Dead Secret (4 page)

Shameena’s CD has finished and gone right back to track one but I cannot move to change it. I don’t want to be part of what’s happening now in this room. When the CD arrived I was
reluctant
to listen and braced myself against the memories. But gradually I find myself wanting to go back to that time as deeply as I can and relive it. It’s almost like finding an old coat from years ago, and trying it on and thinking,
yes
, that’s what it was like. It is dangerous, I suppose, but I don’t want just to ‘
remember
’. It’s not enough. I want to experience it again so that this time, I can make sense of it.

The thing about pain is that it’s just too powerful; you have to anaesthetise yourself or how could you live with it? Five years on, what I am telling you has to be a diluted version: one part pain to two parts deliberate amnesia. Maybe if I had written this in the months after Da died, my memory would not have had as much time to protect me. But an account back then, when it was all so raw, would have lacked insight or overview. It’s as if
everything
has been locked away in a box until I was strong enough to examine it. Until now. Until I heard that music again.

It’s the conversations with Da in that first week after he died that take me back into the past, into my old ‘present’, most
vividly
. They play relentlessly in my head and I can either be an observer to them, listening in on my old self, or if I let go, I
slip back into them in as if I am having them all over again. Perhaps you will think that conversations with the dead are a sign of insanity; certainly those days and weeks seemed tinged with madness. But they don’t scare me now because I see them for what they were. They were both holding on and letting go… trying to find a piece of him that still existed that would make it possible to give the rest of him up. I stood in his room, listening for a sound in the silence, a whispered answer to my questions, knowing that you can’t instantly stop talking to someone just because they die…

Da. Da where are you? I can smell you. Not the artificial smell of soap and aftershave, but the smell of you. The you-ness of you. It drifts beneath my nostrils, faint and hard to define, like a ghost smell. Is scent the last part of you to leave the world? Or are you actually here in the room with me?

The thought sends a sudden rush of blood through me, a rush of excitement, but of fear, too. I honestly don’t know which is greater: my longing or my fear. The longing eats me greedily, like a cancer. But the terrifying thought of seeing a spirit makes me nauseous and shivery, even on a humid June night. The truth is, I am frightened of being in a dead man’s room. Even your room. I want to see you again. But I want the old you, not the new you. Your old warmth is chilled by a new vocabulary. Ghost. Being. Soul. Spirit. I don’t want your spirit. I want your humanity. I don’t want to feel your
presence
. I want to feel the softness of your jumper on my face, the way I did when you hugged me to your chest. Great, crushing bear hugs. “Ah, love,” you used to say when I came back home, wrapping your arms round me and almost swinging me off my feet.

Over there, where the light of the street lamps is streaming through the chink in the curtains, is the chair where you used to toss your clothes at night. I can see a shirt and a pair of trousers. They hang casually, as if you are coming back soon to wear them. You didn’t know when you took those trousers off that you would never step in them again. I’m glad you didn’t know. There’s only one thing worse than your going, and that’s the thought that you went in fear.

Your death has left me with so many questions.

I felt sorry for Peggy today as I watched her washing dishes, her thin frame and rounded shoulders stooped over the sink, the kink of a steel-wool perm curling up over her collar. I had the
feeling
she was crying into the washing-up bowl. I knew it wasn’t the time to corner her but I couldn’t help myself. I suppose I have a certain ruthlessness at times, but I prefer to think of it as focus. Determination.

I don’t really know what I expected when I asked her if there was anyone on mother’s side that I should contact about your funeral. But I didn’t expect all that hostility. Not the burning anger that made her shout that since not one of mother’s family had been in your house while you were alive, they were hardly likely to turn up now you were dead.

Why was she so angry? She kept shouting and I ended up yelling back. I am ashamed of that now. But all that stuff about grief
pulling
people together is rubbish. Grief makes people cut each other up.

“Didn’t he love my mother?” I demanded. “Oh he loved her all right!” She spat those words out and they seemed to sizzle up at me like hot fat. I almost physically shrank back from her they were so ferocious. “He loved her like a man possessed. He was blind.” Da,
what did that mean? I kept asking her, wouldn’t let it drop. “Just leave it!” she kept shouting. But I couldn’t. Did she not love him back? I kept asking. Charlie came to see what was going on, just as Peggy said, “Love him? She bloody well destroyed him.”

