The Penance Room Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  An Interview with Carol Coffey

  The Butterfly State

  Also by Carol Coffey

  The Butterfly State

  Published by Poolbeg

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

  characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

  author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook published 2012

  by Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: [email protected]

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Carol Coffey 2010

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  9781842235737

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  Note on the Author

  Carol Coffey grew up in Dublin and now lives in County Wicklow. She has a degree in Special Education and is currently completing a Master’s Degree in Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. Her first novel, The Butterfly State, was also published by Poolbeg.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Paula Campbell of Poolbeg Press both for the opportunity to publish this book and for her on-going support and encouragement. Thanks also to all Poolbeg Press staff including David Prendergast, Sarah Ormston, and the Accounts and Warehouse staff for getting this book from my computer to the shelves. A special thanks to Gaye Shortland for her eagle-eyed editing and her endless patience.

  For my brothers and sisters

  Chapter 1

  “Mum!” I scream as I jump from my bed and stare into the darkness. Sweat drips from my face and, as my breathing eases, I realise that I have dreamt the same dream once again and have woken as usual just in time to feel the vibrations of the 3 a.m. freight train to Sydney as it passes by the back of our house. I can never understand how its passing doesn’t wake any of the residents in my mother’s nursing home where I live. I am the only one who is woken by its passing and left to roam the hallways unable to return to sleep.

  I slip quietly from my room past the nurses’ station where Aishling is sitting writing her notes. She doesn’t notice me and I am relieved about that. She doesn’t like me creeping around at night but I can never sleep after that dream and feel a need to be near my mother. I walk downstairs. When I reach the hall I can see a sliver of light coming from under the door of the bathroom beneath the stairs and I wonder if my father is also awake. I move towards the front of the house where the vibrations of the trains are not so disturbing and where my parents’ room is. I pass a large ward on my right whose residents are referred to as “the babies”: nine men and women who can no longer do anything for themselves and who lie in bed all day, looking at the ceiling or with eyes closed so tight you’d think they were afraid to open them. I pass the kitchen, the dining room and the large bay-windowed lounge room where the residents while away their days, and then I turn the handle of my parents’ room across the hall. I look down at my mutilated foot from which I still feel pain, a punishment for my stupidity. It happened almost five years ago when I was eight years old. I was playing with my friends on the train line, something my parents didn’t want me to do because of my hearing.

  I can see the accident like a film reel whose middle is caught in the projector and you can only watch the first part of the movie over and over. I am throwing stones into the small waterhole on the opposite side of the track at the back of our house. It is almost lunch-time and I decide to walk along the tracks behind my friends. They don’t want to play and I plead with them to spend more time outdoors. I try to entice them by trick-acting on the tracks but they ignore me and walk down the line towards their homes. My memory goes fuzzy then, and there are things about that day that I cannot remember or perhaps that I don’t want to remember. Foolish things. But I do remember the rumble of a distant train, the vibrations running up my feet and moving through me like a bolt of electricity. I remember my friends’ mouths opening and closing quickly. Simon, who used to be my best friend, is jumping wildly and waving his arms. I realise that he is trying to warn me and turn around just in time to see the train bearing down on me. I know the timetables by heart and think that it is earlier than normal, which I guess is a strange thing to think about when a train is coming at you. Everything seems to move in slow motion and it is like I am describing something that happened to someone else in another lifetime. Frame one: I try to run but my lace is caught. Frame two: I fall and try to get my shoe off as the rumble of the train increases. Then the reel snaps and my next memory is being carried by my mother towards the house. I want to close my eyes but her mouth says, “Stay awake, Christopher, stay with me,” as I drift into a deep sleep. When I wake up I am in a different place. A tight bandage is tied around what is left of my foot. I can see my mother crying at the bottom of the bed. She looks faded and misty in the strange light. My father’s big shoulders are drooped forward as though I have taken the very life out of him. I have never seen his face, usually scorched by the hot Australian sun, so ghostly pale. I can tell that all his hopes for me, his only child, are gone.

  I don’t think I have recovered from the shame and regret I felt that day and although I try, I worry that I can never make it up to them.

  I limp closer to my mother’s bed where she is sleeping soundly. My father is missing so I know it is him in the bathroom. She looks as though she is smiling and her long dark hair falls over the white pillow. She is beautiful and I have often seen my father say this. I think she senses me since she touches the locket around her neck in which she has a photo of me when I was younger. She half-opens her eyes. “Christopher?” she asks but I slink back into the darkness and leave the room. My mother doesn’t get enough sleep and has to get up twice during the night to help Aishling turn some of the patients to prevent bedsores.

