Another Justified Sinner

by Sophie Hopesmith

  ‘Anyway. The funeral’s tomorrow. I know this is last minute, but I’ve been trying to find you for days.’

  My body reeled. ‘OK.’

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. ‘I don’t want you to think I forgive you. Because you’re my brother, but I don’t. I don’t even think of you as a brother anymore. You are dead to me. You hear? Dead to me. Deader than Mum could ever be.’ He swallowed, hard.

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘But Mum would have wanted you there tomorrow, basically. Even now, just a couple of weeks ago, she was talking about you. Talking about you as a boy. Talking about you and Dad. Just talking and talking about you, on and on and on. She knew you were doing well, she knew you were “successful”. I didn’t tell her about you and Lisa. She just knew the good stuff. She was proud of you. She loved you. She always thought you’d patch things up. She never gave up on you. But I have. I have. We’re done. All right?’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘So I’m just telling you this so you’ll come to the funeral. Yeah?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to come. Of course I’ll come.’ I couldn’t even process things mentally, there was just this gush of feelings inside, I was drowning in it, suffocating.

  He sounded a little taken aback. ‘Right. All right, then.’ Pause. ‘Because you were harder to persuade before. But I guess she wasn’t dead then. She’d have preferred a visit when she was alive even better, you know that, don’t you? Fucking twat.’

  I took it. I just held on to the phone and took it. Crying. Wailing like a banshee. I don’t even know where it came from. It wasn’t normal.

  ‘God, you’re a fucking bastard. I would love to just smack my fist into your face. I would love to fucking annihilate you. You twat. Ughhhh.’ He grunted. I heard a bang. Maybe he punched a wall. He was still grunting a bit. A mix of crying and grunting. All I did was listen. Just held the phone and listened.

  We both calmed enough that he could give me the name and address of the church. He didn’t need to do that. I knew the church, all right. It was where Jackson and I had been christened. My dad’s funeral had been there. All night, I stared at the ceiling with every cell in me numb, and braced myself for the stink of that church.

  It was a fucking awful church. It didn’t have much of a congregation. Just a few old people, hanging on for dear life – the priest waiting for their will in the collection box. The vicar was loud and obnoxious. He always tried to slide stupid jokes into things. His parables didn’t make any sense. The building was falling apart. The wood was rotten. The stained glass was scratched and all covered in bird crap.

  I noticed this when I sat down on the pew, right near the back, where I was firmly directed. Of course, I wasn’t doing a reading. Nor was I apparently ‘family’, who sit at the front. Jackson read out something, I don’t remember what. My aunt Tilda, who I’d not seen for years, gave a poem. She said it was one of my mum’s favourites. I had no idea. She said that Mum had loved it since she was a little girl. I had no idea about that, either. I didn’t even know Mum liked poetry. I could scarcely believe she had been a girl.

  I got out my phone and noted down the title and poet. A few people turned round and gave me withering looks. I recognised one as a cousin, now long grown up. Another was an older lady. I didn’t know who she was. Anyway, her look was livid. It only occurred to me later that maybe it looked like I was texting or booking a holiday or checking the football scores. I had a status in this family. I was the black sheep. I was evil incarnate.

  The funeral was pretty insignificant. There was nothing really of Mum in it; or it least it felt that way to me. She wasn’t in the hymns or the prayers or the casket. She was in me. Yes, surely I was one of the few true receptacles? She wasn’t in that urn they were going to put her in: charred bits of bone and marrow. Just physicals. The strewn shell of a tortoise or snail. Like loving a puppet but never reaching for the hand underneath.

  I walked to the car very upright and stiff like I was the urn, like I might accidentally spill pieces of Mum that I would never get back.

  What was inside those pieces? What did I know of her? Her favourite musician, her favourite film star, the endless iterations of telly soaps, all the births and the deaths. A smile at the woman’s weeklies. Her famous roast potatoes. The synthetic smell of lemon. The tears, the shivers, the impassive, cling-filmed face. That bloody dressing gown. Her love of Dad, her love of us. What else was I carrying around?

