CHAPTER TWO
Tinned chicken soup is death food. We eat it the day Da dies. I watch the pallid, glutinous mass of it slide reluctantly from the tin in a solid lump and squelch into the pot. Aunt Peggy is shaking the tin hysterically, like it’s someone’s shoulders. No soup for me, I tell her, but she carries on shaking. Peggy never takes no for an answer.
“Best to eat,” she says briskly.
Christ.
Peggy is Da’s younger sister, the closest Sarah and I ever got to a mother. I’ll never forget the way she looked this morning as she walked with Uncle Charlie down that peppermint-green hospital corridor towards me. It made me think of a miniature doll Da gave me once. It was free on the cover of a magazine I had nagged him to buy me, a little Japanese doll with a white porcelain face, but when I unwrapped the cellophane, the doll’s arm had fallen off. Peggy looked like that: face like chalk and broken.
I put my arms round her and neither of us said anything but I could feel the tremor that was invading her thin body as she clung to me in the corridor. She’s the only one of Da’s family left now. “Oh Becca…” she whispered finally. “To come home for this…” She moved out of my arms and grasped my hand. “At least you were here.” I suppose it was just guilt that made me wonder if there was a reproach hidden somewhere in there. Home for Da’s death, if not his life.
All those years away, working in one lousy hotel after another. I’d only got back again two days ago. Brighton this time. I’d lasted a month. It was supposed to be a receptionist’s job but I’d ended up working the bar and cleaning rooms and waitressing. The day they told me the breakfast chef hadn’t turned up, I told them Superwoman hadn’t flown in either and left. I told Da I was coming home to see him before taking something else, probably in Bournemouth. We had talked about going for a holiday together in the autumn, maybe Italy. The brochures are still tucked down the side of my unpacked case. The case is lying open on the floor of my bedroom, the clothes strewn over the lid, straggling remnants of a life that no longer exists.
Peggy is fussing now. I watch her opening tins, and cutting bread, and clattering pots in the cupboard. She pulls out a battered old milk pan with a twisted lip that has a strip of congealed milk down one side where the pan once boiled over. She shakes her head. “Ah, Joseph Connaghan,” she says tearfully, picking up a scourer from the sink and scrubbing vigorously. Charlie touches her shoulder and she momentarily lays her cheek on his arm. Peggy never lets Charlie do anything in the kitchen and I doubt he’s ever ironed a shirt in his life. But she doesn’t shoo him out today as she would normally. He stands beside her at the sink, buttering bread clumsily on a board. It’s his way of talking.
He never says much, Charlie. He just seems to spend his life serenely absorbing all Peggy’s high voltage. She generates all this crackling electricity that blasts out heat and Charlie simply sucks it all up and transforms it into light. He’s Peggy’s light bulb. Or maybe her fuse. She’d combust without Charlie.
I think Peggy would have liked children but it never happened. She had three surrogate kids instead: me, Sarah and Charlie. She helped Da bring Sarah and me up, and when we weren’t around, she channelled everything into Charlie. She made him dinners that would feed a ravenous navvy and when he sat down to one of her mounded plates, we’d tease him and ask if it had been a hard day in the trenches. Charlie would just smile that slow smile and sprinkle salt liberally over the heap without looking at us. Actually, he was a nine-to-five man who worked as a clerk in an accountant’s office.
Sarah is sticking close to Peggy as always, organising bowls and spoons.
Dutiful Sarah. Without saying anything, I go up to Da’s room to phone Shameena, conscious that I am being furtive, sneaking away. For some reason I always tend to do things as if they are a secret, even when they aren’t. That’s one thing about the Connaghan family that you really need to know. We are a family who operates on secrets. We understand them. We are comfortable in their silence…
The memories after he dies come unexpectedly, like sudden little puffs of smoke from the chimney of my brain. The first comes when I am halfway up the stairs. I am seven. It’s late in the year because the fire is full blast and the wind is rattling the loose casement in the sitting room. I am sitting on Da’s knee after my bath and the cheap, rough weave of his work trousers scratches against the skin of my bare legs as I wriggle in his lap. Sarah is playing with a bucket of bricks across the room.
