Dead Secret (24 page)

Shameena brought me back from the land of the dead when she came north for the funeral. I could feel it almost immediately, the first tiny move outward from inner obsession. It was so good to see her. I did not tell her about Da, about Mother. But it was good to talk to her, to listen to her voice in response. So many of my conversations in the last few days had been monologues to Da. There were bonds between the living and the dead that had been forged and they cannot ever be broken.

I know now that time was special as well as terrible. It would stand alone like a small island in my life, one that is hard to reach again. But even back then, I knew a dead man could not be my only confidant.

Shameena made it to the church for Da’s body being brought in. Khadim was there too, and Shameena said it was the first time she had seen him in eight years. Eight years! I cannot believe that level of obstinacy. They sat apart. She wouldn’t come back to the house in case Khadim did. I told her not to be silly, but she said tonight and tomorrow were about Da and me, about Sarah and Peggy and Charlie, and not about her and Khadim. She wasn’t going to risk any scenes. She needn’t have worried. Khadim didn’t come back either.

I know that she had found it hard to live without Khadim and Nazima. But she could not live without her dreams. It is the hardest thing in the world to live without dreams. She tried to do what Khadim wanted and spent a year studying accountancy, but she was dying inside. She always knew she was trying to take Tariq’s place, that sooner or later she would have to live for
herself
. When she finally decided to leave, we planned it for weeks and weeks. Shameena was so methodical, much more so than me. She walked the music college audition, of course. It was the practicalities that took more time.

She said Khadim would chuck her out when he found out, so she had to get herself a room in a flat. I’m not sure he would have had it in him when it came down to it. Shameena lived in a tiny grotty room in Brixton, with peeling floral wallpaper and beige paint and taps that spat water with a deep-seated rumble. I visited her from time to time when I was working away,
particularly
the year I did a summer season in Kent. I used to go up to her place in London and buy her takeaway Chinese and we’d talk until the early hours of the morning.

Shameena was like a trapped bird that had been set free, but you know what happens to birds when you release them. They go mad, fluttering their wings wildly and battering them against every
obstacle
in their path until they realise they don’t have to struggle. The most serious obstacle was Malik, a sharp-suited political
researcher
she met at a Labour Party meeting. Malik was funny and vibrant and used to tell us about being a teenager and climbing out of his bedroom window and down the drainpipe to meet girls his parents didn’t approve of – which meant all girls who weren’t “his kind”. I was dead impressed by Malik. I thought he had broken through all the cultural restrictions imposed on him.

I was wrong, but as I’ve come to understand, how do you know anyone really? Malik attended lectures in his spare time on the feminist perspective of Marxism. Then he and Shameena became unofficially engaged and he suddenly turned into
Khadim
and started giving her a hard time about her clothes and her career, and talked about her giving up her music to have his
babies
. Shameena said what happened to the feminist perspective and he said he wasn’t marrying a feminist perspective, was he?

Shameena was upset when it finished but she didn’t need marriage. She didn’t need anybody. She was happier than almost anyone else I knew. The only time she got upset was talking about Khadim and Nazima. She wrote to them once. Shameena told them she would be in Glasgow one Saturday and named a restaurant and a time. Only Nazima showed. Silent Nazima who never went anywhere alone. She told Shameena that she and Khadim never spoke about the letter. Nazima knew Khadim wouldn’t go. And Khadim knew Nazima would.

On the Saturday, Nazima went and got her coat. Khadim said nothing. Shameena reckoned that if he had acknowledged where Nazima was going he would have had to forbid her, and he knew Nazima would have had to defy him, and then where would they be? So they both pretended. Khadim read a
newspaper
while she got her coat and her bag, as if it was every day that she went out walking on her own. But Nazima told Shameena that when she turned the corner of the street, she saw a figure at the upstairs window.

Nazima spent all lunch gripping Shameena’s hand and not letting go. She had lost her son first, and now she had lost her daughter too. It was obstinacy, stupid obstinacy. She was
nothing
without her children. When it was time to go, she cried and
cried and Shameena had to take her back home in a taxi.
Nazima
clung to her in the cab, and Shameena wiped her tears and promised she would write and they could meet again, but
Nazima
just shook her head and sobbed. She knew. Shameena said it broke her heart when the taxi drove off, leaving her on the
pavement
. As the cab turned, she stared at the house that had been her home, thinking of old times and wishing they were back. Wishing Tariq was back. The curtains upstairs moved slightly. She knew Khadim was watching.

Shameena said Khadim was too stubborn to ever make peace. I told her she should turn up on their doorstep and see what happened. I couldn’t imagine him closing the door. She said she didn’t want to embarrass him, that he had taken a stand and she could not compromise her father’s dignity. I said stuff his dignity. Save dignity for the grave. But Shameena is almost as stubborn as him.

