by Pat Rosier
‘What was he thinking when he stepped up there and …?’ Isobel was still looking at the rope.
‘We can’t ever know. Don’t try, honey, just don’t try. Shall we take it down?’
‘Yes.' Isobel held the chair while Iris undid the knot around the beam. When she was down again, the rope in her hand, they both looked at it, unable to think what to do next. Then Isobel looked around, took it from her partner, dropped it into the council rubbish bag in a plastic bin in the corner of the garage and led the way out.
‘If you don’t like that funeral director, tell me another one.’ Sally looked up from the paper she was writing on. Iris went for the phone book and Daniel became a series of arrangements and phone calls. At some point Iris rang around their friends until she found someone home to tell, the bare bones, with a request to pass the information on.
That feeling, the feeling that Daniel had become a series of arrangements, arrangements and explanations, remained strong in Isobel over the next days. When Shirley arrived she joined with Sally and Nathan in busy-ness. There was little for Isobel to actually do. She became fixated on finding exactly the right piece of music to contribute to the funeral. Something simple, that everyone could sing. Definitely not a hymn. Sally had already included the twenty-third psalm and said anything Isobel chose would be fine, but they needed to get it to the funeral director on tape or as sheet music by Monday afternoon with a copy of the words for the programme.
My brother’s funeral will have a programme, Isobel thought. In the funeral director’s chapel, with an organist if we want one and our choice of celebrant. Celebrant? They’d found a man who did weddings and funerals as people wanted them, with God or without. It was Nathan who said praying would be hypocritical. Sarah wasn’t making the trip from London. ‘Not even when I offered her the fare,’ Sally said. ‘We don’t get on,’ she had added, unnecessarily, ‘but I thought she’d come for her father. She thinks it’s my fault, thinks I pushed him, she always thought that, would tell me to stop nagging him. She never had the faintest idea.’ Sally was quiet and still for a moment, then shook herself and went on, ‘She says she’ll come later, pay her own fare, when she can get away. Away from what, god knows, I didn’t ask.’
All the while Isobel was playing music and not finding what she wanted. Not Dylan. None of the folk-singers, though for a moment she thought she may have found something on a Frances Black tape. She found some photos of Daniel and Shirley and herself as children to add to the photo board Sally was doing, looking for a long time at Daniel’s face and unable to see any sign of the depression that was to come on him. A wide boy-being-obliging-while-having-his-photo-taken grin. There hadn’t been many photos among her parents’ things.
Lillian, who had been a close friend once but had drifted out of their orbit after a relationship break-up, came around when she heard. Isobel was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by tapes and CDs. Her mother’s sister, Lillian said, had killed herself, when she, Lillian, was about fourteen. She remembered the shock and disbelief, the silences from people not knowing what to say and how hurtful and bewildering it had been to have people say nothing, and had resolved she would always say something.
‘It must be hard,’ she said, ‘and I don’t just mean finding the right music, but that’s part of it. How to farewell someone who abandoned you. Sorry. That was crass.’
‘No. It’s all right,’ said Isobel. ‘I don’t feel at all like Daniel abandoned me, it’s more like we — I — had abandoned him.’
Iris came in as she spoke and said, ‘No guilts, my love, please no guilts.’
Isobel turned to her. ‘No. Seriously. Not guilt. Just knowing we didn’t … I couldn’t … help him, save him, whatever. Sad. Sorry. But not guilt. I think.’ She threw her hands up in the air. ‘And no bloody music, either.’
Lillian started humming a tune that sounded a little like a lullaby and was familiar to Isobel but she couldn’t place it. Then the other woman sang, quietly, about ships and harbours, mother and child, cradling, singing to sleep.
‘Yes!’ Iris was leaning in the doorway. ‘What do you think?’ Isobel wiped away tears and nodded. ‘But people won’t know the tune. And what is it? And will Sally agree?’
‘Alix Dobkin, early eighties, I might have a tape. The tune’s easy and she sings it three times, by the third time everyone will be singing along.' Isobel looked at Iris who said, ‘Who’s going to know Alix Dobkin’s a radical lesbian feminist and who cares anyway? It’s beautiful and it’s perfect.’
