He left his suitcase in the hallway and walked to the kitchen, the room where his father had drunk the white spirit and afterwards walked to his death. The glasses containing the petroleum distillate and liquid antibiotics had been washed and placed in a dish rack, but the paintbrush his father had used was in the sink, its bristles hardened and unusable. Greg picked up the brush and turned it slowly in his hands, as if by touching the last object his father had held he would somehow be reunited with the man.
Absent-mindedly, he placed the brush in his pocket and turned his attention to opening the kitchen window. He released the catch and pushed, but the window wouldn’t budge. He climbed on to the draining board, carefully positioned himself and then thumped the frame several times with the palm of his hand. The window moved and then suddenly sprang open. Greg was about to congratulate himself on a job well done when two tiles, jolted by the sudden vibration, fell from the wall. He climbed down, picked up the pieces and placed them on the counter. It appeared in that moment that the whole house was in danger of falling to pieces; certainly, it wasn’t the house he remembered.
While his mother had been alive, the house had always been state of the art, a show house for the neighbourhood that had pioneered new technologies and embraced modern comforts. If the neighbours hadn’t looked up to his parents – which they had – then they’d certainly looked up to the house. But that was almost thirty years ago, and since then little if anything had changed. After a quick inspection of the downstairs rooms, however, it became clear that the house wasn’t in danger of falling to pieces as he’d first imagined, but was simply tired. It was a house that had given up on life. And Greg knew why.
His mother had been the one to furnish the house and, after her death, the appliances and furnishings she’d chosen were all that remained to give her a presence. It was no longer a family of Lyle, Mary, Billy and Greg, but a family comprising Lyle, Billy, Greg and, standing in for his mother, a twin-tub washing machine, a spin dryer, a refrigerator, a three-piece suite, six chairs, two tables, three beds, and an array of carpets and curtains. Rather than buy new when something broke or became worn, his father would simply have them repaired or patched. In this way, the house became frozen in time, a time capsule encapsulating the essence of their dead mother.
Apart from the fact that he dusted and vacuumed every week, in many ways Lyle Bowman became the male equivalent of Miss Havisham – who, in all probability, also had perfect command of the gerund.
Greg carried his suitcase upstairs and placed it on the floor of the back bedroom – Billy’s old room, and the room he used to covet.
As the last member of the family to arrive, Greg had been given the box room at the front of the house. It was the smallest of the three bedrooms, and there was a gap of no more than two feet between the single bed adjacent to the exterior wall and the wardrobe-cum-desk-cum-chest of drawers placed against the interior wall adjoining his parents’ bedroom. When Billy’s height had stalled permanently at 5ʹ 7ʺ and his own climbed to a fraction over 6ʹ, Greg had suggested to his brother that they swap rooms. Billy had told him to take a hike and his father, after being brought into the discussion, had agreed with Billy: things were fine as they were; there was no need for change. It was another way of saying they should keep things as they were – the way they’d been when their mother had been alive.
Greg cleared a couple of drawers in the tallboy, rearranged the clothes hanging in the wardrobe and unpacked his suitcase. He took his toilet bag to the bathroom and placed it on the shelf above the pink washbasin. His father’s toothbrush was still wedged in the metal holder above the pink toilet, its bristles worn and misshapen, and globs of dried toothpaste clinging to its handle like coral to a reef. Greg could only guess the kinds of bacteria lurking there – the same way he could only guess what had possessed his parents to buy a pink bathroom suite.
The bed in Billy’s room had an eiderdown thrown over it, but was otherwise unmade. Greg went to his parents’ room and searched the drawers for clean sheets and a pillowcase. The room still smelled strongly of his father, an aroma that was musky and, if truth be told, unpleasant. He’d either read or heard somewhere that it was natural for families to find each other’s scents disagreeable. Supposedly, it was nature’s way of guarding against incest, though the times he’d mentioned this to anyone his comments had always been roundly dismissed.