As we gathered to receive my father’s body into the church, I wondered what each of them was thinking. Shameena was
already
successful, but I knew that one day she would be a star. When that happened, Khadim would have been proved wrong in his ambitions for her. And his pride would be a bigger
obstacle
than ever in their relationship. Death makes you acutely aware of seizing opportunities and I wanted them to seize theirs. You get a sense of urgency in the week after a death that is hard to hold onto. While it was still with me, I warned Shameena not to leave it much longer. Time runs out, I said. Time runs out before the right things are said and done.

Tariq comes to me in the night. In the darkness, when the pain is at its height. I am lying awake, thinking about the morning’s funeral when I hear the click of the door, the creak as it opens gently. I turn then, see him standing in the light from the hall. He smiles at me but says nothing. He is slender still, but strong, a visible pulse beating in his bare chest. The hunched gauntness of him is gone; his shoulders filled out with the soft curve of muscle, the bruised blue lips now full and pink. Tariq,
triumphant
, the way I always imagined him.

I whisper his name and he holds out his arms to me. I do not raise myself from the bed to go to him. Tariq is strong, but I fear the vision is fragile. If I move, perhaps he will disappear. His arms remain open as he walks towards me but I lie still. His
embrace
is simply warmth, the slow spread of gentle heat through my body.

Then I feel his lips on my neck as he holds me to him, the
gentleness
hardening to need, and at last I move to grasp him, turn my lips to find his. Before I do, he is gone. It is not instant; the warmth simply dissolves until there is nothing left but an
afterglow
. The sadness that follows his going is blunted by a sense of wonder that Tariq came to me, that for a little while we touched. Afterwards, I drift almost instantly into sleep, as if he had
administered
a drug. A comforting sleep, the deepest since Da died.

A dream? I suppose it was. And yet it seemed so real. Dreams, reality… I’m not sure I know the difference any more.

Five years on, I still do not know what I make of that ‘visit’ from Tariq. As soon as I wrote it down, I felt tempted to erase it, to pretend it did not happen. I know what people think when you say that stuff. You see it in their eyes: the polite enquiry that masks a certain sneer. A tiny rise of a cynical eyebrow. I know. I used to do it.

And yet, I cannot censor my own story. I have to assemble
everything
that happened. Give the evidence. Hope that one day, somehow, a reliable verdict will be possible.

The weather breaks during the night before Da’s funeral, the lazy heat replaced by air with a lemon-zest tang to it. There will be showers before morning is out. I went to sleep last night covered only by a sheet but I wake chilled in the early morning. Strangest of nights. The duvet is in a heap at the bottom of the bed and I pull it up round my neck and lie still; listening for the sounds of the living, waiting to bury the dead.

Funeral day. Grey skies and grey heart, dead as charred ash smouldering in the grate. I feel the same strange mixture of dread and acceptance I had when I cradled Da’s head in my lap and simply waited for the end.

Footsteps on the stairs. Outside the door, the floorboards creak. Sarah. We decided we both wanted to leave for the
funeral
from Da’s, from the family house that has been so much a part of our lives.

“Are you awake, Becca?”

Her voice is low.

“Yeah, come in.”

The door creaks. Sarah sits on the end of the bed tucking her feet under her.

“Here.” I move over in the narrow bed and lift the duvet back so she can sit in beside me. “Bloody hell! Your feet are like ice.”

“Sorry.” She smiles faintly. “I went down to the kitchen to put
the kettle on and the floor is cold.”

We sit side by side, leaning against the headboard.

“Want some tea?”

“If you’re making it.”

Through the thin, unlined curtains, clouds swirl in a
fast-moving
sky.

“Peggy’s coming early this morning,” says Sarah. “She said she’d be here at eight.”

“Hours yet.”

“And then hours until the church. It’s going to seem like for ever.”

I look up at the ceiling, at a black, damp patch on the white paper. A pipe had burst years ago and we’d never repainted it. Da never finished decorating jobs, which was why the house was always a mess. He would get out the plumb lines and the
measuring
tape and the sugar soap and I’d always end up leaving in exasperation. “Preparation is everything,” he’d say. He spent so long on the preparation he never got to the job itself.

“I don’t know how to get through this morning,” says Sarah, so intensely that I feel guilty. For the last few days, while I have been off dealing with things inside myself, Sarah has been left dealing with everything else. Yet despite her practicality, I am far more ready for today than she is.

“I know,” I say and squeeze her hand. I have felt a tenderness for Sarah since I found out, the tenderness of loss and regret. I am waiting to find out what else there is when that tenderness goes, what really binds us.

“Try and think only about the first five minutes, about
surviving
the first five minutes,” I tell her. “Then the next five and the next and the next. One step at a time.”