Tentatively, I put my hands on his face. For a moment, my curiosity makes me see only his features, not my Da. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. I trace the contours, my soft fingers running down the stubble of his cheeks like velvet down an emery board. It feels strange, rough. Where do they come from, those dark hairs? I wonder, prodding them, trying to push them back into the pores.
It is like the exploration of a blind person: the fingertips run over the mound of Da’s cheeks, up over the bridge of his nose, halting at the hard, knobbly, uneven ridge in the middle. I press hard.
“Ouch!” says Da.
Startled out of my own little world, my eyes dart up to his. He is suddenly Da again and not just a series of features.
“Ouch,” he repeats, rolling his eyes in mock agony.
I giggle and press again.
“OUCH!” he yells, and I laugh uproariously.
Sarah drops her bricks at the noise. She pads across the room and leans on Da’s knee, trying unsuccessfully to swing her leg up.
“Up!” she demands, her soft blonde curls falling across her face. “Up!”
Da lifts her with one arm, moving me onto one knee and her onto the other, tucking each of us into the crook of an arm. We look at each other across the divide of his chest. In our house, there is always one between two. Always a half instead of a whole. Da kisses the tops of both our heads. Daddy’s girls. He is all we have. Neither of us wants to share…
His room feels cold with absence. Such stillness. The conversations in my head begin almost immediately. Where are you, Da? I find myself talking to him as if he will answer, searching as if it is impossible that he really is gone. I keep walking from room to room in his house. He is in every one of them and yet in none. In here, he is in the indentation of the pillow, where his head lay only this morning. He is in the discarded washing and the slippers that peep from under the bedclothes. His body lies in the hospital morgue now. But where has the rest of him gone?
“Rebecca!”
The voice startles me.
“Rebecca!”
It is Peggy.
“The soup’s ready,” she calls.
I look around the room before closing the door. It is dusty, stuffy, the air stale with trapped heat. But still it makes me shiver with his absence.
In the kitchen, Aunt Peggy pours the soup into the bowls with a ladle while the rest of us watch silently. My body and mind are in disagreement. My stomach is churningly empty, and yet I don’t want to eat. It doesn’t seem right. It’s so cruel the way the world simply keeps on turning no matter what. On the way home from the hospital, the car had stopped at lights and there was a young couple standing on the pavement, framed in the car window. She was laughing, her arms wrapped around his waist, her eyes raised to his face teasingly. He bent down and kissed her lightly on the lips. It was bewildering this happiness, this intimacy. I wanted to bang on the window and tell them. Don’t you know? Don’t you understand? Da’s DEAD.
I can see the steam rising from the soup bowls. Sarah catches my eye, and for once I know for sure we are thinking the same. She picks up her spoon and dips it in, stirring the soup round and round before sipping it. My spoon clanks on the side of the bowl and I swallow the mouthful whole, feeling it scald my windpipe, burning right down to my gut. The pain helps. Tinned chicken soup. I’ll never eat it again as long as I live.
CHAPTER THREE
Shameena’s voice on the recording pushes then pulls me, thrusting me back into the past as the music takes hold, yanking me forward again into the
present at the end of each track. I yo-yo back and forward at first, until the spells in the past become longer, drawing me deeper and deeper into the memories and I am no longer conscious of one track ending and another beginning. Figures from the past make cameo appearances in my head, events and conversations, snatches of dialogue: disjointed, disparate, sometimes out of sequence…
Me… Shameena… that first time we spoke about my mother. Shameena was such an important part of my teenage years that she pops up in most of my memories of that time. We were at her house. No, that’s not right. Mine. It was my house, in the bedroom Sarah and I shared. It was when we had those stupid pink floral duvet covers that Sarah insisted on. Shameena and I were lying flat on our backs on top of cabbage roses, one on each bed, giggling. Shameena often made me laugh. There was always a sense of mischief bubbling away beneath her demure façade. At times, her mischief bordered on recklessness and it was that quality that drew us together: we each recognised it in the other. I loved Shameena like a sister. And, if I’m honest, I loved her because of whose sister she was.