Eventually, he located the sheets on the top shelf of the wardrobe next to his father’s hats. The wardrobe was sectioned into two, and Billy was surprised to find his mother’s clothes still hanging in the left side compartment. For some reason, he’d assumed that his father had taken them to a charity shop after her death, but now, on reflection, realised that such an action would have been out of keeping with the man’s determined curatorship of the past.
Indeed, such stewardship had led Lyle to continue sleeping on the same mattress he’d shared with Mary. Whether such an old mattress could ever have been physically comfortable after more than thirty years of use was debatable, but there was no doubting the emotional comfort it would have afforded his father. Over the years, the mattress had been turned and re-turned, turned and turned again, and for periods of time Lyle would have slept on the very part of the mattress Mary herself had slept on. His father, however, had remained sleeping on the left side of the bed, the side of the bed he’d slept on when his wife had been alive.
A lump formed in Greg’s throat as he remembered his mother. He rarely thought of her, had forced himself over the years not to think of her. The memories were always too painful, her loss still unbearable. She was the one he’d loved the most, more than Billy and more than his father. And there was no doubting that he’d also been his mother’s favourite.
Greg had been eight when she died. There’d been no build-up to her death and no time to prepare for her loss. One day she’d been alive and the next day dead. A congenital defect, the doctors said, a freak thrombosis that torpedoed her brain and – if government statistics were to be believed – sent her to the Promised Land forty-three years too soon.
He’d been at school the day she died. He still remembered the headmaster coming into the classroom and asking for him, accompanying him to his office where his Auntie Irene was waiting. He could tell she’d been crying, that something was wrong. He thought something had happened to his father or Billy, but not for a moment to his mother. And then Auntie Irene had spoken…
The rest was a blur. Tea at Auntie Irene’s house with Billy and Uncle Frank. The arrival of his father, ashen-faced and trembling. Returning to an empty house and the scent of his mother. Days at home and life on hold. Numbness. Disbelief. A packed church and a tearful farewell. The dawn of a new reality: no Mother.
His father had done his best to fill the void, but it had been an impossible task and Lyle knew this more than anyone. Routine changed by necessity. Instead of going home for lunch, Greg and Billy would eat cooked meals at school and after school go to Auntie Irene’s house and wait there for their father to collect them. Lyle would arrive shortly after six, sooner if at all possible, and drive the boys home. There he would prepare them a cold tea, ask them about their days and then start doing chores: washing and ironing clothes, sewing buttons on shirts and darning socks. Although he proved surprisingly adept at mending their material world, he had greater difficulty repairing the boys’ emotional worlds, especially Greg’s.
Lyle had never wanted Billy and Greg to forget their mother and he would forever regale them with stories: how they’d met, her love for music, the exquisite way she’d danced, the things she’d said and, above all, how much she’d loved them both. It all became too much for Greg, who could only cope by forgetting his mother.
‘Shut up, Dad, just shut up! I don’t want to talk about her anymore. She’s dead! She’s got nothing to do with my life!’ he blurted one evening, and then dashed from the room leaving Lyle and Billy staring at each another.<
br />
His mother, of course, had everything to do with his life, and therapists would have been more than happy to interpret the impact of her death. While Greg would have argued that the death of his mother had alerted him to the fragility of life and the importance of living life to its full, irrespective of consequence, analysts would have posited that her loss had instilled in him a morbid fear of future loss. Not only did it explain his disassociation from the family, but also his reluctance to form long-term relationships. They would have further submitted that his mother’s death had left him angry and resentful – of both her and the world – and in all likelihood accounted for his youthful delinquency.
There was no doubting that Greg had acted up in his youth, but the only person to have ever called him a delinquent was the owner of an abandoned hen hut he’d set on fire. To Greg’s way of thinking it had been an experiment with matches that had gone wrong rather than anything malicious, and fortunately for him his father had believed him. In return for the hen hut owner not calling the police, Lyle had paid the man over the odds for the damage sustained to his derelict property, and then grounded Greg for three weeks.
