Some of the girls made up stories about why she left the convent, most of them involving great spiritual crises. But I said I reckoned she’d left because she’d fallen madly in love with the man who came to clean the convent windows and had been caught kissing him by the Mother Superior. Everyone had looked at me wide eyed and then we had all snorted with laughter at the thought of Miss Edwards ever kissing a man, which was as far as our chaste imaginations went.
Miss Edwards talked a lot about heaven. She was into guitars and tambourines and listened to hymns like that ghastly ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ thing on her car tape deck and she had never even heard of Oasis. I know that because she gave me and Maria Toretti a lift to a fourth-year retreat once. We had to listen for 30 whole minutes to a tape called ‘Hymns of Praise’ and when it finished she said she thought it was terrific that me and Maria were developing our faith by going to the retreat like this. Maria and I looked at one another slyly in the back seat and tried not to giggle. We were only going because we fancied Father Douglas.
Father Douglas was young and intense and beautiful, and almost enough to keep you a Catholic. He preached a lot about purity, his dark hair falling over his face so that he had to keep shoving it back. We quivered while we listened to him, not entirely from religious fervour. It’s just a pity he ran off with Maureen from the café round the corner from the school. Good ice cream, I suppose, and she was a voluptuous blonde, but Maria and I still thought he’d have been better off with one of us because we’d have understood him, while Maureen was a Proddy. I’ll bet she never knew all the words to ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’.
Father Douglas, we were told gravely at a school assembly, had risked his immortal soul and his place in heaven, but after what Miss Edwards said about heaven in RE classes I thought he would probably have a better time with Maureen anyway. Heaven, Miss Edwards said, wasn’t a place at all. That was just childish and we had to grow up now and think as adults. Heaven was a state of consciousness. A state of being. After that I stopped going to church at all. What kind of incentive was a state of bloody consciousness?
I want a place. A place where you still wear short skirts and lipstick. Where you still drown in heavy, musky perfume and fancy the guy in the corner shop, and put six boxes of baubles and two packets of tinsel on the Christmas tree till the branches droop and it looks like it belongs in a tart’s boudoir. Where dinner is sizzled prawns in spicy sauce and there is always, always, the possibility of falling in love with the waiter who brings it. A peaceful state of mind? No, thanks. I want the rest of me there too. I want heaven to be a place I walk around, not somewhere you float about on puffs of cotton-wool consciousness. I want heaven to be earth without the duff bits.
I was never sure exactly what Da thought. He told tales sometimes about the Christian Brothers who taught him in Ireland and how they beat the devil out of you with a switch if you stumbled over the Lord’s Prayer. And how the priest would lift the latch on your door and walk in as if he owned the place, and how Mammy always said the priest took the place of God and you must therefore do everything he said. Da said he lived in terror of the priest because he took Mammy’s words literally and thought if the priest told him to jump from the top of the Post Office roof in Donegal town, sure he’d have to do it.
He still went to church of course. He was enough of an old Irish Catholic for that. I can picture him still kneeling in these very pews, his chin resting on his hands. Sometimes you would see his mouth move in silent prayer, but mostly he was just still, staring at the altar. He made Sarah and I go, though I think as far as I was concerned, he knew the writing was on the wall.
He took to going to the Saturday-night vigil but I always used the excuse I was washing my hair and doing my makeup for going out and that I would go at twelve on Sunday. I’d leave the house at quarter to twelve and then go and drink coffee and read the papers in Roberto’s, the Italian café that was a short walk from the church. Sarah knew, of course. I don’t think she ever missed mass in her life. She was always so prim and disapproving, but I used to tell her to keep her mouth shut or I’d tear her Ronan Keating poster into a hundred pieces and feed it to one of Mr Curtis’s yappy little dogs.
