by Sharon Owens
‘Bye, Mum.’
But she was already off the line.
My father was dead.
The news finally began to filter through.
Bubble integrity dropped alarmingly as the realization reached my overloaded brain.
Before I’d even put the phone down, I was howling like a toddler who’s dropped his ice cream in the sand and knows there’s no chance of persuading his parents to buy him another one.
‘Dad. Oh, Daddy,’ I wailed, sounding as high-pitched as the seagulls. ‘What a waste of a life! What a terrible waste! You could have taken up fishing or built a model railway in the back garden. What do other men do in their spare time besides watching qualifiers? Oh, God!’ I reached for a handful of Julie’s trademark scented tissues and settled in for a good old mope but immediately there was another phone call.
Without hesitation, I picked up. I was hoping it might have been one of my sisters and that maybe she’d heard about the tragedy already. We could have had a lovely long chat about what might have been, and about those endless summers we spent hanging round the carousel looking for dropped coins in the parched grass.
But it was Alexander (my eldest child) and he was in pieces. Sobbing and crying and shuddering with exhaustion.
‘Mum, I don’t know what to do!’ he wept. ‘Everything’s gone wrong.’
‘Jesus Christ! Alexander, tell me, son. Tell me immediately,’ I commanded him, unable to wait for a single second in case the house was on fire and he needed to be reminded to phone the fire brigade.
‘Oh, Mum!’
‘Is anybody hurt? Is one of the family hurt?’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Alexander Grimsdale!’ I screamed. ‘Tell me right now.’
‘It’s Emma,’ he cried, blowing his nose a bit too close to the receiver. ‘She’s broken up with me, Mum.’
I deflated with relief, like a hot-air balloon that’s just been shot down.
‘Oh, Alexander! For fuck’s sake! You nearly gave me heart failure,’ I said. The mere mention of heart failure reminded me of my father and I resumed crying too. ‘Is that all? You’ll make it up with her again, son. Don’t you always? You’ve split up six times this month alone.’
Emma’s a beautiful girl but she was very moody with it around the time she was anorexic. I knew she had an eating disorder the day I met her three years ago because she was very thin and claimed to have an awful lot of food allergies. I mean, I felt sorry for Emma but you can’t help wishing your son had fallen for one of those no-nonsense girls on the hockey team instead. You know the ones with legs like tree trunks and healthy pink complexions? Personally, I have to say that Emma manipulated my Alexander a little bit. He was utterly obsessed with her fragility and her other-worldliness. And she wore the most expensive shoes. At the time, I didn’t trust anyone who wore designer shoes, I must admit. I thought it showed a narcissistic streak if a person considered their own flippers too good for humble chain-store clobber. But maybe I was just being an inverted snob. (In light of what happened later.)
‘You don’t understand, Mum. Emma’s pregnant but she won’t talk to me about it and she says she doesn’t know if she’s going to keep the baby. Mum, you’ve got to see her and talk to her for me? Please, Mum? You’ve got to make her love me again. I want the baby, Mum, and I want Emma to marry me!’
And he blew his nose again, louder this time.
Well, now.
What do you make of that, I thought to myself.
A moody, anorexic and beautiful young woman who’s pregnant with my obsessive son’s baby. What’s a girl to do? I could feel my brain cells dragging out the shutters and nailing them up. Too much to deal with, too early in the day. It was time to be Supermum. That’s what we get paid the big bucks for! (I wish.)
‘Where are you, Alexander? Are you at college? Go sit with some friends, yes? I’ll be right there, my darling.’
But he was at home in his bedroom, it transpired. Reading Emma’s letter and considering an overdose. He was listening to Bill’s copy of Radiohead’s first album. I could hear it in the background. Another few minutes of that and he’d be ready to leap off the attic window sill onto the wrought-iron railings below. Teenage boys are like that, you know. On a hair trigger, emotionally. They’re not faking it to get out of washing the car. They really don’t understand that teen angst is a passing phase and if they can just hang on in there till they’re twenty-one or twenty-two, they’ll become somewhat desensitized to pain and suffering like the rest of us oldies. Enough to keep going when it all seems rather bleak and pointless, at any rate.