‘You know,’ Isobel said to Lillian, ‘Daniel said to me once that our mother was the only person who ever understood him. I never got that, but he said it, so the mother thing’s … … right somehow.’
‘Uh, look, this is just an idea, and I’m sure I could find the tape … but I could, um, shine up the old guitar and sing it live if you like. Get people joining in. But only if … .’
Isobel sat on the sofa and put her face in her hands, shoulders shaking slightly. The other two women looked at each other and sat quietly on either side of her. After a few minutes Isobel raised her head and sniffed. Iris passed her a tissue.
‘It’s such a not-my-family kind of song,’ she said, ‘and so not a song for a sixty-two year old man, and so not asking anything, not bossing, just holding. He didn’t have much holding. Not that I’m blaming Sally,’ she added hastily, ‘he said himself she kept him going.’ She was quiet for a bit and then added, ‘I wonder what he would have done if he hadn’t kept going, if he’d stopped sooner.’ Then she stretched across Iris and picked up the phone. ‘Can you sing it to Sally on this?’
‘Sure.’
‘Can you write out the words for me.’
‘Of course. I’m really glad to help.’
‘Can you come on Tuesday at two. To Kilbirnie?’
‘Yep. No problem.’
In fact it was Shirley, not Sally, who pronounced the song unsuitable. Isobel thought Sally was so wanting to get everything over with, she’d have agreed to anything. Standing up to Shirley wasn’t too difficult and Lillian had the words on Iris’s computer and emailed to the funeral director before she went home.
As they went to bed that night Iris said she thought they — Daniel’s family — were being awfully restrained; few tears, no wailing, and Sarah not even coming.
‘Everyone talks about arrangements, not about Daniel,’ said Isobel. ‘He’s practically disappeared without trace already, and I’m no better than anyone else, I got caught up in finding the right music for heaven’s sake!’
‘Finding the right music for Daniel.’ Iris joined her under the duvet and they snuggled up.
‘Yes, okay, but I wish I could make the others — Sally, Nathan, Shirley — take more notice of … of … Daniel, who he was. More notice than I took when he was alive. And no,’ she went on quickly, ‘it’s not guilt, it’s more complicated than that, it’s sadness, no, sorrow, sorrow that I never really knew him, that I didn’t pursue — now there’s a word! — pursue who he was, what he was like, really …,’ her voice trailed off.
‘That takes two, you know.’
‘Sure. And he did, sometimes, when the boys were babies, just come round.’ Isobel gave a sigh that shook the bed. ‘But we were never good at saying in my family, we — my mother especially — did things, we didn’t talk, except about the doing.’
‘Like Shirley.’
‘Yes,’ with a little laugh, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Shirley’s so different from our mother, she doesn’t look like her, she isn’t like her at all, she doesn’t describe herself like Mum did. And you’re right, she has the same what needs doing approach. Which is not a bad thing — is it? — just, well, limited.’
‘What’s good is figuring out what to do that works for the other person.’ They were both very still. ‘I had so much emotion when Chris ended up back in hospital — I had really believed any crisis was over I think — it was more like panic. At some level I had to think of e
verything to avert further disaster. What I was really doing was, oh I don’t know, desperately trying to get control by being out of control. Stupid really. Hard on Chris and on Eleni. It’s good that you came when you did.’ Isobel felt her back being stroked.
‘Too much, too little, feelings, thinking, doing, does anyone ever get it right?’
‘I doubt it my romantic darling. We all muddle through.’
‘Oh. Of course. I knew that. Really. And Daniel’s still dead, and he still killed himself.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘He told me once he missed out on the tough gene. Yet it’s pretty aggressive isn’t it, hanging yourself where you know your wife and son will find you. Angry even. I never saw Daniel angry.’
‘Mmmm. I’m sorry darling, I’m really sleepy, are you sleepy?’
‘No. I’m all right, though. You go to sleep.' And they both did, within minutes.
