The Stillman

by Tom McCulloch

  When I came back to the bedroom the urn didn’t look right anymore. I moved it to the bedside table. But the thought of waking up in the night and seeing the shadow of my mother skulking in the half-light made me move it to the floor.

  What now? Was the protocol gravely to consider death, all the family members who’d disappeared as the years passed, all the traumatic illnesses and slow declines. But none of those deaths would come, no grainy faces loomed out at me. I rolled over naked and looked down at the floor. Yep, my mother was still there, the closest I’d been to her in over forty years. I felt nothing. Even pre-urn she’d been dead to me all this time. It was unacceptable to compare her to other family members. I moved the urn back to the coffee table.

  ‘Adelina?’

  ‘Jim? Yes?’

  7.03pm. She’d told me I could get her on her home phone any time after seven. ‘I hope I’m not bothering you Adelina. I’ve had a bit of a strange day. I hope yours was better?’

  ‘Are you ok?’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘It is ok to tell me the truth.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re free tonight?’

  ‘Tonight? Yes I – ’

  ‘I mean, I don’t want to put you out.’

  ‘Put me out, but I am inside?’

  ‘No, I mean I don’t want to cause you any trouble, if you are busy.’

  ‘You have not seen Cuban television, no?’

  She was there within the hour. She was obviously choosing to ignore the object on the table until I decided to mention it. Instead she was friendly, talking about her day. My monosyllabic answers soon silenced her. It wasn’t conversation I wanted, just her simple presence.

  We sipped neat rum. I had put on Bermuda shorts last worn around 1990, the palm trees and surfer dude long faded. I wondered when my skinny legs had got so hairy. Between us the ash-tray was almost full. She asked me why I didn’t put on the air-con and I shrugged. She was wearing a knee-length denim skirt. I noticed her slim legs but didn’t stare.

  ‘Do you think the dead belong in the same house as the living?’ I asked, pointing at the urn.

  She glanced at the coffee table and looked a bit nervous.

  ‘Must be strange to think that your friend has been reduced to something that fits in such a small container?’

  ‘Jim. It is very difficult for – ’

  ‘Back home some people make a feature of these things. They turn it into a shrine and surround it with photographs and candles. Imagine you dropped it, imagine looking down at the mess of white ash and seeing something? Like a tooth. Or a toe. Imagine seeing the toe of your dead husband in the middle of the carpet? You’d never expect such a horrible thing to happen. But it might, surely even crematoriums have technical problems now and then?’

  ‘In Cuba we don’t really have these . . . containers.’

  ‘What will I do with her?’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yes. Her.’

  ‘There is no her. Not in there. She is everywhere, anywhere, but not there.’

  ‘It may as well be full of manure for all that I can connect with it. You know manure?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Shit. Cow shit. Horses. They use it as a fertiliser on the fields to make things grow. I want to take that urn full of shit and throw it in the sea. Do you think she’d like that? Did she like the sea? Would she like to be floating free and dead in the Caribbean, slowly dissolving? ‘Cause that’s what she was like for me, a slow dissolve from the age of four till nothing was left, nothing left but the smell of shit that I can still smell coming out of that fuckin urn.’

  Adelina put a hand on my arm.

  ‘Do you have psychiatrists in Cuba? Have you heard of ‘‘closure’’? Apparently everyone wants closure but I got closure when she closed the door one day and pissed off. Why would I want her to explain herself, like sure, I understand, water under the bridge and all that. Fuck closure.’

  She took her hand away. She looked as if she was going to say something then changed her mind.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘About Helen?’

  ‘You said last night that you’d tell me about her. So I’d like to know. Tell me something.’

  ‘I do not think this is the right time.’

  ‘Come on, tell me something!’

  ‘Jim, you are drunk. Please.’

  ‘Of course I’m drunk, my mother’s sitting over there in a fucking urn.’

  ‘I will go now Jim and I think you should sleep.’