‘Alexander,’ I said. ‘Listen to me, son. Switch off that music at once. At once, do you hear me? And go downstairs and set the kitchen table for lunch, for you and me. Yes, just do as I say. I’ll bring home fish and chips and we’ll talk about this properly. It’s not the end of the world. No, it is not the end of the world. Emma’s frightened but she’ll come round. You’ve got to be strong, Alexander. She’s going to need a lot of support, whatever happens. Now, can you manage without me for half an hour until I get there? Or will I call your dad? Only he’s on an important job today.’
And he was, too. Fitting a rain-shower for a celebrity client. Tina Campbell, lovely girl who reads the news here. Nice choppy blonde crop, arty jewellery, pink jacket, genuine smile. You’d like her.
I was going to ask Alexander to take in the washing for me as there was loads of it and it might have occupied his attention for a while but then I stopped myself. I didn’t want to go placing him in close proximity to a few metres of strong, plastic cord. That bloody Emma, I thought to myself and I almost laughed with hysteria. I’d always thought she was too skinny to conceive.
Alexander said he’d try to hold himself together for thirty minutes though he couldn’t make any promises. I hung up and called a taxi straight away. I think I screamed at them to come ‘immediately if not sooner’, but I can’t be sure. They know me well enough by now, anyway – they would have understood it was just another domestic emergency in the Grimsdale household. Weeping uncontrollably, I peeled back my ears for the taxi’s beep. Hating myself every second for not being able to drive – for goodness sake, children of seventeen can drive – but there was nothing for it but to clatter down the stairs with my legs feeling like melting jelly and lock up the lighthouse.
It was only as the taxi was speeding off down the road that I remembered Gary was coming out to see me. But Gary had been demoted several steps down the ladder of domestic emergencies and it was all I could do to keep calm in the back seat of one of First Class’s finest motors. I’ll settle Alexander down first, I decided. The children are my top priority, always have been. Then we’d contact Emma and assure her we’d do anything she wanted. We’d mind the baby for her somehow while she went to classes at university, we’d do the babysitting in the evenings. Anything she needed, whatsoever. Even if she didn’t want to be with Alexander any more, we’d still do our bit in practical terms as well as financially. Alexander would have to get a part-time job and start paying his share towards the baby’s upkeep. And if Emma didn’t want to keep my first grandchild… well, I just hoped things wouldn’t come to that. If that happened, I’d rather not have been told about the baby in the first place, thank you very much.
And then, when we’d made some headway in that little situation, I’d have to call my sisters (both living in Sydney, Australia, did I say?) and tell them about Dad passing away. They hadn’t seen him in ten years and I fretted that it would be too much for them to take in. Organizing a funeral, grieving for the poor man and all the years he’d wasted listening to political talk shows on the radio. Not to mention the expense of it all. I knew Dad wouldn’t have subscribed to one of those nice and sensible ‘Over Fifty’ plans you see on the television, either.
‘How depressing is that?’ he used to say. ‘Saving up for your own friggin’ funeral? Screwed for money, all your life. Right to the bitter end th
ey’re trying to wring it out of you. Well, they can stuff their over-fifty plan, so they can, the greedy bastards. They won’t be getting ten quid a month out of me! They can chuck my carcass on the Halloween bonfire for all I care. Or feed me to the rats. Capitalist fuckers!’
Oh, yes.
You can’t buy memories like that.
And I have no idea who to invite, I thought miserably. He has loads of relatives. Had loads of relatives. But none of them liked him very much. And he didn’t like them. There didn’t seem to be many frequent visitors to his home, at any rate. Like I say, he could be difficult. Maybe an informal stand-up buffet would be easier on all of us, I remember thinking as I bolted into the chippy a few doors down from our house, on the main road. I almost forgot to pay the taxi driver, I was in such a state. Or would a buffet seem like we were scrimping?
‘Two cod suppers, please.’
‘Nine quid. Cheers, love. Salt and vinegar?’
