CHAPTER FIVE
I was prepared to do a little repentance and penance with Sarah and Peggy. I dreaded talking to them. I parked around the corner for five minutes and breathed deeply before I went in. I had concocted a cover story on the long journey south, just to tide me over until I decide what to do about Sarah. But I didn’t have to use it. There were no questions. I think the two of them had got together and decided all this nonsense was just my way of dealing with grief, and I don’t suppose they were wrong there. Anyway, they must have discussed how to play it, because both of them just hugged me and said they were glad I was back. I was grateful for that.
Sarah and I went together to see Da at the funeral parlour. She had already been while I was in Lochglas, but she came again. I can still feel a tremor inside me, thinking about it. I was terrified of seeing him. Terrified. Sarah was calm. The parlour had that awful dimmed-light feeling the minute we walked through the door, that reverential hush that makes you crave the comfort of noise. There was a huge vase of pinks on the front reception, just browning slightly at the edges, like they had been singed with a match flame.
“We’re here to see Joseph Connaghan,” Sarah said quietly.
The way she said it, it sounded like we were in a hospital at visiting time, that we’d see Da sitting up in bed when we went in the room. I said nothing.
The woman in the dark suit smiled kindly and said to just wait one moment. She went to check one of the side rooms and, I guess, switch the lights on. Not much point in wasting electricity on the dead. She held the door open and motioned us to come through and Sarah squeezed my hand briefly. And then we were in there.
You looked lovely, Da. Do you remember we used to joke about the Irish and the way they sit around at wakes and say ah, so and so was a beautiful corpse? You had me in stitches one night talking about some old timer who lost his wife. Remember that story? He was in the pub, chatting, and he said, “Ah sure now, Josephine was a lovely corpse,” and another old timer said sure she was, but the nicest corpse he ever did see was his Anna. The fists were flying in minutes, like something out of that old John Wayne film, The Quiet Man, that we watched on television one Christmas. My dead body is better than your dead body. But I’m not being Irish, Da: you really did look lovely.
There was pink in your cheeks and a faint smile on your lips and your hands were clasped over your tummy. And I knew it was all fakery, the skill of the mortician, that peaceful smile and flush of pink, but I wanted to pretend it wasn’t. I wanted to pretend there was something spiritual that made your body look like that, that there was some significance to it other than the undertaker’s skill with blusher.
“He looks so peaceful, doesn’t he?” whispered Sarah, and we held hands beside you, Da. I tried to imagine if you could see us.
I wanted to hold you; I so wanted to hold you. It was the fear stopped me, because all I could think about was the old you, the softness of you and the smell of you and the warm, pumping blood in your veins, and I knew if I held you now it wouldn’t be like that. Then Sarah put her head on your chest and she cuddled you, actually cuddled you, and I felt bad that she could do it and I couldn’t.
“What does he feel like?” I whispered and she said softly that you were fine, that it wasn’t frightening, it was just Da. There were more things to be frightened of than your own dad when he’s dead, she said, and I knew it was true.
So I reached out a hand and I put my fingers on your hand. Not bravely, but tentatively, like I was touching a trap that might snap on my fingers any moment. And I felt the coldness, the feeling of hard, cold marble beneath my fingers and I gasped with it, with the sheer, awful horror of it. It was more than a gasp, like a squeal, and Sarah caught hold of me and held me up because my legs simply gave way beneath me, and I leant on the arms she placed under my oxters and let her take the weight of me because I could do nothing else. I didn’t cry, I bawled with sheer fright, my mouth open, the howl silent.
“It’s okay, Becca,” Sarah whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” She kept repeating it in my ear, whispering, soothing like a mother to a baby. My little sister. “It’s okay, Becca. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s still Da, it’s just Da… just Da… just Da, Becca. Ssh, ssh, ssh.” She wrapped her arms round me then, not hesitantly, as she had when Tariq died, but with the confidence of a childhood left behind, of maturity. “It’s just Da.”
But it wasn’t, Da. It wasn’t you. You had looked so real somehow lying there, so much like you had when you were alive, but there was nothing human about the feel of your hand. You were cold as a slab of stone. I might as well have been touching one of those statues guarding you in the church that night.
I left then, Sarah holding me still, and we walked past reception where a woman was changing the pinks for fresh white lilies. Out into the streets where there was noise and talk and laughter and there was comfort in all of it. I didn’t see the point in staying in there. You weren’t there. I feel closer to you now, lying talking to you in the dark, than I did standing over your body.
What does that mean? I have no idea. Maybe tomorrow’s whole process will be hocus pocus too. I don’t know what to believe in. Except in you. I’m not sure I believe in a heavenly Father but I believe in my earthly one. I went looking for you both – and at least I found one of you. I have put my hands in your wounds and I believe. I know what I know. You were a good man, Da. All your life you were a good man. We came first, Sarah and I. Everything else was sacrificed.
