The Last Lost Girl Read online

  From the garden, she can hear Goretti Quinn laughing and then the sound of music: Lilly’s radio. It is too far away to tell what the song is, but Jacqueline imagines them spreading the blanket on the grass and lying down together. They are probably still giggling about Sexy Sexton’s spots.

  “I won’t call you again, Jacqueline!” her mother yells.

  Jacqueline closes her eyes. If they want her, let them come find her – everyone knows where she will be. Lilly says the orchard is too full of wasps and only uses it as a shortcut to the river and Gayle never has time for sitting down, but the orchard is Jacqueline’s favourite place in the whole world. Where else can you always find something to eat, no matter what time of the year it is? First there are the Peach Melba – not peaches at all, but crisp sweet little red-and-yellow apples – then the orangey-yellow Widow’s Friend and later in the year the Ardcairn Russets that Daddy says taste better when they get a bit of frost on them. Jacqueline knows exactly how far it is from the orchard to the house: she and Daddy worked it out. They used their feet and, for every step Daddy took, Jacqueline had to take three. Then, Daddy did a sum in his head and said, “Forty yards.”

  “Right, that’s it, Jacqueline Brennan. You’ve missed your lunch so you can do without it now. And I’m sending Regina Quinn down to you.”

  Jacqueline opens her eyes. She really hopes her mother is joking. But before long she hears the sound of someone coming closer and closer – the grass is so dry it rustles like paper underfoot. Jacqueline sits up quickly and picks up her book.

  “Howya, Jacklean,” says Regina. “Are you coming out to play?”

  “In case you’re blind,” says Jacqueline, “I’m already out and I’m reading.”

  Regina sniffs loudly. She is always catching cold and she never has a hanky so she wipes her nose with the back of her hand, leaving silver tracks like snail trails that glitter when the light catches them.

  “That’s alright,” she says. She comes and sits down on the grass beside Jacqueline. “I’ll wait for you. Oh, and your ma said I was to tell you that you’re not getting any lunch today.”

  “I don’t care,” says Jacqueline.

  “I’m starvin’ – will I pick us some apples?”

  “If you can find any,” says Jacqueline. She does not want apples. Now that she has been told that she won’t get any, she wants her lunch. “But if you’re starving, I suppose I’d better go and get you something from the kitchen.”

  “Thanks, Jacklean.” Regina smiles, flashing her buck teeth.

  As Jacqueline walks away she can hear her sniffing.

  Lilly’s radio is playing “Let’s Stick Together”.

  Jacqueline hears them before she can see them. Her mother is there too. They are sitting on the brown blanket with empty plates and glasses on the grass next to them.

  Lilly is telling Goretti Quinn about the boy with the guitar. “I wouldn’t mind if he could even sing – he was completely out of tune. I thought Daddy was going to kill him.”

  Everyone laughs, even her mother, and Jacqueline thinks about what Daddy would say if he could hear them.

  “How did he know where your room was?” asks Goretti Quinn.

  “I heard him, so I got up and opened the window,” says Lilly, “and he saw me.”

  “I hope you’re not encouraging him, Lilly,” says her mother.

  “I don’t have to encourage him,” says Lilly. “I saw him in the town once and he talked to me, and another day he asked me if he could walk me home. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no, but he walked with me as far as the turn for Blackberry Lane. I made him go home then. What am I supposed to do? It’s not my fault if he likes me.”

  Her mother nods her head as though she can understand that. “I remember I used to be like that.”

  “In the olden days,” says Lilly, and Goretti Quinn bursts out laughing.

  “Don’t you be so cheeky, Lilly Brennan,” said her mother.

  “I wish I was like that,” says Goretti Quinn.

  “I mean it, Lilly,” says her mother. “Make sure you’re not encouraging that young lad or your daddy really will buy a gun.”Shelooks up and sees Jacqueline standing there. Shading her eyes with her hand, she says, “It’s too late to come looking for your lunch now, Jacqueline – the sandwiches are all gone.”

  “Oh, I hope I didn’t eat yours, Jacqueline,” Goretti says with a smile and puts a hand to her mouth quickly to hide it.