Later, when I was in my twenties, and Da and I had our nights with a bottle of wine between us, I knew he wasn’t sure about God. He wanted to believe all right. But whether he ever did, really deep down inside himself, I don’t know. I think he had his moments, usually sentimental ones at midnight mass, when his heart and his eyes filled up with it all, and for that moment he believed. But he said God was a civilising force on people whether He existed or not. He was very conservative Da, really, in some ways.
“You’ll come back to the church Becca,” he used to say. “You’ll come back to it when you’re older.”
Is this the moment? I try making a little bargain with God. I’ll come back, if You just make everything all right again. Not bringing Da back, because I know he can’t come back, not now. But maybe a sign. Let me feel a presence. Not my heavenly Father’s, just my earthly one’s, because right now I have no sense whatsoever of his existence and the emptiness terrifies me. I close my eyes, trying to pray. I close them so tight the blackness explodes into grey patches of shooting light. I open them again. I don’t know what to say. I try again. “Please,” I begin. “Please God… Da,” and I stop. Please. God. Da. Three words that get as close as I can to a prayer.
The old lady in the headscarf is having trouble getting up from the side altar. She sways as she stands, waddling up the aisle on heavy, bowed legs, her shopping bag over her arm.
“All right, hen?” she says as she passes, not waiting for the answer.
I can’t wait for an answer either. The heavy wooden door bangs shut behind me and the evening sunlight nips my eyes after the gloom. Maybe Da is in there somewhere among the flowers and the melted candle wax. But if he is, I can’t find him.
Des is waiting in the car for me and Sarah, but I walk right past him and out the gates and back along the tree-lined avenue to the main road. I head to Da’s house without stopping. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I can hear Des shouting to me but I keep on going. It is only a ten-minute walk but by the time I turn the key in the lock, I am sweating slightly with the heat and the exertion and a new sense of purpose.
Half an hour later, the phone rings. I sigh, expecting it to be Sarah. It’s Peggy.
“Sarah is very upset,” she says, her voice thin and tight.
Bloody typical of Peggy. I’m never upset, of course.
“Yeah, well we’re all upset, Peggy.”
“How do you think she felt being left in that room with Father Riley? She sat for half an hour with him before she realised you weren’t coming back. And she said you were rude to him. Honestly Becca, you’re so selfish sometimes. You just go your own way and to hell with everyone else. It’s always been the same…”
On she witters. On and on. God, I could write the script. I’ve been hearing it long enough.
“Becca!” she says sharply.
“What?”
“Are you listening? I said I think you should come over here tonight.”
“I’m tired, Peggy. I’ll sort a few things out here and then go to bed. I’ll come over tomorrow.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Rebecca. Why are you staying there on your own? And whatever are you thinking of, trying to sort things already? There’s no need for that. You’re only going to upset yourself. Charlie and I will take care of that. Come on now,” she says, beginning to wheedle, “there’s no need for you to be in that house alone right now.”
It is the way it was throughout our childhood. Peggy being bossy and knowing what was best; Sarah being reasonable and compliant and doing what she was told; and me being pushed to the outside for daring not to. Peggy always wanted her little brood round her where she could see them and count them, whereas I was forever wanting to wander off and examine the secrets of the reeds in the hidden end of the d
uck pond.
“Sarah wants you to come over,” she adds. “Though God knows she has reason enough not to want to set eyes on you tonight. We’re all here. Des too.”
Christ, that settles it then. Peggy knows from the silence she is losing.
“Haven’t you made your point now, staying there last night by yourself?”
“What point?”
“Charlie!” says Peggy sharply. “Charlie, come and talk some sense into this girl.”
I can hear Charlie mumbling some protest in the background.
“Just talk to her Charlie, for heaven’s sake!”
I hear him take the phone. He clears his throat.
“Becca?”
“Charlie.”
“Peggy thinks you should come over.”
Dear old Charlie.
“I know Charlie and I would, but I’m just so tired I think I’ll have an early night and come over tomorrow if you don’t mind.”