  I didn’t go to the reception. It was in our old house, and Jackson had made it abundantly clear that I wouldn’t be welcome. Lots of the family said so: I was a disgrace, a disappointment, a dickhead, to be frank. Jackson had spared Mum the detail, but he hadn’t spared anyone else. Everyone knew about Lisa, he said. Everyone knew about what I had said to Mum that day. About how I blamed her for everything, for things that didn’t even make sense – when she had never done anything wrong, hadn’t even remarried, and she could have, you know, she bloody could have.

  We were not a large family. Dad was an only child. Our grandfather was alive, somewhere, in a home, but I had no idea where. Nana and Gramps on Dad’s side: dead. Toyboy Tony, whereabouts unknown. There was Aunt Tilda and her husband and our two cousins. There was Jackson and me. And that seemed to be it. Who else would be in that house? I thought back to the church. A handful – at most – of Mum’s friends to account for fifty-five-odd years of life. A friend from school, long turned into a penpal. A distant friend from somewhere she used to work. A sort-of friend from the school gates, when she used to wait for Jackson and I to file out with our satchels and rolled-up socks. Then there were the neighbours – friends only in a superficial sense, really. Friends she would peer at from over the fence, chat to about the weather, maybe the occasional TV show. Rarely, very rarely, one would go over to the other’s house. The grand occasion of it! Shutting your front door and stepping less than a metre to the side, just to knock on the other. No, no, no: Mum’s house was small, but it would look big with a guest list like that. There would still be so much space.

  This bit about space – I got to that part when I was back in my house. I broke down. I only understood that phrase then: breaking down. I felt bones break off, cells misfire, organs unravel and explode. My hair was dragged away from the skull. Nails ripped off the fingers. Kneecaps collapsed to the floor. I lay on the sofa, a heap. I thought I’d never stop crying. I staggered to the toilet: my eyes were red raw, my skin was blotchy, I coughed up phlegm. My throat was all itchy from how much I wailed. I scrubbed at my skin with a pumice stone. That didn’t hurt enough, so I found some scissors and started to poke at my arms, then I yanked at them, hard, so the blood criss-crossed the skin. I managed to stop crying. I gaped at my arms and cast a finger over the lines. It was a better pain than the other pain. Thank God. I said that bit out loud. Thank God.

  Except there wasn’t a God, I could see that now. There had never been a God. It had all been fallacy. Supreme self-deception. Fantasy, and nothing more on my part. I pictured the space above me, the colossal wilderness. The (observable) universe: 78 million light years in radius at least. And most of everything, dark matter and dark energy: light-lacking unseens that we do not understand but which trickle through everything. Everything godless and vast and detached and precise.

  I had betted on the future, hedged the risk with an understanding that I would find salvation in an afterlife, that I would be endlessly redeemed. I thought anything could be traded: even a soul. But I had been dealing with something that did not exist. My hands touched more imaginary grain than there could be actual grain in the world. A bird in the hand was worth two in the hedge, but my hands were empty. I was waking up to an unbearable present.

  I wished for Nancy to die – and she died. But my father had died, and I never wished for that. And now my mother was dead and I never wanted that either. Despite all the anger and betrayal, the years of her eyes all dimmed, I had never wanted that.

  When you get an illne
ss or something fatal or incurable happens to you or a loved one – what is worse than the loss is the realisation, after several attempts, that wishes are unanswered and prayers unheard. No matter how hard you scream them. No matter how chafed the palms. I still rubbed my palms out of instinct, a defective flare gun to God.

  The next day, I called in sick. I never called in sick. They knew it had to be because of the funeral. They didn’t say anything. I hung up. I threw up in the toilet. I really did feel sick, but in a peculiar way.

  My flat was oppressively big. All that space, all the space. My eyes welled up again. I wanted to cram myself into something small – a crack on the wall, a gap under the door. I climbed behind the sofa and lay down on my side, pressed up to the wall, so I took up less room.

  As I’ve said before, it can take me a while to understand an emotion: to pinpoint it, name it, declare it officially as this. So I felt this feeling as only a vague gathering inside me. It took some time for it to scramble together before I could see what was there.

