Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  Sarah was frantic; I remember that before I lost it. She’d wanted nothing to do with it all from the start. She hated the people I was mixing with. Later, she told me I was gabbling and crying uncontrollably and then I started being sick. She was trying to get me to be sick into the living-room waste basket but I was too drunk to have much of an aim. Then I passed out completely and she thought I was going to die because my skin became blue and my breathing slowed so dramatically she thought it had stopped altogether. When she started screaming that I needed an ambulance, everyone disappeared, terrified of being caught up in the stink.

  What a sight I must have been by the time Da got home. Not that I remember much. The first I remember is waking up in hospital and finding Da, pale and grim, at my bedside. My head thumped. I had never felt so ill in my life. He took my hand but I closed my eyes tight shut again, too ashamed to look at him. I tried to turn away from him but couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength. I felt his hand on my arm.

  “Okay, Becca,” he murmured, “okay.”

  A nurse bustled in shortly afterwards and started taking my pulse and temperature and recording it. I still didn’t open my eyes.

  “You’ve been a silly girl,” she said, “haven’t you?”

  Even feeling as ill as I did, I wanted to punch her lights out. But I was in no position to be bolshie. The hospital social worker came round to see me before I went home, and I listened meekly as she told me I must realise that as many deaths occurred from alcohol overdoses as other drug overdoses. She asked how much I drank normally, and if I felt I had a problem, and if there was a reason why I had drunk so much this time. I listened to it all and answered meekly, without my usual sarcasm, because I just wanted home and to be left alone. I thought of Tariq outside the café, the way he refused to respond, the way his body and his mind stayed in his own control. It was a skill to take your mind out of gear and leave it in neutral. I could do it if I thought of Tariq. I’d learned my lesson, I told the social worker soberly, like an AA zealot who had seen the light. A good girl now.

  They probably thought we were a typical one-parent family with a dad who was struggling to cope. We were never a typical anything, though. And Da wasn’t an inadequate father. He said almost nothing about that whole incident, but that was nothing to do with inadequacy, or with not knowing what to say. I think he just knew when there was no need for words.

  We never spoke on the way home when I finally left hospital but I didn’t see that as a punishment. It wasn’t the silent treatment that Peggy went in for.

  “Never again,” he said, looking at me when we pulled up outside the house in the car. I nodded. “You frightened the life out of Sarah,” he continued, unfastening his seat belt. And that was that. We never mentioned it again.

  I wasn’t the only one to go a little mad after Tariq died. Khadim and Nazima… well, they were never the same afterwards. That night we went round after Tariq died was awful, truly awful. Sarah had made the tea that night before we left, a meal that was eaten in almost total silence as we contemplated the ordeal ahead. A stew with doughballs you could have fired from canons. Bloody inedible. I was glad to have an excuse not to eat. Da’s stomach wasn’t great at the best of times and he had to eat Rennies all night. I remember the little white chalky marks at the corner of his mouth. His heart must have sunk when Nazima brought out the pakora. I couldn’t believe that even in the circumstances she made food, but we were honoured friends and honoured friends were always served food.

  It was Nazima who shocked me most. Everyone was devastated, of course, but Nazima was destroyed. Her grief was woven over her, intricate and delicate, like a cobweb woven over a stone statue. Her face was frozen in a permanent frown of despair, her forehead wrinkled, as if in the middle of some terrible trauma she had suddenly been turned to stone and could no longer change her expression. The bird-like movements, the pecks and flurries, were gone. She moved slowly, heavily, as if she scarcely had the energy to lift her feet.

  But it was the wailing I remember most. She was usually so quiet, Nazima, but now she kept talking in Urdu and crying and rocking on her chair, and Khadim had to translate. I had never seen her talk so much. Her children, she said, they were her life. One made her heart beat, one made her blood flow. Without one, how could she keep breathing, keep living? It was like trying to live without a vital organ. And then the wailing started and while she wailed, Khadim began to talk very fast in Urdu so that none of us knew what he was saying. The volume rocketed, and the emotional temperature rocketed, and it was frightening the way it felt, like things could easily get out of control.