  Lilly laughs out loud.

  “You’ve no one to blame but yourself, Jacqueline,” says her mother. “If I called you once, I called you six times.”

  “You called me three times,” says Jacqueline,” and you didn’t tell me you were having a picnic.”

  “So you did hear me,” says her mother. “Well, let this be a lesson to you. Maybe next time you’ll come when you’re called. It wasn’t meant to be a picnic – Lilly said it was too hot to eat inside so we brought our sandwiches out. Now go and get yourself a glass of milk and a couple of biscuits if you’re hungry.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Jacqueline walks past them with her head in the air.

  In the kitchen she stares at the greasy wrapper lying on the table. There is a tiny scrap of meat stuck to it. Jacqueline pins it with the tip of one finger and puts it on her tongue: corned beef, her favourite. She is even more starving now. She goes to the fridge and takes the milk and fills herself a tall glass. She drinks it standing at the window, staring out at the three of them, then she puts the glass in the sink and opens the cupboard. There is half a packet of Marietta biscuits and she takes the pack and shoves it under her T-shirt.

  Outside, nobody even looks up when she passes. Lilly and Goretti Quinn are stretched out on the blanket with their eyes closed. Jacqueline’s mother is lying between them, her head fallen to one side and her eyes hidden beneath her sunglasses. Lilly’s radio is playing “You Just Might See Me Cry”.

  In the orchard, Regina Quinn is crunching on an apple and she has two more in her lap. She grabs the biscuits from Jacqueline’s hand and eats them two by two. Jacqueline’s biscuits stick somewhere in the middle of her chest. My own mother, she thinks, my own mother let Goretti Quinn eat my corned-beef sandwiches and Lilly only laughed. I hate them, I hate them all – my mother and Goretti Quinn and I hate Lilly Brennan too.

  Chapter 8

  Afterwards

  The last wishes of Francis Anthony Brennan took up less than a single sheet of A4 paper. Jacqueline wondered why she felt surprised that there was a will at all. Perhaps it was because her mother, who had at least had some notice, did not make one. While the solicitor talked, Jacqueline sat next to Gayle, her eyes on the square of office window that framed the sky, watching as the day turned from fair to foul. It had rained on the morning they buried him too. Auntie Carol’s stilettos pierced the wet earth and left a track of dainty holes behind her. Watching her father lowered into the ground, something he had said came back to Jacqueline, “Maybe one of the days we’ll take a spin up to your mother’s grave.” She doubted this was what he’d had in mind.

  Gayle apparently saw it differently. “At least they’re together again,” she said, “after all this time.”

  Looking at her sister’s face, features deformed by grief, Jacqueline could see that the notion gave her comfort. Her own mind strayed back to their mother’s funeral. It had been a bright but bitterly cold day in March. The sunshine only intensified the awful yellow of the daffodils that nodded on a nearby grave and, as they had walked away, a flock of Brent geese flew overhead, the sound they made like the creaking of a thousand tree branches. Her father stood still for a moment and gazed up at them. “There they go now, away home,” he said. The memory moved Jacqueline to tears, the first she had shed that day.

  As she drove them from the solicitor’s office to the airport, rain, relentless as Gayle’s sniffing, streaked the windscreen in parallel lines. In all her life, Jacqueline had never known anyone with such an ability to cry as
Gayle had; she wondered if it was a blessing or a curse. In sight of the airport, Gayle began to wail in earnest and Roy’s large hand reached through from the rear seat to pat his mother on the shoulder. In the rear-view mirror, Jacqueline could see his blond head bent over his phone. Multi-tasking, she thought.

  “Don’t upset yourself like this, Gayle,” she said.

  “I can’t help it,” said Gayle. “It’s bad enough that Dad is gone, but now I have to go and leave him behind. It’s not like I can go and visit his grave tomorrow the way you can, Jacqueline.”

  Would she visit his grave tomorrow, Jacqueline wondered.

  “And I’m leaving you too, Jacqueline, with everything to do all by yourself.”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times that I’ll be fine, Gayle. Don’t worry about me.”

