The First Time I Said Goodbye (28 page)

I’d have to call him, of course. I couldn’t be that person who let it all just go after our years together with a text message, but in that moment there was a part of me which was enjoying believing that maybe, just maybe, he was suffering a little.

Suffering just a little the way I had suffered.

While I had never told him I knew about how he had cheated on me – how I had witnessed the cheating in front of my eyes – it had eaten away at me. At us. Each and every time he had tried to comfort me I had felt myself pull from his grasp, even if only mentally. The thought of him with her, in her – it made my stomach turn.

I saw her once – in Walmart, as I was grocery shopping. I was pushing my cart along the aisles when I saw a wave of blonde hair in front of me and she turned to take something from the shelves. She looked like a nice person – not a stereotypical bit on the side. No short skirt and big boobs and high heels. Just a young woman, jeans and a T-shirt, a bright smile and a polite nod of the head towards me as she reached up past me to lift down a tin of beans.

I wondered did she know who I was? Or did she care? God knows, we didn’t live in a big place and Bake My Day was a popular bakery. My picture was in my house – the house she had been in at least once. Did Craig talk about me? Did he tell her I was a terrible partner and that I didn’t understand him? Did he tell her we didn’t have sex? Did he say he would leave me except that my father was dying and that he didn’t want to come across as the bad guy? Did he make up some sad story to cover for his unfaithfulness or did he not care? You would think after ten years together you would know a person – you would know how they think, or how they feel, what way they act and what they say. But I didn’t know him – not at all. I realised that now and I nodded back to the blonde woman with the shopping basket for one and went on my way.

My cell rang – Craig again. This time, more awake, I swiped my finger across the screen and answered the call.

“Craig,” I said, simply.

“What are you playing at, Annabel?” His voice was calm, jokey. Dismissive even. ‘Annabel goes off on one again’ – I could almost see him rolling his eyes. Laughing, getting ready to tell me I was being overly dramatic.

“I’m not playing at anything, Craig,” I said, trying to keep my tone soft. Trying not to show the anger that was threatening to bubble up and jump out.

“It’s over?” he said, and laughed at the end. “What do you mean, it’s over?”

His laughter, for some reason, brought tears to my eyes. Even in this – in breaking up – even now he could not understand where I was coming from. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Everything is okay with Annabel and Craig as long as the sun is shining and life doesn’t get in the way.

I took a deep breath. “I mean it’s over, Craig. I’m sorry. And I’m sorrier still to do this over the phone but now it seems so clear and it’s unfair on both of us to keep this hanging on for a minute longer than it needs to.”

“Anna,” his voice less mocking – more urgent this time, “you need to think about this. You need to calm down.”

“I have thought about it, Craig,” I started.

“What? Over a few glasses of Guinness with your cousin? Yes – perfect atmosphere to make life-altering decisions.”

I shook my head even though I knew he wouldn’t see the gesture and rubbed my temples. “No, Craig. Please listen – for once in your life, please listen. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It’s just, away from it all, away from you, it has started to come into focus for the first time.”

He laughed again. A mocking bark of a laugh which felt like a punch in the stomach. “Off chasing the pot of gold at the end of some goddamn rainbow with your leprechaun friends. You were fine before you left. We were fine.”

“Were we? Really? That’s why you stalked around the house the day I left like a spoiled child. Because we were fine?”

“I didn’t want you to go. Was that so wrong of me?”

Whatever I had expected of Craig, I had not expected this – this lie upon lie about what he wanted. What he needed. That he thought we were okay.

“No,” I said. “But what was wrong of you, Craig, was you having sex with someone else while my father was dying.”

He was silent. I could hear him breathe softly down the phone line. I remembered all the times I had listened to his breathing softly: in the early days, when we had spent hours and hours together, I would lie awake and listen to him breathing, telling myself this was love. This is what it was. God, I was stupid. I had learned so much about love even in the last few days and it wasn’t
what we had. It was so completely removed from what we had.

“I only did that,” he stuttered, “because you were lost to me. I didn’t know how to get you back and I was lonely.”

“I can’t say I can tell you how you could have got me back, Craig, but I can tell you that having sex with someone else was not the way to go about it.” The tears that had been threatening to fall started to slide down my face but I didn’t want to give in to them so I hastily brushed them away. “I saw. I came home and I saw it. The two of you. And I don’t know how many times and I don’t know if she was the only one and, you know what, part of me doesn’t need to know because what difference would it make anyway? It was one thing, Craig, but it wasn’t everything. Don’t you know we have been broken for a long time? And I’m just admitting it openly first.”

“It didn’t mean anything.”

“If it didn’t, why did you risk us for it?”

“People make mistakes, Annabel. You’re not perfect.”

“I never said I was.”

“You pushed me away. You had no time for me.”

“My father was dying!” I almost roared – the words sounding as harsh as the experience was as I let them out.

“But you weren’t. You gave up on life. You gave up on us the day he had his diagnosis and there was no getting you back.”

He might have had a point. Perhaps. Perhaps I did give up on life. In the very moment I learned my father would die a part of me died too. And the part that was still living? That part didn’t want to go on. She didn’t want to wake up every day to the knowledge that death was coming. She didn’t want to watch her hero fade before her eyes. She didn’t want to face a world without her father. So perhaps I did give up. Perhaps I crawled into some far unreachable place where I tried, and failed, to shield myself from the pain that was to come. But he was my daddy; the man who had carried me on his shoulders when I was a little girl; who had put my hair in lopsided pigtails and beamed so proudly; who had been the person who taught me to ride my bicycle; who cheered the loudest when I graduated, and who was first through the door at Bake My Day when we opened. And the world was taking him from me and there was nothing I could do it about. Nothing. No amount of money would save him. No amount of prayer would make a difference. He was going. And I wanted to go too.