  I am fully awake now and feel that it would be useless to return to bed. I decide to wander around the nursing home, which is a habit I have developed since my accident. The home used to be a boarding house for workers when the mine was busy
in the 1940s. It is the last house on Menindee Road and lies at the bottom of a small hill that sweeps up steeply on either side of it – which is where the name “Broken Hill” comes from. There is rolling countryside to the right and the town is a short distance to the left.

  I climb the stairs. There are five rooms on each side of the narrow upstairs corridor. Aishling’s room and mine face each other at the back of the house and are divided by the narrow stairwell that leads to the lower floor. She is the only nurse who lives in and has worked for my mother almost since she arrived in Australia about fifteen years ago. Not everyone here needs nursing care. Some of the people are boarders but have no family to help them, so they live here on the upper floor.

  Wilfred Richter sleeps in the room next to mine. He is from Germany and is in his fifties, younger than most of the residents. One of the nurses said he was a Nazi during the Second World War but I don’t know if this is true. He knows I love history and used to tell me all about his life in Germany when he was a boy. But he doesn’t talk much any more.

  I pass his room and the bathroom and stand for a moment outside Jimmy Young’s room. His door is slightly ajar and I can see him curled up in his bed. He is one of the few residents who was born in Australia and came to live here after he had a stroke and could no longer run his farm. His speech is hard to understand and the left side of his body doesn’t work very well. I look at him as he sleeps and like how still he is. When he wakes, he bangs things around his room, looking for attention. I understand how he feels. It is hard when people ignore you because they cannot understand what you want. I have a voice but I don’t use it, unless I am afraid or get a fright like when the train wakens me. When I was little and still had some hearing, I didn’t like the sound my voice made. My words didn’t sound like other people’s. The staff ignore me like they do Jimmy but, unlike him, I don’t bang things and I try to stay out of everyone’s way.

  Martin Kelly is next. He has a disease in his lungs which makes him cough up black phlegm and a clot on his brain that gives him headaches. My mother says that one or other of these conditions will kill him some day.

  When I get to his room, I notice that Aishling is standing in his open doorway. He is out of his bed and flailing his thin arms around the room.

  “Help! Help me! Someone, please!”

  He looks straight at me and then turns to Aishling. He says something to her and I watch as the side of his mouth moves backward and forward. He has forgotten that I am deaf and I can only lip-read if he faces me. I wonder if he is dying. I see death a lot around here. I am used to it. My mother says death is simply another part of life and is nothing to be afraid of. I think she is right. I move around him to make sure I can follow his words.

  “Can you see her? Can you?” he asks.

  “Martin, there is no one here, now go to sleep. You’re waking everyone up,” Aishling tells him crossly.

  “It’s my wife. She’s come for me. She’s right behind you. The boy can see her.” He looks at me. “Can’t you?” he asks and I hang my head.

  Aishling blesses herself quickly and takes a deep breath. “There is no one here. Your wife died fifteen years ago, Martin,” she scolds him. “And if she were here, she’d probably be haunting you, you old scoundrel!” Locals in the town have told her that Martin was known to beat his wife throughout their marriage. “I’ll leave your light on, all right?” She’s feeling slightly sorry for the old man who is tormented day and night by imaginary attackers.

  I follow Aishling out and watch while she returns to her small desk outside my room. I look out the window at the other end of the hallway which faces the front of the house. It is a beautiful night and a full moon shines directly on to our sign: “Broken Hill Nursing Home and Day Care – Vacancies. Proprietors Emma & Andy Monroe.”I look at the large gum tree, which is shining in the moonlight, and remember swinging from its branches when I was younger. I can see our cat, Paws, licking his lips and meowing on the fence although I cannot remember what this sounds like.

  I walk along the other side of the hallway. Mr and Mrs Klein’s room is first. They are the only married couple here and at the moment they are the people I am most interested in. Neither of them can remember our names any more or the fact that they were once prisoners in a concentration camp. Neither do they remember that their son Jacob died at the camp, which my mother says is a blessing. Despite being in his eighties, Aron is still a tall, broad man. His face is deeply lined and his eyes are a sad deep brown and always look far away, even if he is staring straight at you. Iren is a tiny woman who sits shrivelled up in a chair all day. She calls his name most of the time even though he is right beside her and rarely leaves her side. He pats her hand and hushes her when she cries and she settles if only for a while. I walk over to their bed and watch as he sleeps with his arms wrapped tightly around her tiny shoulders. My mother says he has cancer in his lungs and that she will soon have to move them downstairs. He coughs loudly and shifts. I am afraid that he will wake and I leave their room quickly.

