Home Stretch Page 2

  ‘Ellen, sit down love.’ His voice was soft and gentle. It didn’t sound like him. Ellen could feel her bottom lip beginning to quiver and a pressure building behind her nose.

  ‘Oh Daddy,’ she whispered as she sat beside her mother, who reached across and took her hand.

  ‘Connor was out with Martin Coulter and a few others.’

  That made no sense. Connor wasn’t friends with Martin.

  Her father continued, ‘There was a crash and at least three of them are …’ His voice faltered. ‘They were killed.’

  Ellen raised her hand to stifle a scream. ‘Oh no. Oh Connor!’

  Her mother squeezed her hand. ‘Your brother is fine, love. He isn’t hurt.’

  Ellen looked at her parents, confused.

  Her father bit his lip and looked away.

  ‘Connor was the driver of the car.’

  II.

  A sign in the window of the pub would have been too strange – after all, the Hayes family hadn’t suffered a bereavement – but at the same time Dan and Chrissie knew they couldn’t open the doors. It would have been disrespectful.

  The police had come and gone. Afterwards Dan and Chrissie had conducted their own interrogation of their son. Why was Connor driving? Had he been drinking? Why was he with the Coulter boy and his friends? Connor had sat with his hands clenched between his knees.

  ‘I said I’d drive. I was the only one who hadn’t been drinking. They asked me to go. It was sunny. The beach. I wanted to go to the beach.’ When all the questions had been answered he was allowed to fade away, back to his room.

  The pub stayed shut until the Tuesday. Then Dan just went downstairs and turned the lights on without speaking to any of the family. He sat on a stool behind the bar playing solitaire on the counter with an old pack of cards he kept over the till. About nine o’clock a foreign couple, German, maybe Dutch, came in looking for food. Dan sent them over to the hotel. He waited until eleven o’clock came and then relocked the doors and extinguished the lights.

  The next night when he walked towards the stairs, Chrissie looked up from her book. ‘Are you going to bother?’

  Dan sighed. ‘I am, I think.’

  ‘Is there any point, love? You could sit up here and stare at a clock.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just think we ought to open. Show people that we aren’t ashamed. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

  Chrissie leaned forward and hissed at her husband, ‘Aren’t you ashamed? I know I’m ashamed.’

  Dan turned away and with weary steps slowly headed down to the bar.

  That night Tadgh Hurley came in and sat nursing his usual pint of Murphy’s for an hour. The old man was there most nights and never spoke much, but tonight his silence seemed to fill the pub. He couldn’t even look Dan in the eye as he said goodnight and did his soft-shoe shuffle towards the door. About half past nine Dr Coulter walked in. Dan stood up and braced himself against the bar. The doctor’s face suggested it wasn’t a drink he was after.

  ‘Dan.’

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘A terrible business.’

  ‘Very sad.’

  A silence. Dr Coulter cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m here on an awkward mission, if I’m being honest.’

  ‘Are you?’ Dan took the lone empty pint glass off the bar.

  ‘Yes. It’s Maureen Bradley.’

  Dan kept his eyes on the doctor. Was he supposed to know what this was about? Should he ask a question?

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, Dan, she came into the surgery today and well, she’d prefer not to see Connor at the funeral.’

  The doctor paused and tried to gauge how this news had gone down. In truth Dan was almost relieved. He wasn’t sure what they had been going to do, so this, at least, made their decision for them.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘She didn’t say that she had spoken to the others but the impression she gave was that they feel the same way.’

  ‘I understand,’ Dan repeated.

  ‘You and the family are of course very welcome to attend.’

  Dan must have looked confused because the doctor then added for clarity, ‘It’s just Connor.’

  ‘Thank you. Thanks for letting us know.’ They both nodded to acknowledge that they were two men who understood each other.

  ‘Will you have a drink?’

  ‘I won’t. No. Thanks all the same, Dan. I’d better get back.’

