Dead Secret

Growing up wasn’t a process; it was a moment. It was the
moment
I watched Daddy die. Everything began to unravel then. Not slowly, like rows of neat knitting pulled stitch by stitch, but quickly, in great big, uneven chunks that left ragged, unruly holes.

Even now, I prefer to say that up until he died, we all lived a life full of secrets rather than a life full of lies. “Lie” is such an ugly word. And so deliberate. It wasn’t like that.

I didn’t want him to die, but I particularly didn’t want him to die in that dingy little upstairs hall of his. You’d think it would be irrelevant, that only the dying would matter. But it was so
enormous
that all of it was important. It mattered that he was lying on that grubby, beige-coloured carpet; that there was a seeping stain on the wallpaper above his head. It mattered that the white paintwork was chipped and flaking, that it was pockmarked with spots of primrose yellow from a past life. It wasn’t a good enough place for anyone to die, and certainly not Daddy, but then you don’t get to choose, do you? None of us gets to choose. All he could do was die and all we could do was watch.

I used to think life was about options. Brown bread or white? Coffee or tea? Rent or buy; bus or car; sink or bloody swim. The minute he died I knew choice was just an illusion. All of it.
Endless
options making you feel in control and none of them worth
a damn. You can choose white walls over primrose yellow if you want. But you can’t choose between living or dying. Once you know that – I mean
really
know it – you can’t ever be a child again. And when Daddy died, for the first time I really knew.

Strange the way I keep calling him ‘Daddy’. Like one of those upper-crust girls who has a father with a fat cheque book. But we never had any money and I never called him that when he was alive. I called him Da mostly, though I jokingly called him Pa for a bit after we watched an old episode of
The Waltons
. We hooted at the sickly, saccharine nonsense of it all. But I, who hooted loudest and with most derision, loved that family. I
never
stopped to work out why.

It was only after he died that I sometimes called him Daddy. Just in my head. Just in private. When he went, I grew up in the way I saw the world. But I became a little girl again in the way I saw him. Right from the start, I knew for certain that even when the funeral was over, even when things seemed to be normal again, they never, ever would be. You have to understand. He… it… this… all of it… was that important.

He was all Sarah and I had. My sister Sarah is four years younger than me and was only a few weeks old when Mother died. Sometimes, I think she’s lucky that she never knew her at all. For me, trying to remember Mother is like a puzzle that
never
stops nagging. Sarah doesn’t have to bother. Over the years I’ve tried and tried to bring the fuzzy images in my mind into sharper focus. I remember she had a coat with a fur collar that she wore in winter, and I remember being carried in her arms once and laying my cheek, stinging with cold, against the soft fur and falling asleep. The scent she wore was trapped in the fur and in later years I identified it as the scent of roses. Maybe
that’s because I went into a chemist shop once and sniffed
every
perfume bottle in the shop, and when I sniffed one of those old-fashioned bottles of Yardley’s English Roses, my stomach lurched. But that’s all that’s left of her. A vague scent. I can’t
remember
her face and I can’t remember her voice. There has to be a reason for that.

Mother had remarkable power for a dead woman. She was the source of all secrets in our house, the well from which they all sprang. Da never spoke willingly about her to Sarah or me. We knew better than to ask. But I couldn’t help wondering whether he thought of her in his dying moments. Whether, as he lay there in a silent carousel of summer heat and pain and chipped-paint squalor, he remembered something else, a time when the
carousel
had spun to music. He loved her once. I know he loved her. Even knowing what I know now, I don’t think he ever stopped.

At first neither Sarah nor I realised that Da was suffering heart failure. He was weak and shivering with cold, despite the sticky heat of the warmest June in years, and there was sweat on his brow. He gripped the wall to get to the toilet to be sick, and on the way back, he lay down in the hall. Sarah and I tried to coax him back to bed, but though he wasn’t a big man, he was solid. There was no way we could move him without help.

I don’t think he knew where he was or what he was saying. There were a few words that didn’t make sense, then he seemed to focus on us. “Love,” he said, but his eyes said more. When I re-run that scene in my mind now, I always reply. I say, “I love you too, Da.” But I didn’t then. I was too busy trying to pretend it wasn’t the end.

He retched weakly. I took off his pyjama top to sponge the thin sickness that trickled from the corners of his mouth; little rivulets that ran into the folds of his neck. I only minded
because
I knew he would. He was such a private man. So very, very private. But by then he was already slipping in and out of consciousness. The journey had started, or maybe ended, and he was past caring.

At first there had been all that panic. Get the sponge, feel his pulse, call the doctor. Stop it happening.
Take control.
I always feel compelled to push myself forward as the strong one. But I’m a bit of a fraud, as you’ll find out. I may be the eldest, but Sarah is the natural coper in our family, not me. I dialled 999 but Sarah was shouting to me from the hall that he was getting worse and I ended up crying down the line in panic, unable to speak. “It’s okay,” said the operator, “just tell me where you are,” and I sobbed the address into the mouthpiece. She didn’t know what I was saying. Such a kind voice she had. Patient. Asking me to take my time, to repeat it slowly.

