Free The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce Page B

me. As with the bindweed, I had to be clever. I had to play his game. I had to offer Napier pea sticks until I came up with something so terrible he had no choice but to do the thing I wanted and get rid of me. Only here was the complication: I also had to save your job.
    You see, there were some good bits to me.
    Little did I realize that a few years later you would do all this yourself. You would provide the opportunity to get me in real trouble with Napier. And little did I realize how much leaving would hurt, when it finally came.
    We took our first trip, you and I, a few days later. And I’m sorry to break this to you, Harold: I was dreading it.
    A low grey cloud pleats the sky from east to west. The garden is colourless in the twilight. There is a stillness, but it is a Napier stillness. It harbours chaos. Far away, the sea boils.
    Rain is coming.
    I hope you have an umbrella, my friend.
    Or, at the very least, a waterproof hat.

Where is Sister Mary Inconnue?
    R AIN . A LL NIGHT . I hear it thrash the leaves of the Well-being Garden. I hear it smash against the battlements and cobblestones. It hits the windows like gravel and tumbles from the gutters in gushloads. When lightning cuts the sky, everything in my room snaps to life – the bed, the wheelchair, the sink, the bird picture, the cupboard, the television – and is caught in an ice-blue photograph. Once the rain stops, I still hear it. The drip, the tap, the creak, of a world soaked in rain.
    I wonder if you hear it too.
    My head whirs. Words, words, words. Even when I sleep they wake me. Everything is words. In my dream my pencil races across the page. I’ll never get the words out fast enough. My right hand burns.
    Sister Mary Inconnue is not here again, and I have torn out so many pages that my notebook will soon be empty.
    ‘You have a temperature,’ says the night nurse. ‘You must put down that pen now.’ She changes the dressings on my face and neck. She examines my eye and then she fetches medication.
    As I sip slowly, slowly, her face snaps on and off, on and off, like the lighthouse at Inner Farne Island, blinking through the dark.
    The moment she’s gone, I am writing again.

The long road home
    I AM STANDING on one side of your Morris 1100. You are hovering on the other. It’s the very end of March.
    I say, ‘I’ve heard you’re driving me,’ because I don’t want you to see I’m nervous, but it’s a stupid thing to say because why else would I be waiting by your car with my coat and handbag? I hold my bag out in front of me, gripped tight, like a float.
    ‘Hey, Mr Fry!’ yells one of the reps from a window. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t!’
    I am so flustered I feel plunged in heat.
    You go, ‘Hr-hrm.’ You seem to have no idea what else to do.
    You unlock and open the passenger door for me and then glance away while I get in, as if establishing oneself in a car is an act of intense privacy and you are concerned I might embarrass myself and get it wrong. Once you are in your seat, you put on your driving gloves and start the engine. You ask if I need anything. A blanket, or a cushion? It is the first time we have been alone since the stationery cupboard. You can’t look at me, and I can’t look at you.
    There are three cassette tapes on the dashboard. German for Beginners . Beethoven’s Ninth. Never Mind the Bollocks . They belong to your son, you tell me hastily, placing them inside the glovebox and snapping it shut. The car smells of you. My son prefers music to having to talk to the father, you say with a laugh.
    And I think it is a funny way to talk about yourself. As ‘the father’, instead of as Harold Fry.
    You ask what I would like to listen to and I say, Oh, I don’t mind, and you say, No, no, you choose. And I say, Well, how about music, then? Everything that happens is caught in aspic in my mind. But not the Sex Pistols, I add. You put on Radio 2. You seem relieved. Sometimes you hum, and I wonder if you are