  ‘Right.’

  At the door Dr Coulter turned. ‘How is Connor?’

  Dan thought about his son upstairs locked in his room for four days. He wasn’t even sure if he’d eaten or drunk anything.

  ‘Hard to know. He’s a quiet lad. Very upset obviously.’

  ‘Well, tell him Martin was asking after him.’

  ‘I will, Doctor. Thank you.’

  The door swung shut.

  III.

  Grief is not a competitive sport, but if it were, the whole town agreed that Dee Hegarty would be the holder of the unwanted trophy. True, Maureen and Frank had lost Bernie the day before she was to be a bride, but they still had each other and Connie and Kieran, their remaining children, to keep them going. The bridesmaid Carmel had been killed, but Caroline and Declan O’Connell could still pray that her sister Linda might recover or at least live. They had hope. But David’s mother Dee had nothing, just another grave to visit.

  Such a reserved little woman, none of them really knew her. Perhaps that’s why it was such a shock to witness her at the funeral. Her thin frame draped in a shapeless black coat, she picked her way up the aisle all alone, her feet in black high heels that appeared to be a couple of sizes too big and were probably borrowed. She walked like she was navigating her way through a series of puddles. As people dutifully filed past her, muttering their few chosen words of sympathy, her swollen red eyes seemed not to register anyone’s existence. Shaking her hand was like taking a dog’s paw. Then at the end of the service when she staggered forward to kiss the coffin, loud howls broke free from deep within her. When she fell to her knees, people weren’t sure what to do. This was grief you’d see in a film. It was too much, too raw, and there was no one to support her, to urge her to pull herself together. She lay like a pile of broken twigs on the floor. Eventually it was Dr Coulter who went and led her back into her pew. People wondered how he must feel. It had been his car but he still had his son Martin with hardly a scratch on him sitting beside him, and his wife, while poor Dee Hegarty’s heart was breaking in front of the whole town.

  Maureen had suggested that David and Bernie be buried together but Father Deasy had felt that was a little unseemly. Dee was happy to concur with the priest. Maureen had rolled her eyes and later complained to her husband Frank. ‘It’s not as if they’d be living in sin! They wanted to be together, we all know that, and now they’ll be spending eternity apart, all because of a few vows not taken. My poor lonely girl.’ Frank had never seen his wife this defeated by anything. He tried to stay strong for her but at the funeral his own grief had overwhelmed him. Where had the tears come from? Hankie after hankie soaked through.

  Maureen had insisted on wearing her wedding outfit, though Frank had talked her out of the hat. It was pale blue with a matching coat that had a pretty shoelace tie at the neck. Caroline O’Connell, through her tears, stared at Maureen aghast, thinking of the dress hanging at home that she had never worn. Was this what was meant by small mercies?

  Father Deasy had reluctantly agreed that Maureen could use the wedding flowers at the funeral, so large red and white arrangements sat before each window and on either side of the altar. Nellie Kehoe, who had attended every funeral that had taken place in Mullinmore for the last fifty-five years, wasn’t impressed. ‘Will she be feeding us wedding cake at the afters?’ she sniffed. People pretended not to hear. Undeterred, she continued, ‘And those young ones. Very disrespectful. A yellow and blue anorak at a funeral. Shameful.’

  ‘Will you wisht, Nellie?’ her
friend Peg hissed at her. ‘Aren’t they hardly more than children themselves? What need do they have for funeral clothes? It breaks my heart. Awful, just awful to see pews of young people sat at a funeral.’ Chastened, Nellie retrieved a linen hankie from her handbag and dabbed at the tip of her nose.

  The last funeral held was for Carmel O’Connell. They had waited because her sister Linda had suffered such serious injuries the doctors hadn’t been confident she would live. Eventually Linda was transferred up to Dublin where she remained in a coma.

