Dead Secret (8 page)

The memory of that moment jolts me back into the present.
Shameena’s
music blares out around me still. I wish Da could have heard her sing at his funeral. But perhaps he did.

I took the bottle and headed for bed, another nocturnal
conversation
with Da running in my head.

Why didn’t you tell me Da? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. My head is hurting trying to work it out. I hoped tonight would be cool but it’s hot and murky and I keep thinking that this room smells of death. I don’t know how to describe what death smells like but it smells of this, whatever is in here. Heat and dust and sadness. With the door open, I can lie in bed and see the spot in the hall where you died. I keep looking at it. My eyes won’t leave it alone.

I am talking to a dead man. Best kind, I’d have joked, once. The only kind that doesn’t answer back. Now I’d give anything for an answer. But you’re not here, are you? I am left talking to you in my head, and the only answer is the dust falling through the air in the beam of light from the lamp.

Did you lie to me? Or was it that you did not tell me the whole truth? Did you tell me you had always been a bus driver… or did I assume? I keep asking myself why it matters so much but it DOES matter. Being an accountant, well, it’s a sign of a whole other life that I knew nothing about. It means I never really knew you. I’ve lost my future with you. Now I feel the past is slipping through my fingers too. Soon there will be nothing left.

I still don’t get it. Why would you earn your living as a bus
driver
if you were qualified to be an accountant? Of course, I knew you
were smart. You had books on astronomy and books on physics and books on ancient Greece… books and books and books. You even started learning Italian when we said we fancied a holiday in Italy. But I always thought you were one of those working-class men who was slightly in awe of formal education. One who had never had a chance to turn his natural intelligence into
qualifications
, and who thought people who did were much cleverer. How could I be so wrong about someone I loved so much?

Tonight, after looking in the bureau, I started trying to go right back to childhood. Remember everything in order. See if there are clues about you. About Mother. About why there were so many secrets. I keep thinking there must be things I know that I don’t even realise I know. But the memory-fires refuse to ignite. Early memories are so elusive, fragile wisps that disappear or change shape when you try to grab them. I’ll remember something, then think, did it really happen that way? Or do I just think it happened that way?

When I looked in that bureau tonight, I thought all the
surprises
would be about mother. But there was little about her, not even a death certificate. I still don’t know what my own mother died of. I always wondered if it was something like cancer that took her slowly. Maybe you had to watch the light fading and when the darkness finally fell you couldn’t bear to talk of what once had been. But wouldn’t I have remembered that, even as a tot? A mother whose hair was falling out, who was disappearing slowly from me, eaten up by pain and sickness?

There is one clue that might lead me to more answers. A simple but crucial clue. You always said, Da, that the simple things in life were the most important. It is the address on Mother’s letter:
Bayview
, Lochglas. She was preparing that house for the two of you.
Was it where we lived? I looked Lochglas up on the map. On the rare occasions we talked about living in the Highlands, you always just said we lived near Inverness. Lochglas is only ten miles north of Inverness.

You see the way my mind is working, don’t you, Da? You know what I am thinking? I suggested a trip to Inverness once and you said no so savagely, I never suggested it again. I felt guilty for being so thoughtless. Too many memories, I thought. But what would I find now? Are mother’s family still in that area? I suppose her
parents
would be dead now, though I suppose it’s possible they could be in their eighties or nineties. I don’t know whether she had a big family or a small one, but there must surely be someone up there who at least knew her. It’s twenty-five years but it’s not a lifetime. It’s not impossible. She must have left a mark somewhere. A life doesn’t just get erased, does it, Da?

Questions… Peggy refuses to answer any. And you… well you don’t seem able to. Unless this is your answer. Did you lead me to the bureau? Are you telling me to go? To find answers for myself? I NEED answers. I keep thinking about the funeral, about being forced to finally say goodbye to you. But say goodbye to whom? I want to know who you really were. Once you are in that coffin with the lid closed, I’m so worried I will never know the truth. I have to know more than the name on the brass when we place your coffin in the ground, when we cover it with the cold, black earth.