“She’s just worried about you,” he says, almost apologetically.
“I know.”
“You’re all right now, Becca?”
“I’m fine, Charlie.”
“Rightoh. I’ll put your Aunt Peggy back on.”
“Brilliant, Charlie,” I hear Peggy say sarcastically, as she takes the phone.
I’m not entertaining Peggy any more. She’ll keep chipping away if I let her.
“Peggy, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say firmly.
“Right,” she says, hard and clipped, and I raise my eyes. I love Peggy. I do, really. Beneath that brittle exterior, she has a soft heart. Her heart is warm and squishy, like half-melted chocolate. But she has a tendency to punish emotionally when you don’t do exactly as she wants. Always has had. When Sarah and I were in trouble as children, Peggy just had to turn the frozen mitt on and Sarah would crumble. She’d run to Peggy with big unspilled tears in her eyes and bury her face in her lap and Peggy would relent and take her ‘special girl’ on her knees, and then look from the corner of her eye to see how I was reacting. It was water off a duck’s back to me.
There is a bottle of wine in the kitchen cupboard. I open it and pour a glass. After Peggy’s call I think I need it. I think about putting some music on but I don’t think I can handle it, hearing music from Da’s sound system and him not here.
The memory of that moment jolts me back into the present. Shameena’s music blares out around me still. I wish Da could have heard her sing at his funeral. But perhaps he did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I took the bottle and headed for bed, another nocturnal conversation with Da running in my head.
Why didn’t you tell me Da? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. My head is hurting trying to work it out. I hoped tonight would be cool but it’s hot and murky and I keep thinking that this room smells of death. I don’t know how to describe what death smells like but it smells of this, whatever is in here. Heat and dust and sadness. With the door open, I can lie in bed and see the spot in the hall where you died. I keep looking at it. My eyes won’t leave it alone.
I am talking to a dead man. Best kind, I’d have joked, once. The only kind that doesn’t answer back. Now I’d give anything for an answer. But you’re not here, are you? I am left talking to you in my head, and the only answer is the dust falling through the air in the beam of light from the lamp.
Did you lie to me? Or was it that you did not tell me the whole truth? Did you tell me you had always been a bus driver… or did I assume? I keep asking myself why it matters so much but it DOES matter. Being an accountant, well, it’s a sign of a whole other life that I knew nothing about. It means I never really knew you. I’ve lost my future with you. Now I feel the past is slipping through my fingers too. Soon there will be nothing left.
I still don’t get it. Why would you earn your living as a bus driver if you were qualified to be an accountant? Of course, I knew you were smart. You had books on astronomy and books on physics and books on ancient Greece… books and books and books. You even started learning Italian when we said we fancied a holiday in Italy. But I always thought you were one of those working-class men who was slightly in awe of formal education. One who had never had a chance to turn his natural intelligence into qualifications, and who thought people who did were much cleverer. How could I be so wrong about someone I loved so much?
Tonight, after looking in the bureau, I started trying to go right back to childhood. Remember everything in order. See if there are clues about you. About Mother. About why there were so many secrets. I keep thinking there must be things I know that I don’t even realise I know. But the memory-fires refuse to ignite. Early memories are so elusive, fragile wisps that disappear or change shape when you try to grab them. I’ll remember something, then think, did it really happen that way? Or do I just think it happened that way?
When I looked in that bureau tonight, I thought all the surprises would be about mother. But there was little about her, not even a death certificate. I still don’t know what my own mother died of. I always wondered if it was something like cancer that took her slowly. Maybe you had to watch the light fading and when the darkness finally fell you couldn’t bear to talk of what once had been. But wouldn’t I have remembered that, even as a tot? A mother whose hair was falling out, who was disappearing slowly from me, eaten up by pain and sickness?
