Fergus Loves Emma-Louise Forever - Steve wade (novels in english .TXT) 📗

Fergus Loves Emma-Louise Forever

The early morning traffic was backed-up long enough for him to take in fully the mysterious perfection of the dead creature lying in the centre of the road. Fergus wondered if it was the same fox he’d seen the other night scampering over somebody’s garden wall while he drove home from the hospital - his first and last visit to the hospital to see his dying father.

All that beauty: the sleek red coat, its slender limbs and heightened senses, a thing perfectly adapted to survival – a creature for whom the world was created – cancelled with the ease of a fingertip tapping on a keyboard delete button. Such futility.

Gripped instantly by a sense of loss he couldn’t understand, he would have allowed himself to weep were he alone in a room. To distract himself, he scanned the faces of the drivers in the other cars. Most looked gloomy, others impatient. They hardly seemed to notice the animal’s body in the centre of the road. Those that did let their eyes alight on the pitiful creature displayed little beyond vague curiosity.

Fergus imagined the fading warmth radiating from the fox’s body into his hands should he step from his car and carry it to the kerb. And its smell, a doggy smell maybe. But the disapproving snarl made by the stirring traffic prevented him from acting on impulse. The cars were moving. He, moving with them, remained in his own layer, protected by steel and glass. Though, in truth, he felt far from protected. Snared is how he felt. Entrapped.

The nasal sneer of a car-horn blasted him to momentary freedom. The near miss, nanoseconds away from a collision, affected him viscerally: leaping stomach and needle-jabs at his forehead. The driver of the large silver car, who had had to change lanes to avoid him, bellowed something at him as he overtook Fergus, and then, pulling across him, exited the roundabout. Ignoring the Sat-Nav’s polite instructions, Fergus jerked the steering wheel sideways, and floored it, shouting after the shrinking car.

His spontaneous attempt to power after the silver car was in vain. Fergus’s rental-car, a modest saloon, was no match for the silver Mercedes. What he had intended doing had he caught the bastard, he had no idea. Just as well, he tried to convince himself. Who knows where his impulses might have led him? Besides, his mom and the boy were expecting him. Twenty-two years was long enough to have kept them waiting. With the sleeve of his new black shirt, he sponged the tears from the corners of his eyes - tears of rage.

Back in the country one week now, he had managed to avoid what he could only imagine would be a reunion that would lead to bitter recrimination, or even his mom having a breakdown or a heart attack. One death in the same week was enough.

“Okay!” he roared at the Sat-Nav’s urgent voice, a woman’s, requesting that he make a u-turn as soon as possible. He pulled the car into a gateway to a field. There he cursed aloud the country, its people, himself and his dead father, as he struggled to shift the gear into reverse. Finally, he got it. On he drove experiencing, strangely, an almost narcotic sense of joy and fulfilment.

An oncoming car, flashing its headlights at him on the country road, reminded Fergus that his native country was one of the few countries that still drove on the left. So difficult to remember when you’d been driving on the other side for nearly two decades. He gave the passing motorist an apologetic wave as he wheeled by. The driver, an old man, flicked his eyes from the road before him. His old man’s face wore a frozen scowl.

With extra diligence, Fergus drove on. He’d get through this. He had to.

They left him alone, those feelings he’d already sampled on receiving the news by telegram. The name of the sender’s telegram was Robert. It took him some effort and trawling to figure out that Robert was the name that his sister called her baby boy. 10 days ago he’d opened the telegram. The printout on flimsy paper informed him that his father was dying. The doctors had given him little time: a couple of weeks maybe, at most a month. Implicit was the message that everybody wanted Fergus to come home. The decision was his. But the thing is Fergus and decision-making was a lethal combination. Lives ended when he made decisions.

Once again, his father was interfering with Fergus’s existence, directing his destiny. The autumn was peak season. Accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the people in his adopted country, he was guaranteed to lose established clients were he to leave them for even a week without their tennis coach. Wouldn’t be the first time. There were five coaches now, he and four others, each one competing for clients in the same catchment-area.

Why? What for? Why should he? What, for him, besides self-doubt, bitterness and shame had his father ever inspired? These were the questions Fergus put to himself while bounding around the bungalow in his daily after-work ritual to see if Anna, his girlfriend of seven years, had come back to him. She hadn’t. Good! Who needed her?

How ecstatic he was to be on his own Fergus told the bathroom mirror, again. Everybody was so messed up. The clear image, the memory of Anna’s crumpled features avoiding her own reflection, as he man-handled her before that same mirror, forcing her to take a look at what she’d turned into, shifted and blurred, making way for the hazy recollection of images belonging to another day; a day from over twenty years back – the day before Fergus’s sister’s funeral; a day that never left him alone. The day when Fergus promised his father he’d kill him if he didn’t hurry up and die.

