Dead Secret

Home > Other > Dead Secret > Page 3
Dead Secret Page 3

by Deveney Catherine


  Another puff of smoke from the memory chimney. Smoke from a strange fire, this one, a fire that has slumbered for many years, neither fanning into flames nor quite dying into soot and ash. The childhood memory of a strange night when the police turned up here, on the doorstep of our council house in Govan. I had almost forgotten about it, but then it comes in my head so suddenly that I begin to wonder if I have made it up. Perhaps it is not real memory at all.

  I cannot be more than five or six. It is a hot night, a bit like tonight. At least in my memory it is. Sarah is asleep in her cot and Da has insisted I go to bed too because I have school tomorrow. But I can’t sleep. Earlier, we’d been out playing in Elder Park, and the evening sunshine is still streaming in the window, a river of light flowing steadily through a crack in the curtains.

  There is steady breathing coming from Sarah’s cot as I toss and turn, and eventually I get up to ask for a drink of water. I am hoping Da will sit me on his knee and tell me a story about his parents’ home in Donegal. Like the one he told me about the tinkers who came to the door with a bundle in their arms and asked for a penny for the baby. Grandma said she had no pennies and they said they’d put a curse on her. She died young, so maybe they did.

  But just as I come out of the bedroom, the doorbell rings. Da opens the door. I am watching from the upstairs hall, holding on to the banisters and peering through the slats. I think I remember the prickle of the carpet on my knees where I am kneeling, but how can I be sure? Did I really feel the prickle of the carpet, or have I just made that bit up? And if I made that little detail up, how do I know which other bits I made up? How much can we rely on memory?

  Da has his back to me and doesn’t spot me, but as the door swings open I see the two policemen in uniform standing on the mat. They seem alien, the door like a barrier between my world and theirs. I want Da to close it, to keep the policemen on their side, in their world.

  “What do you want now?” he says, and I remember thinking that Daddy must feel as I do because he doesn’t sound very friendly. He leans his head momentarily on the door. “When is this going to stop?” he asks, his voice low and fervent.

  One of them murmurs something I can’t hear and then the other says, “It would be better if we could come in.” This second one looks at Da as if he doesn’t like him. Da says nothing, but he stands back from the door and opens it wider, watching silently as they file past him. Then he follows them into the sitting room and shuts the door. The paint on the back of the door is beginning to peel, separating like the skin of a partially peeled orange.

  I sit at the top of the landing, looking down the stairwell into the hall below. Why do the police want to talk to my daddy? They frighten me with their hats and their uniforms and their strangeness. I resolve to keep an eye on that door, watch for it opening. Perhaps if I stare hard enough, I will actually see the paint move as it peels. There must be a precise moment when it curls back from the door. Like the moment blades of grass push further through the earth as it grows. My forehead rests against the slats of the banisters until the sharp edges begin to hurt. It is when my eyes are closing that the door handle suddenly turns, making me start. I move back slightly. I can hear murmuring and then the door swings open.

  “We’ll say goodnight then, Mr Connaghan,” one of the policemen says.

  Da doesn’t smile. “So I won’t be hearing from you again?” he asks.

  One of them – the surly one – shrugs, but the other says, “Highly unlikely, Mr Connaghan. Unless, of course, we get any new evidence.”

  Da nods and opens the door. He looks perfectly normal as he sees them off, but when he shuts the door, I see him lean back against it. His head tips back and it seems as if his knees are giving way under him. His shoulders heave as if he is crying. I have never seen him cry. It frightens me and I run back to bed.

  He never mentions it in the morning, though when Auntie Peggy comes to take me to school the two of them have a whispered discussion that becomes quite heated. I don’t hear most of it but at the end Peggy starts raising her voice and saying, “Look, just accept that’s the end of it,” and he says, “Peggy, there will never be an end to it.” I ask Peggy what they were talking about when we walk to school but she just says, “Nothing for you to worry about,” and we stop at the shop to buy crisps for playtime.