  ‘I dreamed about her you know. On the flight over. For the first time in years. We were both on this amazing long beach, nothing for miles in either direction. And she’s talking, talking, talking but I can’t hear anything. She’s saying all these things and I can’t make out a word. When I woke up I felt so claustrophobic, like there was a hand on my throat.’

  She got up then and walked to the door. When she turned round her gaze mixed pity and contempt, like she’d expected better and again been disappointed. ‘You can phone me, Jim. But never shout at me. I do not know you. Your mother was my friend. Not you.’

  Four

  Apparently my chinos are too short, they come too far up the ankle when they should fall across the bridge of the foot. My wife sent me up the stairs to get a pair of jeans, to compare.

  ‘Right. Take your slippers off.’

  ‘Katie, don’t you – ’

  ‘Stand there!’

  So there I stand, bare-foot on the freezing lino, top lit like a baddie in a German expressionist movie. The Cabinet of Jim Drever. I need some heavy eye make-up, exaggerated gestures.

  ‘Right. Now put the other pair back on.’

  I do as I’m told.

  ‘Seeee,’ she shrieks. ‘They’re much shorter!’

  I look at my chinos and wiggle my toes, which seem to be taking on a blue tinge around the tip. The length still looks fine to me. I’d be more inclined to single out the fact that I still wear chinos, last fashionable in 1988, or that they’ve been over-washed into a sickly marbled green. But no, she’s picked on the fact they’re too short. When they’re obviously not.

  The worst thing is that she’s being playful, which annoys me even more. Our arguments are usually heated and often vicious, every word targeted. It throws me off kilter when she picks on something that I’m not meant to take seriously. But invariably I do, can’t help it. I counter-attack, singling out the pot of lentil soup she’s made for dinner and managed to burn.

  ‘It tastes like embers from the fire.’ Hardly a biting insult, granted, which is probably why she laughs. She’s heading for the high ground, trying not to let the situation degenerate into a shouting match. She even chuckles and shakes her head, like oh Jim, why do you always have to take everything so seriously. Yep, she can be disciplined when she has to be.

  And now Amber appears, her mother immediately enlisting her help. I have to take off my slippers and stand up again. Amber takes an appraising step back, angling her head. Yes, she agrees, they’re definitely half-masts. The look of savage triumph on my wife’s face is almost medieval. The worst thing is that as I sit at the kitchen table listening to them gibber on about tomorrow’s wedding-dress fitting I can feel a draft on my ankles. It can only mean one thing, my trousers have ridden up because they are too short. They are indeed half-masts.

  ‘She’s going to look lovely,’ my wife says later.

  ‘She will do.’

  ‘Did you see how excited she was?’

  ‘I did.’

  Amber’s been excited about her wedding since she was four years old. I wonder if this says anything about me. Did she realise early that her father was such a distant presence that he couldn’t ever be relied upon to be the manly rock that every daughter needs? Maybe she projected outwards, yearned for the day when her Donnie Juan would appear.

  Round here you get what you can get. She probably wasn’t
too fussed when Peter appeared not on a panting steed but a transit van smelling of stale fags and chip suppers. Expectation is relative. For Amber, this was Mary Mastrantonio meeting Kevin Costner in Robin Hood.

  My wife’s dewy-eyed, a troubling prospect. We’ll either end up talking about the kids all night or have sex. If I’m unlucky it’ll be both. ‘I’ve never seen her like this, she’s really blossomed. Do you remember that Goth phase? I always knew she was more feminine than that.’

  I’d actually liked the Goth phase. Well ‘like’ is maybe a bit too strong. But the rebellion was surprising and I’d admired it. I’d never have had the balls, even if I’d wanted to whitewash my face and huddle in a basement with angst and acne-ridden teenagers. Like that time when we were teenagers and JC wore a pair of leather trousers to a pub in the Town. The classic Jim Morrison phase. We barely avoided a kicking for being a couple of fuckin faggots.