There is one clue that might lead me to more answers. A simple but crucial clue. You always said, Da, that the simple things in life were the most important. It is the address on Mother’s letter: Bayview, Lochglas. She was preparing that house for the two of you. Was it where we lived? I looked Lochglas up on the map. On the rare occasions we talked about living in the Highlands, you always just said we lived near Inverness. Lochglas is only ten miles north of Inverness.
You see the way my mind is working, don’t you, Da? You know what I am thinking? I suggested a trip to Inverness once and you said no so savagely, I never suggested it again. I felt guilty for being so thoughtless. Too many memories, I thought. But what would I find now? Are mother’s family still in that area? I suppose her parents would be dead now, though I suppose it’s possible they could be in their eighties or nineties. I don’t know whether she had a big family or a small one, but there must surely be someone up there who at least knew her. It’s twenty-five years but it’s not a lifetime. It’s not impossible. She must have left a mark somewhere. A life doesn’t just get erased, does it, Da?
Questions… Peggy refuses to answer any. And you… well you don’t seem able to. Unless this is your answer. Did you lead me to the bureau? Are you telling me to go? To find answers for myself? I NEED answers. I keep thinking about the funeral, about being forced to finally say goodbye to you. But say goodbye to whom? I want to know who you really were. Once you are in that coffin with the lid closed, I’m so worried I will never know the truth. I have to know more than the name on the brass when we place your coffin in the ground, when we cover it with the cold, black earth.
SUNDAY
CHAPTER ONE
Silent midnight. Alone, with only the steady pulse of thought like a mental heartbeat inside my head. Already I have begun to hate Da’s house. There is only emptiness now: a house without substance; a house of dreams and shadows and memories. Loved but loathed. I am trapped inside it, like a crab trapped in its own shell, the housing on my back both my protection and my burden. Inside the shell there is only space, and inside the space the midnight thought grows and grows until it explodes into reality: Lochglas.
I start out not believing I will really go. Finding the map, measuring the distance, packing a small case: they are all simply actions to test the idea. Trying the thought on, wearing it like a shoe, seeing how it fits. Lochglas. The door clicking behind me, my own footsteps on the stairs, the start of the engine… they are not irrevocable. A short drive to the all-night garage. Some chocolate perhaps. A bag of ground coffee. The first edition of tomorrow’s paper.
But I drive past the garage. Ironic that D
a’s car should have a full tank of petrol. The journeys he never went on; the milometer finally stuck. Left. Down to the roundabout leading to the motorway. M8 Stirling. Still it is not irrevocable. A few miles on the motorway, foot to the floor, a release of tension. That’s all. Perhaps no further. Faster. Faster. Perhaps not Lochglas. Peggy and Sarah, after all. Peggy and Sarah.
Lochglas. Walk about in the shoe; look carefully at the reflection in the mirror. See it; feel it. Stirling? Already? I barely noticed the miles I walked. The soft leather fits snugly round my foot. And then, near Perth, the moment where the shoe has been worn too long to take back. The decision is made before it is made. Go on going on. Only the price left to pay. Expensive shoes, a high price: Peggy and Sarah.
Midsummer midnight, a seductive darkness that never quite blackens. Ahead, only white lines and headlights. But through the side window, glimpses of a world flashing by: a full, round moon that sparkles silver on the black water; and a dragon’s-breath puff of mist drifting free across the loch; and a solid wedge of inky shadow reflecting from the army of trees standing sentinel at the water’s edge. Da would have loved this: the surreal magic of it; the spontaneity of the journey; and knowing that, the beauty becomes a kind of ache.
The car speeds through the night, eating up the miles. The mental pulse beats steadily, from memory to memory, year to year. The year we went to Ireland. The year Sarah broke her leg. The year Da won fifty pounds on a fifty-to-one outsider in the Derby and took us all, Sarah and Charlie and Peggy and me, out to eat in a restaurant. Peggy said he should save it but Da wouldn’t hear of it and I loved that about him, the way somewhere inside him, he knew how to live.
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