‘Yes, please.’
Nine quid for two cod suppers? Bloody ’ell, I thought, feeling ever-so-slightly robbed. The price had gone up by fifty pence since last time. What is the world coming to?
Then it was a breathless dash up to our front door and thank goodness Alexander was still alive, his handsome face all swollen up with frightened tears. I hugged him to me for what seemed like an age but was probably twenty seconds. Together, we made our way to the kitchen, me softly rubbing his back the way I did when he was a baby and couldn’t get a burp up. He was still sobbing too much to speak so I babbled on about the price of everything and we set the table together. Gary rang me as I was in the middle of unwrapping the cod suppers and telling Alexander that everything would be all right. Alexander loves fish and chips, you see. That’s his favourite treat and I was trying to keep things as normal as possible for him while Emma made up her mind about their future. All three of them. Hers, Alexander’s and the bambino’s.
‘Mags? What’s happened to you?’ Gary said crossly. ‘I’m standing here at the lighthouse and there’s nobody in. I brought coffee and cakes. And you’ve got people waiting! They’re awfully cross with you. Come all the way from Dublin, so they say.’
‘Oh, God, that must be my three o’clock appointment, come early,’ I said, closing my eyes.
I’d forgotten all about them.
The couple from Dublin, not my eyes.
‘The motorway’s much improved,’ I added feebly. ‘Um, can I take a rain check on the lunch, Gary? Sorry. My father has died and my son needs to talk to me about something extremely important.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ he said at once, ‘to hear about your father.’
‘Thank you. Listen, I’ll call you tonight if I have time, to talk about Julie. Okay? And by the way, could you please tell those people from Dublin I’ll give them a buzz tomorrow evening and we’ll arrange another appointment?’
‘Okay, Mags,’ he said. ‘How did he die?’
‘Suddenly,’ I said. ‘His heart stopped.’
Which was rather stating the obvious, I daresay. I mean, is there any other way of dying?
‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ Gary sighed.
What a gentleman.
‘Thanks. Bye.’
Then I dropped my mobile on the stone floor and broke it.
‘Shit!’ I said, looking hopelessly at the pieces.
‘Mum,’ said Alexander, somehow having managed to filter out the fact that his maternal grandfather had expired in rather tragic circumstances, ‘I love Emma so much, I don’t think I can live without her. How long does it take if you swallow tablets? And do you go to sleep before it hurts?’
‘What?’
My heart twanged in and out again, like a cartoon heart falling in love. Could my six-foot tall, gorgeous, firstborn son really be this serious about that skinny little waif, I wondered. It seemed that he could. I was overwhelmed with fear.
‘Don’t even say something silly like that, my darling,’ I scolded him lightly, as if I thought he was only joking. ‘Of course you can live without her. She’s always been very moody, I have to say. Moody little Emma and her designer shoes! Her feet pampered out of it and her poor wee tummy starved. Plenty more fish in the sea, love. That reminds me, have a small piece of this lovely cod before it gets cold. Where’s the vinegar, darling? They didn’t put enough on mine. Did you fetch it from the cupboard? I can’t eat chips if they haven’t got lashings of vinegar on them. No, you start eating. I’ll get it. Oh, doesn’t this smell lovely? Fancy a slice of bread and butter, love?’
Normality, you see?
Normality is everything in this life.
‘But you got married when you were nineteen,’ Alexander said accusingly. ‘That’s younger than I am now. And you said you knew my dad was the one for you, the minute you set eyes on him in the Limelight Club. Well, Emma is the one for me. I’m old enough to know when I’m in love.’
I had to admit Alexander had a point.
‘Yes, but that was years ago,’ I told him gently, struggling to find some way of lessening what heartbreak might be to come. ‘It was different then. The cost of living was lower. We didn’t go to university, your dad and me. You’re both so young, pet, far too young to settle down. You have years of study ahead of you, years of growing up still to do.’
