He took my hand and held it rather as if he were taking my pulse. ‘Clara, I promise you I will not tell your mother anything that has to do with your personal life. She will of course surmise and she’s not stupid. You must make allowances for that.’
I nodded.
‘You’re in an awful mess but we’ll soon have you right.’ He squeezed my hand gently and then let it go. ‘I promise you that.’
‘I expect you say that to all the girls.’
‘Sometimes it isn’t possible,’ he said. I suppose he thought that was comforting.
I never tried to get in touch with James. I expect I could have if I had made the effort, but the effort seemed too great. The thought of writing either an accusatory or a pathetic letter to him didn’t appeal to me at all.
I think I am my own person.
I realise now that I will have to invent my own immortality.
Perhaps I will take to making jam.
Perhaps I will do something to please my mother.
Perhaps I will go to Oughterard with the doctor. Is that, I wonder, what he was going to ask me?
Perhaps it is time to become a non-fugitive. Sit by a lakeside and watch an aging man fish.
I suppose there are worse ways of spending your life.
I am not dead. I do not hate anyone. Words leap and fall in my head, stumble and rush, fight and chatter, like children I will never have, play and sleep and wake again. I am tired, but I am well. I can laugh again.
Keep salvaging.
It is starting to get light – tiny strips of gold glitter through the trees. The earliest birds are waking and pushing out their soft cries. I will go and make a huge breakfast for that man. Fill him to the brim with food and it will carry him back to North Antrim and his house on the edge of the sea and Caitlin’s paintings stacked by the wall in her studio, and I will kiss him goodbye and wave by the gate until his car is down the road and round the corner. He too is his own man. He may not know it yet, but that is his fate. Cccccllllmmm.ccclllmm.
It is safe to switch off your Macintosh.
Go to dark.
About the Author
About the Author
Jennifer Johnston is a preeminent voice of contemporary Irish fiction. Her long list of accolades includes the Whitbread Literary Award for The Old Jest, the Evening Standard Award for Best First Novel for The Captains and the Kings, and a Man Booker Prize shortlist mention for Shadows on Our Skin. Her recent Foolish Mortals was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Decade by the BordGáis Energy Irish Book Awards. Johnston has authored seventeen novels and five plays. She lives outside Derry, Northern Ireland.
JENNIFER JOHNSTON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
