by Sue Teddern
‘Come on, Cromarty,’ I plead in the squeaky voice we use to communicate with each other. He squeaks back but will not shift.
I know what it is. He is bereft without Dad. Obviously we all are, but at least we know that Dad is gone and that he won’t be coming back. Cromarty will be anxiously expecting his back-rubs and treats, bless him. Now he must learn to tolerate Bev who, as she has constantly reminded us, is not a cat person. Just thinking about Cromarty’s loss and confusion nearly sets me off. When will our beloved moggy realize that Dad is gone?
Bev wiggles her fingers under her chair and he appears with a friendly chirrup, barely acknowledging Kate and me. He leaps onto Bev’s lap, turns around three times and settles into a croissant, head tucked under back paws. Within seconds he is purring loudly, utterly content, with the occasional twitch of his tail.
It shouldn’t matter but it does. Cromarty is totally at home here, in this neat, characterless little house with its turquoise accent colours and reminders of our home: the table lamp that used to be in Mum and Dad’s bedroom; the Matisse print that hung on our landing; the little bowl containing the nuts that I brought back from a holiday in Portugal. (In fact, I brought back two but the second one got broken one lively Christmas.)
I didn’t mind seeing these things, our things, in the bungalow while Dad was still around to use them. But, like Cromarty, they now belong to Bev, and what will happen to them when she dies?
Bev scoops up the cat. ‘Off you get, Marty. I need to fetch something.’ She pours his sleeping form on to my lap where he stays for all of five seconds, then dashes back into the garden.
‘Since when’s he called Marty?’ I ask, ignoring Kate’s ‘don’t make waves’ frown.
‘I think he prefers it,’ Bev replies. ‘“Cromarty” is such a mouthful, isn’t it?’
‘But it’s his name.’ I know I sound ridiculous. I shove a fistful of peanuts in my mouth to stop myself from making this into a ‘thing’. Bev is oblivious.
We chat in a desultory way, Kate, Pippa and I, while Bev is gone. Pippa is seven years younger than me, four years younger than Kate. But she wins whatever competition there is between us because she is married with two adorable children, currently being cared for by her amazing mother-in-law, while Kate and I are spinsters.
‘Elliott and Evie are too young for the funeral,’ Pippa tells us. ‘Better they don’t come than they get upset. They adored Peter. We all did.’
We adored him more.
Kate and I catch each other’s eyes and transmit the same thought. He was ours. You just borrowed him for a bit. He was ours, not yours.
Bev returns with a large cardboard box and a well-stuffed bin bag. She puts the box on the coffee table with a grunt. It must be heavy.
‘Your nana’s best tea set,’ she explains.
Kate unscrunches some old newspaper from around a teacup, nestling among others at the top of the box. It’s white with a 1940s wheatsheaf design and a fiddly handle. Mum never liked this tea set and rarely used it. But she didn’t have the heart to chuck it out. Dad must have moved the box from our family home to the bungalow without ever unpacking it, so he probably felt the same.
‘There’s four place settings and a teapot,’ says Bev, clearly wanting them gone. ‘Or it can all go to the charity shop, along with these old tablecloths and napkins and whatnot.’
The contents of the bin bag smell musty. I pull out an old checked tablecloth, permanently stained with spilled Ribena, then some napkins I won for Mum in a Brownies’ raffle that never came out of the dresser drawer. Nothing here is of use to me. And Kate only likes new things, ideally from Next Interiors.
And then I spot it: Dad’s Shipping Forecast tea towel. It’s creased and faded and the bottom hem is fraying. But this tatty rectangle of Irish linen, denoting Dogger, Fisher and German Bight, says everything about our lives and our dad.
When he first bought it, from a little ships’ chandlery in Whitstable, he wouldn’t let us use it. He treated it like the Turin Shroud. He even bought a plastic clip-frame for it, saying it should take pride of place on the kitchen wall. A semi-serious suggestion that Mum refused point-blank. He knew she would. So it joined the other tea towels in the dresser drawer and clearly got a lot of use.
‘Oh, that,’ says Bev, waving it away dismissively. ‘You have it, Annie. Use it as a cleaning rag.’