  How did I become this person? How did I get here? When was the moment I decided to take those ill-fated turns – or had I made that sort of decision at all? I hated myself. I could feel it. A burn in the heart, a stab of bile in the belly. Self-hatred is like being stabbed from the inside. You can’t even wrestle the knife out of somebody’s hand.

  Of course, there was never a God. There was only ever my mother and father. They were my creators, they were worthy of worship. They had constructed me from nothing, the ultimate magic trick. They had raised me, for God’s sake: all-seeing, all-knowing, knowing they must never intervene. Oh, the guilt. The guilt.

  Now I didn’t have that, either. To be parentless is a terrible, intolerable thing. You feel that the world has no time for you anymore. It has nothing to give you. I was desperate for meaning. I needed to search for a meaning. I just couldn’t bear it. The sheer agoraphobia. The swarm of total nothing. My roots pulled up from the ground.

  I made myself go into work the next day. And the next. And the next. But work deteriorated, like I knew it would. I had lost something – an innermost, sacrosanct thing. I walked about with my back bowed and my eyes blank on the pavement. I thought that everyone could notice it, was staring at it. This sinking, concaving, squishy jelly around my middle. I had gone soft. Something had sunk in and diluted me, made me mushy inside.

  Finnegan called me in his office. ‘Is everything all right?’ Fuck me, he’d noticed.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. The sun was hitting me straight in the eye. I squinted.

  ‘I understand you’ve had a bereavement,’ he said. ‘One of the boys told me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I do wish you’d told me.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t seem pertinent–’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘It’s highly pertinent. It’s affecting your work.’

  I couldn’t make out his face. Just the sun in my eyes. This dancing mesh of lights. ‘But it’s not affecting my work.’ I put my hand up to my eyes to find some shade.

  ‘And yet we’ve had a complaint.’

  ‘A complaint?’

  ‘Yes. From a client.’

  ‘A client? Complained – about me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They say you provided some misleading statements. They say you downplayed some risks…’

  ‘Right. Well, that simply isn’t true. I can’t even think which client that can apply to. Was it an official complaint?’

  ‘It wasn’t a formal complaint, no.’

  ‘I mean, my clients haven’t made any losses. At all. At least, nothing significant…’

  ‘Any loss is significant if a client complains about it.’

  ‘Right. I mean – of course.’

  ‘We are a very small firm, Marcus. We are up against banks, multinationals… We specialise in the smallest of details. Quality of service. Perfectionism. Finesse. That is why our clients choose us. A client complaining – even informally – is always significant. Even if they’re wrong. It’s significant.’

  ‘Yes. I understand. Of course. It’s most unfortunate. I’m very sorry to hear it.’

  ‘It’s not a question of sorry, Marcus. It’s a question of it not happening at all. We can’t afford to make mistakes. That’s it.’ He held his hands up. ‘That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘As I said–’

  ‘If a client complains, it’s a mistake.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I could see that the meeting was over. I walked out very upright, trying to look blasé and urbane.

  From then on, I knew I was being watched ever more closely. Finnegan was right: a small firm cannot afford to upset its clients. Our client list wasn’t large, but it was lucrative. They expected a lot. Our reputation punched us above our weight.

  A year earlier, I would have been distraught. I was an ant. All my day-to-dayness was for work; for the company; for the organisation of work. For work led to money, and money made you impervious. That was all the purpose I needed, that was my only pursuit. To stand on my own two feet, right at the top of the ladder.

  Yet it’s odd – I didn’t know how much I loved my mother. I didn’t think I loved her at all. Obviously there was an ancestral bond that yoked us, but I thought that was something superficial and perfunctory, like saying ‘bless you’ after sneezing. I certainly didn’t think I liked her: mousey and apathetic, her eyebrows scruffed up in tufts, everything unkempt and coarse and traumatic.