I stared at her. She was pale with anger, and a deeper distress had eaten up the familiarity of the face I know so well. She untied the apron round her waist and walked past me, the small, dumpy heels of her brown court shoes clicking stickily on the linoleum floor. There was a damp patch beside the sink where the water had splashed over the edge. Charlie just looked at me and I lifted a cloth and wiped it mechanically.

When Sarah came back, she tried to persuade me to go with them and said I couldn’t stay here on my own, that she would have to stay with me. In the end I had to say to her, “Look Sarah, will you just piss off!” She flushed that way Sarah does, and went and got her coat. I’m sorry I hurt her, but I had to be here on my own with you. I couldn’t talk to you with anyone else around. You understand, don’t you? You understand my need to know?

The strange thing is that when it got dark, I suddenly got
frightened
. I didn’t want to come in here to your room. And yet, if you really will come back, then surely you will come here to this house and this room.

I wore one of your jumpers tonight. There was a pile of clean ones in your chest of drawers but I didn’t want a clean one. I
wanted
one that still had you in it. I buried my face in it and inhaled, like an asthmatic inhaling oxygen. It drowned me, but I wanted to drown in you. Already I am frightened of forgetting. Your face is fading already. How many hours is it since you left? Fifteen maybe. Not even a day and already I find it hard to imagine the exact shade of your eyes. I have looked at them for nearly thirty years
but already I am confused. Were they more grey than blue? Or more blue than grey?

There are little bits of you being stolen all the time, as each hour passes. Your exact eye colour has gone today, and maybe
tomorrow
it will be the exact shape of your nose. Perhaps it will be like a picture where a little bit more gets rubbed out each day, until there is nothing left but an imprint. I think it would be easier if it was just the way you looked that was disappearing, but what was inside you is disappearing too. Can I trust you? Can I believe in you? I keep thinking of your promise to me as a child. Do not be afraid, you said. I am always near you…

No, as I say, you can’t stop talking to someone just because they die on you.

Saturday, the day after Da dies, dawns warm and sticky: a hazy, pearly white June light that promises more heat as the day wears on. The night has been sultry and oppressive, the temperature
never
dropping, a stew of heat simmering at a steady bubble. I twist and turn restlessly all night and wake feeling drained, with the sheet kicked down at my feet. There is a second, a tiny brief second of hope, like a flaring match, when I open my eyes and think it is just another day. And then consciousness sweeps over me and I remember. The day dies instantly, the flame of hope a thin, useless, trail of smoke from a blackened, fizzled-out match-head.

It is that hopelessness rather than tiredness that makes my eyes close again; there is nothing left to wake for. For a while, I drift in a twilight world, where consciousness is heavy with the shadows of sleep. Not fully sleeping, not fully waking. Then, slowly, lured into dreams, the slow-motion fall from
consciousness
, like the fall from dusk to darkness.

Coloured dreams, ferocious dreams, monstrous in their
vividness
. Da is there, walking in the street ahead of me and I run to catch him. But though his pace never changes, I can’t reach him, no matter how hard I run. When I am sweating and out of breath, the ground between us suddenly disappears and I run smack into his back, and he turns so that I am staring into his face. Or what is left of his face.

It is Da all right, but there are great chunks missing: gouged black holes in his cheek and a red, bloodied socket where his right eye should be. And then the face turns on his shoulders like a revolving door, metamorphosing into Tariq.

Da, Tariq. Da. Tariq.

Tariq is Shameena’s brother. I got to know them both through Da when he worked on the buses beside their father, Khadim. Over the years, our families became so close that Shameena and I were like blood sisters, close in a way that Sarah and I were never able to be. But Tariq was not like a brother. No, Tariq was never like a brother.

There is a glaze of sweat on my back when I wake again. Thumping heart, a rush of noise in my head like a train in a
tunnel
. I jump from the bed in a panic, stumbling against the chest of drawers, smashing my hip bone painfully against the drawer handle. Tariq. Da.

Outside the open window, the squeal of kids now, banging sticks on the army of wheelie bins that stand sentinel at the top end of the road. A car engine cuts and dies. Sarah, I think, peeping round the edge of the curtain. Damn it. Des is with her. Pompous, pin-suited, lawyer Des, with his ice-cream-cone hair and shiny shoes.