I take the tea towel, carefully refold it and put it in my bag. I want to cry but I won’t, not in front of Bev and Pippa.
Chapter Five
‘Occasionally Very Rough Later’
On the morning of the funeral, I nearly have words with Bev. She thinks Kate and I should travel to the crematorium with her, in the car behind the hearse, but I can’t think of anything worse. Kate ‘isn’t fussed’ but I am. I know I’m being childish and petulant and I try to snap out of it but I just can’t. In the end, Bev is accompanied by Pippa and Mark, while Kate and I hitch a lift with Rob and Josh, fortunately not in his white work van full of tools and timber.
Like father like son, both Rob and Josh look uncomfortable in smart clothes. Rob wears his darkest jeans and a brown tweedy jacket I made him buy when we were together. We’d booked a weekend break at a flash hotel and I feared he might be turned away from their three-star restaurant if he rocked up in his usual casual gear. He even has a tie in his pocket that he won’t put on until the last minute. Josh wears one of those tight-legged, short-jacketed suits that work on boyband members and shop-window mannequins but look lumpy as soon as you put your phone in your pocket. I’m touched they made the effort.
Kate and Rob aren’t exactly frosty with each other but they’ve never really found common ground. He made her some alcove bookshelves, soon after he and I hooked up. She moaned that he took too long and it wasn’t the shade of wood stain she’d chosen. He moaned that she was too fussy and he’d bloody written down midnight blue, not cobalt, when she commissioned him. I kept well out of it.
I used to have this visual image of me as the middle joint of a chicken wishbone, with Rob and Kate pulling either end. Whoever tugged hardest and got the biggest bit of bone would win my soul. When Rob and I split up, Kate won by default. She could have been a bit more magnanimous in victory, and nicer to Rob, but the pattern had been set.
Never one to hold back, when she has her first sight of my black funeral dress, with its lairy turquoise flowers, she stifles a giggle: ‘Well, at least Bev’s going to approve.’
She has already been picked up by Rob and sits beside him in the passenger seat. She’s wearing trousers and jacket in a sort of aubergine colour that pretends to be black. Kate always looks smart, crisp and businesslike; she’s rubbish, however, at looking relaxed, creased and casual and certainly wouldn’t take lessons from me.
I know my dress is awful but I don’t care. I just need to get through the day. Then we can cut Bev adrift and do our mourning our way, without her fingerprints all over everything. I will behave, I will be gracious and respectful. I can do this.
‘Have you learned your poem?’ Kate asks as we pull into the crematorium car park.
‘No! Why would I?’
‘So that you don’t have to hold a rustly bit of paper and everyone will see your hands shaking.’
I ignore her. The poem is printed in the order of service booklet so no rustly bit of paper is required and, that way, some kind soul can take over if I can’t get through it without falling to bits.
I grudgingly give Kate credit. The Walt Whitman poem I’m to read, ‘Song of Myself’, is actually very beautiful. When she first showed it to me, I said she should be the one to read it. She declined, quite forcefully because a) I’m the eldest so it should come from me and b) she has a horror of public speaking that I’ve always found strange in someone so straight talking and shoot-from-the-hip.
We get out of Rob’s car and switch into daughter mode as people hug us and say soothing things. Yes, he was a wonderful man. Yes, we will miss him. Yes, he died in his ga
rden. Yes, he was at peace. No, if you don’t mind, could you sit next to his friends from Royston so that we can squeeze our old neighbours, Maureen and Ray Gorringe, in beside Dad’s colleague Derek from the insurance office.
Maureen gives me one of those frowny-smiley nods, to convey her sadness, across the packed pews. It was good of them to come; I must tell her to thank Kim, their daughter and my first best friend, for her condolence card. Kim often joked that she’d happily swap her dad for mine because he made her laugh and didn’t mind chauffeuring us back from parties the other side of St Albans.
The service begins with ‘In My Life’ by The Beatles and I’m amazed I don’t cry, even though I know I will every time I hear it from now on. The celebrant talks about Dad’s career, his happy first marriage to Jackie, and his two wonderful girls. I have a terrible urge to stand up and give everyone a cheery wave at the mention of my name. I emit a silent giggle. Kate glares and I pull myself together. Hysteria is a dangerous thing.
