Dead Secret (2 page)

All I know for certain is that in the week from Da’s death to his funeral, from kissing him in that hospital bed to laying him in the ground, everything changed. One week, yet it forced me to face a lifetime’s denial. I had always known the secrets were there. Da’s death just forced me to face them.

Growing up, Sarah and I were affected differently by the mysteries of our family life. For me, they produced a kind of emotional restlessness, an inability to stay still and relate to
people
. Maybe I was frightened that if I stopped, I’d have to think. Sarah was frightened to do anything
other
than think. I got itchy feet and my sister became trapped in a padded cage, craving safety and security. Sarah and I were always opposites.

It was only after Da died that I came to understand the
wasted
years. The flitting from job to job. The lack of direction. The men. I think I always wanted to know about Mother. On some subconscious level, perhaps I
did
know. Perhaps the awfulness of what happened was locked somewhere inside me, a kind of suppressed, intuitive knowledge. Either way – knowing or not
knowing – I was always going to be rootless. If I wasn’t certain where I came from, how could I know who I was? You can call it amateur psychology if you like, but these things matter. Of course they matter.

It wasn’t until the truth came out that I finally learned how to stand still. And maybe how to stop being mouthy and
lashing
out at people I care about. So many milestones since then, important things that Da has missed. With him gone, nothing is ever complete now; nothing is ever truly whole. At the age of thirty-three I’m finally going to graduate and Da won’t be there. And Sarah is about to have her first baby, the grandchild he’ll never see. I miss him. We miss him. We’ve never stopped
missing
him.

It’s five years this summer since he died. It’s not his
anniversary
that has made me relive everything so intensely these last few weeks, made me write it all down. I am not a great one for anniversaries; it is the everyday absence that is most painful. No, it’s hearing Shameena Khan’s new recording of Puccini’s arias. She sent it to me in the post with a note, explaining what I
already
knew: that the roots of this recording went back to Da’s funeral. Every time I listen to it, I feel inspired to to write down a little more of what happened that summer.

It was so beautiful when she sang for Da. I think of rain
after
drought when I hear those opening notes, of water pattering gently on scorched earth. There is nothing quite like music for making part of your life come alive again and re-run like a
movie
reel in your head. The record you danced to the summer you were sixteen. The song you got married to, or made love to by candlelight. Or in the case of Puccini, the music you buried your father to.

Shameena Khan was – is – my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were schoolgirls. Nowadays everyone has heard of Shameena. But she was only just breaking through on the
opera
scene five years ago when she flew up from London to sing at Da’s funeral. There can be few of us who were in the church who didn’t guess what a career Shameena had before her. For me, nothing could ever compare to the way she sang that day. It was music to live for; music to die to; music to make the carousel turn.

Her singing fused with something in me that day, something that is gone now and will never come back in quite the same way. It was a moment where love, and pain, and insight, and beauty, suddenly melted into one another and bubbled up as something new, a brief, transient glimpse of infinity. Such a voice. The
recording
is wonderful too, really wonderful. I am listening to it now, as I write. It is as much my tool as the keyboard I type with.

The power of the music is pumping up the room, taking
every
inch of space and making it swell, the way a sponge swells in water. It fills me too, until there is nothing left of the present, nothing left of now. There is only yesterday. In every note I can see the summer Da died, and smell it, and touch it. More
importantly
, I can feel it. At times I even find myself slipping back into those strange, one-sided conversations I had with him in the week after he died.

I am right back there, caught in the strange, stifling heat of that June, while the music washes over me, a warm, rhythmic, rolling wave of memories.

Tinned chicken soup is death food. We eat it the day Da dies. I watch the pallid, glutinous mass of it slide reluctantly from the tin in a solid lump and squelch into the pot. Aunt Peggy is shaking the tin hysterically, like it’s someone’s shoulders. No soup for me, I tell her, but she carries on shaking. Peggy never takes no for an answer.

“Best to eat,” she says briskly.

Christ.

Peggy is Da’s younger sister, the closest Sarah and I ever got to a mother. I’ll never forget the way she looked this morning as she walked with Uncle Charlie down that peppermint-green hospital corridor towards me. It made me think of a miniature doll Da gave me once. It was free on the cover of a magazine I had nagged him to buy me, a little Japanese doll with a white porcelain face, but when I unwrapped the cellophane, the doll’s arm had fallen off. Peggy looked like that: face like chalk and broken.

I put my arms round her and neither of us said anything but I could feel the tremor that was invading her thin body as she clung to me in the corridor. She’s the only one of Da’s family left now. “Oh Becca…” she whispered finally. “To come home for this…” She moved out of my arms and grasped my hand. “At least you were here.” I suppose it was just guilt that made me wonder if there was a reproach hidden somewhere in there. Home for Da’s death, if not his life.

All those years away, working in one lousy hotel after
another
. I’d only got back again two days ago. Brighton this time. I’d lasted a month. It was supposed to be a receptionist’s job but I’d ended up working the bar and cleaning rooms and
waitressing
. The day they told me the breakfast chef hadn’t turned up, I told them Superwoman hadn’t flown in either and left. I told Da I was coming home to see him before taking something else, probably in Bournemouth. We had talked about going for a holiday together in the autumn, maybe Italy. The brochures are still tucked down the side of my unpacked case. The case is lying open on the floor of my bedroom, the clothes strewn over the lid, straggling remnants of a life that no longer exists.