Da and I had a bet on about Sarah and Des. Da said she’d marry him. He said Sarah needed looking after, that she craved someone solid and dependable like Des.

And minted, of course, I had said. Minted helps. Da had smiled at me, a wry, disapproving smile, and said it was just that Sarah needed security. Security?

Bloody imprisonment, I said. Sarah and I might not always see eye to eye, but I wouldn’t wish Des on her. I wouldn’t wish
Des on anyone. I said I hoped she got smart, cleaned what she could out of Des’s fat bank account, before running off on a world tour with a long-haired rocker from a heavy metal band. It’s the sort of flippant, immature, stupid stuff I used to come out with sometimes. It didn’t mean anything, really. Da just rolled his eyes.

“When are you going to grow up?” he said.

Des has his own law practice, which is the kind of thing that impresses Sarah. “I suppose he’s good looking enough in an
almost
-forty kind of way,” I told her at the time, and Sarah said in her tight little voice, “He’s thirty-four, Becca.” “Split hairs if you want, I said, but he acts forty and you are only twenty-four, for God’s sake.” Des gives occasional lectures at the university and majors in them in his everyday conversation if you let him. Which I don’t. When I was going off on another seasonal job once, he had the nerve to tell me Sarah was worried about me taking all these temporary posts and didn’t I think a smart girl like me could do better for myself? I said considering how well a dumb boy like him had done, I probably could. Sarah didn’t talk to me for two days.

She met Des at the university when he gave a guest lecture to her year and she stayed behind to ask ‘Sir’ some questions. After they had been seeing each other for a while, she came home once all sparkly-eyed and in love and said guess what, her Des was thinking of taking his PhD. She’s a bit of an intellectual snob, Sarah. “What in?” I said. “Smugness?”

They are in the sitting room when I come downstairs. Des gets up and kisses me stiffly.

“I’m really sorry, Rebecca, about your dad.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”

I look at Sarah. Her eyes are red-rimmed and she looks tired.

“Want a coffee?”

“I’ll make it,” she says and goes out, leaving me with Des and an awkward silence.

“It’s good you got back home in time, Rebecca, you know, that you got the chance to be with him at the end,” he says finally.

“Yeah.”

“Lucky.”

“Mmmm.”

“Well, not lucky, but… well… you know what I mean… fate.”

“Yeah.”

We lapse into silence. Des crosses his legs.

“Job wasn’t working out then?”

“Nah.”

I stare out of the window at Mr Curtis next door, walking up the path with his little Yorkshire terrier. Mr Curtis doesn’t look unlike his pet. Such a gallus walk.

Kind of mincing and a bit nebby. But he was kind when we came back from hospital, even knocked on the door and asked if there was anything he could get for us. Millie from number 38, on the other hand, who knows us much better, was embarrassed and pretended not to see me when I went round to
Mohammed’s
for milk. People surprise you.

I can’t be bothered being polite to Des. In the circumstances, I don’t think I should be expected to try.

“I’ll just give Sarah a hand,” I say, and leave the room.

Sarah doesn’t even look up when I come into the kitchen. I stand beside her as she pours the water into mugs. “I’m sorry about last night. About telling you to piss off. I didn’t mean it. I was just… you know…”

She flushes.

“It’s okay.”

Her hand is trembling as she puts the sugar in and I reach out and steady her. The gesture makes her break. She puts the sugar bowl down and clings to me and the two of us sob like babies, more united in sorrow than we ever were in joy. Daddy’s girls. I wipe the tears from her face with my hand.

“We’d better go see Father Riley today and tell him what we’ve organised with the undertaker,” I say quietly. “Make sure he can do the mass.”

She nods. “We’ll go together?”

“Yes,” I say, raising my eyes and making a face.

She smiles. She knows I am making an effort if I am willing to go talk hymns and flowers with Father Riley. “Do you want to get changed first?” she asks, looking at my tight, frayed jeans, and I feel the old, familiar flash of irritation. Sarah looks like she is going for a day at the office in a navy trouser suit and pale pink blouse. Just looking at her always makes me want to tousle my hair and put a rip in my shirt.

“It’s okay,” I say, more drily than I mean to. “You look prim enough for both of us.”