  “But it isn’t just the house, there’s the legal stuff. And all Dad’s things. I wish you had let me make a start on his clothes when I wanted to.”

  “We agreed it was too soon for that.”

  “I know, but there are so many other things, memorial cards to be ordered …”

  “I can do that too.”

  “Everyone who sent a Mass card has to get one. I’ve made a start on a list, it’s on the kitchen table, but you’ll need to add on any more that arrive after I’ve gone. You won’t forget, will you?”

  “You’ve already told me all this. I won’t forget.”

  “You’ll need to pick a verse, and a photograph of Dad for the memorial card. Remember we had a lovely one for Mam, with the words from ‘Lead, Kindly Light’? That was her favourite hymn. Dad didn’t have a favourite hymn really, had he?”

  “No,” said Jacqueline, “but we’ll think of something.”

  “We should have a poem. Dad liked poetry.”

  “Good idea,” said Jacqueline.

  “Jacqueline, about the house, I don’t suppose you’d want to come back?”

  “And live there?” Jacqueline shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I didn’t think you would.”

  “You?”

  “Us? Oh, God no, I could never …” Gayle turned and met Jacqueline’s surprised eyes. “I mean, I don’t think we could, not now. The kids’ lives are in England, and there’s Alison’s baby now. But, all the same, I don’t think I can bear to think of strangers there.”

  “Then don’t think about it,” said Jacqueline. Her voice must have sounded harsher than she intended because Roy’s head jerked up suddenly. She met his eyes in the mirror and gave him a reassuring smile. She was thinking: we won’t be the Brennans of Blackberry Lane anymore.

  Jacqueline hung her damp jacket on a hook behind the door. The house was silent and she realised that it was the first time she had been alone there since they took his body away. She wondered if the fact of his having died here meant the house would always be inextricably linked to his death in her mind. It had been different with her mother who had died in the hospital. Perhaps that accounted for Gayle’s response to the idea of coming to live here herself. Surprising all the same – there had been something almost visceral to her reaction. Turning, she caught her reflection in the mirror. The day had changed and sunshine streaming through the stained-glass pane above the door threw a spangling of false colour across her pale face.

  In the kitchen, the first thing she saw was his grey cardigan draped over the back of his chair. Jacqueline went to stand behind the chair and rested her hands on the shaggy old wool. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was touching his bony old shoulders. She raised the cardigan to her face, it was rich with the smell of him. Her vision blurred and she swiped at her eyes, then she put the cardigan on, pulling the bobbly wool tightly around her. She filled the kettle and, while she waited for the water to boil, twiddled the button with the blue thread. It felt loose and she wished she had taken the little time it would have needed to sew it on properly.

  The water boiled and she picked up a mug and reached for a teabag. “Them oul’ teabags don’t taste the same.”

  Jacqueline heard him as clearly as if he were standing behind her.

  “Fair enough, Dad,” she said. “I’ll do it the proper way so.” She put the teabag back in the box and carefully warmed the fat blue teapot; its inside was stained a rich dark brown. Jacqueline reached for the tin canister. It had been badly scratched, the lid had a small dent, but the colours seemed as rich and true as they had when she was a child. Red and gold glinted in the folds of the slender girls’ kimonos in their unmoving graceful procession toward the fat ponytailed man sprawled on a mountain of cushions. When she lifted the lid and smelled the sweet pungent perfume of the tea, for no reason she could comprehend and just for a nanosecond she felt bleakly happy. She spooned the tea into the pot, poured on the water, replaced the lid and picked up the tea cosy. It was grimy and had a rent in one side and a large singe mark on the other. She wriggled it carefully over the spout of the teapot and pulled it down tight, like a mother dressing a child to go out on a frosty morning. She looked at the pot and smiled.

  “How’s that, Dad?” she said. “Does that meet with your approval?”

  She drank the tea, sitting in his chair at the kitchen table. It was much too strong for her liking but she drank cup after cup.

  The letterbox flapped, and something fell onto the hall floor.Post continued to come, addressed to him – there was a stash of it shoved in between the phone and the mirror in the hall. It would have to be opened, action taken. Things needed to be cancelled, as his life had been cancelled. She had to stop putting things off, and she would. But not just yet.

