barbaraBarbara McKeon, a Dubliner living in Galway since ’98, was for many years a journalist with the Irish Press Group, at which time she had many short stories and plays broadcast on RTE Radio, as well as many more published in newspapers and magazines. She now teaches TEFL English, proofreads at the Galway Advertiser and continues to write fiction at her home in Kinvara, which she shares with her husband and two cats.

FAREWELL

by Barbara McKeon

From the depths of sleep she hears her name being called. Softly, gently. Slowly rising to the surface of consciousness, straining towards wakefulness, like an exhausted deep sea diver drifting upwards from the murky blackness of the ocean’s bowels towards flickering dashes of sunlight. She moans because the smallest movement is painful. Even opening her eyes is like tearing skin off a wound. A watery vision hovers close by, something floating towards which she is drawing nearer. Her name is called again; a muffled sound that comes from the diaphanous being gradually taking the shape of a person. She knows who it is and whimpers; she cannot see him clearly but she recognises his voice. She wants to call out to him but her voice drowns in her throat. The shimmering vision gains form, like when saline water washes from the swimmer’s eyes and the beach becomes vividly real. The figure moves to her bedside, repeats her name once more and she cries out in perfect joy, “Alan!”

He is standing by her bed smiling down, gazing into her eyes, love flowing from him like warmth from a blazing fire. He puts his hands to his face and brushes away his tears.

“Alan,” she murmurs, the effort to speak hurts her face. “It’s really you. You’ve come back to me.” Now she is crying, her tears slicing her cheeks like tiny scalpels. But she is so happy to see him that pain means nothing. He looks so handsome, his face radiant with love. “They told me you were dead,” she whispers. “The told me you’d been killed. But you weren’t. You’re with me here, now, in this room.”

He pulls a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his blazer and presses the silk fabric to his mouth. He is always so particular about his clothes, my darling Alan, she thinks smiling even though it is agonising to move any muscle, even the tiniest ones.

With great effort she raises her hand and reaches out to him. But he does not take it. He just smiles sadly and weeps, whispering her name over and over. Her other hand is tethered to a drip. The room hums with the low throbbing of life-support machines.

“Don’t be afraid, my darling. I can suffer all the pain in the world just to have you hold my hand.” Her hands are bandaged, her body is held together with pins and plaster of Paris. Her face is covered in gauze with just slits at her eyes and mouth. She knows she looks hideous to him, that he is afraid to touch her on account of the pain. Her fingers reach out for him but he recoils, the smile sliding into grief. He calls her name again but there is so much anguish in his voice that she must comfort him and she grasps his hand, the one holding the hanky. He howls like he’s been bitten and frantically pulls away. She holds on, begging him just to let her hold his hand, when to her horror, his hand comes away from his arm. She screams. The amputated hand drops to the floor, the handkerchief fluttering after it. He is sobbing convulsively, not in pain but in sorrow. He picks up his dismembered hand, slowly backing away out of her bed-ridden reach, moving not as a person would retreat but drifting as though carried through water.

She screams and screams as he withdraws, his shape disintegrating, becoming an elusive phantasm, reducing itself into the coiled nothingness of a foetus drowning in the womb.

The door flies open and the nurse rushes in, followed by the doctor who injects a sedative into his patient’s arm. As she slips into unconsciousness she murmurs, “He was here. Alan was here. He was with me in this room.”

“You were dreaming,” the doctor says soothingly. “Alan wasn’t here. It was a dream, that’s all, just a dream.”

As he leaves the room he sees a handkerchief lying on the floor. He bends down and picks it up. It is silk and monogrammed A.F. He knows the initials are those of her husband who was drowned when the car he was driving careered off the sea cliff road and crashed onto rocks far below. He looks at the woman in the bed who survived the crash but with horrific injuries, from which she will never properly recover, and wonders if death wouldn’t have been a better option for her too.

He notices the hanky is damp, and smells faintly of seawater. But how, he starts to ask himself, then dismissing further speculation hands it to the nurse to be laundered.