The Lost Garden (9 page)

‘I’ll see her delivered to her own door,’ said Biddy.

She knew John Joe. He was a quiet, respectable man. Well turned out. Never married. Like herself. Although, he had the two small children his feckless brother had left behind. There wasn’t much you didn’t know about people on this island. They sat quietly, gazing out across the darkening, relentless bogland. Each field looked the same as another, distinctive only to the locals, who knew which land was owned by whom and which land was common ground. John Joe kept his eyes on the road, and nobody spoke for the hour; the only sound was the crunch of the old horse’s hooves on the gravelly road.

John Joe pulled into the boreen that led up to Doherty’s Cottage. It was in a remote spot and the path up to it was long. Biddy had been here once or twice as a child, as her parents had had a travelling shop, but young Paddy Doherty had always run down and met them on the road. Biddy was surprised that Aileen’s mother had not come to meet her with John Joe and was expecting for her to come to the door to greet them.

When she didn’t come out, Biddy got down from the cart and went to the door with Aileen.

John Joe waited. ‘I’ll drop you back,’ he said.

He knew where she lived. Everyone did. She didn’t like being beholden to the man, but it would take her a good four hours to walk across the island and she was exhausted already, so she nodded to him.

Aileen was standing at the front door, hugging her coat tight to herself, looking around her vaguely as if she was a stranger to the place. Biddy said a silent prayer that her mother would
be fit to comfort her, but she already had a bad feeling about that. She was about to knock on the door when Anne came out. She was not wearing an apron, something that one would expect to see in a woman caught off guard in her own house, and was patting down her dress.

She was clearly not expecting anyone to be with Aileen.

‘Thank you,’ she said, holding the door closed, ‘for bringing her home.’ Then giving John Joe the most cursory of waves in thanks, she said, ‘Aileen, come inside now.’

Biddy was scandalized, but reminded herself that grief affects people in many different ways.

Aileen stood in the doorway looking at the sky, like her own mother was a stranger.

‘Aileen!’ Anne called.

Aileen looked at her mother and in the moment that the young woman recognized her, Biddy witnessed the dawning of the sad truth across Aileen’s face, which all but broke her own heart: she was home. Without her father and brothers, she was home. A dark cloud swept across the mountain behind her and Aileen suddenly turned to look at it as if she had heard it gathering at her back. Then she turned back and said the first two words she had spoken since they had left the bothy in Scotland.

‘Where’s Jimmy?’

Chapter Sixteen

Jimmy opened his eyes. They had taken the bandages off while he was sleeping. With the shock of his lids tearing back from each other, a stream of tears escaped and poured down his cheeks. He could feel them stinging as they crept into channels of sensitized skin and ran down to his ears.

He saw the back of his mother’s head across the room. She was talking to a man in a white coat whose voice he recognized. His doctor.

Jimmy knew he was in hospital, although he still could not remember how he got there, and for a good while after arriving, he had not been fully aware of the extent of the injuries he had incurred in the fire. However, the longer he lay in the cold, hard bed, the clearer it became: he had come as close to death as any man had the right to come.

He remembered everything in the lead-up to the explosion at the bothy: going to the pictures with Aileen, kissing her, touching her, then buying her chips and coming back with Sean to find the barn on fire. He remembered the adrenaline rush of tearing into the building to save the men, the black smoke; he remembered one minute trying to rouse Paddy Junior from his bed; then, as his father opened the doors, it seemed that a ball of fire came out of nowhere hurtling towards him; there was a
loud bang that seemed to reverberate through his very bones, then . . . nothing. Next thing he was lying here, all wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, unable to move.

‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ he heard somebody say when he first woke up.

He could see or feel nothing of himself except a terrible searing pain all over his body that seemed to be coming from the inside out. He thought he might be in hell and wondered if the words were being spoken by the devil himself.

Then he heard his mother’s voice saying, ‘He’s awake! Thank the Lord he’s awake!’ His mother was the only person who would have noticed the slight movement he had managed to make with his hand. She must have known his fear because she moved in close to him until he heard her steady voice talk directly into his ear. ‘You’re in a hospital in Glasgow, pet – don’t try to speak.’ She gulped heavily and he knew she was trying to hide the fear in her own voice. ‘You’re very badly burned, son. We’ve got you covered in bandages now, Jimmy. We’ll get you better – don’t you fret. Doctor, can we get something for the pain?’