  Her mother Caroline swapped Linda’s bedside for Carmel’s graveside. How had this become her life? She had seen tragedy visit others but somehow, she had always assumed that if misfortune was heading for her family, there would be some sort of warning, a sign at least. This was like falling through a trapdoor and still not knowing if she had hit the ground.

  Caroline had watched Dee Hegarty and knew that she wasn’t going to behave like that. She would stay strong for Declan and for Linda. She would happily have admitted to anyone who asked that it was only vodka that had got her through that awful day. Nothing could take away the pain, but just a few shots of Smirnoff stopped it pinning her to the floor. Declan had been her hero at the funeral. He never took his arm from around her waist, his self-consciousness about his wife’s height forgotten. He made sure he spoke to everyone, thanking them for their kind words. With him standing beside her, she wouldn’t fall.

  After the funeral people had come back to the house. They hadn’t stayed long. It was too much for everyone. They were exhausted by all the mourning. The Coulters had laid on a spread in their house for David. Dee had been the doctor’s receptionist for many years, and no one could have expected her to squeeze people into her cottage, especially pummelled by loss as she was.

  Maureen and Frank had hired the function room in the hotel. That was when people had gone to the bar and washed away their sorrows for a few hours. They couldn’t be drowned.

  At the O’Connells’, neighbours had arrived with trays of sandwiches and only a few accepted the whiskey that Declan offered around. Mrs O’Mahony from across the road quietly took Caroline up to bed when she found her swaying a little unsteadily in the hall. When everyone was gone, Declan made his way around the house turning off lights and locking doors before he climbed the stairs and lay fully dressed on top of the covers along the length of his sleeping wife. He wrapped his arms around her. The heat of her, her steady breathing. He held tight as if trying to contain the life inside her, for fear it too might vanish.

  IV.

  Bernie, David and Carmel were gone. Linda remained in intensive care. Martin returned to university to follow in his father’s footsteps as a doctor. From the tangled wreck only Connor was still in Mullinmore.

  He locked himself away in his room above the pub, crying, pretending to read and thinking about his future. School had finished two years ago. Since then he had given remarkably little thought to what he might do with his life. He had had a vague plan in his head that he might go to Cork and try to get bar work there. The city wasn’t so far away but it felt like being with strangers would allow Connor to start again, or at least try to see who he was when he wasn’t the boy who worked behind the bar in Hayes.

  He cursed himself for not paying more attention in school. All those dreary lectures about the importance of your leaving cert results had turned out to be true. His friends had either gone off to college with their As and Bs or started work in family businesses that had far better prospects than a small pub in Mullinmore.

  Now even pulling pints seemed beyond what life had to offer him. He was going to appear in court. He’d have a criminal record. That day, that horrible day. He just wanted to reach back in time and rip it out like an unwanted page in history. He thought about his dull life before Barry’s roundabout, and it seemed like a blue-skied idyll full of possibility and promise. What future could there be for Connor Hayes now?

  His father and the solicitor had just talked about him as if he hadn’t been in the room when Connor and Dan had gone to consult someone about his defence. His mother had not come with them, seeming to be of the opinion that legal matters were best left to the men of the family. Connor had found it difficult to concentrate on anything his father and the solicitor had been saying. He grunted his answers while an impatient Dan filled in any details that were needed. The meeting had gone on for over an hour but all Connor could really recall was the way the leather chair he had sat in squeaked if he moved, the sheen on the solicitor’s fingernails, and an unlikely speck of toothpaste in one corner of the fastidious man’s mouth. Connor’s interest had only been piqued when his father had asked about prison. ‘Unlikely’ was the word the man on the other side of the heavy desk had used. That was very different from a firm ‘no’. It meant the possibility of him having to go to jail was still real. How would he cope if that happened? Could he survive? The fear came and pressed on his chest as he lay in the darkness, waiting for sleep.