  I remember Da touching Khadim, and talking softly to him, until he eventually stilled. He simply stared ahead, his mouth quivering, a single unshed tear threatening to spill from his lower lid. Shameena sat miserably beside her mother and reached for her hand and spoke gently in Urdu, and Nazima wiped her dopatta across her eyes, mopping up tears.

  I felt as if I would suffocate in the grief. I longed to get out. Da was lost for words, lost for what to do. Small talk didn’t come easily to him. But even in his stillness I remember feeling that somehow he was very, very… what’s the word? … ‘present’. He was very present. Very ‘there’. I think Khadim felt it. Nazima was past noticing anything external, anything anyone else did.

  It was such a relief to get out into the air that night. It was like the three of us breathed a collective sigh of relief when the door closed behind us. But the three remaining Khans were trapped in there, trapped inside something from which there was no escape and I felt awful leaving Shameena.

  Khadim didn’t cope well with Nazima’s devastation. She became locked inside a glass case of her own grief where she could see and be seen, but couldn’t connect with anything outside her box. Grief didn’t bind Khadim and Nazima together. It forced them apart. Somehow, they just couldn’t help one another.

  Da was there for Khadim but Khadim needed a woman, somehow. He wanted a female chat, not a male chat. He wanted sympathy, not solutions. The kind of sympathy women give men where they hold their head and listen, and cry with them, and indulge them, and make them feel that the most important thing in the world is the way they feel right now. The way they do with their children. And Nazima just wasn’t able to do that.

  I never had the nerve to ask Da about Khadim and Rita, one of the women who worked in the depot. I wish I had. I don’t know how far it went between them. Probably not very. I quite liked Rita but she made an odd combination with Khadim. I saw them sitting in the staff canteen one day when I had to meet Da for the dentist.

  I suppose Rita must have been roughly Khadim’s age but I always thought she looked like one of those ladies from the cosmetic counters in town. Dyed blonde hair, and glamorous in a painted, made-up kind of way. Lots of heavy gold jewellery. At first I couldn’t think what the attraction was for either of them, and then I realised what a powerful thing ears are. Listening. Rita walked into doors a lot. Bruised cheeks, black eyes, sore arms. Lots of accidents. Her husband was a bastard. I think she and Khadim listened to each other’s problems.

  I know Da worried about Khadim because when Rita left that day, he brought him over to a table and sat him down. It was a long refectory table and I was sitting a few seats away from the end where the two of them sat. I was reading a magazine but I could hear them both talking in low voices. I don’t think either noticed that I never once turned the page of that magazine. I was surprised at Da, because he always refused to get involved in other people’s private lives. But he was involved that day.

  “Nazima is a good woman,” I heard him say.

  “I can’t talk to Nazima,” Khadim hissed back.

  There was some low murmuring that I strained to hear but couldn’t. Then I heard Da say something about being a Muslim and how he couldn’t believe the change in him, and Khadim looked like he was going to cry and said where had being a good Muslim got him, because wasn’t Tariq dead? Had God listened to him?

&n
bsp; Khadim had put his elbows on the table and leant his head on his hands in despair. He missed Tariq. He missed him, he said. His shoulders had begun to shake. Where was the future now? What was the point?

  My eyes were glued to the magazine page, to a sentence in an article about summer make-up. ‘Lustrously pink with evening shimmer….’ I read over and over while listening. ‘Lustrously pink with evening shimmer…’

  “There is always a future,” I heard Da tell him. “Whether you want it or not, Khadim, the future just sweeps towards you in a wave. You can either surf the wave or drown in it but it will keep coming anyway. Sink or swim, Khadim. Tariq would want you to swim.”