  I pass by Mina Jensen’s room on my tiptoes. She never seems to sleep and if she hears me she will start shouting that the Japs are coming and Aishling will know that I have been creeping around. Mina was a prisoner of war in Indonesia during the Second World War. She boards here as she was afraid to live on her own when her husband died. She walks with a frame and has two long scars on her hips. She is not as confused as some of the other residents but sometimes it seems like she doesn’t remember that the war is over. She hides food underneath her clothes and is afraid of Li, our cook, who is Chinese not Japanese but Mina doesn’t seem to know the difference. Each night, when the staff help her to her bedroom, they take away the food that she has hidden in her clothes. She begs for it to be returned to her and my mother has to calm her down. She doesn’t believe that there will be more food tomorrow and the day after that and my mother says it might have been better if she had died back then because her mind is still a prisoner and only her body is free. I worry that when she dies her soul will be trapped in the war and she will spend eternity searching for food. I am like that, an unusual child. I worry about things that most other kids probably don’t even know about.

  Next to Mina is Father Francis Hayes. He was a Catholic priest and is from the same part of Ireland as Aishling. He is senile now and often forgets how to speak English but my mother says that, long before he became confused, his mind broke and his Church sent him here. He often cries for no reason and sometimes Aishling is woken from her day-time sleep to comfort him in Gaelic. She hushes him and he smiles and calls her ‘A stór’ – which Aishling says means ‘my darling’. My father, who is from the Hebrides in Scotland, can speak this language even though some of the words from his island are different. I see him speaking with Aishling sometimes and watch as their mouths move in a strange fast way. My mother doesn’t like to see them speak together but I don’t know why. Perhaps it is because like me, she doesn’t know what they are saying and she feels left out of this part of my father’s life.

  Two sisters, Penelope and Victoria Miller, live in the room before Aishling’s. Their father was a lieutenant in the British army and they spent their childhood in army camps all over the world. Despite being born in and eventually settling in Australia, they speak with upper-class English accents and the nurses sometimes mock them if they think my mother will not hear. The spinsters dress almost identically and live their lives by a strict routine. If a meal is late, or they cannot find a belonging, they become so distressed that my mother has to send them on top-secret government work around the nursing home which quietens them for a while.

  I wander slowly back to my room and stare out my window at the tracks that are visible even in the darkness. The train has long since passed and I feel a sense of relief even though I know that I will relive it all again tomorrow night. All day long trains pass here carrying goods and passengers to and from Sydney but, for some reason, only the 3 a.m. train frightens me. Perhap
s that is because in three short hours the house will come alive with the movement of staff and residents and in the vibrations of life, or what is left of it, I will not notice the trains coming and going. As I ease myself back into my bed, I gaze around the room. As every other room is occupied by residents, the staff sometimes have to use my room for storage. Large boxes of medical supplies line the wall on the right making large, unusual shapes in the darkness. I lie down and turn on my side. As I enjoy the cool breeze from my open window, I stare at the ceiling and pray that I may drift off again into what will hopefully be a peaceful sleep.

  Chapter 2

  When I awake I find that I have slept in yet again. I stretch and wonder what time it is. My watch appears to have stopped during the night. I shake it but the second hand doesn’t move. It has been doing that a lot lately. My room is hot with the morning sun but a welcome breeze starts to blow against my fly-screen, cooling my face. I limp over to my window and look out onto the back of our property. I can see Simon and Philip making their way down the train line towards school. I wave but their eyes are looking downwards, out of the glare of the sun. I have never been to school and would have liked to go with my friends, even for one day, but my father said they could not teach me there.

  A train comes slowly down the track and I strain my neck, worried that my friends are still walking east, towards the town, but I cannot see them in the glaring light. I was on a train once when I was five. I still remember getting dressed up with my parents, my thick brown hair slicked back like my father’s, my mother fussing, making sure Aishling remembered everything that needed to be done while she was away. The direct train to the hospital in Sydney took almost fourteen hours so we would have to stay two nights with a friend of my mother’s there. My mother packed sandwiches and water into a basket and we set off. When the train pulled out of the station in Broken Hill, I watched as people waved and laughed, opening their mouths wide and closing them again. My father held me tightly by the hand as we walked down the wood-panelled hallway and sat in a carriage on our own. Someone was eating freshly made bread and I could feel my mouth watering from the smell. Even though it was still early morning, my mother was already sweating in her long patterned skirt and boots and dabbing her forehead with a white handkerchief. The seats in our carriage were deep red and had matching red-velvet curtains over a large window from which I could watch the towns speeding by. Towns I had never been to and have never got to since. Darnick, Condobolin, Katoomba and Parramatta. I could read these names even though I should have been starting school only that year. My father used to teach me in the evening when he got home from work and said that because I was partially deaf I needed always to be ahead of kids my age. I am well ahead by now.