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

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.

‘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.’