Shameena often came round after school because we had the house to ourselves. I liked the company and she liked the freedom. That day, she was making me laugh with an impersonation of Sunday afternoon teas in the Khan household, when her mum and her mad aunties got together and did each other’s hair, and criticised each other’s dress sense, and tried to outdo one another with tales of their kids’ sheer brilliance. The way Shameena switched between Urdu and her own Glaswegian accent was hilarious. When we finally stopped laughing and lay silently gazing up at the ceiling, she asked, “What did your mum die of, Becca?”
“Dunno.”
Shameena stared at me.
“You don’t know! How can you not know?”
“She died when I was four. Da never talks about her.”
Shameena considered this for a moment.
“That’s dead romantic, that,” she said eventually.
“What, my mother snuffing it?”
“No! Of course not! Your dad not talking about it.”
“Is it?”
“I bet he’s got a broken heart and can’t bring himself to talk about her.”
“You reckon?”
“Yeah.”
“So do I, actually,” I said, so quietly that I’m not sure if she heard.
I remember watching Shameena as she sat up and took out a brush, dragging it through her thick, black, waist-length hair. Deftly, she twisted the hair into a rope, then piled it up on top of her head, looking at the result in the mirror.
“Haven’t you ever asked about her?”
“Sometimes.”
“And?”
I shrugged. “He doesn’t say much.”
Shameena twisted her head round to profile and sucked in her cheekbones, glancing sideways in the mirror. “Do you think it makes my face look thinner if I put my hair up like this?”
I considered her with ostentatious care, from every angle.
“Nope.”
She laughed, let the rope fall, and threw a hair scrunchie at me.
“Why don’t you go to the records office without him knowing and look up your mum?”
The suggestion had startled me.
“I couldn’t do that,” I said instinctively.
“Why not?”
“I just couldn’t. It would be like… like… a betrayal.” It was the first time I had articulated the subconscious feeling that to need a mother would be a slight to my father. It was almost as if I was adopted and felt a tug of loyalty between my birth parent and the person who brought me up. But both were my real parents, so why should Da and my mother be in competition? Why did there have to be a choice between them?
Shameena was the first person I phoned the day my dad died. I still remember the sound of her voice when she heard mine: ‘Oh hi, Rebecca!’ I was unwilling to shatter the normality. How luxurious normality is. How underrated. I longed to be there with her, in a moment that was not filled with crisis. A moment that was not now.
You got back okay? Shameena said, and then rattled on without waiting for an answer. Why would she suspect anything was wrong? I had just spent two days with her on my way home from Brighton. Two more days I could have spent with Da if I’d known he was dying. The guilt after he goes is instant, insistent.
There was a strange hiatus before I said anything, before Shameena realised. It can only have lasted a minute… less… but for that short time, I simply surrendered to her voice, to the illusion of normality. She had been unlocking her front door when the phone rang and I could hear she was slightly breathless with running to pick up. My senses felt strangely heightened as I listened to her. I pictured her in the hall of her flat, kicking off her shoes, maybe putting her door keys down on the old mahogany wooden table she has. I could hear the clink of the keys, feel the honey smoothness of the polished wood beneath my fingers.
It was boiling in London, Shameena said. Still I said nothing. I imagined the scene outside her flat where I’d so recently been. A haze of heat and city dirt, the drone of London traffic and the steady flow of workers from local offices traipsing into the downstairs deli, leaving with paper bags and polystyrene cups, steam shooting through the lid vents. They would walk past the old man on the corner of Shameena’s street, the one I had watched from her window as he stood with his cap out and his eyes down, leaning on a stick.