Then we get on to Bev and how happy she made Peter in their twilight years. Does the celebrant know Dad was only 65 when he died? That’s not twilight, that’s barely bloody teatime.
I am called to the front to read my poem. I suddenly have no fear, no nerves, even with all those caring, expectant faces focused on me. I see Rob, scrunched in between Auntie Jan and a pillar. Josh stands at the side; he must have given his seat up for Uncle Frank. I take a deep breath and remind myself to take it slowly:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
I stop for a moment and see a little cluster of Dad’s Ramblers pals nodding in unison at the boot-sole reference. Bev too. That’s how they knew him, in his Berghaus boots, sturdy fleece and cargo shorts, with a rain-protected OS map on a cord round his neck.
Yes, he loved tramping the hills and rewarding himself with a pint and a ploughman’s afterwards. But Kate and I have a more engrained image of this funny, friendly, stubborn man and before I know it, I put the poem down and my own, initially stumbling, words echo round the room.
‘Dad wasn’t just a Rambler, although he loved his walks. Obviously. He lived in St Albans, with no sea for miles around. But he had this thing about coasts and lighthouses. He liked to imagine little fishing boats bobbing about at night and ferries going to Dieppe and Rosslare and Shetland. He loved the Shipping Forecast. He bloody loved it. He saw it as a kind of security blanket, wrapped round the British Isles, keeping us all safe.’
I stop for a moment to mop my eyes and blow my nose, then I go on. ‘Ardnamurchan Point, Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough, Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, Channel Light Vessel Automatic, Machrihanish flipping Automatic. Those names were as much poetry to Dad as anything by Walt Whitman or John Lennon.
‘When I was 17, Dad drove me up to Norwich so we could check out the University of East Anglia. Mum didn’t come; it was when she first got ill. Anyway, I was map-reading and I saw this place on the coast of Norfolk called Happisburgh and it made me laugh. Happy’s Berg. Quick as a flash, Dad turned off our route and drove us there to see the famous lighthouse. And, as I’m sure some of you will know, it’s pronounced “Haisbro”, not “Happy’s Berg”.
‘So we get there and we look at the lighthouse and it’s a very nice lighthouse, as lighthouses go. And we eat our cheese-and-Branston sandwiches, and it’s really windy and it starts to rain. And we’re happy in Happy’s Berg, Dad and I. And I make myself remember it, there and then, as a special moment. And, well, it was, it is, a day that will always make me happy. Sorry. Thank you.’
I stumble back to my seat. I can see I’ve made at least four people cry. Kate puts her arm around me and the coffin trundles off behind some curtains, like the ones at the Odeon, and the celebrant says a bunch of words I don’t even hear.
I grit my teeth for the final piece of music, as listed in the order of service: ‘Wind beneath my Wings’, specially chosen by Bev. I will try not to hate it. I’ve said my bit and deviated from my instructions. I will let Bette Midler wash over me, hoping I need never hear it again.
But it isn’t Bette, it’s ‘Sailing By’, the soporific signature tune to our family’s lives. The congregation looks surprised. One or two chuckle. Rob and Auntie Jan applaud.
Kate squeezes my hand. She did this: for Dad, for Mum.
But mostly for us.
Chapter Six
‘Moderate, Occasionally Poor’
Everyone tells me that the bereavement process can really only begin after the funeral. So much is invested in the day: who will attend, who will say the wrong thing, who will eat too many goat’s cheese straws and Portuguese custard tarts? (Answer: me.)
Dad was the reason for all the planning and organizing and gathering, and at least it distracted us from our grief. But now it’s over and we need to make a stab at dealing with his absence and trying to get on with our lives.
Which is fine for Kate, who has just been promoted at work and is super-busy. And it’s fine for Bev, who is spending a few days with Pippa, Mark and the kids. It’s even fine for Cromarty, who gets fed, stroked and spoilt rotten by Two-Doors-Down Dawn whenever Dad and Bev go away. Went away.
