Blood And Water (26 page)

William raised his eyes in response, getting a good sense that she wasn’t here to sing either his or his son’s praises.

“I’ve watched how you run your children, torment your wife and quite honestly lord over your constituents and so often I’ve wanted to tell you what I think but out of respect I’ve said nothing.”

“Until now,” he interjected with a bittersweet grin, bracing himself, his adrenaline rising, priming for the game to begin.

She smiled and nodded, “Until now. Call it my swan song.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Typical William,” she mocked. “Always manipulating, always working. Can’t wait, my backside! Admit it, William, beyond that charming, smiling exterior you’re frantically trying to second-guess me. Well, in this instance I’m sorry to disappoint. There’s no great mystery. All I’m doing here is pointing out the obvious.”

“And that is?” he asked.

“And that is that you are a selfish, controlling swine.”

“Is that it? Actually, I take that as a compliment.”

“I assumed you would,” Kathryn replied, “and that’s what makes it so abundantly devastating that you would think that terrorising and marginalising your own family and the people who bizarrely care about you is a good thing.”

“Well, thank you so much for your thoughts,” William told her, doing his best to assert his self-appointed potency from his hospital bed. “If you’re done, feel free to leave, close the door behind you and have a safe flight.”

In the absence of retaliation she knew she’d found some kind of kink in his armour. “Don’t try to dismiss me, William. I’m not one of your submissive children. I’m not going to roll over and bark. I actually bite. And don’t you forget it.”

“Are you threatening me?” he asked her with venom in his eyes.

“Good God, no! I’m not threatening you – just warning you. That’s all.”

William threw his head back against his pillow and laughed as if it were the most entertaining thing he’d heard in years.

“You’re a piece of work, sitting there with your long legs, dressed up like some kind of high-class hooker. You don’t scare me. You might take on that prim stuck-up-bitch attitude with your husband but it won’t work on me. So why don’t you take yourself and your friendly advice off to somewhere and someone else that actually gives a shit.”

“William,” she said in an apologetic tone, delighted to have ruffled his feathers and not in the least bit affected by his snide remarks, “I’m only expressing what everyone else is just dying to say but they’re all simply too damn scared to open their fearful little lips.“ She stood up to go, smoothed down her skirt and stood tall. “For some reason you hold people to emotional ransom and now that I’ve taught two of your sons a very expensive lesson and have absolutely nothing to lose, I’m happy to confirm to your face that you are an unbelievable asshole and one day soon the karma of your manipulative and frankly evil endeavours will come back to bite you. Hard, I hope.”

She walked to the door but before leaving stopped and turned.

“I suspect,” she warned with a grin, “you’re in for a little bit of a shock and when you get it I want you to think of me.” Blowing him a kiss she made to leave, almost crashing into Barbara who was on her way in.

“Barbara,” she greeted her and kissed her on each cheek. ”I’m just saying goodbye. William will no doubt explain.”

Confused, Barbara stood back to let her leave, looking on in surprise as Kathryn threw a final wink back at a beautifully dumbstruck William.

Part Two

Chapter 24

Martha was an only child. It hadn’t always been like that but, after her brother and not long after her older sister died, it was just herself and her mum. Although she tried every day to maintain the mental image of her sister, after so many years Martha could just about remember her. Her most vivid memory was of her in her purple coat with a pink scarf wrapped around her long hair pulled back in a tidy bun, stepping onto the bus the day she left to start her big job in the city. She remembered her mother’s tears and gushing pride. For weeks she could talk of nothing else to her friends and neighbours: her brave and grown-up daughter who seemed to mature almost overnight. Although they both missed her they knew she had no option but to go.

Two years had passed since their father left for England in search of work. Every day for years her mother went to the small cottage post office at the end of their lane to ask them to check, and check again, for a letter from him until one day she just didn’t bother. Two years without a word.

With no idea if he were alive or dead, they struggled to make ends meet so it made perfect sense for her sister, just like so many of her friends, to forgo her education in favour of a wage.

She had only just left when her brother was knocked down and killed. He was only thirteen and on his way home from school. ‘Big school’. They said he ran across the road without looking but Martha didn’t believe it for a minute. No, he was likely just another tragic victim of a careless driver on the road, a child from the flats that was dispensable, an accident that no one bothered to look into. Someone saw him, they said, running without taking heed of the traffic. But he always looked and made her look too, every time. Her sister couldn’t come home for the funeral, she couldn’t take the time from work, but when she did come, two weeks later, they all clung together and cried for their brother and son.

Martha’s memories of her sister were scant. Without a picture to remember her by, she had to rely on her young and immature memory to recall her face. In her mind’s eye her sister had been as tall as her mam and just as slim with narrow shoulders and a long straight-down kind of body, as straight as her hair. But in Martha’s mind, her sister’s pretty face had matured with augmenting soft focus, blurring more and more around the edges until eventually there was little definition left, just an indistinct pale smudge resting on straight shoulders.

She and her mother weren’t told of her death until after she was buried. A tragic accident, they were told, and despite Martha pleading with her distraught mother to visit the grave, she refused, unable to accept that her daughter was gone.

Martha never understood why her mother insisted on blaming herself.

“I shouldn’t have let her go,” she cried desperately. “I should have let her stay right here. We could have found a way. We could have survived.”

Inconsolable and taken over by her grief, she found solace neither inside nor outside the house. Martha tried hard to make her smile again. She tried to make up for her profound loss, but her mother was unresponsive to her desperate, often agonising attempts to connect and day-by-day slipped deep into a world where only she and her dead children existed. Alone.

Martha, helpless and useless, wanted nothing more than for her mother to come back to her: the child that still lived. But no matter what she did she couldn’t disperse the gloom that like a shroud seemed to settle over her comatose mother and their little terraced house. The day her brother and sister died a piece of both Martha and her mother died too but, while Martha was young with her whole life ahead of her, it was different for her mother. The part of her that died was her will to live.