Groundings for Greg became as much a routine for the denuded family as eating school dinners and visiting Auntie Irene’s. At various times and various ages, Greg was grounded for truancy, underage smoking and drinking, for taking Lyle’s car without permission and crashing it into a tree, and for stealing a cheap propelling pencil from the local newsagents – a misdemeanour unnoticed by the owner but witnessed by Mrs Turton, who was more than happy to tell his father.
It was the drugs, however, that concerned Lyle most. He’d grown up in an age when all drugs had been considered dangerous and an expressway to either living on the street, prison or death. He was therefore unconvinced by Greg’s argument that the marijuana in his room was a harmless organic put on earth by God for the same reason He’d planted hops and grapes: to give people a fucking break, Dad!
Unsurprisingly, it had been Uncle Frank who’d spoken up for Greg when Lyle confided in him that his youngest son was smoking dope.
‘Is he hurting anyone?’ Uncle Frank had asked, who at heart was a libertarian and resentful of any interference in his own life.
‘Only himself,’ Lyle had replied.
‘The lad got straight As in his GCSEs, didn’t he?’
Lyle acknowledged that he had, though wondered how his son had managed such a feat considering the amount of studying he did.
‘Then ask me again when his grades start to slip. I’ll reconsider the matter then.’
Greg’s grades, however, didn’t slip. He sailed through his A-levels, gained a first class honours degree, then a master’s degree and, a week after Billy’s marriage to Jean, announced to his father that he’d won a scholarship to study at the University of Arizona. As always, Lyle had been proud of his son’s achievement, but also puzzled. Why, he wondered, had things never been this easy for Billy?
And Billy probably wondered the same thing.
If not a straight ‘A’ student, Billy had more than made up for it by being a straight ‘A’ son. Lyle had no doubts that his first born would grow up to be a model citizen, and neither had the neighbourhood, which considered Billy the politest boy to have ever lived. He bade a cheery hello to all he met, doffing his school cap or, if hatless, touching his brow with two closed fingers. When funeral corteges passed in the street, he would come to a halt and bow his head until they passed.
Although Billy’s anachronistic behaviour impressed those of his father’s generation and beyond, his own peers and those younger found his manner risible, and Greg was one of these. As far as he was concerned Billy was an embarrassment, a goody two-shoes who, irrespective of intent, always ended up making life more difficult for him: Billy the church-goer, Billy the Boy Scout, Billy the boy who never swore or answered back, Billy the son who helped his father with the chores, Billy the brother who endlessly nagged him about the stupid things he did, and Billy, the example he was always exhorted to follow.
There was a difference of four years between the brothers but, as far as Greg was concerned, it could have been forty.
Ghost
When Greg and Katy returned from The Tearoom the previous day, his suitcase had been standing conspicuously in the kitchen.
‘Your suitcase arrived,’ Jean announced unnecessarily. ‘I suppose you’ll be leaving tomorrow?’
Despite protestations from Billy and Katy, Greg acknowledged that he would. The sooner his father’s house was made shipshape, the sooner he could return to Texas.
‘Greg’s got a girlfriend called Cyndi,’ Katy said.
‘No doubt next year she’ll be called something else,’ Jean said. ‘Now go upstairs and practise your dance steps, darling. You know what Mrs Parkinson says: practice makes perfect. And put some effort into it, too: you need to burn off those cake calories. You know there isn’t a call for fat dancers in the world.’
‘There is in Mauritania,’ Greg said. ‘Fat women are considered attractive in that country.’
‘Well, if you haven’t noticed, Greg, this isn’t Mauritania, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your comments to yourself while you’re living in my house.’
‘Sorry, Jean,’ Greg said, and then after a slight pause: ‘Is it okay if I phone my opinions through once I’m living in Dad’s house?’