My ‘normal’ life, however, is fucked. It was fucked before Dad died but back then, what seems like a million years ago, I could at least pretend I was merely taking a sabbatical from teaching, a time to recoup and re-energize. Going to the pictures, not going to the gym, getting up late with a long nap in the afternoon . . . these were medicinal mechanisms designed to get me well again. And I was sure I’d get well because I knew Dad would worry if I didn’t.
But now, who honestly cares? I don’t.
Three days after the funeral, I’m trying to haul myself out of bed. The sun is streaming through a gap in the blinds and the milk in my fridge has fermented. At least I don’t need to get dressed to get milk. That’s the great thing about living 24/7 in the same T-shirt and leggings; people think you’re off for a run and you must be so flipping keen to get out there and clock up the 20k that you’ve forgotten to brush your teeth or put a comb through your hair.
I return with essentials: a litre of milk, a loaf of white sliced and some creme eggs. As I walk up the path, I see Rob parking his van. Oh great, he’s checking up on me. At the funeral, he told me he would, and I said he didn’t have to and he said he did and I closed the conversation by biting so enthusiastically into another Portuguese custard tart that the filling fell on my lap. Damn, now I’ll have to wash that dress before I take it to Oxfam. Unlike the dishwasher, my washing machine does still function.
That’s why Rob’s here. He couldn’t fix the dishwasher and Kate told him I’m still living in a tip and I can’t even wash up and she fears it’s the thin wedge of a slippery slope.
‘Don’t pull that face,’ he says, following me in. ‘Your sister’s worried about you.’ He clocks the creme eggs. He never liked them: too sweet and gloopy. I should have taken that as a sign that our relationship was doomed.
‘And I’m worried about her,’ I reply. ‘She’s gone straight back to work and she’s stressed enough as it is.’
Rob only has to look around the flat to see that I have indeed let things go a wee bit since Dad died. Rob is one of life’s unfeasibly tidy folk. When I moved in with him, it was his place and space so I made an effort. I really did. I even thought I’d stopped being messy forever.
He looks at his watch and nods to himself. ‘Right. It’s five to ten. I need to be back on a job in Tring by noon. Get showered and dressed. We’re off to Currys to get you a new dishwasher.’
I’m tempted to tell him to sod off. I don’t need anyone frogmarching me anywhere. I’m doing fine. I have six plates, six knives, six forks, so that’s nearly a week I can go without washing up, if I stack carefully.
But actually I do feel a bit stir crazy. The walls are thick, so I can cry for hours, not that it helps. The people in the other flats barely say �
��Hi’ to me, which means that at least I haven’t had any do-gooders pitching up with nourishing casseroles and platitudes about Dad being with Jesus. Even so, I do need to break my non-routine routine. Currys it is.
Rob’s van is spotless. No Lucozade bottles or semi-munched KFC detritus kicking around the floor. No trodden-in sawdust or wood shavings. He even has his familiar, and now faded, passenger’s cushion in the seat beside him. I bought it at a school fayre because the fabric has a Minions design; they make him cry with laughter.
‘How long has the dishwasher been out of action?’ he asks.
‘It hasn’t been right since I moved out of yours. My klutzy tenant must have broken it but I didn’t realize straight away.’
‘And then it was too late to make a fuss and keep back some of the deposit. That’s so typical of you, Annie.’
‘Isn’t it. Once a flake, always a flake.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Good.’
We barely converse after that. I haven’t come on this mercy mission just to be reminded of my failings. I can do that perfectly well from the comfort of my own sofa and watch The Repair Shop at the same time.
Rob turns into Apsley Mills Retail Park. If this isn’t hell on earth, you can certainly see it from here. But actually, this day out feels good. We used to love a shopping trip: buying a birthday present for Josh; treating ourselves to a new high-tog duvet or a belated non-Christmas treat. It felt so intimate and couply. I miss that.
A dishwasher is a dishwasher is a dishwasher. My only caveat is that I like my white goods white. I see one. It will do. But Rob takes it upon himself to quiz the 12-year-old shop assistant (whose badge tells us he’s called ‘Ash’) about cycles and eco-washes and how many place settings this machine will take. As if I’m ever going to have thirteen people round for dinner. I honestly don’t care which one I buy but I’m liking that Rob does. He’s impressed with the Serie 2 SPS24CW00G Slimline and, yes, it’s white, so why not?