Silent midnight. Alone, with only the steady pulse of thought like a mental heartbeat inside my head. Already I have begun to hate Da’s house. There is only emptiness now: a house
without
substance; a house of dreams and shadows and memories. Loved but loathed. I am trapped inside it, like a crab trapped in its own shell, the housing on my back both my protection and my burden. Inside the shell there is only space, and inside the space the midnight thought grows and grows until it explodes into reality: Lochglas.

I start out not believing I will really go. Finding the map,
measuring
the distance, packing a small case: they are all simply actions to test the idea. Trying the thought on, wearing it like a shoe, seeing how it fits. Lochglas. The door clicking behind me, my own
footsteps
on the stairs, the start of the engine… they are not irrevocable. A short drive to the all-night garage. Some chocolate perhaps. A bag of ground coffee. The first edition of tomorrow’s paper.

But I drive past the garage. Ironic that Da’s car should have a full tank of petrol. The journeys he never went on; the
milometer
finally stuck. Left. Down to the roundabout leading to the motorway. M8 Stirling. Still it is not irrevocable. A few miles on the motorway, foot to the floor, a release of tension. That’s all. Perhaps no further. Faster. Faster. Perhaps not Lochglas. Peggy and Sarah, after all. Peggy and Sarah.

Lochglas. Walk about in the shoe; look carefully at the
reflection
in the mirror. See it; feel it. Stirling? Already? I barely noticed the miles I walked. The soft leather fits snugly round my foot. And then, near Perth, the moment where the shoe has been worn too long to take back. The decision is made before it is made. Go on going on. Only the price left to pay. Expensive shoes, a high price: Peggy and Sarah.

Midsummer midnight, a seductive darkness that never quite blackens. Ahead, only white lines and headlights. But through the side window, glimpses of a world flashing by: a full, round moon that sparkles silver on the black water; and a
dragon’s-breath
puff of mist drifting free across the loch; and a solid wedge of inky shadow reflecting from the army of trees standing sentinel at the water’s edge. Da would have loved this: the surreal magic of it; the spontaneity of the journey; and knowing that, the beauty becomes a kind of ache.

The car speeds through the night, eating up the miles. The mental pulse beats steadily, from memory to memory, year to year. The year we went to Ireland. The year Sarah broke her leg. The year Da won fifty pounds on a fifty-to-one outsider in the Derby and took us all, Sarah and Charlie and Peggy and me, out to eat in a restaurant. Peggy said he should save it but Da wouldn’t hear of it and I loved that about him, the way
somewhere
inside him, he knew how to live.

The first stab of tiredness cuts into me. I open the car window and switch on the radio. It crackles and hisses, the reception blocked by the hills. I turn it off again. Tomorrow, I think, I will phone Shameena. Let her know the arrangements for Friday. Maybe I’ll tell her where I am. Maybe not. I love Shameena but right now I am in a world that is shrinking. There is only me and
Da, and a shadow of mother standing behind us. And Tariq, of course. Tariq is always on my shoulder.

It is time to talk about Tariq. It will not surprise me if you find what I say childish. I don’t expect anyone to understand. I don’t really care if you do or you don’t. You may think it was
unimportant
because I was only sixteen. But you would be wrong. Tariq is ageless, timeless. He simply is.

It was those boys spitting at Khadim on the bus that led me to Tariq, albeit in a very indirect kind of way. The next evening, Da came home from day shift and said we had been invited to Khadim’s house for a meal. Sarah and I looked at one another in surprise. We never went to anyone’s house. Da was friendly to people but he kept his distance; he wasn’t a sociable man. He never went to parties, or to the pub, or even out to the pictures, though Peggy and Charlie would have looked after us any time he wanted.

I screwed up my face.

“Do we have to?” I said. I was fifteen and didn’t want to go anywhere that involved adults.