  That day we have plasticine at school. Blue plasticine that we roll into big meaty sausages before singing, “Five fat sausages sizzling in a pan.” Miss Stewart says the plasticine should be brown for sausages, but I prefer blue. I remember it is the day we have plasticine at school because that night, I really want to ask Da about the policemen, but I end up telling him about the blue sausages instead.

  When I think back to those first years in Glasgow, I remember uneasiness. Not unhappiness, but uneasiness. Whispered conversations between Da and Peggy. An almost instinctive understanding as children that there are things we mustn’t ask about, things we mustn’t talk about. An awareness that the Connaghan family is a little different from other families. Maybe that’s why, later, we got on so well with Shameena’s family, the Khans. They were different too. Different for different reasons, but we pulled together in our shared sense of being outsiders.

  In the days after Da died, my memory frustrated me. It sent out these puffs of smoke, like a series of signals that I could not interpret. What message was my subconscious trying to give me? Try as I might, I could not remember Mother dying. There was no trauma there to be discovered. Not like there was now for Da. I couldn’t remember her being ill. I couldn’t remember being told she was dead. I just remembered knowing that she was gone.

  We moved to Glasgow from the Highlands after she died, and in my head, there is only our city home: the cramped two-bedroom maisonette in Rosebank Street. It’s a street that never seems to house any adults, only rangy, mean-looking dogs, and packs of straggly-haired kids. Down one end there was an enclosure for the wheelie bins, and up the other, the street’s status symbol: Mr Curtis’s beige Skoda. In later years, Da’s battered Fiesta sat alongside, and the drug dealer at number 56 got a white Ford Capri.

  Nothing of the Highlands – no matter how hard I try. After Da dies, the memory chimney belches out smoke in its own shape, in its own time. However hard I try, I seem unable either to stoke the fires or dampen them down. The earliest memory I have is being lost in a huge department store in Argyle Street, not long after we arrived in the city. It was a few weeks before my fifth birthday and I had to start school soon. Da and I had gone for my uniform. I don’t know where Sarah was. Peggy probably had her. Looking back, I don’t know how Da would have managed without Peggy. Anyway, it was a rare treat because it was just me and Da.

  I was standing next to him at a counter when I saw a whole display of Matey bubble bath close by. The bottles were like little sailors and I started to finger them, thinking how much I’d like one, but knowing without asking that there wouldn’t be any money for it. I shifted them all on the display, arranging them by coloured tops, creating little groups of friends. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept watch on Da’s black jacket. But when I looked up, I realised with a jolt of panic that his black jacket had been replaced; there was a woman in the black jacket I thought was his.

  I ran then, through the store. There was a doorman in a white coat who tried to take my hand but I screamed and screamed for Da. That’s how I know that I understood Mother was gone. I never screamed for her.

  Da came running at the noise, cheeks pink with embarrassment, and I threw my arms round him and sobbed into his legs. He held me close, then, and said that I must never be afraid if I found myself alone. He would be somewhere close by because people don’t just disappear. I knew that wasn’t true but I was comforted by it anyway. “I’ll never leave you,” he had murmured, stroking my head. “I am always near.”

  Afterwards, when he’d calmed me, he took me to the sweetie shop and bought a whole bag just for me. Lemon toffee bonbons, dusted with pale yellow icin
g sugar that I sucked from my fingers. “Do I have to share with Sarah?” I asked immediately, but Da shook his head. The bag made my pocket bulge, and I kept one hand in Da’s and one hand in the open bag, sniffing back the shuddering remnants of tears and then popping the sweets into my mouth.

  In my whole life, I only remember Da mentioning Mother off his own bat once. It was the day we went to Charlie and Peggy’s silver wedding anniversary party. I was ninteen. I wore a close-fitting green dress, with thin, delicate straps and an embroidered bodice. I bought it from a catalogue and paid it up over ten weeks at three pounds a week. I don’t wear dresses much, but as soon as I saw that dress I knew it had my name on it. I have never been able to throw it out, though it has long gone out of style. When I slipped it on, it was like slipping on another personality. I felt more alive, more vibrant, more confident.