He is there every day and people don’t see him any more. He is simply part of the landscape, to be negotiated like the seats of the pavement café, and the restaurant bins in the lane, and the metal grille which is awkward for stilettos. The man wears an old, torn overcoat, even in the heat. It hangs awkwardly on his scrawny frame, like a coat scrunched on a hook. His skin is grey, the colour of left-over porridge, and I looked at him two days ago and wondered how long he had left. Yet he outlived Da. How mysterious life is.
“Rebecca?”
She had realised. Stopped suddenly.
“Is everything okay?”
“No. No… Sorry.”
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Is it my dad?”
I can hear the panic, her voice rising to a squeal. She thinks I am phoning to give her bad news about Khadim.
“No, Shameena, no,” I say quickly. “No it’s okay, it’s not your dad.” The tension lowers at the other end. “It’s mine.”
I was in Da’s room as we talked, perched on the edge of his bed, and I looked at the bedside table with his book spread-eagled on it, open at the page he was never coming back to. Which was the very last word he had read? His reading glasses lay beside it, one leg flailing hopelessly in the air. A thin film of dust lined the concertina folds of the bedside lamp and I ran one finger through it.
There are not many people I have ever cried with, but Shameena is one. We have shared bereavement before. His name unmentioned, his presence towering between us.
Shameena offered to come to Glasgow straight away, but I told her to stay where she was until I knew the funeral arrangements. She had rehearsals to attend. I told her about that awful feeling I had when I looked at Da, the sudden fear that he had been essentially a stranger. The way his death flicked a switch. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know about Mother. I wanted to know about me.
“Death steals people from you, Becca,” Shameena said slowly. “At least, you think it does at first. But gradually, they come back to you and you remember their living as well as their dying. And that will happen with your dad. He’ll become himself again. He’ll come back to you in time.”
“But I’ve lost my chance to find out the truth. He’s gone.”
“No, sometimes death is the catalyst… the start… It’s amazing the things that come out when someone dies. Amazing,” she repeated softly. “You wouldn’t believe…” The line goes quiet. “There is one person,” she continues eventually, “who will know almost as much as your dad did.”
It took me a moment to understand. She meant Peggy.
&nbs
p; “Rebecca,” Shameena added hesitantly. “Your dad… he was lovely.”
Her voice cracked and my eyes swelled up painfully with unshed tears until I felt they would burst. I nodded, as if she was in the room, as if she could see me.
“You’ll sing at the funeral?” I asked.
“Of course.”
Shameena has seen more of my dad than her own in recent years. She needs to sort it out. It is a long time since she and Khadim have spoken, a long, long time. But not as long as fo ever is going to be. For the first time, I understand what for ever really means.
CHAPTER FOUR
Da’s body is to be moved from the hospital morgue to the funeral parlour.
“We need to make arrangements,” says Sarah quietly. She gets up from her chair and fetches her handbag. In my handbag, everything lies in a heap at the bottom: loose coins; old bills; makeup in cracked containers; the scattered remains of a packet of chewing gum; a few shredded paper handkerchiefs. Sarah’s bag is organised into neat compartments. Sarah is a lawyer.
She opens the flap and takes out a small notebook and a pen. Christ. I can’t believe she is going to make a list for Da’s funeral. Sarah catches my look and flushes slightly. Men always find that attractive about Sarah, that shy little blush. Cool efficiency on top but not too scary underneath. They don’t like to be threatened, men, do they? Sarah is a very sweet person. I am not sweet.
We decide that Charlie and Sarah will go to the funeral parlour to speak to the undertaker, while Peggy and I ring round people to let them know. There aren’t many. Da didn’t socialise much and Peggy is the last of the immediate family, apart from one or two cousins. I will need to ring Khadim, Shameena’s dad. Obviously, she won’t be phoning home to tell him. When Sarah comes back, the two of us will go and speak to Father Riley, Pa’s parish priest. I don’t want to go. I have, as you will find out, a bit of a thing about priests.
Dead Secret Page 2