“Da really loved you,” she says suddenly and I sense a hurt, a terrible deep hurt in her.

“He loved us both.”

“I know. But I always felt…”

“What?”

She shrugs unable to speak. Her lips tremble. “You’d go off and work and I’d stay. Always. And yet, I felt he came alive a bit more when you came home.”

There is silence. Grief is a terrible thing for making everyone take their gloves off, for revealing the dirty nails beneath the neat, kid leather.

“If you’d gone and I’d stayed,” I point out, “it would have happened the other way round. It’s just the prodigal son thing. Prodigal daughter.”

“Maybe.”

“Sarah, Da was really, really proud of you. Remember your graduation day? When he talked to me that day about you, I thought he was going to burst. His girl. A lawyer.”

She smiles, a watery smile.

“Really?” she says, with a neediness that I’ve never heard in her before.

“I was jealous.”

“You!” Sarah looks at me incredulously. “Why?”

“I never gave him that. I never made him proud in that way. I bummed around and made him worry. He always used to shake his head and say what was going to happen to me when he wasn’t around. He said I’d end up an old bag lady on the streets without a home or a pension.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it was okay, I’d have a rich bitch lawyer sister.”

She smiles.

“Are you going to stay with Des?”

“Yeah,” she says a little uneasily, smile fading. She thinks I am going to have a go at her. Instead, I nod.

“Do you love him?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

“Does he love you?”

“Think so. Hope so.”

“Marry him, then,” I say. She looks suspicious, like she thinks I’m being sarcastic, but I mean it. Life is short. Happiness is short. Take it while it’s yours. “I thought you weren’t keen.” Her voice is curious. “You’re always horrible to him.”

“I am not!”

“Even last night…”

“That was just a joke!”

Des had been for a haircut so he would look smart for the funeral. Shorter at the sides but still full on top. Looked like he had a Mr Whippy on top of his head. “Nice haircut, Des,” I’d said. “Do you want raspberry with that?”

“You don’t exactly hide the fact that you don’t like him.”

“I don’t
dis
like him. Not really. And anyway, what do I know? I’m heading for thirty without a proper job, without even a sniff of Mr Right. What do I know?” I repeat.

It is true. I know nothing. I always thought Des was dull, that he was old, that he wanted a trophy wife. Pretty little
Sarah
, ten years younger to serve up at corporate dinners. But you can’t tell about others people’s love, can you? You can’t know, can’t judge. Nobody knows what goes on between two people. Not ever.

“He’s good to me, Becca,” she says.

“Marry him then, and have lots of little lawyer children.” I prop my pillow further up against the headboard. “Remember that advert that Ronnie Corbett used to be in when we were kids? Some car or other. And this little troop of kids, who looked exactly like him, all piled out of the back seat with their thick black glasses, just like his.” I look at her sideways. “Your kids can be a little row of Cornettos.”

She gives a little snort, a half-laugh in spite of herself.

“With Des, I feel like… for the first time in my life… I come first,” she says hesitantly, looking to see if I am going to slap her down. “Like I’m not the second most important person, or the third most important. I’m the first. And that I don’t have to prove myself, or try to make myself more interesting.”

“Why on earth would you have to do that?”

“You were always more interesting than me.”

“What? Don’t be daft, Sarah. I have always been the one everyone sniffs disapprovingly at. The disruptive one. The
ill-disciplined
one. You were Saint Sarah.”

She smiles.

“And you were Peggy’s favourite,” I add.

“I wasn’t! I just did what she told me.”

“That’s a bad habit of yours.”

Sarah laughs. “What about you? Is there anyone?”

I make a face, don’t reply.

“Tariq?” she asks tentatively. “Was he…?”

“Who knows.”

I say it more dismissively than I mean to but I can’t talk about Tariq. Not today. Maybe not ever. Sarah flushes slightly.

“Maybe,” I add, more softly, and she looks gratefully at me. She smiles comfortingly like she understands. I think maybe she does.

Is it emotionally stunted to say someone you knew at sixteen, someone you kissed only once, might be the best there is? I can’t ever know what Tariq would have been, and that is both burden and comfort. What was there was unfulfilled, and that makes it perfect, brimming with possibilities, not spoiled by twenty years of disappointment, of expectations that never materialised. And yet, somehow I believe that there was more. That love is strange and unpredictable and timeless.

In the silence, I lift Sarah’s hand from the duvet and squeeze it gently. She looks surprised.

“It’s going to be awful today but we will get through it all
together
,” I say.

She nods. “Want the first shower?”

“No, you go on. I’ll make the tea.”

I watch her as she goes out, with her honey hair and almond shaped eyes, her peaches-and-cream skin. She is slender and perfect, fragile as a china doll. I could smash her in pieces. I know it, and I don’t know what to do. I really don’t.