by Paul Burman
“Mum!” I shout, running to fetch her.
She wipes her hands on her apron as she moves towards the bulky shadow, which fills the glass panel and spills darkness down the hallway. I stand behind her, not wanting to miss out.
“Mrs Passmore?” the policeman says in a voice that’s deep, but which he softens in a way that makes it sound misplaced.
“Yes.”
“It’s about your husband. I wonder if I might come in.”
She stands a moment, unmoving.
“Go to your room, Thomas.”
I scramble upstairs and lay on the freezing lino, hoping to hear from there, but can’t. All I hear is the murmur of a deep voice, which sounds like water burbling over rocks from where I am, and then a silence, followed by my mother saying, “Thank you.”
Only that is clear: ‘Thank you’.
There are no tears or screams to remember.
I find her sitting in my dad’s armchair. She doesn’t see or hear me at first, but is looking down, staring at her clenched hands, pinched tight and frozen.
“Why did the policeman call?” I ask. Twice. “Mum?”
“Weak,” she mutters. “So weak.” And I wonder whether she’s talking about the policeman, me, my father or herself.
Extending an arm to draw me to her, she then withdraws it and folds her arms, squeezing herself in and upright.
“Go to your room, Thomas. Go straight to your room. No, wait; come here first. Stand here. I have to tell you something.”
To begin with, my childhood imagination paints a simple picture of his death. I imagine a cartoon-like collision between two cars, similar to scenes from my favourite comics. Kerpow, bang, crash! The smash snaps something vital in his body, like the filament in a light bulb, the snuffing of a candle, but everything else remains intact. Kerplonk! Dead. No blood, no gore, no disembowelling agony; no chest-embedded steering wheel, no shredded limbs or dismemberment; no ebbing, waning, draining of consciousness among shards of plastic, chrome and rubber littering the bitumen; no expanding puddle of oil, petrol, brake fluid, blood, piss.
Our house becomes crowded with visitors, relatives, well-wishers, busy-bodies, who suffocate Christmas with their shrouded whispers and morbid clothes, and their stink of eau-de-Cologne and mothballs. There are aunts I’ve never seen before, who expect me to sit still or play in silence without toys, and when I ask if I too can go to the funeral they ignore me so furiously that I daren’t suggest it again. So I find pleasure where I can, and it sits in a bucket, decorated with red crêpe paper and a painting of Father Christmas.
Each morning I turn the tree lights on and leave the rest of the room to winter darkness. Sitting cross-legged in front of our tree, I soak up the warmth of its brightness and the richness of its scent, until Mum comes in and switches them off again.
On the second morning, she says, “Leave the lights alone. I don’t want those bloody things on.”
Someone calls and delivers a clear plastic bag that contains Dad’s ‘effects’. Mum thanks them and leaves it untouched, unopened, on the cabinet near the front door, at the bottom of the stairs. When she’s not looking, I stare at the contents: keys, his wallet, some coins, his wristwatch on its brown leather strap, his tobacco pouch and his comb. I want to open the bag and touch these things, but daren’t.
On Christmas Eve, I know everything’s gonna be okay again – we can’t forget Christmas, even if there’s no presents under the tree yet. And I turn the prism by its cotton until one of the lights shines through, although I can’t find the rainbow among the baubles and tinsel, among the shadows behind the needles. It’s the first day the house doesn’t fill with visitors by lunchtime and the first day I don’t have to squeeze my nostrils against the stink of their mothballed Sunday finery.
I sit in front of the tree until mid-morning, building a farm out of wooden blocks and stocking it with pigs, two cows, a carthorse, one sheep and a few hens. I drive a tractor through the yard, build a shed for it, with a book for a roof, and then decide to people it with my collection of cowboys and Indians… after which the slaughter begins.
Mum walks into the room, holding my coat, scarf, hat and gloves. Both gloves are attached to my coat sleeves with elastic, so I don’t lose them.