It was worse afterwards when the terrible stillness came, when we knew there was nothing else to do but watch. His chest was like a slowly deflating balloon, sinking lower and lower with each breath. His skin became paler, almost
translucent
, as his breathing dropped. My heart began to thump, beating faster and faster as his slowed, and for a moment I had the strangest sensation that his heartbeat was transferring into my body. Neither Sarah nor I spoke. I sat and cradled Da’s head in my lap and listened as a distant siren came closer and closer.

Sarah let them in. Their feet thumped on the wooden stairs as they ran up and I could feel the vibration running through the
floor. They were quite gentle as they moved me away from him, but firm too. While they worked on Da, Sarah and I sat on the stairs like two strangers in our own family’s house. Like it was nothing to do with us, really.

I watched them through the bars of the banister and I wanted to ask them why they were bothering with all that equipment, why they were rushing and pushing and pulling. He was gone
already
. They might make his heart work like a mechanical pump but we knew he was gone. Well, I did. I seldom know what Sarah really thinks.

I could see the barrel shape of his chest and the little hairs inside his nostrils and the slackness under his chin. It looked like Da from the outside but whatever had been inside, whatever spark had fuelled the engine room of Joseph Connaghan, was gone. There seemed no point in all that commotion. It was only later that it felt important they had fought for him and shown that he mattered, that he wasn’t just some random old man. That we hadn’t given him up willingly.

They wouldn’t let us travel in the ambulance. I kept asking why they wouldn’t let me be with him but they said it was better not to. Maybe they thought I’d go crazy if I suddenly realised I was shut in the back with a corpse. A couple of women from further up the street had come out onto the pavement and were standing in their slippers, looking down the road at the
ambulance
. And Mr Curtis from next door, of course. Mr Curtis watches everything in Rosebank Street.

Mr Curtis shrinks when people talk to him. He looked like he wanted to run back inside and peep from behind his
curtains
when one of the ambulance men shouted to him to ask if he could drive Sarah and me to the hospital. Normally I’d have
been angry. I don’t like people organising me. But I didn’t say a word. Neither Sarah nor I could have got behind the wheel. We did the whole journey in silence. “I hope…” he began, as he drew up outside the hospital, and then he looked at me and trailed off. I banged the door shut and ran inside, leaving Sarah to mumble thanks.

A nurse showed us into a waiting room at the hospital. Sarah stood silently. I walked up and down. The walls were pale
yellow
, the curtains lemon with streaks of lime green. They made me think of a soft drink we used to order on holiday abroad, a lemon soda that was served with rocks of ice and twists of lime in the glass. Funny what your mind thinks of in a crisis. Sarah’s eyes followed me everywhere I went in that room.

The nurse came in, closing the door gently, precisely, behind her before speaking. The doctors were still working on Da but he wasn’t responding. Did we want them to continue? Bloody stupid question. There was no point in saying yes because he was gone. If he wasn’t, they wouldn’t have asked. I suppose it was her way of giving us a decision, letting us take control of the goodbye, but by then I already knew there was no such thing as control.

I looked at Sarah. What exactly were we meant to say? No, it’s all right nurse. It’s only my old dad rasping out his last. Tell them to go and have their lunch break. I know I shouldn’t have taken it out on her. She was nice, really. But who would want to say no to a question like that? And what was the point of saying yes? “How can we answer that?” I snapped at her. Sarah apologised for me. I hate it when she does that. She can be so bloody prissy sometimes, Sarah. “It’s okay,” said the nurse, and she touched my shoulder as she left.

He was laid on a white sheet when they finally took us to see him. There was another sheet over him but his chest was still bare and I wanted to pull the sheet up to keep him warm, protect him from the chill of death that rippled through the 85° heat. I could scarcely breathe in that heat, but I still looked at him and felt cold. Grey stone, snow dusted; ice-cracked earth and lichen stiff with frost. Extra socks. I wanted extra socks for my dead father’s feet.

I think maybe the nurse had combed his hair because it was slicked down neatly where usually it had a mind of its own and sprouted in unruly bushes in different directions. His hair was white and without the animation of life he suddenly looked so old. He was sixty-eight but he could have been more. I wanted to tell the nurse that wasn’t how he looked. It was only a month since I had left for a summer season in Brighton. He could have passed for ten years younger then. But nothing stays still for long. Everything in life shifts beneath your feet like moving grains of sand.

I don’t know why it mattered to me that the nurse should know he didn’t usually look that old. Except that as soon as he was gone, I felt the need to make him exist in people’s minds, make them understand the real Da, make them love him as I loved him.

But then I looked at his face as I bent and kissed him one last time, a face so familiar and yet now so unfamiliar, and I felt the solid base of my life suddenly shift and tilt.

The real Da.
I ran a finger gently down his cheek, still soft with the leftovers of life. There had been so many mysteries in our young lives, and while Da was alive it hadn’t really mattered. Or so I’d thought. We had him. It was only now he was dead that
I began to wonder if I had ever known who the real Da was, if I had ever really known him at all.

Secrets. Secrets. Sss… secrets. They have lapped back and forth inside my brain for five years now, ever since Da died, constant as the tides. My understanding has ebbed and flowed steadily too; sometimes it reaches a peak, like the spring tide, when the water is high and deep and complete. I try to hold onto it, the completeness of that understanding, but somehow it always drifts away from me again, receding far out into the distance as if it will never return.