“Look it!” he remembered shouting at his father’s drunken reflection, his arms hooked beneath his armpits, easily supporting his frail body in front of the full-length mirror in his parents’ bedroom. “Because of you she’s dead. You killed her! Look at yourself!”

“I’ll tell your mother,” his father said. His high-pitched voice, trembling with cowardice, irritated Fergus.

“Why don’t you just hurry up and die?” he said to their reflected images, though he was drawn more to the twisted hatred in his own face than his father’s deflated expression. “I’ll kill you!” he added.

“Please, son. You’re hurting me. Leave us alone.”

The pathetic plea, the note of desperation, and his old man’s limp body surrendering in his arms turned everything around. The hatred Fergus harboured for his father was infiltrated by reluctant pity. He wanted to dash his father’s brains out against the wall, and at the same time wanted to undo all the horror.

Would testifying against his father in a court of law have, in any way, appeased that horror? A question Fergus tormented himself with for twenty-two years. A question whose answer he would now never know.

Emma-Louise, Fergus’s sister, had addressed her suicide note to Fergus. The police read it before he did. They told him that his sister’s posthumous allegations were very serious. Regardless of the allegations, an investigation into this type of tragedy was procedure. Family members would be interviewed. Should it go to court, they strongly advised that he testify.

Fergus’s mom was categorical. A couple of days after Emma-Louise’s funeral, she and Fergus were talking, really talking, for the first time since his sister’s new flatmate had found and opened the sealed white envelope left by Emma-Louise addressed to Fergus a week ago. Clumsily re-sealed and passed on to the police, the note directed them to the storm-battered cliffs in North County Dublin, a onetime favourite spot of brother and sister.

Fergus’s mom wasn’t going to stand idly by and watch her family torn asunder. Emma-Louise was unstable, that’s all. Ever since his sister was a child, his mom had known it.

Fergus’s attempts to reason with her about what Emma-Louise had written in the note were dismissed by his mom as the ravings of a terribly disturbed young woman. There was something wrong with that child. A mother could tell.

A click sounded in Fergus’s head. He could no longer stay quiet. “And why wouldn’t she be disturbed?” he heard himself roaring. “Jesus Christ! She kept all that fuckin’ crap buried away for … ”

“Lies!” his mom interrupted. “She only had to open her mouth and out spewed all that filthy bile. Evil is what she was, and that’s the truth of it.”

Regretting his outburst, and yet crookedly savouring its cruelty, Fergus pushed on. “She was confused, Mom. How many times did she try to tell you what was happening? I tried to tell you. You wouldn’t listen. Why do you think she came to me?”

“No!” his mom shouted. “No! You Can’t! You won’t! Your father’s a wonderful man. Nobody, not you or that, that … fiend is going to hurt him anymore. Not ever!” She was out of her chair and shaking her finger down on him. Her added threat screamed at him in that piercing voice he hated, that she and he were finished forever this time, if he persisted with his lies, his sticking up for that monster who had already brought so much suffering and shame to the family, had him brushing passed her, lest he say or do something for which he knew he could never repent. Or might never want to.

Before tearing open the front door, he lashed out with the back of his hand at the Virgin Mary Holy water font on the wall, knocking the blue and white ceramic statuette from where it had been a fixture forever. A piece of the broken statue wedged beneath the door.

Fergus re-shut the door from inside the hallway, kicked the obstruction clear of the door’s path, and re-opened it so hard it slammed into the coat-rack, cracking something. He ran from the house as though he were fleeing Death.

Not until he reached the wood behind the church did he feel the stinging pain buzzing through his hand. Running from his knuckles to his wrist was a beautiful zigzag line of already congealed blood. He searched his pockets. No tissues. He left the cut alone.

The tree. Although he hadn’t known it, the tree was the reason he had come. A sturdy oak from which he and his friends as kids used to play, the tree looked as solid and reliable as he remembered it. Taller than all the other trees, they had tied ropes from its swollen limbs and swung themselves to dizziness in summertime. Its canopy provided shelter from the sun in July, and kept them dry when caught in torrential outbursts of rain. But, for Fergus, it meant far more than that. There was something else. A secret.

The secret lay hidden in the tree’s uppermost branches. To re-witness the secret suddenly overwhelmed him.

Ensuring there was no one about, he pulled himself into the tree’s lower branches. A feeling like an instant flame raging under his armpit suggested something, a ligament or some muscle-fibre, had come apart. And the cut on the back of his hand had re-opened. He rested for a bit, massaged the troubled