But maybe even more than that I wanted someone to hold me up – to listen to me cry. To take it on the chin when I shouted. To tell me they were just as angry as I was and damn right, it wasn’t fair. It was rubbish. I wanted that person to be Craig – and it wasn’t. It never was. I didn’t give up on us. I just realised there wasn’t really an ‘us’ there to begin with.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could muster.

I could be angry, I realised. And I was – but more than that I was sad. And more than sad I was relieved.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

“I don’t think so. We shouldn’t hurt each other any more,” I said, and ended the call before switching my phone off.

Then I lay back, in the soft light of the Derry morning on the bed that I had all to myself and I waited for the tears to start falling properly. I waited for the sobs and the heartbreak and the questions over whether or not I had done the right thing. I waited for the horrors to hit and the urge to call him back and say it was all a mistake to come. But none of that happened.

Instead, I fell back into a sleep where I dreamt I had one last day with my daddy – sitting in the garden, holding his hands – still warm, not cold as they had been the last time I held him – and he was telling me he loved me and that all would be okay.

I woke, gasping, half expecting him to be in the room with me but while he was, obviously, not there, I could feel his warmth around me, telling me it would be okay. And if Daddy said it would be okay, it would be.

* * *

Sitting in Dolores’ front room, I tried to imagine the
life I had read about so much in my mother’s letters. I tried to think about my grandparents, whose faces stared down at me from the walls, and how they made this house a home, even in tough times. I imagined my Uncle Seán as the gap-toothed boy my mother had written about, even though he was now a grandfather. I imagined my mother laying the table in the impossibly small kitchen – which of course Dolores had remodelled numerous times since she had taken over ownership of the family home – and I imagined the night my mother and Ray stood in this room toasting their engagement. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the echoes of the world I had come to know so much about in the last few days – to try and understand them all better. Especially my mother.

I felt a peace towards her now. An understanding of why she did what she did. An understanding that she loved my father very much but that before him there had been someone else – someone she had loved desperately, whom circumstance had kept her from.

I still had questions of course – pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that needed piecing together and now that I had read the letters I needed to know the rest.

Dolores had smiled at me when I turned up at her door, then looked over my shoulder expecting Sam to be there.

“He’s gone to work,” I explained and she nodded.

“He loves that job. Loves that shop. Works too hard sometimes too. I’m glad you’re here making him take some time off for a change.”

“I don’t think he considers it work most of the time,” I laughed as she poured me a cup of tea and directed me to the front room. “Says it’s like playing dress-up for a reason.”

Her shoulders stiffened at this remark. “Yes, well. He always was a little flamboyant,” she sniffed.

“Auntie Dolores,” I began but she turned to leave the room.

“I’ll just go and get your mother so you can concentrate on matters concerning your own family.”

With that she was gone and I tried to marry the impression of a young, flighty, carefree woman painted in my mother’s letters with the woman in front of me who seemed to deny her son so much.

“You can’t fix the world,” I heard my father’s voice somewhere in my head. But I knew I had to try. Okay, I would start with Mom. But Sam too. And Dolores. We could all do with some fixing.

Chapter 25

I was in shock. I have never felt shock, pain like it before. Not until now anyway Ray. Do you understand? I hadn’t realised I would never get the chance to say goodbye.

* * *

Derry, February 1960

A moment can change the course of your life forever. All the plans – dreams and hopes you thought you had can suddenly disappear. Life can take a new direction. Things change. Decisions are made – decisions that you think are the best for everyone at the time but that have consequences so far-reaching you can’t possibly understand what they will mean for you. Stella Hegarty learned that on February 16, 1960, when just as it seemed as if the paperwork would finally come through for her new life with Ray, her life turned on a hairpin and things would never be the same again.

* * *

By February Molly Davidson had started work again at the factory. She told Stella, who she had come to confide in, that she was terrified of walking through the doors again and of what everyone would think. Stella had told her to hold her head high – that she had done nothing wrong but still, bowed and broken by her experience, Molly had replied that she knew the girls would laugh.

“They carried me out of there singing before – and now I’m scuttling back in. A divorcee in the making.”

“Your mammy will get that annulment sorted, pet,” Stella had soothed her. “Sure hasn’t she been up to the priest already?”

Molly had nodded but in her head she felt like spoiled goods and Stella knew that no matter what she could say to her it would make her feel no better. She was just going to have to work through it. As she had walked home from Molly’s house that night she had wondered how her friend would cope when she, herself, went to America in the coming weeks. As much as Stella had made herself available to the young, devastated bride, others had stayed away. Molly was right to feel nervous about going back on the factory floor but she had little choice. Both Mr and Mrs Davidson had been up to see the supervisors to make a case for their daughter to be allowed back to work – and it was an income they sorely needed after borrowing a hefty sum to get Molly back in the first place.

Walking home from Molly’s house where the pair had sat talking until she felt her eyes droop, Stella wrapped her coat around her and assured herself that it would be okay as long as she was there for the first few days and weeks to ease Molly in. The gossips might never forget the young girl who had left so full of hope and wonder but hopefully they would move on and, in time, treat her like one of their own again.

Letting herself in, Stella climbed the stairs to the room she shared with Dolores to find it empty. Dolores must be out with Hugh again, she thought. The pair had quickly become inseparable after that first night in the Corinthian and Dolores had been mooning about the house ever since. Should Stella have dared to have rolled her eyes at her sister’s monologues of how Hugh was the most handsome man in all of Derry, she would have received a sharp comeback that she was jealous because Hugh was very much still in Derry while Stella’s relationship was now held together by a weekly letter and the promise of a visa.