  I thought about that advice often afterwards, and I wonder now about the place inside himself from which Da must have pulled it. Khadim’s head remained bowed. ‘Lustrously pink with evening shimmer…’

  “Rita’s a nice woman,” Da continued, “but she’s not the answer to anything. It’ll just make things worse. And worse for her too. If it goes any further and her man finds out…”

  The possibilities remained unspoken, but Khadim’s head seemed to sink even lower towards the table. I felt sorry for him, so sorry for him. Da told him we had to go because he had to take me to the dentist and he touched his shoulder as he passed. Khadim remained seated.

  “Rebecca,” Da called, and I glanced up as if I’d been absorbed in my magazine all along.

  “Bye, Khadim,” I said and followed Da out.

  Khadim arrived at our house late one night, maybe a week after that. The doorbell rang at 10.30 and we all looked at one another. I got up to answer.

  “I’ll get it, Becca,” Da said, getting out of his chair, because he didn’t want me answering at that time of night. I heard Khadim’s voice, high and urgent in the hall. He was in a state. I heard Rita’s name mentioned but couldn’t make anything else out.

  Da came in and looked at me and Sarah. “Girls,” he said and left the rest of the talking to his solemn grey-blue eyes, the way he so often did. We got up immediately. “Hi Khadim,” we said uneasily, walking past him and out of the room, but Khadim was too distraught to do more than grunt a response. Sarah and I looked sideways at each other on the stairs. We got ready for bed and then sat and chatted softly, but we left the bedroom door wide open in case we could hear anything from downstairs.

  It was near midnight when Khadim left.

  “Go home, Khadim. Go home to Nazima and sleep well,” we heard Da say softly in the hall. I looked down from the top landing and saw them quaintly shaking hands.

  “What was that all about?” I called to Da when the door closed.

  “Nothing.” I could see he was distracted when he looked up at me. “Someone from work has had an accident and is in hospital.”

  “Who?”

  “Rita.”

  “Is she seriously hurt?”

  “Head injuries. She’ll be okay.”

  “How did that happen?”

  I saw his mouth tighten.

  “She walked into a lamppost in the dark.”

  And then he went in and closed the sitting-room door.

  “Why is Khadim coming at midnight to tell Da about Rita being in hospital?” asked Sarah, puzzled. I shrugged my shoulders.

  I still think Rita’s man got the wrong end of the stick. I don’t think anything happened. I can’t see it, Khadim and Rita. But what I can see is that grief challenges your beliefs if you have any, like Khadim; and it challenges your lack of them if you have none, like me. I think Khadim was pushing things, testing them. Grief makes you a little mad and love makes you a little mad. The question is, just how mad did that make Da?

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  The trouble with talking to the dead is that they don’t answer back. Not in a voice that you can hear, anyway. Not in a voice you can understand. It’s like one of those one-sided conversations down a telephone line when you can hear the other person talking, but they can’t hear you. “Hello?” the disembodied voice says. “Hello?” And down your end you’re screaming, “It’s me!” But it doesn’t make any difference. No matter how loudly you shout, no matter how angry you get, there can be no communication. It’s as if you are on two different networks.

  Maybe it’s like that between the living and the dead. How do you interpret silence? For a while, you strain to hear anything that might confirm a listener: the whispered tune of steady exhalations; the percussion crash of a sudden cough. But when all you hear is silence, it’s hard to know if it’s a living silence or a dead silence.

  Restless sleep interrupts the bursts of listening. I wake with a headache, nose miserably blocked with pollen, eyes gummy. Turn my face into the pillow. Three days without Da. Four till we bury him. Running out of time. I pad sleepily into the bathroom, the tiles sticky beneath the warmth of my feet, and splash cold water into my eyes, trying to wash out the pollen and ease the burning. I have to get to the library today, find the truth of the story I was told by Marion, the assistant in the Lochglas shop. Look up old newspaper cuttings. Yesterday was a lost day. The library would have been shut on a Sunday, but then I probably wouldn’t have made sense of any newspaper articles anyway. I wasn’t making sense of anything yesterday.

