by Thomas Brown
However, the worst thing isn’t the death rate. The worst thing is the landlord. He smells like road-kill and every so often tries to have a ‘chat’. He knocks clumsily on the door and says, “Hi sweet cheeks”, exhaling a bottle of whiskey over me. He always manages to talk his way in, pretending he has some issues about rent or the building to discuss, and as there is nowhere else to sit, we always end up on the bed. He then says things like “I love your soft hair” and runs his hand through it, making my curls moist with sweat and “that’s a very… very… nice top” when he’s really looking at my cleavage. When he tries to grope me, I always throw him out. I’m a tough girl so I don’t mind.
I have to cope with these things because you can’t protect me now, Mum.
Although, if he does it again, I may have to kill him.
5 The Dead, Silence
Thom is surprised during the funeral. No one seems to have known Daniel. Thom himself spends the whole funeral in a daze, thinking about adjectives for Daniel, only realising it’s over when Emma squeezes his hand. She looks great in her black dress. If it weren’t so inappropriate, he would take her to the car and distract himself with a good dose of indecent exposure.
By the time they watch the curtain devour his coffin, Thom has thought of only useless adjectives for Daniel. He was mysterious, elusive, and witty. He always seemed like he knew more than everybody and he probably had. That’s what drove a wedge between Daniel and everybody else. That’s why during the funeral there are few tears. The entire room is suffocated with only one feeling: guilt.
The wake is at Aunty Val’s house. Thom feels the pieces of furniture he grew up with are stabilisers. He can’t help but think he has missed seeing it more than he has missed seeing Daniel over the last few months. The tired grey sofa in the living room is so old and so used that you can see the mould of people’s arses. His is the one in the middle. Aunty Val doesn’t care much for decoration as she always tells him people are more important than houses. Therefore, she doesn’t care (especially today) that the wallpaper in the living room has started to peel at the seams and that a stain has grown on the ceiling, the colour of tea, from when Richard always spills his bathwater. The mourners walk mud into the living room and nobody complains.
During the wake, Thom drifts between everybody, trying to catch snippets of conversation about Daniel. Yet, everybody seems to be discussing the food: “These sausage rolls are tasty”, or the weather: “It’s warmer than I expected it to be”, or where they bought the clothes for the funeral: “It was a bargain, especially as I’m only going to wear it once…” Worst of all are the people who are saying nothing at all. The only bit of shocking information is that Mrs Launder’s dress, which looks like shit, apparently cost her one hundred pounds. She has clearly been robbed.
Thom slumps onto the nearest thing for the second time that day and rests his head in his hands. Emma appears a few minutes later, kissing him on the ear. She sits across from him, pushing a cup of tea in his direction. He gives a faint smile and takes a sip, then pushes it aside.
“How are you?” she asks, reaching across the table to touch his hand. He is conscious of the dried sick on his sleeve but hopes she won’t notice it.
“Fine”, he says automatically.
“No. How are you really?”
“I’m really fine”, Thom pauses and adds, “I’ve just been thinking about how little I knew him”.
“Don’t people always think that when someone isn’t around anymore?” Emma counters, thinking this isn’t serious. He hasn’t told her about the note, which has crackled in his pocket through-out the day, so loud at points that Thom wonders why someone hasn’t heard it.
“This is different”.
“How?” She is leaning forward.
“I’m not sure”. He shrugs, chickening out. Sometimes, he is worried that he finds it hard without a script for every eventuality, a line to satisfy people when they want clarification. Emma lets him get away with it for now. She doesn’t say anything else. She just pulls him closer and kisses him on the lips, deliberately, hard. She holds his face an inch from hers for a moment, saying she is here for him; she will wait, until he understands himself.
6 Red Pen
Nobody notices when I slip upstairs during the wake and go into his room. I tag onto the group again when they arrive back from the funeral and mill amongst the people who knew him. I wonder about the connections in this group. Who loved him? Who has come out of guilt? Who is tagging along like me? What would these people say if they knew his murderer is here?
I check all the rooms on the second floor and decide which one is his. The first one obviously belongs to a woman, judging by the lacy bras. The second has a letter in it addressed to Richard Mansen. The third is a guest room or a storage room, where old furniture that will probably never be used again is waiting, hopefully. The other room is a bathroom so it only leaves the last door, which doesn’t look any different from the others, but the wood is pulsing when I press my hand against it. There is a secret message written along the wood that only I can read.
His room is plain. The walls are white, the carpet a dull brown. There are several sets of drawers, all light MDF wood. One of the drawers is slightly open but not enough to see inside. A large antique looking wardrobe sits behind the door. His bedspread is white with only one black line near the top, showing where the head should be. The spread is creased and one corner is folded back like an eyelid permanently open.
I sit on the bed, clutching the scarf in my fist and try to imagine him sitting beside me. I imagine the speed and heaviness of his breath in the silence, the size and presence of his body, the depth the bed would sink under his weight. Would he say something to me? Would he whisper or speak in a loud deep voice? Would he pronounce the Ts in his words?
The only thing I am certain about him is that he made me kill him.
