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

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.