Maybe you loved Mother too much to find another partner. But how could you anyway, with all that history, all that baggage, with everything that had to be kept secret? Easier to stay alone. Remember Betty, the widow who lived a few doors along from us? Sarah and I used to tease you that she had her eye on you, and in all honesty I think she probably did. She was a smart-looking woman, younger than you. But I stopped teasing you about her because it wasn’t a comfortable joke. It just didn’t seem funny. When we met her in the street, and she engaged you in conversation, I remember you spoke politely because your manners were always impeccable. But there was a distance there, an emotional distance, that I never saw any woman ever bridge. I wonder how it felt when you were alone at night. I wonder about the ache then.
It wouldn’t have been possible really, would it? Not even if you’d wanted it. All those secrets. A whole other life to hide. If you’d met someone else, if you’d told them, would you have seen fear in their eyes at every tiff? Would they have told me and Sarah? I can understand why none of it seemed worth it. Why you simply made do and got on. How could you find someone else who knew you well enough to know, really know, that you hadn’t done it? To know the colour of your guts when they spilled inside out. Like I know now.
We brought your body to the church that night, a short ceremony in preparation for the requiem mass tomorrow. I keep thinking of you now, lying in that box in the still church with the lights out. I don’t like to think of you there, abandoned amongst all the statues and shadows; the candles and the altar curtains; the coldness of stone walls. No one with you. It is a cold place to lie. I haven’t abandoned you, Da. I carry you in a warmer place.
I dread tomorrow. I cannot imagine, I just cannot imagine, laying your body in the cold earth. Throwing dust on your coffin. Putting flowers on your grave. It hurts. Part of me doesn’t want to stop hurting because it’s the only live thing I have left, the only connection straight from me to you, an umbilical cord of pain. Once that goes, what’s left?
Except love, I suppose. When I think about it, the only thing that’s left from your life is your love and maybe that’s the only thing worth keeping from a life anyway. I suppose I am part of your love. All these nights looking for something that endures from you and I was it all along. What lasts after you have gone? I do.
And Sarah. Because love isn’t just about blood, is it? I am sorry. I’ve just realised that in all these conversations I’ve never once told you the obvious. I loved you, Da. Un
conditionally. I love you still. Whatever you have or have not done.
CHAPTER SIX
Shameena brought me back from the land of the dead when she came north for the funeral. I could feel it almost immediately, the first tiny move outward from inner obsession. It was so good to see her. I did not tell her about Da, about Mother. But it was good to talk to her, to listen to her voice in response. So many of my conversations in the last few days had been monologues to Da. There were bonds between the living and the dead that had been forged and they cannot ever be broken.
I know now that time was special as well as terrible. It would stand alone like a small island in my life, one that is hard to reach again. But even back then, I knew a dead man could not be my only confidant.
Shameena made it to the church for Da’s body being brought in. Khadim was there too, and Shameena said it was the first time she had seen him in eight years. Eight years! I cannot believe that level of obstinacy. They sat apart. She wouldn’t come back to the house in case Khadim did. I told her not to be silly, but she said tonight and tomorrow were about Da and me, about Sarah and Peggy and Charlie, and not about her and Khadim. She wasn’t going to risk any scenes. She needn’t have worried. Khadim didn’t come back either.
I know that she had found it hard to live without Khadim and Nazima. But she could not live without her dreams. It is the hardest thing in the world to live without dreams. She tried to do what Khadim wanted and spent a year studying accountancy, but she was dying inside. She always knew she was trying to take Tariq’s place, that sooner or later she would have to live for herself. When she finally decided to leave, we planned it for weeks and weeks. Shameena was so methodical, much more so than me. She walked the music college audition, of course. It was the practicalities that took more time.
She said Khadim would chuck her out when he found out, so she had to get herself a room in a flat. I’m not sure he would have had it in him when it came down to it. Shameena lived in a tiny grotty room in Brixton, with peeling floral wallpaper and beige paint and taps that spat water with a deep-seated rumble. I visited her from time to time when I was working away, particularly the year I did a summer season in Kent. I used to go up to her place in London and buy her takeaway Chinese and we’d talk until the early hours of the morning.
Shameena was like a trapped bird that had been set free, but you know what happens to birds when you release them. They go mad, fluttering their wings wildly and battering them against every obstacle in their path until they realise they don’t have to struggle. The most serious obstacle was Malik, a sharp-suited political researcher she met at a Labour Party meeting. Malik was funny and vibrant and used to tell us about being a teenager and climbing out of his bedroom window and down the drainpipe to meet girls his parents didn’t approve of – which meant all girls who weren’t “his kind”. I was dead impressed by Malik. I thought he had broken through all the cultural restrictions imposed on him.
I was wrong, but as I’ve come to understand, how do you know anyone really? Malik attended lectures in his spare time on the feminist perspective of Marxism. Then he and Shameena became unofficially engaged and he suddenly turned into Khadim and started giving her a hard time about her clothes and her career, and talked about her giving up her music to have his babies. Shameena said what happened to the feminist perspective and he said he wasn’t marrying a feminist perspective, was he?
Shameena was upset when it finished but she didn’t need marriage. She didn’t need anybody. She was happier than almost anyone else I knew. The only time she got upset was talking about Khadim and Nazima. She wrote to them once. Shameena told them she would be in Glasgow one Saturday and named a restaurant and a time. Only Nazima showed. Silent Nazima who never went anywhere alone. She told Shameena that she and Khadim never spoke about the letter. Nazima knew Khadim wouldn’t go. And Khadim knew Nazima would.