I had believed it started with me but the chain began some-where before that, and I have to find out where and when. This is why I am here in this room, listening to the clattering of the train and the murmuring mass of people below. I am a trespasser, the murderer transforming into an investigator. I’m going back to the start of the flow chart to discover the direction and force behind each move.
The open drawer seems the nearest place to begin. It is one of six drawers, all about 5cm by 5cm, in a set beside his bed. I edge towards it, feeling like it’s a landmine waiting for me to add stress and unknowingly kill myself. Yet I still stick my hand in, with my eyes closed.
Nothing. I feel nothing. I think my hand must have gone numb. I peer inside. The drawer is empty. I tug open all the other drawers in the set and find the same. They are all empty. I jump to my feet and begin flinging open all the drawers in the room, the wardrobe, checking under the bed, opening the cupboards above the wardrobe, even pulling back the bedspread in the hope of finding something.
Yet I find everything is empty. There is nothing in this room. He was never here. The only discovery I make in the room is a small red pen mark on his bed sheets and the only object in the room is the angry bedside radio, which is screaming red numbers at me and they happen to be, 15:32…
I wilt onto the floor. The carpet smells new. And I notice, belatedly, the faint smell of paint. He has completely erased himself from this house. He has pressed backspace on the keyboard and removed his life. And this all seems to add to his words as he fell.
He planned it. He chose me. He moulded me.
Mum, how did this happen?
15:32 hadn’t been instinctual. It had been as set as the train tracks onto which I pushed him.
7 Aunty Val
After the wake is over, Thom agrees to stay the night. Emma leaves because she has to go back to work the next day. He says goodbye to her at the door and, as her car pulls away, he has to grasp onto the door handle to stop himself from waving to her.
Inside the house, the lock sounds like a bullet. This is followed by soft crying from upstairs and the clatter of p
lates that can be heard from the kitchen. He decides Aunty Val is the priority of the two.
He tiptoes upstairs, wincing at the creaks he should have remembered were there. It is instilled in him that death is quiet; something the living shouldn’t flaunt themselves in the face of.
Aunty Val’s door is open. He stands outside for a moment and peers in, instantly smelling the sorrow, hanging in the air like smoke clouds. The walls seem to be quivering in disgust, the paint flaking like dead skin.
“Hello”, he whispers through the crack in the door and slowly moves his head through.
Aunty Val gasps. A fresh tear is rolling down her face, an afterthought, because now she has turned white as paper. She is breathing hollowly, holding herself up with her arms. Then after a few minutes of looking at him, proofreading his features, she gulps in air and starts to cry again.
It’s only now that he springs into action and rushes to her side, taking her in his arms. She is crying words into his body, something like “your voice” and “Daniel”. Thom doesn’t want to think about what she is saying though, feeling his heart begin to shiver behind his rib cage, so he presses her into him until her words are too muffled to hear. It isn’t the first time someone has mistaken his voice for Daniel’s but this is the only time when it scares him.
Yet, almost thankfully, she is too concerned with crying to continue moving her mouth, and her lips forget. She sobs onto his neck and he remembers sobbing onto hers for a week after he’d first moved here. He knows from those times to let her finish, let her run out of water, and let her moans grow muted, disappear.
When these things happen, she looks up at him shyly. Thom tries a smile but even his mouth knows it’s stupid. She leans her head on his shoulder. He thinks her eyes are washed out, as if somebody has diluted them. They used to be a much stronger green. He knows it’s to be expected but when he thinks back to a month ago, when he last came to visit, he’d noticed it then too. She has let her hair go grey, when usually she keeps it coloured a medium blond.
Aunty Val always keeps herself well dressed and maintained. He always thinks of her saying, “You’ve got to keep up the hard work if you want to look good”. She is fifty-two and looks good for it, although she is always embarrassed when a man shows interest in her.
So did this neglect start a month ago? Or even longer? He hasn’t visited as much as he should have. And if this neglect had been occurring before Daniel’s death, then why? Had she been worried about Daniel? Perhaps this supported the theory that he committed suicide. But would he have? Thom guesses they are questions he can ask later (and some which he cannot) but now he has no right to bother her.
“He’s really dead”, is how she breaks the silence. It seems obvious but Thom feels like it stabs him in the ribs then. She is right, he can’t argue. He can only nod, trying to breathe.
“Did you like the song we chose?” she asks.
“It was good. Did Daniel like it?” he blushes.
“It was one of his favourites”, she confirms, and he feels himself smile, glad that at least one person feels certain regarding Daniel. She is the kind of person who always takes notes and stores them in a mental filing cabinet, in order to refer to them later. Thom on the other hand keeps forgetting people’s birthdays and buying Emma gold jewellery when she only likes silver.
“I’m sorry”. He throws in a worthless phrase to secretly apologise for not knowing Daniel and now it’s too late.
“I’m too young to be losing kids”, she says, adding, “like you were too young”.
“Let’s not talk about that”, he dismisses, and kisses her forehead.
“But I want to”, she croaks, wiping her nose on her sleeve. He can’t help but find this uncomfortable, especially as she has always been so strong for him, more so than with her own children. She faces him and holds onto his arms at the elbows, pressing down, needing to make her point. “I know it’s different but I thought you would be the best…” Her lips rebel against her, muffle her words. “I thought you would understand this…”
“Okay”, he interrupts.
