The Legacy of Lucy Harte: A poignant, life-affirming novel that will make you laugh and cry

The Legacy of Lucy Harte

EMMA HEATHERINGTON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperImpulse an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2017

Copyright © Emma Heatherington 2017

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Holly Macdonald

Cover layout design by HarperCollins

Emma Heatherington asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

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.

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Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780007568826

Version 2017-11-21

For Ciaran and Ashley

#donatelife

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

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

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About Emma Heatherington

Also by Emma Heatherington

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Prologue

I thought I saw you once on a train to Dublin.

You were about six years old. You were slurping on an ice-cream, your face covered in chocolate sprinkles and you were laughing so hard at the little boy beside you that I thought you were going to choke.

I thought I saw you a few years later, but this time you were a curly-haired toddler in a park throwing a high-pitched tantrum when you couldn’t reach the swing. A handsome man scooped you up in big strong arms and took you to a pram, where you kicked and screamed, your little arms stretched out, your hands opening and closing and reaching back towards the play area.

I thought I saw you as a lanky teenager one sunny afternoon when I was in London as you shopped for clothes with your mother, arguing with her over a pair of ripped jeans versus a pretty floral dress.

I think I see you all the time, even though I have no idea what you look like, who you are or what your story might have been.

You are inside me. You are part of me. You are within my every move.

I feel like I know you, Lucy Harte, I really do.

But you will never, ever know me.

Chapter 1

Monday 10th April

I am dying.

I am drowning, or else I am having a heart attack, but either way, whatever it is, I can’t breathe and I’m definitely dying this time. How ironic it would be for me to die today, of all days…

Oh God, please help me.

I sit up on my brand-new bed and automatically fall back again, my squinted eyes unable to open just yet and my shaking body needing much more time to recuperate from my latest ‘party for one’.

This is no ordinary hangover. Hell, no. My head is like a bowling ball, I can’t open my dried-out mouth, the phone is ringing off the hook and I wish whoever it is would just stop already because I don’t want to talk to anyone.

Not Flo, not my parents, not my boss and definitely not my excuse for a husband.

I really can’t listen to lectures or ‘I told you so’, not today, not today of all days, please no. Plus… I can’t remember where I was or what I did last night and I’m afraid. I am so afraid that if I answer the phone I will hear what I did last night and I can’t face up to that truth ever.

Did I do something wrong? Did I leave my apartment? I can’t remember!

No, no I didn’t. I definitely didn’t. Not this time.

With relief I get glimpses of flashbacks of turning off the TV, stumbling into bed in my pyjamas (always a good sign when you wake up wearing pyjamas), so I can’t have done that much damage, can I?

Unless I was texting everyone about how miserable I am or sharing my suffering on Facebook. Please no! Or even worse, I could have been texting him.

Ah Jesus! Oh why do I do the things I do? It wasn’t me, it was the wine. Oh, for God’s sake Maggie get it together!

But I can’t get it together and the phone won’t stop ringing! Why can’t they leave me alone? I don’t want to talk to anyone and I just can’t bring myself to look at it to see who has woken me from my deep, drowning, drunken sleep so I shove the phone from its usual perch on the bedside locker and feel instant relief when it hits the bedroom floor in silence and falls into three pieces – the front, the back and then the battery.

There now. All is quiet at last.

But the constant pounding of my head from dehydration, and the voices of my nearest and dearest echoing, remind me of how, no matter how quiet it is here, I am so not at peace at all these days.

‘Are you sure you’re okay, Maggie? We’re really worried you aren’t able to cope with this stress.’ (My mother/father – delete as appropriate.)

‘Why don’t you come and stay with me for a while? I have a spare room?’ (My best friend, Flo.)

‘Are you on some sort of death wish or what? Get a grip, Maggie!’ (My ever-sympathetic brother, John Joe.)

‘What? Ah Maggie! Why do you need to work from home again?’ (My boss/colleagues.)

‘You are going to have to move on, Mags! Get over it! Get over me and you!’ (My husband, I mean, ex-husband, Jeff.)

‘You really need to stop drinking so much. It’s not helping’ (All of the above.)

I really should stop drinking. I really should stop avoiding them all.

I really should just answer the phone and face up to their concerns, or at least reassure them that, yes, I am certainly having a shit time coping with this whole marriage break- up thing and, yes, I know my job is suffering and, yes, I need to pull myself together and get back on track, but I’m not just ready to. Not just yet.

Ah, sweet Jesus, not the landline now too! Whoever it is they are pretty bloody persistent!

‘Stop! STOP!’ I shout into the emptiness of my new apartment.

Its IKEA shininess and anonymity makes me want to smash it up and crawl out of my skin or at least under the covers, where I don’t have to be constantly reminded that this is where I live now and it doesn’t feel like home. I don’t feel like me.

I don’t know who the hell I am any more.

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, and I pray to Lucy to help me find acceptance that he is now with her, the one he left me for only ten weeks ago. Her name is Saffron, she is an air stewardess who speaks with a lisp and they met on Facebook. Lovely.