Peggy is fussing now. I watch her opening tins, and cutting bread, and clattering pots in the cupboard. She pulls out a
battered
old milk pan with a twisted lip that has a strip of congealed milk down one side where the pan once boiled over. She shakes her head. “Ah, Joseph Connaghan,” she says tearfully, picking up a scourer from the sink and scrubbing vigorously. Charlie touches her shoulder and she momentarily lays her cheek on his arm. Peggy never lets Charlie do anything in the kitchen and I doubt he’s ever ironed a shirt in his life. But she doesn’t shoo him out today as she would normally. He stands beside her at the sink, buttering bread clumsily on a board. It’s his way of talking.

He never says much, Charlie. He just seems to spend his life serenely absorbing all Peggy’s high voltage. She generates all this crackling electricity that blasts out heat and Charlie simply sucks it all up and transforms it into light. He’s Peggy’s light bulb. Or maybe her fuse. She’d combust without Charlie.

I think Peggy would have liked children but it never happened. She had three surrogate kids instead: me, Sarah and Charlie. She
helped Da bring Sarah and me up, and when we weren’t around, she channelled everything into Charlie. She made him dinners that would feed a ravenous navvy and when he sat down to one of her mounded plates, we’d tease him and ask if it had been a hard day in the trenches. Charlie would just smile that slow smile and sprinkle salt liberally over the heap without looking at us. Actually, he was a nine-to-five man who worked as a clerk in an accountant’s office.

Sarah is sticking close to Peggy as always, organising bowls and spoons.

Dutiful Sarah. Without saying anything, I go up to Da’s room to phone Shameena, conscious that I am being furtive, sneaking away. For some reason I always tend to do things as if they are a secret, even when they aren’t. That’s one thing about the
Connaghan
family that you really need to know. We are a family who operates on secrets. We understand them. We are comfortable in their silence…

The memories after he dies come unexpectedly, like sudden
little
puffs of smoke from the chimney of my brain. The first comes when I am halfway up the stairs. I am seven. It’s late in the year because the fire is full blast and the wind is rattling the loose casement in the sitting room. I am sitting on Da’s knee after my bath and the cheap, rough weave of his work trousers scratches against the skin of my bare legs as I wriggle in his lap. Sarah is playing with a bucket of bricks across the room.

Tentatively, I put my hands on his face. For a moment, my curiosity makes me see only his features, not my Da. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. I trace the contours, my soft fingers running down the stubble of his cheeks like velvet down an emery board. It feels
strange, rough. Where do they come from, those dark hairs? I wonder, prodding them, trying to push them back into the pores.

It is like the exploration of a blind person: the fingertips run over the mound of Da’s cheeks, up over the bridge of his nose,
halting
at the hard, knobbly, uneven ridge in the middle. I press hard.

“Ouch!” says Da.

Startled out of my own little world, my eyes dart up to his. He is suddenly Da again and not just a series of features.

“Ouch,” he repeats, rolling his eyes in mock agony.

I giggle and press again.

“OUCH!” he yells, and I laugh uproariously.

Sarah drops her bricks at the noise. She pads across the room and leans on Da’s knee, trying unsuccessfully to swing her leg up.

“Up!” she demands, her soft blonde curls falling across her face. “Up!”

Da lifts her with one arm, moving me onto one knee and her onto the other, tucking each of us into the crook of an arm. We look at each other across the divide of his chest. In our house, there is always one between two. Always a half instead of a whole. Da kisses the tops of both our heads. Daddy’s girls. He is all we have. Neither of us wants to share…

His room feels cold with absence. Such stillness. The
conversations
in my head begin almost immediately.
Where are you, Da?
I find myself talking to him as if he will answer, searching as if it is impossible that he really is gone. I keep walking from room to room in his house. He is in every one of them and yet in none. In here, he is in the indentation of the pillow, where his head lay only this morning. He is in the discarded washing
and the slippers that peep from under the bedclothes. His body lies in the hospital morgue now. But where has the rest of him gone?

“Rebecca!”

The voice startles me.

“Rebecca!”

It is Peggy.

“The soup’s ready,” she calls.

I look around the room before closing the door. It is dusty, stuffy, the air stale with trapped heat. But still it makes me shiver with his absence.

In the kitchen, Aunt Peggy pours the soup into the bowls with a ladle while the rest of us watch silently. My body and mind are in disagreement. My stomach is churningly empty, and yet I don’t want to eat. It doesn’t seem right. It’s so cruel the way the world simply keeps on turning no matter what. On the way home from the hospital, the car had stopped at lights and there was a young couple standing on the pavement, framed in the car window. She was laughing, her arms wrapped around his waist, her eyes raised to his face teasingly. He bent down and kissed her lightly on the lips. It was bewildering this happiness, this intimacy. I wanted to bang on the window and tell them. Don’t you know? Don’t you understand? Da’s DEAD.

I can see the steam rising from the soup bowls. Sarah
catches
my eye, and for once I know for sure we are thinking the same. She picks up her spoon and dips it in, stirring the soup round and round before sipping it. My spoon clanks on the side of the bowl and I swallow the mouthful whole, feeling it scald my windpipe, burning right down to my gut. The pain helps. Tinned chicken soup. I’ll never eat it again as long as I live.