We present an extract from Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, the new novel by Elaine Feeney, the acclaimed author of As You Were and How to Build a Boat.
Claire O'Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But snatches of her old life are sure to follow her, when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby for work. As Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself.
Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – obsessing over the internet, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house.
Candles were littered about the bedroom in red votives, and some had been placed close by her face. Máire kept coming in and out quietly, making Joe fix things, talk to people, she was dividing up prayers and gifts, replacing the candles before they would burn out. When she relit one, she would turn to Mother and bless herself, then rub my shoulders, or catch my hand. Often she fixed the rosary beads into my mother's hands this way and that, and I wouldn’t dare do it with her. She started rosa- ries and would then chat halfway through. I wondered if they had left Mother’s shoes on her feet, but I resisted touching them.
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The curtains were closed tight as cars came in the back yard, grumbled, deadened for a few moments, and soon started up again and left the yard. Mourners came in to the small room to see her, more just dropped in bottles of whiskey, or food. Dishes belonging to the kitchens of other houses littered the Formica worktops. Father came in with a clutch of mass cards in his large hand and shoved them into her coffin underneath the cheap lace. I wondered if they would cause discomfort to her, but I resisted asking him to be gentle for I would be decades late for such a demand, and he would, like most of our conversations throughout my life, misunderstand my intention.
Eventually I went and took some air outside in the yard. I sat on Mother’s windowsill, lit a cigarette and called Tom.
'How is it?’ he said.
‘What?’ I said, irritated by his lack of focus. He took a long in-breath, and let it out, and another one. ‘Are you meditating?’ I said, my back heavy against the glass. I was finally smoking in front of my mother without fear of reproach.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not. Look, I am sure this can’t be easy on you. I can’t imagine—Oh sugar, Claire, I am—I’m sorry but I have to run, I’m launching Steve’s book in five and they’re calling me. I’ll ring you later. I’m so sorry. Such bad timing.’ He paused a moment and cleared his throat, politely. ‘I am so very sorry for your loss, Claire.’
We talked on a little and then I lied and said I needed to go inside and make tea, as though it were busy in the house, and I was busy, and he apologised for taking my time. I watched my brothers walking around as if no one had a thing to say to one another. I thought of the Mor- tons’ house on Sundays in London, the constant chat, the weekly updates.
My graduation photo was faded on the wall over her body. I had a head of ringlet curls waterfalling down my back under my mortar board, and everyone was looking awk- ward and unsure in the university setting. My eyes were closed. Brian had his arm around my back and Father was stood off to the right as though he didn’t belong to us, or us to him. Mother’s make-up was overdone, which was so out of character, and she was wearing the same dress she was now laid out in – lemon with navy piping, her make-up was a fawn shade, so much darker than her neck, and she didn’t look at all like herself.
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Late into the small ashen hours of the morning we gathered as a family in the bedroom. Conor stayed close by the door. We said the rosary and when the men slipped out to their beds, waited on.
I looked about, opened the curtains into the dark yard, a dog barked in the distance. I went close to the photo of us all, and stared. I lifted a gold tube of lipstick from the night table by the bed. I removed the lid and twisted the stick up and out of its shell. It was a dark pink – fuchsia – but darker than I had seen Mother ever wear before and it was moulded to a sharp tip, unlike my lipsticks, which were usually rounded. It struck me how lipsticks take the shape of their owners. Like shoes. I dabbed it on her lower lip, drew it then to define her narrow top lip, staining them. A final statement, even if it was, by now, too late in the day. I leaned in and kissed her forehead.
The next morning we washed in a procession, one after the other running to the small bathroom, and we dressed in rooms alone and quietly with only the dull hum of the radio from the kitchen where Lara fussed and fixed things into the wrong presses and popped her head in and out of the bedroom where I readied myself.
'Claire?'
‘Yup,’ I said, scraping my hair back into a tie.
‘Is there any chance you would have a word with Conor, you know, get him to say goodbye properly, before you—’
I shook my head slowly. ‘Please, Claire. He’ll regret it.’
‘She’s gone, Lara. I think it’s best just to leave him be, you know, forcing it, well—’
‘He’s not thinking straight. He’s really not accepting it. Sorry. But you know what I mean, Claire – he’ll listen to you.’
‘Will he?’ I said. ‘I doubt it.’
Mother’s presence in the bungalow was making me hold back because she had held back her whole life with Conor.
‘Look, Lara, I love you so please let’s just leave it. Not today,’ I said, and she nodded, and slipped away. I was glad when she left the room, when she stopped with her habit of pushing for some sort of resolution.
Resolutions are overrated. A city girl – Lara, and the country was vastly different in its family style. She had given up her job as a postdoc in a Dublin university, researching the effects of ageing on grey matter in the brain, and was obsessed with feeding Conor fish oils.
Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is published by Harvell Secker