“I want you to go to the shops, for milk and bread. But be careful on the pavements – they may be icy. Don’t try sliding. I won’t be pleased if you skin your knee again or break a leg. Oh, and Brussels sprouts and spuds too. I’ll write it down for you.”
“I don’t like Brussels sprouts,” I tell her. “Do we have to have them?”
“Your father likes them,” she begins, and then drifts into a poisonous quiet. “Just go.”
When I get back from the village, the tree has gone. There’s a telltale trail of sand on the carpet and the step by the French window, which she hasn’t yet swept up. Across the lawn is a scattering of broken baubles and a strand of tinsel; across the patio lays the broken shards of glass birds, the star and fragments of my prism, and at the end of the garden, dumped on its side, with several decorations still draggled around it, is the tree.
“I hate you!” I shout, and run to the kitchen where she stands at the stove. “I hate you!”
But she doesn’t shout back or smack me, or send me to my room, or even turn and look at me, so I slam the kitchen door and crawl under my bed to cry among my toys.
That afternoon, when she’s fallen asleep in front of TV Christmas carols, I grab a cardboard box and pad down the back garden to the tree, picking up baubles and tinsel along the way. Dragging the bucket off the root ball and sand, I shove the tree upright against the fence. The decorations have lost their glow outside, so I begin undressing it, untangling the gold and silver tinsel, unclipping the remaining birds, taking off the baubles and unwinding the lights.
The soil is rock-hard, so I run a saucepan of hot water in the kitchen and pour it over the spot I’ve chosen. I find Dad’s spade in the shed and scrape away an inch of topsoil before hitting the freeze again, so hurry back to fill the saucepan once more and put the kettle on to boil. Mum’s in the deepest of sleeps, curled like a baby, but with her mouth wide open and her hands tucked beneath her chin. She should be in bed. I’m about to sneak past her and turn off the TV – the King Singers are beginning The Holly and the Ivy – until I realise the sudden quiet might wake her.
The afternoon light is fading, but the boiling water sends up a massive cloud of steam that fills half the garden. When it clears, there’s a slush of stones, grit and a twitching chrysalis, which I shovel to one side. I pour more water and probably scald a few worms to death, but I’m creating the hole. It’d be good to dig all the way to Australia and leave this mess behind, but night is drawing in and the ground’s too hard. When I’m about a foot down, and ready to drag the Christmas tree over, among the washed stones is a piece of white flint which, I’ll learn before too long, was knapped into a point thousands of years previously, and it’s waiting to be noticed and picked up.
I pick it up.
My hands are numb with cold, but the sharpness of the point, the keenness of its edges, can still cut through that. Holding it in the palm of my hand, examining it from every angle, I draw its sharp edge across the fleshy heel of my thumb, then drop it into my pocket and continue planting my Christmas tree the best I can.
When I’ve finished and my gumboots are caked in mud from pushing the soil down around the roots and the base of the trunk, I stand back and admire my handiwork. It’s almost dark, but my eyes have adjusted as the light’s dissolved. And I no longer care about the hiding I’ll get.
However, the tree seems too empty now, and cold, so I kneel down and sift through the box of decorations. Pulling out three of the glass birds, I peg them on different branches, and the tree is happy again.
Later, heading upstairs to my bedroom, I stop to look at Dad’s ‘effects’, still sitting on the cabinet in that horrible plastic bag. Having planted the tree, I’m feeling reckless
and brave and so I unfold it, take out his wristwatch, put it to my ear, listen to the soft tick of it: the gentlest of movements. It’s still going. Though it’s too big for me, I strap it to my wrist, and then, before refolding the bag the way it was, I take one last, long heady draught of the smell of his tobacco. My dad. My tree. My watch.
Our home withers and the house acquires a smothering quiet about it; soil-heavy and pressing down. Living there is like being buried alive. And something between my mother and me withers too.
Another visitor comes casting a shadow through the glass of the front door about a week after Christmas. The visitor is all shadow, even though it’s dark outside.
“Hello, young man,” it croaks.
