The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 7 Charlie

CHAPTER 7? CHARLIE

London, England

I was a while away from your beauty.

Charlie sang the lyrics from his father’s favorite song about his Irish hometown in Waterford, a haunting melody. The women stilled and the men took slow, deep breaths so they wouldn’t betray their emotions.

Even if they didn’t know the Irish words he sang, the soul understood the longing and exile.

So, I came back to you… Sweet Comeragh.

He sang the song first in Irish and then in English, and throughout his singing, the crowd sat still.

When he finished, everyone leapt to their feet, clapping and whooping, ready for frenetic fun—a reel, a rocking song, anything but dwelling in their own unfulfilled longings.

The Sheep and Lion was full to the walls. It was the last song of the Lads’ set, and the crowd hollered for more. The golden glow of the dim lighting, the open wood beams of the low-slung ceiling, and the heat of the fire in a stone hearth made the room seem separate from the world outside, a nest of comfort. No one wanted the night to end.

Charlie bowed out and handed the microphone to Fergus, who would launch into a bawdy ballad to close the night. Charlie made his way through the crowd, feeling slaps on his back and shoulders. Your father would be proud. Sorry about your loss. Well done.

He found a spot to stand at the sticky bar and leaned across to order a shot of whiskey. Benny the bartender slammed one down in front of Charlie, a golden glow inside the cut glass with the crest of the pub. “On the house, mate. When are you going to put your songs on a record and be too famous to come here anymore?”

Charlie lifted his shot, drank it down, and felt the warm burn. “Never.” He smiled and turned around to watch Fergus close the night.

He never played his drum to become famous. That wasn’t his goal. He barely liked being on the stage, but he did it for the love of music.

His father, yes, he was proud that Charlie played that drum and sang the old songs.

Chelsea, his ex-fiancée, had also been enamored of his playing. The night he met her was at a pub just like this one, and even as he chased away her memory with another shot of whiskey, it turned around and found him. He recalled the way she sat in the front row in her tight sweater dress, tapping her toes and tossing her auburn hair. The way she found him at the bar after the set and told him about how the music made her feel, the way she sat next to him and leaned in so very close.

How had he not seen the falseness of her? The hard core of her insincerity?

It was possible that he noticed it, or that’s what Fergus told him when it ended. “Mate, by the time you saw the rot, you were already long gone.”

“I don’t think I was ever fully aware.”

“Deep down, in that murky subconscious of yours, you knew.”

And maybe Fergus was right. When Chelsea tried to explain to Charlie that she was in love with his best mate and that Charlie had never truly given himself over to her, he saw it was true: he’d held back. The things that mattered—the anam cara of it all—were never between them.

The breakup was placed at his feet. The tears. The handwritten calligraphy invitations that were destroyed. The phone calls his mum made to friends and family to cancel the wedding. And he never tried to right it; he never told anyone the truth about seeing Chelsea and his university mate Graham kissing in the garden.

Everyone believed that Charlie was heartbroken because his fiancée left him for his friend. But heartbroken was the wrong word.

Disgusted and relieved seemed more relevant.

Later, he’d heard the murmurs— Didn’t go to his best mate’s wedding. Couldn’t get over it. A fight in a London pub.

From the gossip, people believed he’d been hurt. He had been, but only by Graham, who hid their secret love story. Chelsea—well, he might have lost her, but his mate was the larger blow, and he was still unaccustomed to their distance.

He was startled from his malignant memories.

“Charlie.” He heard a soft voice and turned.

Millie Barker. The sweet and fragilely beautiful girl he’d known since childhood. “Hallo, Millie.” She stood next to him and turned to watch the band. She held an empty glass in her hand, and he bought her another gin and tonic.

They leaned against the bar, and her arm was against his, and then her hip. He felt the heat of their bodies finding each other. “That was beautiful tonight,” she said. “You… I mean your singing. Especially that last one.”

“Thank you. Father’s favorite.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, and turned to face him, placing her hand on his arm. “I loved him. He was so… sweet and yet so—”

“Much a man.”

“Yes.” She smiled sadly. “That would have been batty for me to say.”

“How’s your family?” he asked.

“Batty.”

“Then all is well,” he said, and they laughed, clinking their glasses together.

Logan, the flute player, walked by and slapped Charlie’s back. “Always the one wooing the girls,” he said. “Good to be you.”

Charlie scoffed and looked to Millie with a blush. “He’s drunk.”

“But he’s right,” she said.