“Of course we have to,” said Da. “We’ve been invited.”

“Why?”

Da shrugged.

“He wanted to say thank you. About what happened on the bus yesterday.”

“What happened?” said Sarah.

“Couldn’t he just say it?” I asked.

Da sighed.

“Couldn’t you just go without having to have your
tuppence-worth
all the time?”

“Excuse me for living.”

“Is nobody going to tell me?” demanded Sarah.

“What’s your problem anyway, Rebecca?” said Da, dishing out shepherd’s pie onto three plates. “Get the cutlery, will you?”

“It will be embarrassing,” I said, sighing heavily and throwing open the drawer. I brought the cutlery over to the table where Da was trying to shake off a wedge of grey, lumpy mashed
potato
from a spoon. “Still,” I muttered, watching it fall like a rock down a hillside, “at least we’ll eat.”

Da had few alternatives when it came to cooking and most of them involved mince. Sarah and I took a culinary interest at a remarkably young age. Sarah even took cookery books out of the library and we’d drool over the pictures and then leave them lying around the sitting room, open at the pages of some dish or other we fancied most. Da never took the hint. So Sarah and I started cooking. It wasn’t so much interest as self preservation.

“I mean, I like Khadim, but we don’t know his family, do we?” I said as we sat down.

“Well, we won’t if we don’t go,” said Sarah.

“Oh shut up, Sarah!” I banged a knife and fork down in her place.

“Rebecca!” said Da sharply. “Don’t talk like that.” Da found my teenage years the most trying. The moods and the stroppiness. He got Peggy to do all the women’s stuff, of course. The day he arranged for our little “chat”, he could hardly look me in the eye.

“As far as you are concerned everything’s embarrassing,” Da continued crossly. “Even going to Peggy’s is embarrassing. Being asked to go the corner shop is embarrassing. Being picked up from parties is embarrassing.”

“Well it is,” I said. “My friends all get the bus home.”

Da shoved a plate across to me. “We’re going.”

“When?”

“Friday.”

“Amy said I could maybe go to hers on Friday.”

“Too bad.”

I scowled and took a mouthful of shepherd’s pie, crunching into a half-cooked carrot.

“Any pickle?”

“Khadim has a girl about your age,” said Da, opening the fridge door. “And a boy a year older. Doesn’t keep too well.” He handed me a jar of Branston with a gummed-up lid and dried pickle down the side.

“Who?”

“The boy.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Heart trouble.”

Shit, I thought. A Friday night stuck with a girl I’ve never met and her sickly brother.

“This pickle bottle’s disgusting,” I complained. “It’s all sticky.”

Shameena and I hit it off immediately. She was a stroppy cow, like me. She had been made to dress up in her best clothes and she sat mutinously on the sofa when we arrived, kicking her heels against her seat.

“Hi,” she said, scarcely looking up when we were introduced.

“Shameena!” said Khadim sharply, and Shameena struggled to her feet to shake hands with Da and Sarah and me.

I thought she looked like a bit of a goddess actually. A
glorious
, sulky goddess. She had on a bright red salwar kameez and
a scarf edged in gold that hung down over her plump, golden arms. Her eyes were outlined with thick, jet-black kohl and two huge gold earrings dangled from her lobes. Best of all was the diamond stud through her nose.

“Like your stud,” I said, and she suddenly grinned.

Khadim’s wife Nazima inclined her head in welcome and
avoided
looking us directly in the eye. She was like a tiny, colourful bird in her blue salwar kameez, with sharp, precise little movements as she turned this way and that. Her dark, expressive eyes stole glances in the way a bird steals crumbs and darts away with them again. Khadim looked like a giant next to her. Nazima
communicated
in smiles so that she didn’t have to talk. She had a few words of English but Khadim had to keep translating into Urdu for her.

“She’s never bothered learning English,” Shameena explained to me. “Twenty years here and she can scarcely speak a word. She understands quite a lot though.”