~~~
Chapter 25
The day of Daniel’s funeral was cold and still. There was nothing to do in the morning, Sally was having afternoon tea delivered to the house and Isobel didn’t feel like joining her. Shirley and Nathan were busy with household and setting-up tasks. Iris had, apologetically, gone to work for the morning for a long-awaited meeting with software developers in from Sydney. After she had gone, promising to be back in time to drive Isobel to Sally’s so they could all go to the chapel together, Isobel sat at the table with her second cup of coffee thinking how little she knew of her brother’s life.
‘It’s not the wind that determines your course but the way that you set your sails.’ She said it out loud but it was her mother’s voice; her mother who had never as far as Isobel knew set foot on a yacht, would say that when she thought you were making excuses for the way something had turned out. The same mother who, according to Daniel was the one person who had listened to him, even though he went into a career he hated at least in part to please her.
Oh Daniel, Daniel, I didn’t know you. And I knew a different mother. Did any of us know our father? Or he us?
For a moment she thought she was seeing things when Shirley sat down in the seat opposite her.
‘You shouldn’t leave your front door wide open,’ said a very real Shirley. Isobel shrugged.
‘I was thinking about Daniel,’ Isobel said, ‘and our parents. Why do you think he did it?’
‘That’s not somewhere I care to go.’ Isobel looked at her sister and thought, my god, she’s looking her age. Today, she looks sixty-seven. ‘And,’ Shirley continued, ‘I’m grateful neither of our parents is alive — they’d be devastated by this — in different ways, but both devastated.’
‘What do you mean?’ Isobel wasn’t going to be put off by an impatient look and continued. ‘Go on, tell me. You knew them for nine years longer than I did.’
Shirley was agitated. ‘Look I didn’t come here to talk about them ….’
‘Why did you come?’
‘To see you, to see if you were all right, Iris had said she was going to work this morning.’
‘Well, I want to hear what you meant when you said our parents would have been devastated in different ways.’ Isobel didn’t want to sound childish so she added, ‘I’ll put the jug on. What will you have?’
‘Tea, then.’ Shirley sighed. ‘Dad would have been upset because he was kind and wanted us all to be happy and happy people don’t ….’
‘Kill themselves.’ Isobel tossed over her shoulder as she arranged and rearranged mugs, teabags and milk on the bench.
‘Actually, I meant more that he would have been upset by Daniel’s unhappiness.’ Isobel wasn’t sure she could tell the difference.
‘And Mum,’ she insisted.
‘Mum would have been disappointed, let down, her golden boy opting out. She was the one who pushed him, you know, into a job he never liked. A nice, secure, respectable job. Just like she pushed Dad.’
Isobel put the filled mugs on the table and sat down. ‘Mum pushed Dad? How?’
‘Making him sit exams so he would get on. Look, I don’t go in for this raking over the past. I’m way over blaming our parents for my life, or Daniel’s.’
‘Looking for explanations is different from blaming.’
‘It’s just as likely to end in wallowing in self-pity though.' Shirley stopped and sighed again. ‘Look Isobel, I didn’t come around to argue I came to see if you were all right. I’m sorry about Daniel, he was …’
‘I don’t know who he was! I didn’t take notice, all those years I didn’t really take notice.’
‘No, none of us did.'
Isobel wasn’t sure that she wanted to be aligned with her sister on this.
‘But there is more than one side to taking notice, there’s … oh, you know!’ Unexpectedly, Shirley laughed. ‘I gave up introspection years ago,’ she said, ‘and now when my little sister pops back into my life, she’s prodding and poking away like she always did — and I don’t think I like it.' Shirley looked at her watch, then said, ‘come out with me, there’s time, come out and we’ll look for clothes, or shoes, even a hat, do you fancy a hat?’
Isobel did not fancy a hat, or any other shopping. She encouraged her sister to leave, assured her she was fine, suggested Shirley call in at a couple of boutiques in Hataitai on her way back to Sally’s. Only ten past ten, nearly three hours until she could expect Iris. Isobel cleared away the tea neither had drunk and moved to an easy chair in the corner of the dining room. Leaning back, she gradually became aware of the wintry sun warming her legs and belly. Shirley’s big sister mantle was fading — or was it Isobel’s little sister slipping away? Daniel in the middle. Was it really a case of ‘poor Daniel? She knew many of her friends better than either of her siblings. ‘A thin, threadbare family,’ she remembered that from somewhere, and they were and maybe that was all there ever had been, could be, she had at least managed to weave a stronger fabric with her friends, and now with Iris. With perhaps a hole to darn here and there, but she had faith they would do that, together. Introspection — Shirley wouldn’t approve — Shirley never approved but it didn’t matter, she’d grown a skin against Shirley’s disapproval — Isobel let herself doze off.