  I couldn’t stay in Lochglas as I’d planned. I drove from the village like a madwoman, careering along the twisting single-track road to the bridge that would take me back to Inverness. Running away, I suppose. Over and over in my head I could see Marion in her pink overall, saying, “Joseph Connaghan,” and looking at me curiously. It was like I had pressed some rewind button, and the scene just kept playing and replaying. Joseph Connaghan. And again. Joseph Connaghan. Her hand lifting the bag with my morning roll up towards me and then rewinding back down to her side. And forward and back. Joseph Connaghan. Joseph Connaghan.

  My B & B is a small chintzy guest house down by the river. Floral sofas and polished sideboards, a piano with open music waiting to be played in the residents’ lounge. It’s not expensive, just a nice house rather than a hotel, but it’s still more than I can afford. I wasn’t in a mood for thrift yesterday. This place had a credit-card symbol in the window and I didn’t care what it cost. I had other things on my mind.

  I ask my landlady for directions to the library, but there is one other thing I have to do first. I have put it off too long. I need to make a call, but the mobile reception is hit and miss and this conversation is going to be difficult enough as it is. Round the corner from the guest house is a phone box. The heat is suffocating as the door closes behind me and it stinks, but the traffic noise from the road makes it impossible to keep the door open. As I dial, a picture of the house in Glasgow slots into place in my head, pulled from a mental filing cabinet. I see the empty room, the phone ringing out and shattering the silence.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice sounds dead.

  “Sarah? It’s me.”

  There is a silence and I look out at the street, watch a fair-haired girl in lime-green shorts and a white t-shirt pass by licking ice cream. My mouth feels hot and dry.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Inverness.”

  “Inverness! What the fuck are you doing in Inverness!”

  I’ve never heard Sarah swear before. It’s surprisingly shocking, like Santa telling a child to piss off.

  “Sarah, I’m sorry. I couldn’t… I just had to get away.”

  “You always have to bloody get away, Rebecca. You spend your entire life ‘getting away’. And why Inverness, for God’s sake?”

  Sarah sounds angrier than I’ve ever heard her.

  “You know why. We used to live up here.”

  “So?”

  “So.”

  She doesn’t wait.

  “You just take off without a word, leaving me in that house with Father Riley on my own. It was so bloody embarrassing. It took me half an hour to realise you weren’t coming back. I didn’t even want to speak to you that night when I finally left. Des said you
went shooting past him. By the time I got round next morning you’d taken off for God knows where. Charlie and Peggy and I have been frantic.”

  “I’m sorry.” Now Da’s gone, it’s everyone else on one side, me on the other.

  “Sorry! That’s easy to say! Rebecca, we are trying to deal with everything with Da and you just… just… make things worse by…” As soon as she says Da’s name her voice begins to waver.

  “Sarah. Sarah don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” God, it’s stifling in this box. I feel the sweat on my back. I can scarcely breathe. I open the door with my foot, trying to let some air in. A lorry trundles by, its brakes squealing as it stops at the junction.

  “Sorry, Sarah, what was that?” I let the door fall.

  “I said, I miss him.”

  Her voice is scarcely above a whisper. The telephone box is filthy but I let my head drop onto the smeared pane of glass anyway.

  “I know, Sarah. I know.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not here, are you?”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Make it up? How are you going to do that exactly?”

  I look into the newsagent’s shop window outside the telephone box.

  “I’ll bring you a stick of rock and a soft toy Nessie with a tartan hat.”

  I can hear her snort at the other end but it is a half-laugh, despite herself.

  “Silly cow,” she says, and it makes me smile faintly hearing Sarah talk this way.

  “How many do you think will come to the funeral?”

  “Peggy reckons not more than twenty or thirty of us.”