For months that persistent shroud sheltered them sufficiently to block out any sunshine that might have existed around them until eventually, for her mother, it smothered her completely.

Almost seven months later her mother passed away, from what their family doctor described as a broken heart. Martha had woken up one morning to find her lying cold and stiff in her bed.

A bitter poison seemed to take hold of Martha that day: at ten years of age she had been abandoned, left to fend for herself by everyone. Was she invisible? Was she that worthless? Did she not matter? Did anyone even care? Apparently the answer to each of her questions was
yes
with a single
no.

Initially she had refused to leave the house. It was where she belonged. Just because they had discarded her, first her father, then her brother followed by her sister and now her dear mother, that didn’t mean she should be punished by taking the only constant in her young life: her home. But,as she packed up what few belongings she had and was taken into care, it seemed that she should.

Martha moved from foster family to care home but she could never settle, deeply unhappy and confounded as to why and how she had ended up so alone.

“You’re just not a very lucky lady, that’s all,” she was told with genuine sympathy by one of her many minders who polished, swept and cleaned around her. “Some of us,” she told her with matter-of-fact precision, “are destined never to be blessed with happiness.”

It was assumed that since she had been told to accept it, she should. And when she couldn’t let their memory go, rather than help her they ignored her. In
the system
, it seemed, the only way to be noticed was to kick off: the bold ones got all the attention. But she was one of the quiet ones, never caused any trouble, never spoke out of turn, did what she was told and so faded into the background like whitewash in the snow.

Chapter 25

1982

The day she turned sixteen she once again packed up her things and left the care of the state to venture out into the world. All by herself. Again.

“Well, Martha,” Helen, the Head of House, said to her least troublesome charge with a reassuring smile, “I’ve arranged a place for you with the Sisters of Mercy Nursing College. It’s live-in so you won’t need to worry about a place to stay. Here,” she said, handing her a piece of paper with the address written down, “ask for Sister Josephine, she’s expecting you.”

With no other choice, Martha took it.

“Thanks, Helen,” she replied, looking down at the handwritten note, not knowing what she should do next.

“Come on,” Helen encouraged her, getting up from behind the desk.

Leading her from her make-do home-office with an arm around her shoulder, she walked her down the hall and out to the front door.

“Now. You have money in the envelope I gave you earlier. Don’t lose it. and, if you need me, you can always come and see me, or give me a call.”

Sensing Martha’s nervous reluctance, she turned to stand in front of the vulnerable young lady about to embark on the next chapter of her life. Placing a firm hand on each shoulder she gave her a squeeze, smiling affectionately as she lowered her head to chase and catch her gaze.

“You need to go now and make something of yourself. Show them they’re wrong. You can be great, you
will
be great. You know that, don’t you?”

Martha nodded with tears in her eyes.

“Well, go on! Be brilliant.”

Helen watched her walk down the street towards the bus stop with her small check suitcase and silently wished her well.

It was peculiar to no longer be answerable to anyone. Martha didn’t think she’d like it but nursing surprised her. She relished the idea that she was needed and was able to make a real difference, do something positive. And she was good at it.

“You’ve a lovely manner about you,” the Matron remarked on her first day on the wards. “They’ll like you.” She nodded towards the old dears who dribbled uncontrollably in their beds.

The training-college boarding house was old-fashioned and rundown. It was managed by Elizabeth, an old spinster battle-axe the girls affectionately named Bad Betty. It smelled of cats and damp fabric but the new friendships she made with the rest of the girls in the house made up for the stench and the bad-tempered old bat. She shared a room with the maddest of them all: Joan. Like Martha, she had been in care since she was young, having run away from home, refusing to return to her abusive father and drunken mother. She too couldn’t believe her newfound independence. Bonding immediately, they quickly became inseparable.

February 1983

When Martha asked Joan to make the trip to visit her sister’s grave she was flattered and didn’t hesitate for even an instant.

They left early on a misty Friday morning, making their way by bus into the city centre where they picked up the train that traversed the country, stopping in almost every town along the route, to the county of Donegal. It took forever. With the name of the town, Ballybeak, indelibly etched into her brain from the many times she heard her mother repeat it, over and over, Martha knew exactly where she was going and had worked their journey out, step by step, on the map.

On their way, sitting at the back of another rickety old green bus whose suspension had seen better times, going where they were going, it was impossible not to recall the day they were told of her sister’s passing. At the time, she remembered, her mother wouldn’t accept it was Lillian at all.

“Sure what was she doing there?” she asked, confused. “Isn’t she working in Dublin, in that big fancy house? What would she be doing in the depths of Donegal?” But there was no one else to ask, no one to tell her why. A simple woman, it just wasn’t in her mother’s nature to question the authorities further, so with no other option apparent to her, she had to take them at their word and accept it.

It took what felt like days for them to get there along the narrow, potholed roads that tossed them about like rag dolls in the back of that little green bus. Nauseous and tired, the girls were both glad and lucky to arrive in one piece. The bus passed the cemetery on its way into the town.

“That must be it,” Joan whispered over her shoulder, immediately setting off the butterflies in Martha’s tummy.

“Must be,” she answered, looking back at its stone wall which was just about visible in the failing light as the bus chugged past. She had waited all this time; another final night wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

At a glance Ballybeak consisted of a single road that ran through its centre with a church at one end and a pub masquerading as a shop at the other. It didn’t take long to find their Bed and Breakfast, sandwiched between two fast-food restaurants, halfway down the street. The day had turned into a dark, cold and eerily quiet evening, leaving the girls feeling much less brave than when they’d set out that morning.