“No Thom, please”, she begs, “I know you hate talking about it”.
“It’s not the same”, he tells her, wriggling in her hold.
“But it was wrong too”. She is staring at him, searching. “Your parents shouldn’t have died then and Daniel…” she falters again, “shouldn’t have...”
“What do you want me to say?” He cuts over her, unable to go back, even for her. He has never been able to discuss it properly. The week he cried himself to sleep is the closest she ever got to it. The closest anybody has got in fact. Even he struggles to get near to his feelings about it all. Perhaps back then, he asked somebody why or what happened or some question that didn’t matter like what happened to the car but he hadn’t opened a showroom to let everyone examine his feelings. Perhaps, this is his problem. Perhaps that is why he has a job where he always knows what to say because there is a handbook.
“I don’t know what I want you to say”, Aunty Val eventually admits. He moves and puts his arm around her, pressing her shoulder against his.
He thinks about work, about the people who phone about a loved one’s life insurance, how they’ve lost that person and to really rub it in, they have to argue with him about the clauses in the contract. And so he says what he says to them (because he isn’t a bastard), “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll do all I can”.
8 The Reading
Thom is only beginning to recover from the funeral when the reading of the will pops up like an uninvited relative. He doesn’t even remember he has to attend until Aunty Val shakes him awake in his old bed, three days after the funeral, where he has been having nightmares for most of the night. She says they’re leaving in an hour.
He turns on his side and stares at the wall. He sees the faint remains of the treasure map he and Richard drew on the wall the first summer he’d been here. Daniel insisted it was too simplistic and went to draw his own, more complicated and realistic map. Two hours after they finished their hunt, Daniel appeared with a five-page map, complete with cryptic clues. He and Richard could make no sense of it and resorted to mocking him instead.
This is how Thom feels now. Like he is standing in a map, an infinite number of pages long, trying to find somewhere familiar, somewhere he can start from. He can’t help thinking he has lost the solution page to the puzzle that had been Daniel. But as soon as he returns from the solicitors, he is determined to find at least an impression in the wet sand, however small, that will lead him somewhere.
The solicitor is a well-spoken man and all Thom can remember about him is his twitching moustache that nods along to his every word. A desire to laugh jabs at the back of his mouth throughout the reading. Yet Thom is sure that laughing will be inappropriate and it is so quiet in the office that the clock could be arrested for excessive noise. Its only competition is the shuffling of papers on the solicitor’s monster of a desk for five minutes, and the formalities of death, voiced softly by moustache man.
The solicitor, Thom, Richard, Aunty Val and a shrunken prune of a woman, who has yet to identify herself, occupy the room. Aunty Val’s husband left when Richard was two and Daniel not even born, and no one cared to find him. In this room were the people that Daniel wanted to share himself with, or share his possessions with, which were probably just as estranged from him as most of them felt.
After reading the obligatory paragraph, the moustache moves on to awarding prizes, for knowing Daniel, for loving Daniel, for caring he is dead. Yet Thom misses most of the information. He drifts away until he realises the moustache is addressing him.
“And to Mr Thomas Mansen, I leave this key”. The moustache slides a key across the desk, as though he is passing him a bribe. “I hope he finds his gift as thoughtful as I hoped it would be”.
Thom takes the key, weightless in his hand, contradicting his heavy frown lines. Why did the comment about his gift seem loaded? After all, wha
t twenty-four-year-old has a will anyway?
Aunty Val and Richard have passed by, without event. Then focus turns to the prune woman. Her face is a fruit gone bad, folding and collapsing into itself. Her skin is a landscape of rough ground filled with ditches. She stares at the moustache throughout, squinting, holding a handkerchief. Thom doesn’t remember seeing her at the funeral.
“I leave Mrs Mary Tray, the sum of two-hundred pounds, to spend as she pleases”. The moustache has concluded, abruptly. The woman, Mrs Tray, doesn’t flinch or express any emotion. She continues to sit for a further ten seconds, Thom counts, then excuses herself with a graceful wave and hobbles out of the room. The rest of them watch, on the edge of words, silenced by the resolve of the door.
“Thank you for attending the reading”, the moustache says, dismissing them. The three of them, a small fabricated family, help each other up.
The reading of the will means more questions. Thom has a desire to put his hand up, like a schoolchild, and wait for somebody to ask him what he wants. Perhaps that way, someone will have to answer him and he won’t need to think anymore.
9 Postbox
I have been watching them for twelve days. After the emptiness I encountered in Daniel’s room, I have latched onto them, not knowing where to go or what to do anymore. They fill up the emptiness with their sorrow, their quiet desperation, and their connection with the dead.
I stand outside their door every day from about 8am to 9pm, following each of them separately or together when they leave the house, learning about their habits and lives. I hate when I have to go home and try to sleep, when all I can think about is where they might go and what I might miss. Sometimes I do follow them until the early hours of the morning and survive on only a few hours sleep before running through the streets, excited and breathless, to see them again.