He nudged her and knew she meant no harm. How lovely to know someone enough that one didn’t have to explain his past to them. Now the band packed up. In the commotion, and as the night ended, the bartenders hollering out for last call, Charlie tossed his drum case over his shoulder and walked into the night.

Unseasonably warm, the sky clear, a single cloud moving slowly across the star-streaked sky.

Lonely as a cloud.

The Wordsworth line from the poem about his beloved Lake District ran through Charlie’s mind and he almost laughed. It was as if his father walked alongside him tonight, his mind whispering things his father might utter.

Father had warned him about Chelsea, but not in direct words. He never said anything directly, as if the Irish in him allowed him only to go around things, around and then back again. Father might tell a story about a changeling turning a princess into a witch or the flight of an owl that warned of deceit. Charlie heard his father’s warnings but paid him little mind, for Charlie thought, or he believed, he was in love.

Such a farce. He coughed out a laugh and lifted his face to the new mystery in his life. “So who was Bronwyn Fordham, Father?” he said to the night sky. But there was no answer.

The sky wheeled and the stars blended; he’d drunk one shot too many. He needed to remember that whiskey was never the answer to grief; it was the gateway to grief, and to the softest and most beautiful memories.

Like this one: the morning when he sat in a rowboat on Esthwaite Water with his father and his brother, Archie. The twins could not have been more than twelve years old. The boathouse across the lake was smudged with a woolly mist that hovered thick over blue waters. The lake rippled where a fish jumped. Geese squawked their secret language. Father uttered a sentence in Irish.

“What did you say?” Archie asked.

Father looked to the sky. “I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”

“You did,” Charlie said. “What was it?”

“Ah, lines from the Irish poem ‘Cill Aodáín.’ We memorized it as children.” He closed his eyes. “It means ‘The Land Where Everything Grows.’?”

Charlie and Archie sat still, their father the center of the morning and of their world. “Why did you stop?” Charlie asked. “Stop speaking Irish? Let it go? It was your language.”

“I didn’t let it go, Son. It let go of me. It was as much a part of me as my skin and bones, as the very beat of my heart. But when something breaks the heart, things fall out of the cracks and fissures, and Gaelic was one of those very things.”

Charlie and Archie didn’t fully understand what Father meant or how to remedy something that made him so sad. Instead of responding, they sat quietly.

Finally Charlie asked, “What’s the word for lake ?”

“An easy one, Son. Loch .”

Charlie and Archie repeated the word and held their fishing poles above the water, glancing at each other in their silent brotherhood.

Now in London, far off, a siren howled, and Charlie found himself not on the edge of the lake but the edge of High Holborn. He would know what to say to his father now. “If it hurts, if the words bring back the pain, use them all the more until they heal you.”

How could Charlie have known the truth of that so long ago? The more he sang the old songs, the more he understood his connection to his father wasn’t just in life.

Charlie made his way toward his flat, which was only a ten-minute stroll. His place with the wide, tall windows looking out over the River Thames, the concrete floors that he’d covered in old rugs he’d found in his parents’ attic, a mishmash of furniture, and a bed covered in quilts from his childhood.

He’d wanted something of his own when he’d bought the flat. But now he wanted something he could hardly name. Something of his father and of family, of roots and lake edges. “Charlie?”

Charlie spun around to see her coming toward him on the pavement, picking her way slowly through the darkness, the careful walk of someone who was deep in the drink.

“Millie!” He held out his hand to her as she stumbled toward him. “What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to catch up with you.”

“Oh?”

She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his, a searching kiss that he returned. She pulled back and held her hands to either side of his face. “I have wanted to do that since the third year of primary school.”

“Oh, Millie, you don’t want this or me.” He spoke gently, placed his hands on top of hers, and took them from his face. Her pink lipstick was smeared, and he wiped it clear for her.

“What if I do?” She wobbled. “What if I do want it and you just don’t know everything?”

She swayed in the internal wind of whiskey, and he slipped his arm through hers. He would not leave her alone on the street. He walked her to his flat, guided her back to his bedroom. She reached for him, and he gently laid her down and placed his quilt over her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Saving you from regret.” He kissed her forehead and walked out.

Another thing that didn’t heal grief—bringing a drunk and beautiful girl to his flat. He’d learned that lesson by trial and error.

He grabbed a piqued blue wool blanket from the closet and slumped onto the couch. He was asleep within minutes, dreaming of Esthwaite Water and his father teaching him amhrán , the word for song .