‘Oh!’ she jumped as Ginger landed on her lap and the doorbell rang simultaneously. There was no-one there when she opened the door and it took a moment for her to notice the flowers, wrapped elegantly in stiff purple and yellow paper, tied with an extravagant straw bow. There’d been phone calls, many, and cards but no flowers directly to her until now. She put the bouquet — there was no other word for it — on the kitchen bench and undid the card. ‘For Isobel,’ it read, ‘with our thoughts at this sad time.’ The names on it were Bob, Joyce, Neil and Andrew. The family unit. ‘I did that,’ she said out loud, ‘I made that family unit,’ and pushed away the thought that she had made a successful family by putting herself firmly on the outside.
Daniel, Daniel, she wanted to be thinking of Daniel, feeling Daniel, feeling the loss of him in the world. My elusive brother where are you? She went back to her small collection of family photos and held ‘that diary’ as Isobel had called it, in her hand for a moment as she moved it out of the way. Too many other distractions to looking for Daniel in there she thought as she put it down. Finally she found a photo of Daniel as a young man, walking with their mother, taken probably by a street photographer. Both were striding towards the camera, both smiling, Daniel wearing a suit and tie, her mother a coat and hat. Where were you going she wondered. There was nothing on the back, no date, no place. There were more typical pictures of him, but she liked this one, he had an air of a person knowing his place in the world. She covered her mother with her hand. Yes, Daniel out in the world, hopeful. She put the photo on the sideboard, resolved to have it framed, keep it out, remind her that Daniel had had a life, was more than poor Daniel. Omigod, the ship on the harbour song! How poor Daniel was that?. Not particularly, she answered herself, stop worrying, Daniel’s life and death, Daniel’s life and death,
Daniel’s life and …. She was rocking, on her knees on the floor, arms wrapped around herself, slowing to stillness as she became aware that she was trying to make herself cry, sob even, trying to make herself feel — more? — differently? Then the tears came, for herself as much as Daniel, and for the loss of a relationship that had never been anything much and now never would be.
Seven friends of Isobel and Iris’s, including Lillian with her guitar, seven friends of Daniel and Sally’s, two colleagues from his work and the family party, that was all. Sarah would have made twenty, Isobel thought. The pleasant man running the proceedings — Isobel could not think of him as a celebrant — had been well-briefed. Nathan spoke, well, of his father as a father and of his mother as a rock for them all. Which, to Isobel, made it even more obvious that the piece that had been sent by his sister, which he read out, where Sarah referred to Daniel as, ‘a good father, the best,’ did not mention Sally. Sally sat rigidly throughout, between Isobel and Shirley, Nathan was on the end of the row so he could go up easily. Iris was on Isobel’s other side. When it came time for Lillian to sing she read the group accurately, to Isobel’s relief, and sang the words only twice, the second time very quietly, without suggesting the rest of them join in.
Sally was firm about not wanting to go to the crematorium. In the end Iris drove Isobel, Nathan and Shirley. They followed the hearse slowly through the city, silent all the way to Karori. As the coffin slid out of sight Nathan raised one hand in a half wave, Isobel clasped Iris’s arm, and Shirley gave a huge sigh.
Iris had started the car for the trip back to the house when Nathan said, ‘can we hold on a minute, there’s something I want to say.’ The three women looked at him, Isobel and Iris turning from their seats in the front. ‘I’m still not sure if I should tell you,’ he went on, ‘but I’m going to — obviously. I hope you don’t …… I hope you can …… don’t be too tough on Mum,’ he said finally, in a rush, ‘but she’s seeing someone and he was at the funeral today and I think she’s scared of upsetting you if she says and not saying is so unlike her that …… well I think she’s finding it really hard.’