She could not even touch his hand, although he could sense her hovering over him closely, wanting to hold and comfort him but unable to.

For a while after he woke Jimmy’s whole body, including his face and head, was bandaged up. He could not speak, even if he had had the inclination to do so, which he did not. Day and night meant nothing to him anymore – beyond the muffled voice of his mother telling him, ‘Goodnight,’ it was difficult for him to calculate how long he had been there.

With his head covered in bandages, all sounds were muted. Aside from holes to breathe through his nose and one big enough to hold a straw in his mouth for eating, he was completely encased in bandages. Jimmy slept as much as he could. If he
moved at all, he would wake with pain, then try to sleep again. People could not see his eyes, and it hurt to move his limbs, so he guessed those around him – his parents, the doctors and nurses – did not know if he was awake or asleep. As a result, they barely spoke to him. He could hear them moving around, discussing him, whispering speculations when they thought they were out of his earshot.

‘You must stay positive,’ he heard a man say to his mother – an English accent, a doctor. ‘He’ll pull through if he has the will.’

‘We’re praying for him,’ said another – a priest perhaps.

He wondered sometimes if they thought he was dead already under all the bandages. At times he felt that this was what it might be like to be a ghost. Dead and entombed but remembered. Still a part of people’s lives but living on the edge of their consciousness. Central to everything and yet never part of the action.

When they changed his dressings once a day, he knew he was alive because of the pain of physical contact. No matter how gentle and kind the nurses were, there was always pain. They moved him around, this way and that, two of them – nuns, he imagined, as he could not see them – making kind, reassuring noises. They did not intend to hurt him, but certainly for the first while they did. The worst part was when a bandage was removed and the cold air hit the raw wounds. That was when he was reminded that the bandages were there because he had no skin to speak of.

Sometimes the younger nurses forgot that his brain and ears were working. Once, a rough-handed girl said, ‘Ew – that looks very nasty,’ as she was unwrapping the layer of bandage next to his skin, and the other added, ‘Don’t know why we’re bothering with this one, really. He’d be better off dead.’

They gave him tablets, shoving the bitter pills in through the small hole of his mouth, followed with a straw of cold water. They were supposed to ease the pain, but all Jimmy could do was wonder what the pain would be like without the supposed numbing effect of these strong drugs.

Worse than all of this, though, was the terrible, empty despair. It was like a black hole that was growing inside him. He was grieving for the loss – not of his limbs or his ability to move, to hear properly, to see, but of Aileen.

He did not even try to ask for her. He knew she wasn’t there. He could feel it. With the same certainty with which he had loved her, he now knew he had lost her.

One afternoon, a few weeks in, while his father was sitting with him, he managed to ask, ‘Aileen?’

‘I don’t know if you’re ready to hear this, Jimmy, but you’ll find out sooner or later anyway.’

His father then told him what had happened, to everyone.

The men had died and Aileen had returned with the rest of the women to Illaunmor to bury them. It had not been Jimmy’s fault. They had died of smoke inhalation before he had even entered the building.

‘It’s by God’s grace you’re alive, son,’ his father said. Then his voice broke as he added, ‘If I hadn’t opened the doors when I had . . . If I’d have known—’

His mother’s voice cut in: ‘Shh, Sean, don’t torture yourself. Our son is alive – that’s the main thing.’

But it wasn’t the main thing for Jimmy. The main thing was that he had lost Aileen. He had wooed her and won her and now he had lost her. He had tried to save her brothers and father, and in failing to do so, he had let her down. It didn’t help that his father told him it would have been impossible. The impossible was what love required of you. When he was with
Aileen, he could do anything; the impossible was what he was all about. He was a boy who could swim oceans, but now he was not even able to raise his arm up off the bed to touch his own face. He was completely dependent on other people – to turn him, to toilet him, to feed him. He could do nothing for himself. The complete loss of independence was a torture in itself, but what made it unendurable was the fact that his one true love was a world apart from him again.

Without Aileen, there was no hope of a future for him. He would get out of here, probably, possibly, but what was the point if Aileen wasn’t there to share his life with?

For the first few weeks of his care Jimmy was disillusioned and depressed thinking of all he had lost. Then as the pain began to lessen, which it did by a little every day, and his body began to heal, hope began to creep back in.