‘If Emma doesn’t want me, I can’t go on living and that’s all there is to it,’ he said simply and we both sat there, arms round each other, watching the fish and chips turn cold on the plates. No point in telling Alexander he might have discussed the possibility of pregnancy with Emma before it was too late. I mean, Bill and I were no better but at least we knew for certain we loved each other. If Emma dropped Alexander and didn’t carry their baby to full term, well, the poor boy would be mentally scarred for life. I just knew that. Alexander is incredibly sensitive for a boy.
Easy for me, huh?
Oh, Julie, if only you knew.
8. The Wake
What with my dad’s funeral to sort out, and Alexander and Emma’s baby-news to come to terms with, Julie’s Galway escapade had to be moved to the back burner for a while. Gary called me several times that evening and in the end I simply told him Julie was having a holiday by herself and she didn’t want any company. He was very upset but I assured him Julie was simply working through a few issues from her past and the best thing he could do was leave her alone.
‘You know how she is,’ I reminded him. ‘She likes to handle things her own way.’
He had no choice but to agree with me though I knew he was going to start looking for her right away. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d hired a detective already. He’s very determined, is Gary Devine.
‘Where did you say she was again?’ he tried, at the end of our conversation. Which was rather cunning of him but he was desperate, I suppose. And it was right on the tip of my tongue to tell him the name of the spa but I remembered just in time.
‘I’m sorry, Gary. She didn’t say.’
Liar, liar.
I dialled Australia.
Oh, God!
It’s not easy telling your two beloved younger sisters that the father you’ve all ignored for years has pegged out with his head on a supermarket loaf. I did my best to sweeten the pill. But still, they had to be told their father was alone when he left this life. Peaceful and quick, as it hopefully was, he was nonetheless alone in a shabby rented house, his last meal a humble can of chicken and mushroom soup. They were hysterical, needless to say. Their chirpy Australian accents disappeared in a heartbeat and their full-on Belfast snarls returned with a vengeance.
I had to cover the handset with my hand. It was nervous laughter, of course, but I felt bad about it. They said they’d be on the next flight and although I knew it would be hard for them, I was delighted. It was unsettling to think we hadn’t been together for ten years. And flights have got so much cheaper recently but there was always something coming up, important things to be done, too much on at work. And we never managed to arrange an
ything. But now, our father’s premature passing was uniting us in our own home town at last.
So Ann and Elizabeth were in the air somewhere as I identified Dad’s body and liaised with the funeral director. Bill was on the phone for hours, informing the long list of relatives and acquaintances. I was hoping they’d all make their excuses and leave us in peace to grieve. But no, they all wanted to come to the wake. I watched Bill’s face darken as he gave directions to Eglantine Avenue, over and over and over again. By the end, he was just saying, ‘Oh, you can’t miss it!’
The house had taken on an eerie, still quality as if it was preparing itself for an important occasion. Alexander lay sobbing quietly in his room, still inconsolable over the temporary (or perhaps permanent) loss of Emma. But the other children were marvellous, tidying up at lightning speed. Which was a revelation for me, I can tell you, as it usually takes them several hours to put a pair of socks away. Bill was amazingly thoughtful. He did his best to get into the spirit of things even though I warned him it was going to get very weird. Well, Protestants are more formal about these things. I daresay it’s the influence of the British Royals. Stiff upper lip, no matter what. And why not? Making a scene never did any good, did it? Bill’s never been to a real belter of a wake, and I was worried for him and our precious children.
But I knew in my heart there was nothing I could do to stop the momentum. So I went crazy with a duster and just let events unfold. Wakes are like that, anyway. They take on a life force of their own. (Pardon the pun.) Bill bought a huge bouquet of elegant white flowers for the hall and some pretty boxes of tissues to dot around the place. Then he did a rapid trolley-dash down the biscuit aisle in Marks & Spencer while I did an even quicker vacuum of the entire house. Bunging laundry into cupboards and hiding my most expensive handbags in one of the hatboxes on top of our wardrobe. Well, you never know. Gatecrashers aren’t bothered if it’s a funeral or a twenty-first-birthday party. Then the hearse was suddenly pulling up at our front door and that was a pantomime in itself.