Dead Secret (3 page)

Shameena’s voice on the recording pushes then pulls me,
thrusting
me back into the past as the music takes hold, yanking me forward again into the present at the end of each track. I
yo-yo
back and forward at first, until the spells in the past become longer, drawing me deeper and deeper into the memories and I am no longer conscious of one track ending and another
beginning
. Figures from the past make cameo appearances in my head, events and conversations, snatches of dialogue: disjointed, disparate, sometimes out of sequence…

Me… Shameena… that first time we spoke about my mother. Shameena was such an important part of my teenage years that she pops up in most of my memories of that time. We were at her house. No, that’s not right. Mine. It was my house, in the bedroom Sarah and I shared. It was when we had those stupid pink floral duvet covers that Sarah insisted on. Shameena and I were lying flat on our backs on top of cabbage roses, one on each bed, giggling. Shameena often made me laugh. There was always a sense of mischief bubbling away beneath her demure façade. At times, her mischief bordered on recklessness and it was that quality that drew us together: we each recognised it in the other. I loved Shameena like a sister. And, if I’m honest, I loved her because of whose sister she was.

Shameena often came round after school because we had
the house to ourselves. I liked the company and she liked the freedom. That day, she was making me laugh with an
impersonation
of Sunday afternoon teas in the Khan household, when her mum and her mad aunties got together and did each other’s hair, and criticised each other’s dress sense, and tried to outdo one another with tales of their kids’ sheer brilliance. The way Shameena switched between Urdu and her own Glaswegian
accent
was hilarious. When we finally stopped laughing and lay silently gazing up at the ceiling, she asked, “What did your mum die of, Becca?”

“Dunno.”

Shameena stared at me.

“You don’t know! How can you not know?”

“She died when I was four. Da never talks about her.”

Shameena considered this for a moment.

“That’s dead romantic, that,” she said eventually.

“What, my mother snuffing it?”

“No! Of course not! Your dad not talking about it.”

“Is it?”

“I bet he’s got a broken heart and can’t bring himself to talk about her.”

“You reckon?”

“Yeah.”

“So do I, actually,” I said, so quietly that I’m not sure if she heard.

I remember watching Shameena as she sat up and took out a brush, dragging it through her thick, black, waist-length hair. Deftly, she twisted the hair into a rope, then piled it up on top of her head, looking at the result in the mirror.

“Haven’t you ever asked about her?”

“Sometimes.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t say much.”

Shameena twisted her head round to profile and sucked in her cheekbones, glancing sideways in the mirror. “Do you think it makes my face look thinner if I put my hair up like this?”

I considered her with ostentatious care, from every angle.

“Nope.”

She laughed, let the rope fall, and threw a hair scrunchie at me.

“Why don’t you go to the records office without him knowing and look up your mum?”

The suggestion had startled me.

“I couldn’t do that,” I said instinctively.

“Why not?”

“I just couldn’t. It would be like… like… a betrayal.” It was the first time I had articulated the subconscious feeling that to need a mother would be a slight to my father. It was almost as if I was adopted and felt a tug of loyalty between my birth parent and the person who brought me up. But both were my real parents, so why should Da and my mother be in competition? Why did there have to be a choice between them?

Shameena was the first person I phoned the day my dad died. I still remember the sound of her voice when she heard mine: ‘Oh
hi
, Rebecca!’ I was unwilling to shatter the normality. How luxurious normality is. How underrated. I longed to be there with her, in a moment that was not filled with crisis. A moment that was not now.

You got back okay? Shameena said, and then rattled on
without
waiting for an answer. Why would she suspect anything was wrong? I had just spent two days with her on my way home from Brighton. Two more days I could have spent with Da if I’d known he was dying. The guilt after he goes is instant, insistent.

There was a strange hiatus before I said anything, before
Shameena
realised. It can only have lasted a minute… less… but for that short time, I simply surrendered to her voice, to the
illusion
of normality. She had been unlocking her front door when the phone rang and I could hear she was slightly breathless with running to pick up. My senses felt strangely heightened as I
listened
to her. I pictured her in the hall of her flat, kicking off her shoes, maybe putting her door keys down on the old mahogany wooden table she has. I could hear the clink of the keys, feel the honey smoothness of the polished wood beneath my fingers.

