew he’d never lift the receiver on the phone on the wall in the kitchen and punch in the number. The fact that he would have no idea of her phone number said enough really. He didn’t speak when they were face to face, so he would certainly never consider a phone chat. Carmel knew that, despite what Julia and the girls were saying, she had not broken his heart, and he most certainly was not devastated.

  She wondered if anyone in Birr would miss her, or even notice she was gone. The gossip machine would start up soon, and Bill would be embarrassed but the people would reassure him that he was better off and that Carmel was damaged goods and that nobody that ever came out of an institution was right in the head. ‘Just listen to the radio any day,’ she could hear them say in the pub and the post office, ‘all those people who came out of homes and industrial schools, it’s very sad, but they all have drink and drugs problems and they can’t make relationships work, ’tis not their fault, God knows, but they aren’t suitable matches for normal people.’

  Someone had placed milk and tea and some groceries in the fridge, so she made a cup of tea. Did she really do that? Just pack a bag, walk into Birr, get the bus to Dublin, and from there across the Irish Sea to here?

  She wondered if Bill just got up and went out to the farm the next morning. Did he make his own breakfast? What did he think about her sudden and unprecedented disappearing act? Did Julia tell him about the fight?

  She was so grateful she’d had a passport; she didn’t have one for years. Even getting a passport with the birth certificate supplied by the home was such a sad experience. Her father was marked as unknown, and her mother just as D Murphy. Carmel often wondered who D was and if Murphy even was her real name. She remembered when her friend Kit got hers, her mother was listed as Murphy as well. Maybe for anonymity, the nuns listed all unmarried mothers as Murphy, it being one of the most common names in Ireland. She had applied for it secretly, hoping she’d be invited along to New York when Niamh went there with her sister and Aunt Julia to buy a wedding dress, but no invitation had been forthcoming and so the little wine-coloured book with the gold harp on the front remained pristine in the drawer beside her bed. She liked to read the message inside, where the Minister for Foreign Affairs asks that the bearer, a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, be offered all assistance necessary to travel within other countries. She knew it was silly, but it made her feel part of something. She wasn’t in a family really, and she didn’t have any real friends but she was an Irish citizen and the Minister cared about her.

  She didn’t have any cards, Bill took care of everything; there was an account at the local shop so she got what she needed and he settled up the bill at the end of the month; she didn’t drive, so there was nothing else really. She had her phone, which she loved, it kept her connected to her friends on Facebook, people from groups that she’d never met, but who were more alive to her than the people in her so-called real life. She bought the smartphone with the voucher for the local electrical shop Bill had given her for Christmas. She would have loved an iPhone but it was too dear.

  He assumed she’d buy a new iron or something for the house, but she bought the phone and for twenty Euros a month she could send and receive texts, though she had nobody to text, but more importantly, she could surf the net. She learned it all quickly and joined lots of groups online, all on the themes of mindfulness, and spirituality; she loved Wayne Dyer, Oprah Winfrey, Dr Phil, and all those American gurus who told you to go out and live your best life. She never acted on any of that advice of course, which led her to beating herself up even more.

  She relived her departure so often, amazed at how calm she was. Once she was sure she had everything, she went to the jar beside the clock on the mantelpiece. In there, Bill kept some cash for the coal man, who was due to call to be paid. One hundred and eight euro exactly. Feeling a twinge of guilt, she stuffed the money into the pocket of her jeans and as she replaced the lid on the jar, she caught sight of the framed wedding photo of Bill and Gretta, in pride of place where it always was. How often had she dusted round it, afraid of cracking it or even touching it?

  ‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘he’s all yours again now, Gretta, not that he ever wasn’t.’ She took one more glance around, slipped her wedding ring off, and placed it beside the photo.

  Chapter 3

  She felt a bit silly setting the table for herself, just to have a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich but she tried to channel her inner Oprah who would tell her to enjoy the drink and sandwich, focus on it, really taste it, and experience it. All of that sounded like a load of old rubbish to her at the start but the more she got into the whole mindfulness thing the more it made sense to her. She sat at the table in this beautiful peaceful place and counted her blessings, she was healthy and had an envelope full of letters her birth mother had written to her over the years, she was wearing a necklace and earrings her mother had left for her, and she now had Dr Sharif Khan in her corner. Initially, he was fulfilling a promise he made to Dolly, her mother who died right here in Aashna House, but when they met in Dublin that day, something happened. It was as if he saw her, really saw her like nobody else had ever done before.

  That night over dinner in a fancy place in Dublin, and later on back at the hotel, he told her more about her mother, about what a character she was. He told her about his own parents, how Nadia his mother and Dolly were best friends all their lives, he listened to her stories about growing up in Trinity House, she even told him about her best friend Kit who was so much braver than Carmel and had struck out for Australia, only to be killed in a road accident. Sr Bonaventure used to say Carmel must have been Wednesday’s child, full of woe.