Dark-suited, dark-browed and sunken-jowled, I recognise Reverend Lofton, even though he’s not wearing his black frock. Visible between the lapels of his coat is a black vest and white collar, while craning down from this is the craggy face of a gargoyle, beaking forward with a lop-sided grin and hollow eyes. His likeness is chiselled in stone, perched along the roofline of St Giles’ church, facing the school. At Harvest Festival and Christmas and Easter each year, he leads the school in morning assembly, chanting sentences that bubble and stew around the hall, which already reeks of stale school dinners, as he preaches about flesh and blood and corruption, bread and wine, life and death, salvation and damnation.
He brings a cloying scent into the house, which pervades the lounge and hallway, but beneath it is the centuries-old dampness and mildew of crumbling stone. I walk past the doorway several times and notice him sitting forward in the chair, balancing a teacup and saucer on its arm. The best china. He may be offering sympathy and solace, the busy God’s-body, but even at seven I recognise how proud my mother is. She sits opposite, in my father’s chair, and holds her teacup with her little finger poised uncharacteristically in the air.
“Why was that man here, Mum?” I ask afterwards. I’m in my pyjamas and I’ve even brushed my teeth, but my dressing-gown won’t button up anymore.
She’s sewing. Lengthening a hem or mending something.
“Reverend Lofton? To see if we’re alright, I suppose.”
“Are we?”
“Of course we are.”
“Why don’t we go to church, Mum?” And I expect anything from anger to delight.
She carries on with her sewing. “We just don’t.” Blunt. As hard-edged as her thimble.
I move closer to her sewing, stand in her light. She looks up.
“Some of my friends do.”
“What?”
“Go to church.”
“You want to go too?” She pricks her finger with the needle and puts it to her mouth.
Although he’s a man who scares me (partly because he’s more gargoyle than man – a bogey-man – and partly because everything about him stinks of death), I’m also curious.
“I don’t know,” I say, knowing that I do, and realise in the same instant that my dressing-gown is inside-out.
“Why on earth would you?”
I shrug.
For the following Sunday, she asks Mrs Davies, an elderly neighbour, to take me to church with her. I’ve learnt enough at school to know it’s a house of ghosts and souls, and that maybe Dad’s ghost or soul might find a way there too.
The Reverend Lofton is cloaked in the softness of white and purple – surplice and silk stole – but he can’t mask his gaunt face. Escorted by a dozen choirboys, he slides from the vestry, up and down the gloomy aisles, snaking through the eleventh-century church towards the chancel, illuminated by candles burning gold and brilliant against the burnished brass. My skin prickles and, at first, I’m sure it’s because ghosts from all the way back to the Dark Ages are pressing against me, hanging off the backs of the oak pews, kicking their hallowed heels to every chanted response in the ritual. While the sermon is boring beyond anything I’d ever imagined, everything else is part of the dark mystery: the foreign language, the wine and the slivers of bread, the hymns, the sitting and standing, the kneeling and praying – the mumbo-jumbo of magic. Hocus pocus; abracadabra.
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.
Our Father.
Our Father who art.
Hallowed be Thy name.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and give us this day our daily bread.
Forever and ever and ever and ever.
So be it. Amen.
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.
But when I walk out, nothing’s changed at all. If there’re ghosts in there, then Dad’s isn’t one of them. I’m further from him than ever before, and drifting towards learning that death is the premature extinction of a light, along with all the possibilities of its hidden colours, replaced by the dark vacuum of winter night. For all time.
Old Lofty – the Angel of Death – visits once more, about a fortnight later, but not after that. I’ve been playing at a friend’s house, but I can smell him and the best china is sitting on the draining board. This time, I ask nothing of my mother and don’t go to church again either.
A respectable year and a quarter passes before Brian Taylor slithers onto the scene – or before I meet him, let’s say. Outside, it’s a cold, spring day, with daffodils in bloom, shivering yellows in the wind, hurrying-up the sun. Inside, the atmosphere is tense with the odours of purple Windowlene, polish and purple hyacinths.
