Looking back now on all those times Dad died, I’d have to say the first one remains my favourite.
When he was twenty-nine, Dad was working as an in-house solicitor for a now defunct telecommunications firm. He lived alone in Peckham, and clocked in long, unsociable hours. One hot July evening, a little past nine o’clock, he got home and found a dead man lying at the foot of his stairs.
I killed my mother-in-law last month. Obviously, David doesn’t know I was responsible for his mother’s death. He thinks it was just an accident. Which is infuriating, because I was finally going to prove to him what a cow she was. But now I have to listen to him crying over “Poor Mummy,” and reminiscing about how perfect she was.
You complain that we won’t find Daddy’s Civic the entire way to the junkyard.
When we arrive at the lot of gutted cars, you lull behind me like a shadow. A sickle moon stamps the night sky, glowing pale white like my flashlight. The wind is cold; I zip up my jacket and put the hood over my head; I can feel my lips drying, chapping like the ridges of a dry desert.
I am a mutant. A being living between two spaces I (don’t) know how to occupy.
I don’t know how to speak Spanish, a torment that pulls at my insides. A feeling that festers like anger like rage, it bubbles like tears as they slide hot down my face. I am reminded of this feeling when my grandmother is downstairs watching telenovelas after my brother’s graduation. When the voices drift up the sitars and pour into the crack of my bedroom door like a lullaby of sounds I can only piece together. When I laugh at the half-broken text messages my grandmother sends me on my birthday, an attempt to tell me that she loves me but the words just don’t line up right. When my grandmother calls my mother in the car and the conversation carries through the speakers, a blending of languages as they slip between worlds, the ease of a conversation I can’t follow.
You are compact, says the estate agent, a glorified cupboard say your owners. You are the custodian of cardboard boxes and unwanted wedding gifts. You are magnolia.
You are papered in pink princesses. Cartoon character curtains hang at your window and a homemade mobile of cotton wool clouds and knitted rainbows is suspended from your ceiling. You are filled with laughter and lullabies, crying and crises, the gurgling, giggling growing of your girl.
Shane picks his mysteries by their covers. Trench coats, fedoras, shadowy back alleys, that sort of thing. One Sunday afternoon, at a restaurant called Chester’s, Shane was caught up in a mystery involving a stolen antique spoon when a dark-haired young lady leaned across her table to say, “Any guesses?”
Shane blank-faced her over top of his paperback.
“Who stole the spoon?” she said. Her voice was low, syrupy, and her smile said she was about to give away the answer.
‘Mind you get that bike home in one piece.’
His mother left him at the school bike sheds. The car faded towards Ipsden Heath, leaving him to cycle home the long route.
The long route would have been all right in the end. But on this fateful day Tom Purton decided to make the descent of Berins Hill, the forbidden shortcut. Thirty seconds down the incline he heard a little tinkling behind him. His rear brake was falling off. Away went the endless sequence of nuts and washers accompanying the brake pads, into the abyss. The bike picked up speed.
There was some confusion about where Carole should sit. She had ordered five low mourners’ chairs, but the rabbi (who had stayed far too long as it was) explained yet again that Jewish law did not permit ex-wives to sit on mourner’s chairs, even if they had been married to the deceased for nearly thirty years. She could, if she wanted, sit near her ex-brother-in-law and her daughters, but not next to them. She was only there as a comforter of mourners, not as a mourner. As he put on his high black hat to leave, he reminded her to cover her mirrors, as was required for a house of mourning.
‘All the mirrors,’ he added, with the air of a man who knew a rule-breaker when he saw one.
My father’s finger nail bed, picked raw from worry, would’ve hugged the trigger of the gun. After hesitating, maybe not, the finger would’ve curled shut. The gun would’ve erupted, its bullet would’ve split his temple. No matter how long he had planned to end his life, even he couldn’t have escaped the surprise of death, which would have eventually trickled away, the deep crease of his brown unfurling, finally soft.
It had probably been a moan not a shot. A tired exhale.
This is what I thought of, in the middle of the quiet and dark hospital room, as I cradled my newborn son.
Idle Ink 