  Bill’s letter to Trinity came at the perfect time, she was too old for the children’s home, she should have been gone a good few years earlier but the nuns took pity on her and allowed her to work for bed and board. If the health board or the Church authorities got wind of it, they would have been in right trouble, so when Bill wrote wondering if there was anyone eligible who would like to meet an older well-to-do farmer who was a widower with two young daughters with a view to marriage, she decided to give it a go. It was mad, certainly, and when Kit heard about it, she wrote from Australia asking if she was in a John B Keane play. He was ancient, a staggering forty-nine to her twenty-three and Kit said it was more like something from the fifties than the nineties, but it was an offer and Carmel hadn’t had any of those.

  It was the bravest thing she’d ever done, agreeing to marry Bill. Nobody was interested, though, and even the nuns thought she was mad, but she couldn’t stay at Trinity House forever and she spent the weeks before the wedding imagining a life where she had a husband and two adorable little girls calling her Mammy. She would have friends who also had families and they’d talk about how their husband’s snoring was driving them crazy or how their little one was getting on at piano lessons. In truth, Carmel hadn’t a clue what married people talked about but she imagined it was something along those lines. She couldn’t wait. But, it turned out that the nuns were right, that it was a mad idea, a gamble that most certainly did not pay off. Year after dreary year passed and while Bill wa
sn’t cruel, he was just, absent. She saw him every single day, slept in the same bed, but they were strangers.

  As she finished off her delicious sandwich and drank her tea gratefully, there was a gentle knock on the door.

  She jumped as if she had no right to be there, but opened the door, and tried not to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

  ‘Hello, you. Settled in okay?’ Sharif stood outside. ‘May I come in?’ She stood back to allow him in, which she knew was ridiculous, he owned the whole place for God’s sake. As with every time she looked at him, the breath caught in her throat. He really was beautiful. She knew that wasn’t a word usually attributed to men but Sharif Khan was beautiful. His dark almond-shaped eyes, and silver hair, which was longer on top so it was brushed back from his high brow, made him look like one of those models for coffee or expensive aftershave you’d see in the magazines at the hairdresser’s. She blushed pink at the thought that he could read her mind, and tried to cover it up with a discreet cough, which turned into a wheezing fit. She really had to pull herself together.

  He handed her a glass of water and waited for her to recover her composure.

  ‘Do you have an inhaler? For your asthma?’ he asked, suddenly the doctor not the rescuer.

  ‘No,’ she wheezed, ‘It’s not too bad. Much better than when I was a kid; I can manage.’ She spoke, trying to have her breathing sound less laboured. She had had trouble with wheezing since she was a child, but nobody had ever diagnosed it as asthma before.

  ‘Sit,’ he commanded, leading her to the chair. Removing his stethoscope from his neck, he put it in his ears and raised up her jumper, placing the cold part on her back. He located it in several spots and did the same on her chest. ‘Are you seriously telling me that you have had this condition since childhood and you have never used medication? Carmel, do you have any idea what damage you have done to your lungs? Each asthma attack scars your lungs and puts your heart under undue pressure, and really there is no need. I’ll write you a prescription for a preventative and an inhaler for when you are having an attack. Take it to Rosa over at the pharmacy, it’s beside the reception, you take the preventative morning and evening and the other as you need it.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ she grinned.

  ‘I can see you are not going to be a good patient,’ he chuckled, ‘just like your mother. She was impossible, smoked cigarettes to the day she died, had gin and tonics every night, loved Kentucky Fried Chicken, and organized a take-out night here every Friday where the residents had too much alcohol and a fairly savage poker school. I’m going to have my work cut out for me, as she would say.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she spoke quietly. The way Sharif drew her mother into the conversation so regularly and so unselfconsciously had made her squirm at first. It raised uncomfortable truths for her but he kept on doing it and, as each day passed, Dolly Mullane was becoming a real person. She and Kit had been right, Murphy was a default name put on birth certs of Ireland’s unwanted babies. The photos her mother had left her, one of her and a man called Joe, another of Sharif’s family, another of her at her birthday party, the last one before she died, were tucked into Carmel’s wallet; she must have examined them a hundred times.

  ‘What for?’ he asked, as he hung his stethoscope round his neck once more.

  ‘Everything.’ Carmel spread her arms around, ‘This apartment, offering me a job, finding me. All of it.’

  ‘No regrets?’ he spoke quietly. They had kissed on that first night in Dublin and Carmel thought nothing like that could ever happen to someone like her. In the intervening weeks, she convinced herself she imagined it but now that he was here in front of her, it seemed possible again.