  With Amber it was actually the shock on her mother’s face that I liked more than the rebellion. I tried to understand Jim, I really, really did. But in the end she put it down to drugs. Drugs! Defeat by any other name. You can’t understand your teenager so you put it down to drugs, the evil of drugs (she actually said that). In the past it would’ve been the devil, Amber burned at the point overlooking the Firth, my wife nodding grimly, it’s for her own good. ‘All we need now,’ I suggest, ‘is for the Boy to find himself a girlfriend. It’s just what he needs.’

  She’s appalled but amused at the same time. ‘God, can you imagine it?’

  ‘Maybe the McAllister lassie from up the glen.’

  She gives me a nudge in the ribs, a guilty smile. ‘Stop it, that’s awful.’

  ‘What!’ I protest, like I’m serious. The McAllister girl, Anne or something, has learning difficulties. ‘He could do worse.’

  ‘Stop it.’ All of a sudden she looks appalled.

  I can hear the usual thrash metal pumping out from the Boy’s room upstairs. A few years back I asked Malky how his kid was doing. He’s fourteen now, at the wanking. I take the glass of wine my wife hands me and swallow half, trying to obliterate the image of my masturbating son. That’s the trick about being a parent, honing the strategies to deal with the horror.

  She’s looking pensive now. ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with him though?’

  ‘He’s just a teenager.’

  ‘I know, I know, but some of the things he does are just so weird.’

  ‘I’m sure you were a bit weird yourself at that age, weren’t you?’

  ‘But that’s the thing,’ she whispers, all conspiratorial. ‘I don’t think I was. You weren’t either, I remember. What do you think happened to Gonzo? I mean, really what do you think?’

  Gonzo was our cat that went missing about 6 months ago. ‘The cat? The cat was about 15 years old, she just crawled away to die. Who do you think’s skulking up there, Ted Bundy Junior?’

  She nods vaguely then suddenly seems to make her mind up about something, face brightening. ‘You’re right. Amber turned out ok. I’m sure the boy will too.’ She smiles, reaching across the table and putting a hand on mine. ‘We drank an awful lot of wine that night too, when I got pregnant with her, do you remember?’

  ‘How do you know the exact night?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake Jim.’ She snatches her hand away. ‘Can you not just take my word for it? Call it woman’s intuition.’

  ‘How come there’s never any man’s intuition?’

  ‘You really are determined to spoil this aren’t you? Well I won’t let you.’

  I didn’t realise I was spoiling anything. Now she’s all playful again, coming round and giving me a shoulder massage. I close my eyes. She’s actually quite good at this. She starts on about Amber again, the wedding preparations, how the final number for the meal is 65, that the menu is sorted. And the Dress, the Dress, she’s more excited than Amber about the Dress.

  ‘You can give me a hand when you come back,’ she says when I get up for a pee. ‘I said to Amber we’d have first go at the place settings, who sits with who. Oh come on Jim, it’ll be fun to do this together.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  I spend a long time in the toilet. I even brush my teeth. She doesn’t really want my help so why the pretence? I open the bathroom window. Breathe, breathe the cold air. The kitchen window is directly below me, casting a vague yellow glow on the white frozen ground of the back garden. In the middle of the glow is a darker patch, something blocking the kitchen light. My wife, she must be standing at the window too. Someone looking at our house from a distance would see the two of us standing alone at our different windows, staring out.

  Mean Streets has almost finished when she opens the door to the Den. She stands behind me and I feel myself tensing. Then she tousles my hair, like I’m a little boy. ‘You’re such a prick,’ she whispers.

  She’s right. She goes to work the next morning without a word. Ambiguity. I can’t help it. I sit in my purple pants re-reading my mother’s journal and realise she’s the very opposite. Straight down the line. No subtlety. I should be grateful for that small mercy, I suppose. It would have been upsetting, cruel, to be given the impression that she wasn’t sure about her choices.