‘The skin is healing very well,’ he heard the doctor tell his mother. ‘We’ll have you back on these feet in no time,’ he said more loudly, gently patting Jimmy’s leg.

He was getting better. He was coming back to himself. He would go and get Aileen again. He knew where she was. He would beg her forgiveness, and if she didn’t forgive him there and then, why, he would stay right next to her and wait until she did. It did not matter to him if it was five minutes or five years – or fifty. He would do what he did before, which was, quite simply, keep her within his sights, except this time he’d never let her go. He had won her before and he would win her round again.

The bandages on his face were the last to come off entirely. For the longest time he could not open his eyes and there were doubts as to how far the fire had damaged them. There was speculation that perhaps he was blind, but there was no way of knowing until the skin around his eyes had healed.

The nurses called for the doctors and there was great fuss and excitement when it was revealed he could see. His mother came and held his hands and cried, and while it was wonderful, there was only one person whom Jimmy really wanted to see. It came upon him then that he preferred to have his eyes closed, because then he could imagine Aileen’s beautiful face. He could visualize her swimming up to him off the steps in Aghabeg, her red hair like crimson seaweed snaking down her back, or coming in close to kiss him. He replayed their embrace in the cinema over and over and over again, and listened for the soft timbre of her voice, and the whimpering of her passion as he had taken her into his arms. When he remembered, his whole body ached with such intensity that he could not tell if it was the burns or his heart breaking in his chest with the fear of never holding her again.

As each day passed, Jimmy’s resolve to recover and get Aileen back strengthened. He watched as the blisters abated and the skin grew back on his limbs. His arms and legs were revealed to him again. There was scarring in places – that was to be expected – but the doctors told him that seawater had miraculous healing qualities and that they had heard he was a fine swimmer. He was to go swimming in the healthy saltwater around the island each day and his scars would soon soften. His face was the part of him still to be uncovered completely. In the days leading up to the unveiling, the dressings were loosened so that his skin could become accustomed to the air. As they took the bandages off, he studied the faces of the nurses for clues as to how he looked. Their calm features were unmoved, which he took to mean he looked all right.

The week leading up to this had been a frenzy of progress and change. He was able to sit up, and although his tongue still felt swollen in his mouth, and his voice therefore sounded somewhat strange to him, he could now speak. His legs were shaky and he
would have to learn how to walk on them again after such an extended period in bed, but the doctors were confident that there was no permanent damage and that with practice ‘and some fine home cooking’, he would be right as rain in a few months.

It was all good news and now that the face bandages were gone entirely, it meant that it would only be a short time before he came back entirely to himself.

He tried to sit up, and as he did, he grunted and his mother came quickly from across the room. She smiled at him, a soft smile full of love, but he thought there was perhaps a slight mixture of pity in her look too. She had been through a lot with him these past few weeks, surely. He was her only child and he felt the pressure of her holding him close to her. He remembered how she had fought his father, not wanting them to go to Scotland. It was as if she had known something bad was going to happen to them. ‘A red-haired girl? The thundering wee eejit! Oh well, then – I might have known.’ Why had his father told her about Aileen? He knew she’d fuss. Still, she seemed happy now. He was going home. He would get himself in tip-top shape and then he was going to find his girl. Everything was going to be all right.

He tried to smile, but his face felt peculiar. Tight.

‘Bring me a mirror,’ he said to his mother. ‘I want to see myself.’

It was not like Jimmy to bother about how he looked, but he felt that perhaps there was something amiss and, well, he was simply curious. He had been burned after all, so there must be scarring. He thought the scars would be like the ones on his arms, but time and the magical, medicinal powers of the Aghabeg seawater would make them fade.

His mother flinched. He saw her actually flinch, then look at the doctor, who nodded and handed her a round hand-held
looking glass. Jimmy had a strange, ominous feeling that there should be such an item so readily to hand. It was as if they were expecting him to ask for it, to want to look at himself, as if there was something wrong.

His mother took the mirror from the doctor and gave it to him without saying a word. Her serious expression and silence gave him some idea of how she thought he might react. She handed the mirror to Jimmy face down, gripping it tight, clearly reluctant to let him take it in his swollen, red hands. Jimmy kept his eyes firmly fixed on his mother’s face and saw on it a mixture of apology and fear.

He turned the glass and looked straight into it. A terrifying monster looked back at him.

It seemed that Invincible Jim was not so invincible after all.