That’s as much as I know so far, despite my full-time mission to suss her out through social-network stalking but her bloody pages are all private and the most I can see is that she seems to really like cats. This makes me happy. Jeff is allergic to cats – they bring him out in hives and welts. Delighted.

‘She must have done something wrong,’ I overheard my mum say to my dad a while ago when she thought I couldn’t hear her. ‘A man doesn’t leave his wife for no reason. There must have been something.’

Once again my father’s logic put a different spin on things as I listened from the kitchen.

‘I never really liked him anyway,’ he told her from behind his newspaper. ‘He dyes his hair that colour, you know. Weird blacky brown. I could never trust a man who dyes his hair, especially the colour of cow dung. And he wears heels on his shoes.’

My dad is so on the ball. Jeff does dye his hair and he has a ‘special’ cobbler who he visits every time he gets new shoes…

‘Jeff? Heels? Are you sure, Robert? I never noticed that.’

‘Yes, heels,’ my dad said. ‘Put it like this, a man who needs inches there probably needs them in other places too. Nah. I never liked him. Let him get on with it. Our Maggie’s way out of his league.’

I haven’t told my parents about Saffron, the stewardess, and I probably never will. That would totally put my mother over the edge and we can’t have that. She may wonder if any of this was my fault, but she is old-school and sweet and innocent to the ways of the modern world and she would never get how Jeff was able to fall in love with someone he met just once in a sweaty gym and then wooed through private messaging on Facebook, while I was still admiring our wedding photos and choosing names for our future family.

Instead of telling my parents the real reason behind my big fat failure of a marriage, I spill my heart out to a dead fourteen-year-old just as I tell her my secrets every year on the same date and same time of the morning, when the rest of the world is doing school runs or in rush-hour traffic heading to work or having coffee in front of early-morning television.

I tell all of this to Lucy Harte, a fourteen-year-old girl who I never met but who gave me a second chance at life, even though she has no idea that I even exist. I pray for her family, whoever they are, and I thank them from the bottom of my borrowed heart for the day they said yes to organ donation.

Then I bless myself quickly and aim to get out of the church before someone mistakes me for a real Christian and I leave Lucy to do whatever it is dead fourteen-year-olds do up in heaven, while I go back to my new life of singlehood, meals for one and real estate, which is highly pressurised, fast-moving and a far cry from the soft Irish countryside where I was brought up.

I am being brave.

I am being brave but I am not brave.

I am not brave at all. In fact I am bloody scared stiff.

Fuck you, Jeff.

I want to scream and shout and kick and cry so loudly but I am in a church so I can’t and it’s so damn frustrating.

Fuck you for leaving me and fuck her for taking you away. Why? What the hell did I do that was so bad?

I think I am going to cry and I so don’t want to cry in public.

I close my eyes, breathe in and out, in and out, in and out and focus on Lucy Harte. I am not here to think about Jeff. I am here to say thank you to Lucy.

It’s been a long time, Lucy Harte. Seventeen years is a long, long time for you to beat inside of me. Why do I have the feeling that we haven’t very long left?

I really should get to work.

Chapter 2

‘Are you sure you are okay? You don’t sound okay? I’ve been calling you all weekend, Maggie!’

And don’t I know it…! My mother’s voice is always high-pitched, but today it is more frantic than ever.

‘I’m fine, Mum. I’m driving,’ I tell her. I shouldn’t have answered. My head…

I’m not really driving but it’s the only thing that might get her off the line. My mother would talk the hind leg off a donkey but she sees right through the whole ‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up’ or ‘I’m in a bad area’ or ‘I have an important call coming through’ excuses I usually make when I can’t be bothered with conversation.

‘You’re not fine. I know you’re not fine. Robert, she says she’s driving and she’s fine.’

‘Lies!’ my father shouts back. ‘She’s not fine. Maggie, you cannot do stress! You need to rest. No stress!’

‘You should have taken the day off and done something nice, Maggie. Even your father says so. You can’t afford this stress.’

‘Yes, she should have taken the day off and done something nice,’ I hear him echo in the background. I can just picture him, standing in his green wellies and baggy old-man trousers with his braces over his checked shirt, hovering by the ancient navy-blue landline phone that is attached to our kitchen wall back home in the big farmhouse I grew up in. He will be chewing on something, the end of his pipe, probably, and he will have a pen behind his ear (chewed also), just like I always do when I am doing something I enjoy and he will smell already of manure and sawdust.

‘I’m going out for dinner with Flo after work and she is meeting me outside the office at six, so it’s best I’m there,’ I lie. ‘I’m really looking forward to it.’

‘Oh, that’s nice. Where are you going for dinner? Robert, she is going for dinner. With Flo.’

‘We’re going to… um, we’re going to that new place,’ I waffle. ‘You know, my favourite. On George Street.’ More lies. ‘You see, I’m keeping busy, Mum. Busy, busy, busy.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s better than having too much time to think. Did you go to the church?’

‘Yes.’

‘Robert, she went to the church.’

Oh, Christ.

I hear a rustle as my dad takes the phone.