  Da certainly thought I looked different. I remember coming in the room and seeing a look of shock that blew across his face and disappeared again like a passing breeze.

  “You look so like her,” he said, almost to himself. His face had turned pale.

  I said, “Who?” and he said, “Your mother.”

  It was such a shock to even hear him use the word “mother” and my heart skipped a beat.

  “What was she like?” I said quickly, so, so quickly before the moment got swallowed up.

  “She was… she was…” he said, and for one awful second I thought he was going to cry because he gave a little gasp, like a stifled hiccup.

  “Am I really like her?” I asked, and he said, “On the outside anyway.” Then he turned so that I couldn’t see his face, and he put his shoes on, and I knew that was the end.

  “Come on,” he said, before I could ask anything else. “You know what Peggy will be like if we’re late.”

  Years later, when we were sitting the two of us with a bottle of wine between us, laughing about stuff me and Sarah had got up to, I brought Mother up and said I wondered what she would make of us now. Da didn’t get angry exactly, but the atmosphere in the room changed.

  “Why have you never spoken about her?” I asked, because I had drunk two thirds of the bottle to his one third. My heart beat a little faster even hearing the question out in the open. I’d waited all my life to ask it.

  “Lets not talk about that, Becca,” Da said, his smile fixed. “Let’s not spoil tonight with sad memories.”

  I shrugged and got up to make coffee and by the time I came back, Da had switched on the television and we sat in silence, watching a late-night comedian who didn’t make either of us laugh.

  And now he’s not here. In my head, I hear his voice in my ear, just as it was when I cried into his coat as a lost child. “People don’t just disappear, Becca. I am always near.” But he did, didn’t he? He did disappear. Maybe that’s why there was such a sense of betrayal, of abandonment. Parents spend their lives creating security for their children, reassuring them that the world is safe. Their death is the ultimate admission that they were lying all along.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shameena’s CD has finished and gone right back to track one but I cannot move to change it. I don’t want to be part of what’s happening now in this room. When the CD arrived I was reluctant to listen and braced myself against the memories. But gradually I find myself wanting to go back to that time as deeply as I can and relive it. It’s almost like finding an old coat from years ago, and trying it on and thinking, yes, that’s what it was like. It is dangerous, I suppose, but I don’t want just to ‘remember’. It’s not enough. I want to experience it again so that this time, I can make sense of it.

  The thing about pain is that it’s just too powerful; you have to anaesthetise yourself or how could you live with it? Five years on, what I am telling you has to be a diluted version: one part pain to two parts deliberate amnesia. Maybe if I had written this in the months after Da died, my memory would not have had as much time to protect me. But an account back then, when it was all so raw, would have lacked insight or overview. It’s as if everything has been locked away in a box until I was strong enough to examine it. Until now. Until I heard that music again.

  It’s the conversations with Da in that first week after he died that take me back into the past, into my old ‘present’, most vividly. They play relentlessly in my head and I can either be an observer to them, listening in on my old self, or if I let go, I slip back into them in as if I am having them all over again. Perhaps you will think that conversations with the dead are a sign of insanity; certainly those days and weeks seemed tinged with madness. But they don’t scare me now because I see them for what they were. They were both holding on and letting go… trying to find a piece of him that still existed that would make it possible to give the rest of him up. I stood in his room, listening for a sound in the silence, a whispered answer to my questions, knowing that you can’t instantly stop talking to someone just because they die…

  Da. Da where are you? I can smell you. Not the artificial smell of soap and aftershave, but the smell of you. The you-ness of you. It drifts beneath my nostrils, faint and hard to define, like a ghost smell. Is scent the last part of you to leave the world? Or are you actually here in the room with me?