  She moved into the sitting room where she picked up his reading glasses from the coffee table. She moved her fingers gently across the thick shiny frames then replaced them and picked up the book from the table next to his chair – Daniel Deronda. Sheflipped the dog-eared pages. The thought came into her head: Where are you, Dad?

  She carried the book upstairs to his bedroom. The dark-stained boards creaked as she moved about in her stockinged feet. She stared around the stark room that had been his for the greater part of his adult life: at the jaded rug, the bookshelf and the bed. The bed had been stripped and the things he had left lying about had been put away, but the room still smelled of him. His bedside locker held a rolled-up tube of haemorrhoid ointment, a bottle of Syrup of Figs and the glass, that, had he died in his bed, would have held his teeth. She went to his dresser and opened a drawer. She remembered how she had baulked at the idea, yet here she was after all, rifling through his collection of underpants and long johns, his socks, his stash of cotton handkerchiefs, not ironed but folded in neat, slightly crumpled squares. Underneath, she found a tiny notebook, its shabby black covers falling apart. In it he had scribbled some telephone numbers and addresses, but mostly it was quotes written in his neat and distinctive hand, extracts from plays, Shakespearian sonnets and other poems.

  The stag at eve had drunk his fill,

  Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

  And deep his midnight lair had made

  In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade …

  Jacqueline thought about him keeping the notebook next to him as he read, jotting down something that he liked or wanted to remember, a word he wanted to look up in a dictionary. It satisfied her in a way that nothing else had so far, as though at last, just for a moment, she might be holding a part of him in her hands. She read it through from cover to cover and then put it in the pocket of his cardigan. In the shelf in his wardrobe, she found unopened birthday and Christmas gifts: soap on a rope, aftershave, gift sets still in their unopened packages, unused ties, pyjamas, DVDs in cellophane wrappers. She thought of how he had always said to his daughters: “You shouldn’t have, love.”

  And as it turned out, perhaps they really shouldn’t have.

  His sagging bookshelves held the weight of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Henry Fielding, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, George Elliot, Robert Frost, The L
etters of Samuel Johnson and a couple of John le Carré’s: “I don’t like that modern stuff much.”

  By modern stuff, he had meant anything later than the 19th century. Jacqueline looked about her. This was his room and these were his things but, apart from his books and some jottings in his notebook, of her father’s inner life, the world uniquely fashioned by his consciousness, she had found little trace.

  Chapter 9

  1976

  Daddy is making his dinner. The kitchen smells of fish and turnip.

  The door opens and Lilly comes in. She is wearing her denim flares and a white smock top and she is in her bare feet. “Good morning, Daddy,” she says. “Good morning, Jacqueline.”

  Jacqueline and Daddy look at one another, then Daddy looks at the clock.

  “It hasn’t been morning for over an hour now. And what’s that muck on your face?”

  Jacqueline looks at Lilly’s face: she is wearing purple eye shadow and bright-pink lipstick.

  “It’s just a bit of make-up, Daddy.”

  “‘Tis unnecessary and silly to gild a lily’,” says Daddy.

  Jacqueline waits for Lilly to roll her eyes, but Lilly is pouring cornflakes into a bowl.

  “Poor Daddy,” Lilly says, “I bet you wish you didn’t have to go to work on such a gorgeous day.”

  Daddy winks at Jacqueline. “How would you know if it’s a gorgeous day? You’ve slept the best part of it away.”

  Lilly smiles. “I know, I’m such a lazybones.” She pulls out a chair and sits down next to Daddy at the table.

  Jacqueline decides to make herself comfortable. She has only come in to get her cool pops from the fridge, but Lilly is up to something, Jacqueline just knows she is. Lilly never stays in the kitchen when Daddy is cooking. Jacqueline cannot blame her. Anything might come out of the pot when Daddy makes his own dinner: nettles, pig’s trotters, sheep’s brains, something’s head or tongue or heart. Jacqueline’s mother says Daddy has the stomach of an ox.