“This is Mr Taylor,” Mum says. The visitor she’s made me wear a crummy tie for. “Say hello to Mr Taylor.”
Her eyes are shining, probably from polish fumes.
“Hello, Mr Taylor.”
He stretches out his hand to shake mine, man-to-man. I’m eight. He has a dark moustache and thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and he has the smell and slip of Brillo in his hair and on his hands.
“You can call me Uncle Brian. He can, can’t he, Margaret?”
“He can.”
There’s a celebratory smile between them, which I catch, but pretend not to. If it was a butterfly, I’d put it in a glass jar to see if it’d lay eggs… and it’d die there.
All the same, it’s good to be made a fuss of. For a while.
Brian Taylor is listening to the radio with Mum when I’m told: “Say night-night and get yourself ready quick-smart for bed, young man.” He’s absent the next morning, but rings the doorbell an hour before lunch. I know he’ll reappear because the smell of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding hasn’t filled the house since the accident.
“We used to have Sunday dinner every week when Dad was alive,” I say by way of polite, man-to-man, lunchtime chitchat. “Didn’t we, Mum?”
“Ssh,” she says. “I’ve told you before I don’t want to hear you talk about that. If you’ve got nothing useful to say then don’t say anything.”
“How about we go to the park this afternoon?” Mr Taylor says, stabbing the roast potatoes and cutting the beef with a fierceness that’s been missing from meals for too long.
We go that week, the following week, and the week after that.
It doesn’t matter at first because I like hearing her laugh again, even if he grips her hand in his own slippy paw; even if it’s him that makes her laugh – not me, not Dad. There’s been times when she’s spat bitter words at the memory of my father, and I’ve felt guilty, as though some of this was my fault and because her sense of loss was bigger than anything I could replace it with.
“Do we have to do the same thing every week?” I ask one time.
“It’s a kindness,” she tells me from the bathroom mirror, pursing her lips to achieve symmetry of lipstick. No longer the same person. “He doesn’t have to take you to the park.”
“We could go by ourselves,” I say. “You and me.”
“We could, but we never did though.”
This is true. And whose fault is it?
I try running circles around their conversation as they walk the village pavements arm-in-arm, expecting me to skip ahead. I imagine I’m the string on a kite tying t
heir words up in a tangle of interruptions, so they’ll have nothing left to say to one another, but they’re quicker than that.
Several months after, following a brief appointment among the red carpets and plush government furnishings of Northampton Registry Office, we’re officially made a family. The frequency of the man’s visits and the ease with which he’s settled into Dad’s chair puts the event beyond surprise.
And the memory of my father as a person recedes. With it goes part of who I am – my link with who I’ve come from, my connection to our past. There’s nothing else to hold onto except his name – the smallest of fragments – and the knowledge of his death.
Until they try smashing that too.
I’ve been sent to bed early after something I’ve said, but, unable to sleep, I pad downstairs quietly, politely, in the hope I’ll be forgiven and allowed to watch TV. When I’m in the hallway though, I stop to flick my hair into a parting, the way Mum likes it, and I hear them talking about me.
“Tell the boy, Margaret. You’ve got to tell him sooner or later.”
I move to the doorway of the kitchen and stand there with my arms at my side, thinking they’ll see me waiting politely, but she’s got her hands on the edge of the sink, facing the window, and he’s standing behind her, talking to her back.
“Not yet. I can’t.”
“The longer you leave it, the harder it’ll get, and he’ll keep on saying these things. What happens when some busy-body tells him his Dad killed himself? What then?”
“Ssh,” she spits, “don’t you dare. Don’t you ever dare.” There’s a pause, before she adds in a softer tone: “He might hear.”
“For crying out loud, Margaret, the boy’s asleep, thank God,” he says, and turns away from her to see me standing there. The clock ticks. The water gurgles down the sink. “Well, there you go. Why the hell aren’t you asleep like you were told?”
My mother turns then and, at the sight of me, covers the round ‘O’ of her mouth with one hand, as if she can shovel their words back in.