  During his days Connor sometimes stood at his window looking out over the rooftops of the town, swirls of smoke drifting up to meet the sky. Clearly life was carrying on. He pressed his face against the chill of the window glass and surrendered to self-pity. He thought about the others, the ones who were gone, and a part of him envied them. He lay on his bed listening to his Joshua Tree cassette on headphones until the tape became stretched and Bono’s voice transformed into a baritone slurring its way through ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. He wept again. The task of untangling the mess of secrets that he had created seemed so impossible. He could not see how this life could continue. Of course, he considered ending everything. It made perfect sense. Erasing himself from the face of the earth was the best solution for many people. His very existence was an insult to the families who had lost so much. If he disappeared, then his parents would be free of their shame. People might even find some sympathy for them or him, if he did the honourable thing. And yet, and yet … The problem was the unknown. To take the leap into that dark mystery with no hope of second chances or return was just too frightening.

  He studied his room with the curtains drawn against the world. Everything looked so childish and innocent. His Madonna posters, the pile of glossy annuals and comics. The Connor who had lived in this room already seemed like a distant memory. He could scarcely recall how it had felt to have no real worries. The only comfort he could find was that as horrible as his situation was, at least he understood it. Everyone hated him and he would have to live with that fact. There would be no dressing-gown cords fashioned into a noose, or pills stolen from the bathroom cabinet, just this huge weight of shame and regret crushing him forever.

  There was a firm knock on his bedroom door and before Connor could respond, it burst open and his mother came in. Chrissie Hayes was a woman who had had enough.

  ‘So, have you given up working for a living?’

  ‘I can’t go down there, Mammy. I can’t serve people.’ His voice was a child’s not wanting to go to school.

  ‘There’s more to running a pub than pulling pints. I’m not having you festering in here.’

  Eventually his mother forced him out of his room. He couldn’t work behind the bar, but he could still be useful. The cleaning of the pub became his responsibility and restocking the shelves or changing barrels before his father opened up were also part of his new duties. At night he would retreat back to his room. He had tried sitting with his mother to watch television but it was filled with reminders: funerals, road safety films, car chases. Without comment his mother would change the channel but before long there would be a weeping actress or an actual news report. Alone in his bedroom was easier.

  It was so quiet. The hush of fabric as someone passed his room, the careful creaks on the stairs. Nobody knew what to say so they simply chose not to speak. Connor and his sister Ellen, with their two-year age difference, as well as attending different schools, had never been especially close. Anything that might have pa
ssed for conversation between them tended to be just harmless teasing or petty squabbles, but this was different. Ellen hadn’t said a solitary word to him since the day of the accident and he understood why. She was now the sister of the boy who had killed three people, so her life was also on hold. Something else for him to feel guilty about.

  V.

  Ellen walked through the empty pub when she came home from work and wondered how long it would be before Hayes Bar shut its doors for good. Seeing her mother and father pretending not to worry broke her heart. At work over the hill to the south of town in the large farm supplies outlet, she found she had been removed without comment from standing behind the counter and now spent her days in the back office going through invoices or sorting boxes of nails and screws into bags. The other girls weren’t rude or hostile, but they did stop conversations abruptly whenever she appeared. Ellen knew that she would have behaved in exactly the same way in their position, but that didn’t make it any easier. One night on the walk down the hill she spotted Mrs Bradley walking towards her. She froze with an unfamiliar mix of fear and embarrassment, but when the older woman noticed her, she immediately crossed the street and ensured that no eye contact was made. Ellen began to walk faster and was practically running by the time she reached the pub, but still not fast enough to avoid people seeing her crying in the street. She cursed herself for deciding to work for a year before going to college. How could she survive twelve months of this?

  Ellen’s best and really only friend was Catriona, Trinny for short. She worked part time at the farm centre at weekends, so if they could, she and Ellen would take their lunch break together. Usually they just sat hunched on chairs by the staff lockers but if it was fine, they could be found outside perched on the wall opposite the loading bay, Trinny banging her heels against the bricks so she seemed even younger than she was.