The Legacy of Lucy Harte: A poignant, life-affirming novel that will make you laugh and cry
as much as I know so far, despite my full-time mission to suss her out through social-network stalking but her bloody pages are all private and the most I can see is that she seems to really like cats. This makes me happy. Jeff is allergic to cats – they bring him out in hives and welts. Delighted.
‘She must have done something wrong,’ I overheard my mum say to my dad a while ago when she thought I couldn’t hear her. ‘A man doesn’t leave his wife for no reason. There must have been something.’
Once again my father’s logic put a different spin on things as I listened from the kitchen.
‘I never really liked him anyway,’ he told her from behind his newspaper. ‘He dyes his hair that colour, you know. Weird blacky brown. I could never trust a man who dyes his hair, especially the colour of cow dung. And he wears heels on his shoes.’
My dad is so on the ball. Jeff does dye his hair and he has a ‘special’ cobbler who he visits every time he gets new shoes…
‘Jeff? Heels? Are you sure, Robert? I never noticed that.’
‘Yes, heels,’ my dad said. ‘Put it like this, a man who needs inches there probably needs them in other places too. Nah. I never liked him. Let him get on with it. Our Maggie’s way out of his league.’
I haven’t told my parents about Saffron, the stewardess, and I probably never will. That would totally put my mother over the edge and we can’t have that. She may wonder if any of this was my fault, but she is old-school and sweet and innocent to the ways of the modern world and she would never get how Jeff was able to fall in love with someone he met just once in a sweaty gym and then wooed through private messaging on Facebook, while I was still admiring our wedding photos and choosing names for our future family.
Instead of telling my parents the real reason behind my big fat failure of a marriage, I spill my heart out to a dead fourteen-year-old just as I tell her my secrets every year on the same date and same time of the morning, when the rest of the world is doing school runs or in rush-hour traffic heading to work or having coffee in front of early-morning television.
I tell all of this to Lucy Harte, a fourteen-year-old girl who I never met but who gave me a second chance at life, even though she has no idea that I even exist. I pray for her family, whoever they are, and I thank them from the bottom of my borrowed heart for the day they said yes to organ donation.
Then I bless myself quickly and aim to get out of the church before someone mistakes me for a real Christian and I leave Lucy to do whatever it is dead fourteen-year-olds do up in heaven, while I go back to my new life of singlehood, meals for one and real estate, which is highly pressurised, fast-moving and a far cry from the soft Irish countryside where I was brought up.
I am being brave.
I am being brave but I am not brave.
I am not brave at all. In fact I am bloody scared stiff.
Fuck you, Jeff.
I want to scream and shout and kick and cry so loudly but I am in a church so I can’t and it’s so damn frustrating.
Fuck you for leaving me and fuck her for taking you away. Why? What the hell did I do that was so bad?
I think I am going to cry and I so don’t want to cry in public.
I close my eyes, breathe in and out, in and out, in and out and focus on Lucy Harte. I am not here to think about Jeff. I am here to say thank you to Lucy.
It’s been a long time, Lucy Harte. Seventeen years is a long, long time for you to beat inside of me. Why do I have the feeling that we haven’t very long left?
I really should get to work.
‘Are you sure you are okay? You don’t sound okay? I’ve been calling you all weekend, Maggie!’
And don’t I know it…! My mother’s voice is always high-pitched, but today it is more frantic than ever.
‘I’m fine, Mum. I’m driving,’ I tell her. I shouldn’t have answered. My head…
I’m not really driving but it’s the only thing that might get her off the line. My mother would talk the hind leg off a donkey but she sees right through the whole ‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up’ or ‘I’m in a bad area’ or ‘I have an important call coming through’ excuses I usually make when I can’t be bothered with conversation.
‘You’re not fine. I know you’re not fine. Robert, she says she’s driving and she’s fine.’
‘Lies!’ my father shouts back. ‘She’s not fine. Maggie, you cannot do stress! You need to rest. No stress!’
‘You should have taken the day off and done something nice, Maggie. Even your father says so. You can’t afford this stress.’
‘Yes, she should have taken the day off and done something nice,’ I hear him echo in the background. I can just picture him, standing in his green wellies and baggy old-man trousers with his braces over his checked shirt, hovering by the ancient navy-blue landline phone that is attached to our kitchen wall back home in the big farmhouse I grew up in. He will be chewing on something, the end of his pipe, probably, and he will have a pen behind his ear (chewed also), just like I always do when I am doing something I enjoy and he will smell already of manure and sawdust.
‘I’m going out for dinner with Flo after work and she is meeting me outside the office at six, so it’s best I’m there,’ I lie. ‘I’m really looking forward to it.’
‘Oh, that’s nice. Where are you going for dinner? Robert, she is going for dinner. With Flo.’
‘We’re going to… um, we’re going to that new place,’ I waffle. ‘You know, my favourite. On George Street.’ More lies. ‘You see, I’m keeping busy, Mum. Busy, busy, busy.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s better than having too much time to think. Did you go to the church?’
‘Yes.’
‘Robert, she went to the church.’
Oh, Christ.
I hear a rustle as my dad takes the phone.
‘I hope you weren’t making an eejit out of yourself in front of those people,’ he says in a fluster.
By ‘those people’, he means ‘a man of the cloth’. By ‘eejit’ he means going to what Catholics call ‘Confession’. There is no one my dad hates more in this world than the Clergy.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You could say your piece in your own apartment and it would do the same good than telling ‘them’ boyos your problems. None of their bloody business. Nosey –.’
‘I didn’t even see a priest, Dad. I just said what I wanted to say to Lucy, lit a few candles and left. I’m about to walk into the office now, so I’d better go.’
That bit wasn’t a lie. I was standing outside our office block and Davey, the porter, was winking at me as he did every morning and checking out my boobs, legs, bum and everything in between. Davey loved a good old perv.
‘You’re a good girl, Maggie O’Hara,’ says my dad and I can hear his voice shake. ‘A really good girl and you deserve the best and you deserve to be here. God bless wee Lucy Harte, but you deserve to have a life too and a great one at that. Now, push those guilty feelings to the side and have a good day, do you hear me? And look at Princess Diana. Charles didn’t want her but it didn’t stop her finding a man again, did it?’
‘No, it didn’t, but