Free The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce

heartbeat was gone. Everywhere I looked I saw mothers and babies. I could have hated them, but I had hated life when I left Corby and I didn’t want that any more.
    I never lost the thick ring of flesh I gained at my waist when I was pregnant. It’s because I’m small. As an adult, it’s never been easy for me to appear slim. Or perhaps I kept the extra weight because it was all I had left to remind me of my baby. I don’t know. I could tell that the reps at the brewery made jokes with Napier about me. But I was recovering from a miscarriage. I heard them call me names and imitate my walk, and I put up my chin and I waddled more. If they were going to laugh, they might as well do it properly.
    I had no child and so I gave my love to you. After all, I observed you most days, depositing your beer cans in the bin below my office window. Giving my love to you was like finding a convenient vessel into which to pour the thing I had no use for, just as you had found a bin in the yard for your unwanted empties. Since the stationery cupboard we hadn’t spoken, you and I, although I was aware of you, sometimes glancing in at my door to check that I was still working at the brewery, maybe even looking for me in the canteen. I found myself listening for your voice, and if someone mentioned you by name the heat came to my face and my pulse quickened. I still had your handkerchief. But I took care to avoid you, and so giving you my love felt a safe option. It kept me warm, it gave me pleasure, but I expected nothing more.
    It was time to pack my suitcase and move on. ‘You never rest,’ my father said one of the last times I saw him. ‘You never stay long enough for a cup of tea.’ There was no anger in his voice. Only the habitual moist-eyed wonder.
    I hope you are hearing this, Harold. I hope you are taking it in. I confess my part in your tragedy, but you must understand that I tried to remove myself from Kingsbridge, even at the beginning. And this was before I’d got in your car and come to know you. This was way before I’d met David.
    At the beginning of March, I went to Napier. I’d finished working through the boxes of loose accounts. I’d put them in order, and in only two months I’d found a way to save him six hundred pounds. I’d achieved more than I promised. It seemed fair to hand in my notice.
    Some things in life are a law unto themselves. Napier was one. Bindweed is another. One summer it grew all over my sea garden. It coiled itself round the tender stems of my Mrs Sinkins pinks and strangledthe living sap out of them. I tugged it up by the armful, but a few days later it was back. You have to leave only a small piece of bindweed in the ground and it will regrow itself, leaves and roots and everything.
    So I said to the bindweed, You want to be in my garden and I don’t want you. I can’t dig you out. If I poison you, I run the risk of poisoning the plants I want to keep. We have a problem that will not go away. Something needs to change.
    Beside every bindweed stem, I pushed in a hazel pea stick. About twenty in all. The bindweed shot up these supports and rewarded me with lilac trumpets of flowers striped with white. I wouldn’t say I loved the bindweed. I certainly didn’t trust it. It would have scrambled all over my pinks the moment I stopped offering new sticks. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that even though you don’t want bindweed you have it, and you’d better get along side by side. It was the same with Napier.
    When I told him I was leaving the brewery, he went very quiet. Then he screamed. I’ve never seen a man fly so quickly from composed to hysterical, missing out the progressive stages in between.
    ‘What do you mean, you want to go?’ He slammed his fist down on the desk, and his Murano glass clowns trembled like frightened girls.
    ‘I need to travel,’ I said.
    ‘You’re not a student,’ he said.
    I said I was thirty-nine, but I could still purchase a bus