I felt a bit honoured. Didn’t look like they had many white visitors. Nazima’s life was her family: her husband and son and daughter; the cousins who lived nearby; and Khadim’s brother who lived in Edinburgh. She didn’t go out to work and I could see why she had so little English.

We were only in a few minutes when Nazima called
Shameena
and the two of them disappeared into the kitchen before reappearing with bowl after colourful bowl of food, enough for a maharaja’s feast. Pakoras and samosas and bowls of rich, dark, curry. Indian vegetables and naan breads and popadums. Brightly coloured sweets, rolled in coconut and coloured yellow and pink and green like the tail feathers of an exotic bird.

Nazima motioned us with swift little hand movements and smiled into the carpet. Her son, Tariq, had been delayed and we
would start the meal without him. This could be tricky. Da was a stew and mince and tatties man. But he surprised me the way he not only ate, but enjoyed, the feast that was put before us. Da always did like colour. He loved the richness of the clothes Nazima and Shameena wore, the intensity of the colours and the sparkling threads of gold and silver that ran through them. He loved the exotic sweetness of the sliced mango on the table, and what, to him, was the fire of the curries. Specially mild dishes, Khadim said, for his new friend Joseph. I felt a bit touched by that; I had never known Da to have a friend.

Da laughed and said he’d never tasted anything as delicious as this Kashmiri chicken with its mouth-watering mixture of spices and bananas and pineapples. He was in such good
humour
that night. Halfway through eating, Tariq arrived home. When the door opened and he walked in, I nearly dropped my fork. Sarah was sitting opposite me with her back to the door and she clocked my stare before she turned to see who had come in. When she turned back to the table she gave me a little grin of amusement, and I flushed with annoyance and glared at her, kicking her lightly under the table.

He was gorgeous. Tariq would have been about eighteen or nineteen then. His eyes drew me, great dark pools that seemed older, deeper, wiser, than the rest of him. He wasn’t that much older than me and Shameena really, but there was something about his eyes that put him in a different league from us and the spotty youths we hung around with. Despite his slenderness, Tariq seemed like a man rather than a boy, and that was
irresistible
to an almost-sixteen-year-old girl.

I found him deeply attractive but underneath the warm, golden tones of his skin it was obvious that he was not well. He moved
slowly and seemed breathless with the least exertion. Nazima fussed the minute he came through the door, and sat him down and laid bowls before him like he was an honoured guest, and he smiled a slow, warm smile at her and told her not to fuss. He sat next to me and turned those huge dark eyes on me and nodded.

Tariq had been born with a congenital heart defect. Doctors told Khadim and Nazima that he would be in a wheelchair when he was a teenager, but see, they said, he was not in a wheelchair. Allah was good. They thought he got better all the time. But he needed an operation soon. They prayed all the time for their son, said Khadim, and Nazima closed her eyes and clasped her hands as if in prayer.

“They’re not kidding either,” said Shameena, under her breath to me. “All the bloody time.”

Tariq heard her and grinned lazily at his sister. I glanced up quickly to see if Khadim had heard too, but he was too busy encouraging Nazima to spoon more Kashmiri chicken onto Da’s plate.

“We go to church every week too,” I said.

“Just once? You’re lucky. We pray five times a day and go to the mosque at least once a week.”

“God!” I said

“No, Allah,” grinned Shameena and we both giggled. “The only time I don’t have to go is you know… that time of the month,” she whispered to me behind her hand, so that nobody else could hear.

“What?”

She shrugged.

“That’s the custom. Don’t ask me. I don’t complain. I had two last month.”

I laughed, choking on a chunk of naan bread.

“Pass Rebecca some water, Shameena,” called Khadim from the other end of the table, and then turned back to some
involved
conversation with Da.

“Didn’t they notice?” I asked.

She shook her head, pouring water from a jug into my glass.

“Mum did, but she just went along with it because she didn’t want any more arguments. Me and Dad are always fighting.”