The Legacy of Lucy Harte: A poignant, life-affirming novel that will make you laugh and cry. Emma Heatherington
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I am alone, ‘separated’, desperate and miserable in a hazy, drunken limbo between marriage and dreaded divorce and I have no idea of who I am or what I’m supposed to be doing.
‘Please stop calling me! Please stop!’ I sob into the spongy new pillow that smells like lavender – a tip from my mother to help me sleep, but the scent of it makes me want to retch.
‘It’s much better than wine, love,’ were her words, but what would she know? She’s been teetotal all her life.
The phone continues to ring, piercing my fragile brain and I picture the caller, determined to ‘do the right thing by poor Maggie’ and check in on me at every bloody turnaround.
Have they no stupid lives of their own? Do I constantly barrage them with phone calls and concern every time they screw up? No I don’t.
But then they don’t really screw up, do they?
And then I realise it’s Monday. Ah, Jesus. It’s Monday.
I have no idea what time it is or if I am meant to be in work right now. Normally, on waking up like this, I would already be in the shower in a blind fit of panic and praying for time to stand still so that I could get to my latest appointment or show my face in the office and convince everyone that I am fine but today… today is different.
I don’t care if I am late because there is somewhere else I need to be and, at the risk of losing my job, which is no doubt already written on the cards, the place I have to go is much more important. I hate my job. I hate everything right now, but most of all I hate Jeff and his new ‘girlfriend’ and how he has made me into this shell of nothingness, desperate and empty and drunk and sad.
I sit up on my bed again and focus.
The phone has stopped ringing. There is a God.
I open my eyes slowly and steady myself and consider what to wear, but I don’t really care about that either.
It’s time for me to go. It’s time for me to talk to Lucy Harte.
It’s weird thanking someone from the depths of your soul when you can’t see them, have never met them, when they can’t hear you and when they have no clue who you are.
It’s a bit like talking to God, I suppose. It takes faith and belief, so here I am an hour after my latest meltdown of loneliness, in a church, lighting candles, saying prayers and thanking Lucy Harte for my life – and she can’t hear a word I am saying.
I hope she is here somewhere, floating invisibly like a little angel with a smile on her face and taking in my every word, glad to have given me part of the life she left behind.
I like talking to Lucy, even if it’s via my mind and not aloud and even if it is only once a year when I get the chance to really dig deep and have a good old chin wag. I think about her every single day, but it’s always on this date that I feel her closest.
I talk to her like an old friend. Well, she is an old friend if you consider that our one-way conversations have been going on for exactly seventeen years today. Not many friendships last that long, especially when, like ours, they are totally one-sided.
Even my marriage didn’t last that long – seventeen months and ten days, to be precise, but then again, that was pretty one-sided too.
I wanted to be married to him. He didn’t want to be married to me. Pretty simple, when you think of it that way …
‘Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times and had seven different husbands,’ my father reminded me when I told him that Jeff was leaving. ‘And you’re even more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor, I’ve always said it, so I wouldn’t worry too much about Jeff bloody Pillock.’
Yes, Pillock. Thank God I didn’t take his name.
He’s ever so slightly biased, my dad, but then again, I am his only daughter. He has to say nice things like that. It’s kind of his job.
My mother’s reaction, on the other hand, was a bit more traditional.
‘But he can’t just leave you!’
‘He can, and he did,’ I told her.
‘But not so soon!’ she said, bewildered, as we both sobbed uncontrollably for days over endless cups of tea in her kitchen, then damning Jeff to a life of misery without me and insisting that karma would one day come to bite his sorry ass. ‘Marriage is so throwaway these days. And all that money on the hotel and fancy dresses all down the drain. Disgraceful. Promises and dreams down the feckin’ drain.’
She is right, of course. All those big promises and dreams just thrown away before the real hurdles of life had even set in. And, as for the money… I shudder to think what our wedding cost. It was wonderful, but hardly worth it for seventeen months and ten days …
It’s cold in the church and I hug my jacket around my waist. There are a handful of others in here, older people mainly, whose whispers sound like they are whistling as they chant with rosary beads clasped tight around their wrinkly hands.
I close my eyes and focus on Lucy again. Today is our special day. Today is the day she gave me life, a life so precious that I am reminded whenever I feel her heart beating in my chest. This heartache I am experiencing right now, as painful as it may be, reminds me of the gift of life her family gave me when they gave me her heart seventeen years ago.
I want to thank Lucy for everything I can remember in this thirty-minute window I have allowed for this encounter. It’s important for me to thank her on this day, at this time every year. It’s the nearest I get to gratitude, I suppose, and it keeps me sane and positive.
I try to focus on the good times from the past twelve months since we last ‘spoke’ and I can’t help but smile at the irony. The good times are hard to come up with, believe me –but with some reflection they begin to roll off my tongue, silently, of course. I’m sure the little old ladies and gentlemen who sit around me with their eyes shut don’t want to hear my life story and I find strange comfort in my thoughts over their repetitive whispery chants of the rosary.
I thank Lucy for my promotion in January, which was mega and which means I have actually got spending money at the end of each month and savings. Actual savings. My father always told me that money burned a whole in my pocket – I would either spend it straight away or give it away by buying random presents for everyone and anyone I could, but now that I am totally all on my own in the big bad world I’m starting to put some away for a rainy day and it’s starting to look good.
I give thanks for my apartment. I’m getting used to living on my own again (I am so not, but I keep telling myself that and one day it will be true) and it even has a garden. Well, it has a window box and a small, decked balcony with potted plants, but it’s enough of a garden for me, for now. I can barely look after myself these days, never mind tend to a real garden with weeds and growing grass and other living things that need attention.
Then I get to the really good bits, where I tell her of all the crappy parts of the past year and how they have turned my once pretty-damn-fine life on its head.
I tell her of the night I embarrassed myself in front of my now ex-husband’s family by singing Britney Spears ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ along with a full-on dance routine wearing his dad’s tie with my skirt hitched up after five-too-many glasses of Prosecco. I don’t even like Prosecco. Hell, I don’t even know if I like Britney Spears that much, if I’m honest, so God knows where the idea to imitate her came from.
I have a feeling that night was the beginning of the end for Jeff and I. Maybe that’s when it all started to go wrong? Who knows? I’ve kind of blamed everything I can at this stage and still can’t get my head around it. But, for now, let’s blame Britney and Prosecco…
I tell her about the last few months I spent with Jeff as his wife, which was mainly made up of a) me checking his phone and b) me finding what I didn’t want to see,