  I mean, it had been fun to be the favourite in childhood. It was so easy to orchestrate, so tirelessly amusing. But I didn’t think I wanted her affection, not as I grew older. I was embarrassed. I would dawdle out of school in the hope that she’d move away from the gates and back into the banger. Her eyes wide and worried; Cliff Richard on the radio… No: in a million years, I could not have predicted that Mum’s loss would hit hardest. Don’t get me wrong: Nancy and Dad’s knocked me sideways, dragged me down into pits. But Mum’s…

  Perhaps it was because I was once curled up in her womb; and she pushed me out slowly, gently, like a flower from a bulb. She changed my nappies; she clothed me, fed me, bathed me. She waited at the gates, she waited in the car. In her final days, in the last few years, she had no doubt been waiting still.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it. All I knew is that her death pulled something out of me and nothing could put me back together. It might have been her ultimate revenge. For now I was drab. I stared morosely into some middle distance. I didn’t wash myself. I spent all the time squinting, my hands held up to my face, trying to find some shadow, trying to hide back in the dark. Our lives felt intertwined then, her genetic hold less weak.

  I told my ‘closer’ colleagues about my mother’s death. One of them must have told Finnegan. I don’t even think it was worth the risk I took. The confession felt uncharacteristic and awkward. We didn’t tend to trade in emotions.

  True, bits of people had fallen off through the years. Some armour had rusted. Harry and Claire were divorcing. There were custody battles over kids and alimony. One day, he went to the toilet for a very long time, came back with eyes all slopped with blood and water. He coughed up about the divorce, with shaking hands; tried to dismiss it, but his voice wouldn’t let go of the words. He never mentioned it again – but it was there now, around him, like a miasma of smoke.

  And then there was the time that Philip got absolutely trashed. As in – the most drunk we had ever seen him. Right before the flood of vomit down his shirt, he blurted out that he was gay. Nobody knew, he told us, not even his parents. Some of the guys were a bit wary of him afterwards, but we mostly treated him just the same. Yet that night in the bar, in that night of wind and rain and revelation, some of us even encouraged him to come out and live the life that he wanted to lead. This is the 21st century, we said. Nobody even cares anymore. You only get one life. But come Monday, the masks were back. Our noses were hard: we’d been trained to seek out patter
ns, sniff up lines of order, you see.

  I went out with the lads at the end of my first week back. Ben was picking up women like a party trick. Shots lined up on the table. Harry got hold of some pills. He shook them over his head, like maracas. The music thumped. All of our ties were crumpled and stained and the top buttons of our shirts tugged undone. I left very early. I didn’t even understand why.

  At home, I cried. Thinking of Mum. Her whole life a pregnancy that never got to the labour. I cried those big, sploshing tears that feel like you’re expunging your insides. I was crying at everything, lately. It felt like I was getting a lifetime of tears in just under a fortnight. Everything was delicate, like being caught in a web.

  I was slipping down the slope. If you are brittle, you are not standing upright. All the qualities necessary for my job were slowly ebbing away. How can you be confident about the future price of a commodity, when you don’t even have confidence in your own future self?

  I got paranoid. I assumed that Finnegan was waiting for an opportunity to bump me off: the merest slip-up, I’d be out on my backside. In a pre-empting act, I approached a large international, who had headhunted me previously. There was talk of a bigger role. There was talk of transferring to the US.

  I went along to the interview. I put on that mask and I acted. The words tumbled off the tongue. It was well rehearsed. My greatest strength, my greatest weakness. A little bit of background. La di da, la di da. Then the obsequious zest for the company: the awe of its success. A flatter of the ego. The kickass presentation. The killer last slide, with the punchy closer. They seemed interested, leant forwards, doing that twiddly thumb dance and the gentle nod. They said they’d call me over the coming week. I saw the approval in their eyes and I wanted it.

  But when I got home from the interview, I did something atypical. I sat in my favourite armchair, stared at the artwork some firm had picked out for me. Then I dialled my brother’s number and I waited, hunchbacked and pale in my creased navy suit. It rang out like a trombone, or the forlorn bellows of a hunted whale. It rang into emptiness, it rang into space. It rang and it rang until it clicked into voicemail. There was the tone and I inhaled, audibly – but I didn’t know what to say, so I ended the call.