Jean ignored his question and left the room with Katy in tow.
‘I think she’s warming to you,’ Billy said.
‘I sense that too,’ Greg replied.
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
After a somewhat awkward dinner when Jean again pushed out the boat and served fish fingers, Greg and Billy retired to the lounge to discuss their father’s house. Over a bottle of wine and the last of Greg’s whisky, they agreed that Greg would clean the house and make a list of everything requiring attention before it could be put on the market. The kitchen and bathroom, however, were to be exempted, as both rooms now qualified as period pieces and would be gutted by anyone purchasing the property.
‘I could be wrong,’ Billy said, ‘but from memory the only areas needing a complete repaint are the hallway and dining room. Dad was a great toucher-upper but his eyesight was poor and he never appreciated that the new magnolia he was dabbing on to the walls and woodwork was of a completely different hue from the magnolia paint that had been there for twenty years.’
How right Billy was, Greg thought when he saw the rooms. Both looked to be studies in impressionism, more likely to have been painted by an early Claude Monet than the late Lyle Bowman.
It was early evening by the time Greg finished cleaning the house and completing his to-do list. He went to the kitchen and looked through the cupboards, found a tin of stew and opened it. (The can opener was in the same place it had always been; everything was as it was on the day he’d left – and also the day his mother had left.)
He took the warmed stew into the dining room and sat down in his father’s rocking chair. Strangely, something about this room was different; something had changed. There was no television! Greg put down his plate and went into the lounge, a room that had always been reserved for special occasions and entertaining visitors. But there was no television in this room either.
Greg felt slightly panicked. ‘How the hell am I supposed to entertain myself?’ he wondered out loud.
‘I’ll talk to you, son,’ a voice said.
Greg froze.
‘It’s me, kid, your old Dad,’ Lyle said. ‘Turn around and let me take a look at you.’
Greg turned slowly, nervously, wondering if the voice was in his head or an intruder was in the house. It was neither. Standing by the door was his father – or at least an opalescent outline of his father. He was naked, his full frontal rhythm section swinging from side to side like a metronome, and he talked with an American
accent.
For a moment Greg couldn’t speak and stood transfixed.
‘Cat got your tongue, son?’ Lyle smiled.
Greg still couldn’t speak. He worked his jaw, tried to get some moisture back into his mouth and stared at the apparition. He told himself this wasn’t happening – couldn’t be happening! It was a trick of the mind – that’s all it could be – and occasioned in all probability by the circumstances of the day: being in his parents’ house again, stirring the past and resurrecting memories. He’d been thinking of his father and now he was picturing him. He was having a hallucination!
He closed his eyes and kept them closed, fully expecting the manifestation to have disappeared by the time he opened them again. But, when he did open them, the illusion stubbornly remained and once more he heard a voice.
‘I know this is weird for you, Greg – it’s weird for me too, kid, believe it or not. But you have to get with the programme. You have to accept that I’m here. Isn’t there anything you want to say to your old man?’
Still Greg didn’t speak. Slowly and reluctantly, however, his mind started to accept the changed reality. There appeared to be no other option. And getting with the programme, he reasoned – if, in fact, he was reasoning – might well be the only way of ever understanding this mystifying turn of events. But what to say to his father after all this time? He stammered the obvious: ‘You… you haven’t got any clothes on, Dad.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know, kid,’ his father shot back. ‘You wouldn’t have any clothes on if someone stuck you in an oven and turned up the volume. What did you think I was wearing – an asbestos suit? And whose goddamn idea was it to put me in a bamboo coffin?’
‘That was Jean’s idea,’ Greg said, his voice still tentative. ‘She’s concerned about the environment.’
‘And I bet Billy went right along with her, didn’t he?’ Lyle said. ‘That boy needs to get himself a pair of balls. He lets that woman walk right over him.’
The Last of the Bowmans Page 7