No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [3]
Mary began listing some of the endless possibilities. Was the hooded boy a metaphor for a death? Poor Mr Monkels! She worried about her dog until approximately three fifty at which time, having accepted that the link between a hooded boy and an ancient dog was tenuous, she considered whether or not the dream might have related to Penny’s disastrous love life. Then again, this disaster was on-going. That might explain the running. Poor Penny! But the kid was definitely a boy, not a girl, and after all, Penny’s love life might not have been the stuff of fairytales but at least she had one. It was just after four fifteen when she had begun to contemplate why she was alone. Am I frigid? No, I like to get laid just as much as the next person. It’s very relaxing. Am I scared? Yes? No? Maybe. OK, this is getting too heavy. Change the subject. Am I a lunatic? Has grief driven me to the edge of sanity? She smiled – in her head she was humming “She’s A Maniac”.
Although her ramblings distracted her, they had no effect on her elevated pulse or sense of dread so she refocused. Her dad had just had his heart checked and was healthier than a fourteen-year-old. Ivan seemed happy and healthy, although he was still adjusting to life after an acrimonious separation. It had been more than a year ago, but he hadn’t even attempted to find himself a girlfriend. It seemed a great waste to Mary as her cousin was kind, loving and not an ugly man. At around five she vowed to watch over him, knowing that he wasn’t built to be alone.
At six she was still uneasy. Maybe it was down to the rain that had started to fall just after she had woken from the dream. The pier had flooded last year and some of the cottages had been badly damaged. She had miraculously escaped for no other reason than sheer luck and there was no way she would be lucky twice. It was extraordinary that she’d been lucky once. Maybe fear of flooding was niggling in her. Yeah, it must be that.
Despite her outward appearance, which suggested a calm, cool nature to those who loved her, and possibly an impenetrable, cold one to others, Mary often worried about things that most people didn’t. She would often daydream about terrible events that she would undoubtedly survive while those around her didn’t. The end of the world was her recurring nightmare – she’d be left to stand in the centre of the universe alone, with nothing but thousands of miles of bodies and destruction around her. She wasn’t depressive or paranoid; she wasn’t insane or morbid. She was just aware that bad things happened and that they could and did happen to her. She didn’t have the comfort of viewing death and disaster as some faraway notion to be skipped over in favour of a conversation about shoes.
It was a belief long held by Mary and many of the towns-people of Kenmare that she was a curse to those who loved her. She had long ago become used to being called “Mary of the Sorrows”. Of course, it was used mostly behind her back but sometimes an individual slipped and more often than not she responded to the truncated version: “Mary of the…”.
People around her had died – her mother, her boyfriend and her son – and she had long ago accepted that her place in the world would be apart from the crowd. Her father had often attempted to disprove her theory – after all, he had survived – and she would smile at him, but it didn’t help that she would most likely survive him too, and that one day he would be a picture for her to lose herself in on a rainy day.
Mary put a basket of neatly folded clean clothes under the stairs: a four-day headache culminating in a sleepless night meant she was