  The thought sends a sudden rush of blood through me, a rush of excitement, but of fear, too. I honestly don’t know which is greater: my longing or my fear. The longing eats me greedily, like a cancer. But the terrifying thought of seeing a spirit makes me nauseous and shivery, even on a humid June night. The truth is, I am frightened of being in a dead man’s room. Even your room. I want to see you again. But I want the old you, not the new you. Your old warmth is chilled by a new vocabulary. Ghost. Being. Soul. Spirit. I don’t want your spirit. I want your humanity. I don’t want to feel your presence. I want to feel the softness of your jumper on my face, the way I did when you hugged me to your chest. Great, crushing bear hugs. “Ah, love,” you used to say when I came back home, wrapping your arms round me and almost swinging me off my feet.

  Over there, where the light of the street lamps is streaming through the chink in the curtains, is the chair where you used to toss your clothes at night. I can see a shirt and a pair of trousers. They hang casually, as if you are coming back soon to wear them. You didn’t know when you took those trousers off that you would never step in them again. I’m glad you didn’t know. There’s only one thing worse than your going, and that’s the thought that you went in fear.

  Your death has left me with so many questions.

  I felt sorry for Peggy today as I watched her washing dishes, her thin frame and rounded shoulders stooped over the sink, the kink of a steel-wool perm curling up over her collar. I had the feeling she was crying into the washing-up bowl. I knew it wasn’t the time to corner her but I couldn’t help myself. I suppose I have a certain ruthlessness at times, but I prefer to think of it as focus. Determination.

  I don’t really know what I expected when I asked her if there was anyone on mother’s side that I should contact about your funeral. But I didn’t expect all that hostility. Not the burning anger that made her shout that since not one of mother’s family had been in your house while you were alive, they were hardly likely to turn up now you were dead.

  Why was she so angry? She kept shouting and I ended up yelling back. I am ashamed of that now. But all that stuff about grief pulling people together is rubbish. Grief makes people cut each other up.

  “Didn’t he love my mother?” I demanded. “Oh he loved her all right!” She spat those words out and they seemed to sizzle up at me like hot fat. I almost physically shrank back from her they were so ferocious. “He loved her like a man possessed. He was blind.” Da, what did that mean? I kept asking her, wouldn’t let it drop. “Just leave it!” she kept shouting. But I couldn’t. Did she not love him back? I kept asking. Charlie came to see what was going on, just as Peggy said, “Love him? She bloody well destroyed him.”

  I stared at her. She was pale with anger, and a deeper distress
had eaten up the familiarity of the face I know so well. She untied the apron round her waist and walked past me, the small, dumpy heels of her brown court shoes clicking stickily on the linoleum floor. There was a damp patch beside the sink where the water had splashed over the edge. Charlie just looked at me and I lifted a cloth and wiped it mechanically.

  When Sarah came back, she tried to persuade me to go with them and said I couldn’t stay here on my own, that she would have to stay with me. In the end I had to say to her, “Look Sarah, will you just piss off!” She flushed that way Sarah does, and went and got her coat. I’m sorry I hurt her, but I had to be here on my own with you. I couldn’t talk to you with anyone else around. You understand, don’t you? You understand my need to know?

  The strange thing is that when it got dark, I suddenly got frightened. I didn’t want to come in here to your room. And yet, if you really will come back, then surely you will come here to this house and this room.

  I wore one of your jumpers tonight. There was a pile of clean ones in your chest of drawers but I didn’t want a clean one. I wanted one that still had you in it. I buried my face in it and inhaled, like an asthmatic inhaling oxygen. It drowned me, but I wanted to drown in you. Already I am frightened of forgetting. Your face is fading already. How many hours is it since you left? Fifteen maybe. Not even a day and already I find it hard to imagine the exact shade of your eyes. I have looked at them for nearly thirty years but already I am confused. Were they more grey than blue? Or more blue than grey?

  There are little bits of you being stolen all the time, as each hour passes. Your exact eye colour has gone today, and maybe tomorrow it will be the exact shape of your nose. Perhaps it will be like a picture where a little bit more gets rubbed out each day, until there is nothing left but an imprint. I think it would be easier if it was just the way you looked that was disappearing, but what was inside you is disappearing too. Can I trust you? Can I believe in you? I keep thinking of your promise to me as a child. Do not be afraid, you said. I am always near you…

 

‹ Prev