Fergus Loves Emma-Louise Forever by Steve wade (speed reading book txt) 📖

he made her promise to steer clear of their family home and their father. A promise she had no difficulty keeping. Without Fergus in that house, she had no reason to stay there. And he made sure, too, to let his father know the consequences of pursuing legal parental custody.

For Fergus, prison proved the perfect place for rumination. He blamed himself, his weaknesses, his inability to admit and accept the charges he so often levelled against himself. Emma-Louise’s protestations that he, like she, was a victim of a dysfunctional horror story not of their making was in essence true. But not every child who is smacked goes on to assault the weak and vulnerable.

That his sister’s continuance and mental stability was dependent upon him, his guidance and physical presence, was negated by fact. On her weekly visits to him in prison she appeared as normal and together as any girl her age. She banged on about her temporary job in a café, how weird some of the customers were: the clothes they wore, the things they did and said. And then there was the baby. The months were tripping along, she’d gush. The thoughts of her with her very own little mite to take care of filled her with smiles and laughter so contagious, Fergus one time caught the prison guard on watch beaming as though he, the guard, was the expectant father.

Emma-Louise’s unborn child, for Fergus, was the decider. Although she and he never alluded to its father – he or their own father – the prospect of dealing with a living, breathing, thinking and scheming creature whose existence was the manifestation of warped impulses and premeditated evil was something he wasn’t going to deal with. Enough.

“Our baby!” she said when he explained to Emma-Louise his intention to leave the country as soon as he’d done his time in less than a month. He was being granted early release for good behaviour. “Our baby needs a father,” she continued. “I need you. Fergus, what are you saying? I love you.”

“Keep it down!” Fergus hissed at her. “They can hear you.”

The overweight guard with the hygiene problem stepped forward from behind Fergus and warned the two of them to relax. They weren’t the only ones around here. There were others trying to have a civil conversation.

But Emma-Louise’s breathing had shifted to her nose, and her curled lips trembled the way a child’s does before the uncontrollable wailing begins.

Fergus sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and dropped his eyes to the tabletop. He shook his head.

The last memory he had of his sister was of her screaming how much she hated him, and how she would always hate him. He never looked after her as prison officers escorted her out of the visiting area. He pushed himself to his feet, turned and walked ahead of the guard and back to his cell.

For the remaining weeks of Fergus’s prison sentence, Emma-Louise stayed away. The last communication she made with him was on the day of his release, the day she chose to show her irrefutable declaration of love for him through action. Not long after he had arrived to his family home on two buses from the city’s main prison, a Garda squad car picked him up and drove him to the nearest Garda station.

Following lengthy questioning centring round the suicide note, Fergus was cautioned, released and warned that there would be further investigation into the cause of Emma-Louise’s decease. Not that the actual cause of her death was in question. The Gardai were more interested in the details left by Emma-Louise in the note she addressed to Fergus outlining her motives.

On a more humane level, one of the Gardai warned Fergus that he and his family should brace themselves for a shock before viewing Emma-Louise’s remains. Pitted against gravity and the jagged shale cliff-face on the 100 foot drop to the sea, Emma-Louise’s body was, well, Fergus could imagine, couldn’t he? Added to that, her body had undergone the ravages of being in the sea for four or five hours until it was washed ashore on a beach 3 kilometres away.

Fergus’s decision not to see his sister’s body at all was one of the few decisions he would never regret making.

Three days after Emma-Louise’s funeral, the day Fergus was due to report back to the Garda station, he boarded a ship for Britain. And from there he flew to Tuscany, where he’d lived for twenty-two years.

* * *
You have reached your destination, the Sat-Nav announced. In his nervousness, Fergus brought the car too close to the kerb. A protesting hubcap scraped along the side of the path. From inside the gate of Fergus’s aunt’s house, a young man dressed in black made a clenched-teeth expression, in a jokey way, and greeted Fergus with a thumbs-up gesture.

The boy, Fergus realised. He had to be the boy. His aunt and uncle had no children. They’d told him at his father’s bedside a few days ago how they’d raised the boy. Fergus’s mom couldn’t cope with him. She’d gone ‘all wrong’. That’s how his aunt put it.

Robert. That was his name; Emma-Louise’s unborn baby pupated into a tall and vital looking young man.

Fergus stepped from the car and felt a wave of dizziness stream across his eyes. What if he saw his father’s face in the young man’s? Or if, close up, it was like looking in a mirror? He steadied himself by holding onto the car-roof. He shouldn’t have foregone breakfast. With his hand extended before him, he moved forward toward the young man approaching him. “Hi,” he said. “You must be Robert? I’m Fergus.”

“That’s me,” Robert said. The handshake turned into an embrace between the two men. Fergus heard himself trying to apologise to Robert in a voice about to come undone.

He leaned away from the boy and, studying his face, recognised his smile – Emma-Louise’s full-toothed, slightly crooked smile. His hazel eyes, too, were the same sad-happy, or happy-sad eyes of his little sister.

“How’s your mom, I mean your grandmother?” Fergus asked, allowing the sudden awkward mistake to carry him away from confused sorrow and self-pity.

Robert told Fergus that Fergus’s mom had her good and bad days. “Ups and downs,” he said. “You know. She’s doing well today. She’s expecting you.”

Walking next to Robert, as they made their way to the house, a fuzzy thought took shape in Fergus’s head. By close of day, by the time the condolences for his deceased father had been extended, the memories recalled, the eulogies offered and the handshakes grown limp, thousands, hundreds of thousands of cars would have further undermined the dead fox’s existence by trundling over it with their indifferent, mocking wheels.

Post funeral, Fergus would choose an alternative route back to the hotel. Nothing then could alter his memory of the fox with its glistening sun-red coat, dew-covered and sparkling in the weak winter sunlight. Unsullied perfection.

End of Story


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Publication Date: 12-22-2009

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