On the Saturday, Nazima went and got her coat. Khadim said nothing. Shameena reckoned that if he had acknowledged where Nazima was going he would have had to forbid her, and he knew Nazima would have had to defy him, and then where would they be? So they both pretended. Khadim read a newspaper while she got her coat and her bag, as if it was every day that she went out walking on her own. But Nazima told Shameena that when she turned the corner of the street, she saw a figure at the upstairs window.
Nazima spent all lunch gripping Shameena’s hand and not letting go. She had lost her son first, and now she had lost her daughter too. It was obstinacy, stupid obstinacy. She was nothing without her children. When it was time to go, she cried and cried and Shameena had to take her back home in a taxi. Nazima clung to her in the cab, and Shameena wiped her tears and promised she would write and they could meet again, but Nazima just shook her head and sobbed. She knew. Shameena said it broke her heart when the taxi drove off, leaving her on the pavement. As the cab turned, she stared at the house that had been her home, thinking of old times and wishing they were back. Wishing Tariq was back. The curtains upstairs moved slightly. She knew Khadim was watching.
Shameena said Khadim was too stubborn to ever make peace. I told her she should turn up on their doorstep and see what happened. I couldn’t imagine him closing the door. She said she didn’t want to embarrass him, that he had taken a stand and she could not compromise her father’s dignity. I said stuff his dignity. Save dignity for the grave. But Shameena is almost as stubborn as him.
As we gathered to receive my father’s body into the church, I wondered what each of them was thinking. Shameena was already successful, but I knew that one day she would be a star. When that happened, Khadim would have been proved wrong in his ambitions for her. And his pride would be a bigger obstacle than ever in their relationship. Death makes you acutely aware of seizing opportunities and I wanted them to seize theirs. You get a sense of urgency in the week after a death that is hard to hold onto. While it was still with me, I warned Shameena not to leave it much longer. Time runs out, I said. Time runs out before the right things are said and done.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tariq comes to me in the night. In the darkness, when the pain is at its height. I am lying awake, thinking about the morning’s funeral when I hear the click of the door, the creak as it opens gently. I turn then, see him standing in the light from the hall. He smiles at me but says nothing. He is slender still, but strong, a visible pulse beating in his bare chest. The hunched gauntness of him is gone; his shoulders filled out with the soft curve of muscle, the bruised blue lips now full and pink. Tariq, triumphant, the way I always imagined him.
I whisper his name and he holds out his arms to me. I do not raise myself from the bed to go to him. Tariq is strong, but I fear the vision is fragile. If I move, perhaps he will disappear. His arms remain open as he walks towards me but I lie still. His embrace is simply warmth, the slow spread of gentle heat through my body.
Then I feel his lips on my neck as he holds me to him, the gentleness hardening to need, and at last I move to grasp him, turn my lips to find his. Before I do, he is gone. It is not instant; the warmth simply dissolves until there is nothing left but an afterglow. The sadness that follows his going is blunted by a sense of wonder that Tariq came to me, that for a little while we touched. Afterwards, I drift almost instantly into sleep, as if he had administered a drug. A comforting sleep, the deepest since Da died.
A dream? I suppose it was. And yet it seemed so real. Dreams, reality… I’m not sure I know the difference any more.
Five years on, I still do not know what I make of that ‘visit’ from Tariq. As soon as I wrote it down, I felt tempted to erase it, to pretend it did not happen. I know what people think when you say that stuff. You see it in their eyes: the polite enquiry that masks a certain sneer. A tiny rise of a cynical eyebrow. I know. I used to do it.
And yet, I cannot censor my own story. I have to assemble everything that happened. Give the evidence. Hope that one day, somehow, a reliable verdict will be possible.
FRIDAY
CHAPTER ONE
The weather breaks during the night before Da’s funeral, the lazy heat replaced by air with a lemon-zest tang to it. There will be showers before morning is out. I went to sleep last night covered only by a sheet but I wake chilled in the early morning. Strangest of nights. The duvet is in a heap at the bottom of the bed and I pull it up round my neck and lie still; listening for the sounds of the living, waiting to bury the dead.
Funeral day. Grey skies and grey heart, dead as charred ash smouldering in the grate. I feel the same strange mixture of dread and acceptance I had when I cradled Da’s head in my lap and simply waited for the end.
Footsteps on the stairs. Outside the door, the floorboards creak. Sarah. We decided we both wanted to leave for the funeral from Da’s, from the family house that has been so much a part of our lives.
“Are you awake, Becca?”
Her voice is low.
“Yeah, come in.”
The door creaks. Sarah sits on the end of the bed tucking her feet under her.
“Here.” I move over in the narrow bed and lift the duvet back so she can sit in beside me. “Bloody hell! Your feet are like ice.”
“Sorry.” She smiles faintly. “I went down to the kitchen to put the kettle on and the floor is cold.”
We sit side by side, leaning against the headboard.
“Want some tea?”
“If you’re making it.”
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