Long Goodbyes by Scott Hunter Page B

half-smile. His hair ruffled in the breeze and she could distinctly make out the freckles around his nose and forehead.
    ‘You wanted to tell me-?’
    ‘I was there,’ the boy interrupted. ‘I’d been there a while, y’see. He was a kind soul, Mr Maclennan. But I felt her anger, I did. She knew I was there too, but I never spoke to her. His sister heard me one night, tho’. I was cryin’. Sometimes I do that.’
    I am mad . Jean allowed the possibility to enter her thoughts. I am having a breakdown.
    ‘Yous’re all right,’ the boy nodded. ‘I’ll be away soon and you’ll be fine. Just listen ter me awhile, afore he comes. And he will, you’ll see; he likes the young women, Ms Brady, so he does, especially you - his wee girl an’ all - but I’ll be sure to be away when he shows up; yous’ll be all right.’
    ‘He?’
    ‘No matter. Listen ter me, now will ye?’
    ‘I will.’ Jean’s face felt slack. ‘I’ll listen. But what’s your name?’
    ‘Doesn’t matter, does it? I’m all of ‘em. All the kids.’
    ‘Well, then. Tell me about Orla Benjamin. Please.’
    ‘I saw what happened. Jenny MacLennan killed her. With the stick. Called her a whore. Said she’d always had her eye on her husband. Said that’s why she was on th’ road to the cottage in the middle of the night - lookin’ for him, even tho’ he’d gone away with the auld witch. Ye can’t help y’self, Orla, can ye? says Jenny Mac. Yous’re obsessed with my Jack, right enough, she says. The woman Benjamin says no, you’re wrong, but MacLennan hits her. Again and again.’  
    The boy laughed, slapped his hand on the rock. ‘Then she runs off ter the grand house, after she’s stopped her hittin’. Leaves the woman bleedin’. I saw it all. I been in your cottage before, right enough. Sure, it’s warm, and I ate what I found. He left meat, didn’t he? So I was going to eat it all but you came back. It was rank, but I still ate some.’
    ‘ My cottage?’
    ‘Jenny MacLennan’s; Malachi’s Jenny’s. All of youse. When a woman’s with child they need t’eat, right? It’s all the same ter him. Understand?’  
    Jean was drawn to the boy’s eyes again. So wise, so old. Yet now there was something else, something evil beginning to overshadow the openness of the boy’s expression…
    She mouthed the name. Sir William … and felt his proprietorial grip on her mind, her soul…
    ‘Youse can’t ‘ave her’, the boy’s voice said firmly, although she gathered that the words were not directed at her. ‘ Never havin’ her.’
    Jean backed away from the pull of the eyes, stumbled on the uneven ground, almost fell.  
    ‘Out. Out of me! Away now!’ The boy’s voice rang in her head. She had a sense of some old conflict reignited, timeworn wounds reopened. She clamped her eyes tightly shut. Now she knew why she was drawn to this place, why she felt so…connected…  
    Oh God, no, no…  
    When she looked again the boy was gone and she was alone.
    The wind gusted and brought with it a fine mist of rain. A fulmar called from its cliffside nest, a harsh summons for her to return to her ordered and measurable world. She leaned upon the boy’s rock for a few moments, ran her fingers across its smooth contours, allowed her eyes to linger on the space where he had sat. A fragment of Dickens rose and bobbed upon the ebb and flow of her thoughts and she found herself speaking the lines aloud:  
    ‘“ People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr Peggotty, ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood…’”
    Not properly born…
    She looked beyond the restless movement of the ocean to the horizon, where the infinite began. Her feet left a line of shallow indentations in the wet sand, temporary traces of her visit, until they were overrun and eventually obscured by the encroaching sea.

From the archives of St Judith’s Sanatorium,