  ‘No, no regrets. Terror at the future, yes. Worry about well…everything, definitely. But regrets, no. That life is gone now, for better or worse. They texted me, his daughters, Julia, accusing me of breaking his heart; the reality, though, is I doubt he even noticed I was gone. Julia has probably moved in, she wanted that when Gretta died, or maybe all those years ago she still harboured hopes for Donald Wooton, the local landowning bigwig. He never looked twice at her, but everyone in the place had it that she was carrying a torch for him. At least she was until he up and married some English one he met at the races in Leopardstown, with a big farm of land and a plummy accent. Maybe she thinks if she gets her hands on Bill’s farm, she’ll have men queuing up for her, though I doubt it. Anyway, to answer your question, how could I have second thoughts about this place? It’s so beautiful.’

  Sharif pulled her gently to her feet, encircling her waist with his arms.

  ‘And me? Any second thoughts about that?’ Suddenly, all the self-assuredness disappeared, he wasn’t the very wealthy, capable doctor, but just a vulnerable man. She hadn’t imagined it. He liked her. She put her arms around his waist and looked up into his face.

  ‘You’re the one who should be running a mile. Seriously, Sharif, I’ve nothing, I’ve no skills, I don’t know anyone or anything. I don’t know what on earth you’d want to hitch your very fancy wagon to me for, honest to God, I don’t. I’m about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike, and for all I know, I could be a wanted criminal for shoving that angular old bat down the stairs.’ She was convinced he was making a mistake.

  He threw back his head and laughed, and the sight of it never ceased to delight her.

  ‘I can just picture it. Well done, anyway, you said she got up again, she’s fine. And as for you being useful, well, just leave that to me, okay? You forget, to me, you are someone very special indeed, not just because I’ve met you and know you to be a funny, charming, beautiful woman, but because in some ways I feel like I’ve always known you. Dolly talked about you all the time, spent hours speculating how you would be. She would look at pictures in the Irish papers, of people at parties or the races or even on the Irish news, she would scan the street crowds when they did outside broadcasts. I’ve lost count of the amount of times she’d pause it and call me, asking if I thought this woman or that one was you.’

  Carmel grinned at the thought, it elated her. ‘You’re making her real for me, not just a memory, but an actual person.’

  ‘Oh, she was real alright, larger than life…and you’re her daughter.’

  She laid her head on his chest and could hear his heart beating. He held her tightly and together they stood as the sun streamed in the window.

  Chapter 4

  She glanced at her watch. Ten to nine. The meeting was at nine and she didn’t want to arrive too early in case she was left standing alone, feeling awkward. He wanted her to relax and take it easy for a few days at least, but she wanted to get busy. Eventually, she pestered him, pleaded with him to find her something useful to do until he gave in. She had been stunned when he suggested a role for her. She imagined a cleaning job or something. But instead, she was now the official events coordinator at Aashna House. He offered her the position, explaining that the woman that used to do it called from Portugal last week, where she was on holiday, to say she was staying there with the love of her life, a twenty-four-year-old Syrian waiter she’d met in a disco. Sharif explained that this development had caused a few raised eyebrows from the other staff, given the fact that Maureen was fifty if she was a day, but they had a whip-round and wished her well. Sharif was more understanding than most employers would have been, and when Carmel asked him about it, he just said that Maureen had not always had things easy, so if this man gave her some joy, then who was he to stand in the way?

  ‘But what if he’s just using her to get a passport?’ Carmel asked. It felt so relaxed, the two of them, chatting happily. Sharif had kicked his shoes off and was sitting cross-legged on the floor. At first, she had smiled at the peculiar pose, but he explained that he spent most of his downtime sitting like that, it was a Pakistani thing, and it was his most comfortable position. He was a yogi as well, she discovered, and he explained how sitting cross-legged on the floor, was, in fact, an asana known as sukhasana
, which aids digestion and encourages mindfulness. He reminded her of a leopard sometimes, he was so supple and flexible.

  That first night they spent together and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Carmel never imagined lovemaking to be like it was with Sharif. Gentle, passionate, and fun. She was in love, for the first time. She couldn’t imagine ever being happier than this.

  The conversation when she had to tell Sharif that she’d never actually had sex before was one of the most awkward she’d ever had to endure, but she was terrified he’d freak out if she didn’t tell him. She knew the mechanics, obviously, but what you were actually supposed to do was a bit vague. He was incredulous at first, but when she explained about how that side of the marriage to Bill was nonexistent, he understood. She even told him about her botched attempt at seduction one time when she followed the instructions to the letter from a magazine, with candles and flower petals and sexy lingerie, but Bill had been mortified and almost bolted back down the stairs to his cattle. Sharif let her talk and then he held her tight and assured her that if she’d gone to that much trouble for him, then he would have had a very different reaction. After that, it was easy.

  ‘Well, if he is, he is. But from what she said, he’s a refugee, lost all his family in the flight from the war, and Maureen is not only remarkably good looking and well presented for her age, but there’s an inherent kindness in her. Maybe he sees that too and needs her as much as she needs him. She seems convinced he’s genuine and I’d trust her judgement.’

  ‘You’re lovely,’ she said and kissed him on the nose as she placed the plate of crackers and a glass of wine down in front of him.