The Penance Room

by Carol Coffey

  “She does know you though, she’s seen you before?” the doctor asked.

  “No, sir, eh, Doctor – I just started on the farm a few months back. Do ya want to call them? I mean, check who I am and all that?”

  Dr Cosgrove stared incredulously at the young man. He could not believe that Tess’s family, knowing her condition, would send a complete stranger to collect her. He suddenly had grave misgivings about releasing her into their care but knew that there was nothing he could do. She was, after all, an adult now and could no longer stay in this section of the institution. She was supposed to be moved into the adult wing once she turned eighteen and he had done everything in his power to prevent this, citing that her disability would make the adult ward unsuitable for her. There were times during her early years when he thought she would end up there and would remain in care for the rest of her life, but she had eventually settled in and he had seen no reason not to release her into the care of her family. Until now. He was aware that the family had not visited over the years and the fact disturbed him though he knew Tess’s siblings were under pressure caring for their younger brother and running the farm and that their parents were dead. In reality, Tess could have been returned to her family some years back but they hadn’t responded to his requests to attend progress meetings. The older sister sent Tess a present on each birthday and at Christmas but he had often wondered why they couldn’t visit even a couple of times a year. But to do this! She needed to see a familiar face, not the face of a stranger he knew she would be afraid of. The doctor ran his fingers through his hair and turned slightly to look around the large foyer, as if an answer lay in one cold corner or another, and then he saw her, packed, waiting, watching.

  “Tess! Em, this is Mr, em, I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

  “Dermot, Dermot Lynch.”

  “Mr Lynch. He has come to take you home today. How did you get downstairs?”

  This was an afterthought. He was always meeting Tess on stairs she shouldn’t be on, in rooms she had no access to, staff never knowing how she got there. After many incidents he stopped investigating her whereabouts as she never once went outside the grounds and did not seem to be doing anything wrong. So everyone got used to seeing her anywhere she wasn’t meant to be and not finding her where she was expected.

  “I’m sorry, Tess. I was expecting your brother or sister to come. I’m not sure what’s happened but I will telephone immediately and ask that they come on another day to collect you.”

  Tess shook her head at the doctor and walked slowly towards the shy young man.

  Dermot felt as though he was on one of those television programmes where a joke was pulled on you and everyone watched you look like a complete idiot.

  Dr Cosgrove thought that she didn’t understand. “Tess, this is not your brother but I will telephone him to sort this out. I’m sorry, Tess.” He knew she had been looking forward to this day.

  “I’ll go,” Tess said flatly.

  Dr Cosgrove was taken aback but recovered quickly. “I’m sorry, Tess,” he said again and knew that he was not apologising for this mix-up but for the years he had failed her. “Goodbye and keep in touch. If there’s anything you need or . . .”

  But she was already walking out of the building, sailing past nurses and orderlies who had been part of her life for so many years. She did not look right or left but carried on straight with her suitcase. With ease she climbed up into the truck, pausing only to look for her window from a different angle, from the outside. She had promised herself she would do that although she didn’t know why and she pondered this as the truck started up and headed for home.

  Árd Glen was a small farming community in the south west of Wicklow county. Although a beautiful scenic place, surrounded by mountains and lakes, its population count of about three hundred people remained generally unchanged over the years. There was little to do here, most families having small livestock farms, the land too hilly for crops. Spring was busy with new lambs to tend to. Summer brought the usual snippets of tourists, mostly Americans looking for their great-grandfathers’ or grandmothers’ graves, but in autumn and winter a heavy grey sky descended on the village, confining all within to their memories, good or bad.

  It was these memories that made Seán Byrne pace the kitchen floor of the modest house in which his family had lived since he was a baby. The house had a long dark T-shaped hallway. The room to the left of the hall, once a bedroom, was now a sitting room that they rarely used. To the right was Seán and Ben’s room. Kate and Tess’s room was around the corner to the right at the end of the hallway and faced the small bathroom which Seán had built on to the back of the house, his father being too mean to allow the family such “luxuries” in his lifetime. The kitchen was at the end of the hallway to the left. It was dominated by a large old-fashioned range that had blackened the once whitewashed walls. A small sink stood underneath the window that faced out onto the back yard and was flanked either side by two cupboards, their doors peeling and flaking. An old-fashioned wooden kitchen table and four worn upholstered chairs sat in the middle of the kitchen, using up the limited space.