  Nope, she locked on to the target and never deviated. For better, for worse. Like the grim-faced words of the minister on our wedding day. I repeated but wasn’t sure I meant it. But you can’t hedge your bets when the congregation’s crowding, alert to any err or umm, any verbal slippage that might reveal a nagging doubt. That’s the whole problem, we repeat without thinking, trusting that happy certainty will forever prevail if we say something often enough.

  Not me though. Never have. Some might call this a failing. Certainty, after all, is the mother of belief in the beardy man in the sky, the Red Flag or the swastika, even a football team. Ambiguity can only lead to disrespect. Like the kids at school who changed their allegiance based on who’d just won the league. I’m sure Man United didn’t have half as many fans back in the 1980s when they were pish. And no doubt they’ll all melt away when the success starts to dry up. Then we’ll be mocking the fair-weather fans, their disloyal ambiguity.

  I never had any certainty in any of it. I can imagine a God and not imagine a God, it just depends, on whether I’m constipated, drunk, how heavy it’s raining . . . Football? You can fuck right off with football. Imagine the utopia we’d be living in if the loyalty and absolute belief that people show for a football team was mirrored in politics. Only the fascists seem to manage it, never the lefties. But it’s easier to be a selfish bastard than a saint, the bovine herds happy to believe the default system we’re left with is the pinnacle of human achievement.

  Course it is! Who wouldn’t want 25 brands of cornflake, who wouldn’t want a cabal of interchangeable wet-lipped deviants long to rule over us, who wouldn’t want to fly, fly, fly to sweaty-arsed places where we do everything we do at home but wearing fewer clothes? Even today, as the system collapses around our penny-grubbing fingers, we can’t bring ourselves to imagine that there might just be an alternative. It’s because we can’t function with ambiguity. Except me, which is why I find it hard to garner enthusiasm. About most things.

  Take last night. I feel a bit embarrassed. It’s unnecessary in most cases, perhaps even all, to pick a fight about lentil soup. It’s probably also wrong, being a father and husband, to be so obviously uninterested in my daughter’s wedding. My wife was in a good mood. I should’ve been able to indulge her for just a little while. I should be able to reminisce without cynicism. But I’m not convincing enough to lie properly. My wife hates my ambivalence. Why can’t you ever say what you mean, why do you always have to twist things?

  My wife gets home early, mood improved by the latest appearance of The Dress. She, Amber, and the dress fitter bunker down in the living room, the Boy and I under strict instructions to stay upstairs. To reinforce the point we were both brought bacon r
olls and a coffee. I close the last journal entry. Although I only got the email a couple of days ago the thought of not getting another is vaguely disappointing. Outside the world remains buried in white. Nothing moves. I click to Porn Hub but can’t manage an erection. How many middle-aged men are sitting in cold bedrooms as the snow piles up, idly watching an Italian orgy?

  A sudden thump and I instantly close the site. Amazing how fast I can move when I think I’m going to get caught having a tug. A true gift, discovered age twelve and honed ever since. Amber’s shouting. The slam of a door followed by frantic knocking, my wife’s raised voice and words I can’t make out. Sam Spade would conclude that Amber has locked herself in the bathroom for an as yet unknown reason. Now would be a good time to take the interest I so spectacularly failed to show last night. I step onto the landing and peer down the stairwell.

  ‘Everything ok?’

  In a moment my wife’s face appears below me. She looks worried and puts a finger to her lips.

  ‘What is it?’ I half-mouth, half-whisper.

  My wife glances round warily then quickly puffs out her cheeks, patting her stomach at the same time. Then she’s gone. In a moment the knocking on the bathroom door starts. Amber honey it’ll be ok, don’t worry.

  When I turn round I see the Boy at his bedroom door. He gets more pasty-faced every day. I see a screen flickering behind him. Maybe Bruce Lee’s face, he’s obsessed with the box-set I got him.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I can almost feel the glee waiting to burst out.

  ‘There’s a problem with the dress.’

  He suddenly looks triumphant. ‘She’s too fat, isn’t she?’

  ‘No she’s – ’