  Seán was proud of the changes he had made to the house and farm as a young man. Preferring farming to school work, he had left the books for the fields at thirteen. His family didn’t have the best of reputations in the village and he had worked hard to change this during the late 1960s. But it had all been for nothing. He had spent his youth trying to develop a farm and a reputation that was destroyed faster than a fire spreads through a barn of hay. It was hard to imagine himself now – young, fit and full of hope – but he had been that man. Now he spent his days trying to hide his drinking from the nag his sister had turned into and from the farmhand who, although he said nothing, could see that his employer was an alcoholic. Over the past ten years they had managed to maintain some semblance of normality within the house: Seán working the farm as best he could, if only to keep some money coming in; Kate, resentfully running the house and caring for Ben who would never be a man and who would need to be cared for long after they were both gone. Somehow they had managed. Now, when they seemed to be getting on and putting the past behind them, it had reared its ugly head in the form of their younger sister. Old memories would be stirred up in the village and people would begin talking about it again. Seán could feel his face redden. If only they didn’t have to have her back. If only the institution could have kept her there. If only she was fit enough to have lived out her life in Dublin on her own or in one of those residential homes. He had tried to put the nosy psychiatrist off, ignoring letters regarding her wellbeing, not visiting. You’d have thought they’d have got the message. But no. He couldn’t very well have said “We don’t want her back.” It wouldn’t have seemed right, would have got people talking just the same.

  He could feel the blood rising in his face, not sure himself if it was in anger or shame, when Kate interrupted his thoughts.

  “No point dwelling on it, we have to make the best of it. Maybe she’ll have changed, mellowed a bit. She was just a child, remember. She might be a good help with the lad. God knows she might understand him better than me.”

  Kate always knew exactly what he was thinking and even feeling. Kate, always one step ahead of him, cool and calculating, smarter than her older brother by far. Seán looked at his sister who he felt was just like their mother had been, calm and beautiful. He was always conscious of how different he looked to his siblings and parents. He was the only redhead in a raven-haired family. He had green eyes and freckled skin whereas his siblings had blue eyes and clear white skin that neither burned nor tanned. He stared at Kate, envious of her composure. His sister had even more reason to resent Tess’s return than he as she was engaged when the “accident”, as they liked to refer to it, happened. Kate was a different woman then, popular and about to be married to the eldest Moore son who would eventually inherit a large farm and money with it. But it wasn’t just that. She was
in love with Noel Moore. His family hadn’t been the happiest about it in the beginning but Kate soon won them over, even Noel’s mother who had thought there would never be anyone good enough for her eldest son. Her future looked bright and happy but Tess had been waiting in the wings to destroy it all.

  Dermot sat uneasily into the driver seat of the battered truck and shot a nervous smile in Tess’s direction. She didn’t look dangerous. She was small and like her older sister was not bad-looking. Dermot thought that she looked like a younger Kate, with long hair that was so black it made her white skin look even paler than it was. He noticed she did not look at him when he spoke and that her dark blue eyes looked neither happy nor sad. He hadn’t realised that he had thought so much about how she would react both to leaving this place and going home but she didn’t seem to care much one way or the other and spent the journey staring out of the truck’s muddy window.

  The silence was making Dermot uneasy.

  “Shouldn’t take us too long to get back at this time, not much traffic.”

  No reply.

  “You must be looking forward to seeing your family again – it’s been a long time.”

  Silence.

  “Do ya not answer someone when they ask you a question?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, why don’t you answer my questions?”

  “You didn’t ask me a question. ‘Shouldn’t take us too long to get back at this time, not much traffic’ and ‘You must be looking forward to seeing your family again, it’s been a long time’ are not questions.”

  Dermot stared back at the strange girl, amazed that she had repeated word for word what he had just said and a little annoyed that she was right: he hadn’t asked her a question.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right, they weren’t questions.”

  “I know,” Tess said coolly and turned her head towards the window.

  She didn’t want to talk to this man who she had never met before. She wanted to savour every minute of this drive, hoping to get through noisy Dublin city quickly and arrive at the edge of Wicklow with its cool mountains and lakes, hoping they would be as she remembered them. Dermot, sensing this, focused on driving as fast as the law allowed. He wasn’t great with people at the best of times and this one was different, impossible to talk to. He couldn’t wait to get this job done and get back to what he loved best, tending to animals.

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