It was boiling in London, Shameena said. Still I said nothing. I imagined the scene outside her flat where I’d so recently been. A haze of heat and city dirt, the drone of London traffic and the steady flow of workers from local offices traipsing into the downstairs deli, leaving with paper bags and polystyrene cups, steam shooting through the lid vents. They would walk past the old man on the corner of Shameena’s street, the one I had watched from her window as he stood with his cap out and his eyes down, leaning on a stick.

He is there every day and people don’t see him any more. He is simply part of the landscape, to be negotiated like the seats of the pavement café, and the restaurant bins in the lane, and the metal grille which is awkward for stilettos. The man wears an old, torn overcoat, even in the heat. It hangs awkwardly on his scrawny frame, like a coat scrunched on a hook. His skin is
grey, the colour of left-over porridge, and I looked at him two days ago and wondered how long he had left. Yet he outlived Da. How mysterious life is.

“Rebecca?”

She had realised. Stopped suddenly.

“Is everything okay?”

“No. No… Sorry.”

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Is it my dad?”

I can hear the panic, her voice rising to a squeal. She thinks I am phoning to give her bad news about Khadim.

“No, Shameena, no,” I say quickly. “No it’s okay, it’s not your dad.” The tension lowers at the other end. “It’s mine.”

I was in Da’s room as we talked, perched on the edge of his bed, and I looked at the bedside table with his book
spread-eagled
on it, open at the page he was never coming back to. Which was the very last word he had read? His reading glasses lay beside it, one leg flailing hopelessly in the air. A thin film of dust lined the concertina folds of the bedside lamp and I ran one finger through it.

There are not many people I have ever cried with, but Shameena is one. We have shared bereavement before. His name unmentioned, his presence towering between us.

Shameena offered to come to Glasgow straight away, but I told her to stay where she was until I knew the funeral
arrangements
. She had rehearsals to attend. I told her about that awful feeling I had when I looked at Da, the sudden fear that he had been essentially a stranger. The way his death flicked a switch. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know about Mother. I wanted to know about me.

“Death steals people from you, Becca,” Shameena said slowly.
“At least, you think it does at first. But gradually, they come back to you and you remember their living as well as their dying. And that will happen with your dad. He’ll become himself again. He’ll come back to you in time.”

“But I’ve lost my chance to find out the truth. He’s gone.”

“No, sometimes death is the catalyst… the start… It’s
amazing
the things that come out when someone dies. Amazing,” she repeated softly. “You wouldn’t believe…” The line goes quiet. “There is one person,” she continues eventually, “who will know almost as much as your dad did.”

It took me a moment to understand. She meant Peggy.

“Rebecca,” Shameena added hesitantly. “Your dad… he was lovely.”

Her voice cracked and my eyes swelled up painfully with
unshed
tears until I felt they would burst. I nodded, as if she was in the room, as if she could see me.

“You’ll sing at the funeral?” I asked.

“Of course.”

Shameena has seen more of my dad than her own in recent years. She needs to sort it out. It is a long time since she and Khadim have spoken, a long, long time. But not as long as fo ever is going to be. For the first time, I understand what for ever really means.

Da’s body is to be moved from the hospital morgue to the
funeral
parlour.

“We need to make arrangements,” says Sarah quietly. She gets up from her chair and fetches her handbag. In my handbag, everything lies in a heap at the bottom: loose coins; old bills; makeup in cracked containers; the scattered remains of a packet of chewing gum; a few shredded paper handkerchiefs. Sarah’s bag is organised into neat compartments. Sarah is a lawyer.

She opens the flap and takes out a small notebook and a pen. Christ. I can’t believe she is going to make a list for Da’s funeral. Sarah catches my look and flushes slightly. Men always find that attractive about Sarah, that shy little blush. Cool efficiency on top but not too scary underneath. They don’t like to be
threatened
, men, do they? Sarah is a very sweet person. I am not sweet.

We decide that Charlie and Sarah will go to the funeral
parlour
to speak to the undertaker, while Peggy and I ring round people to let them know. There aren’t many. Da didn’t socialise much and Peggy is the last of the immediate family, apart from one or two cousins. I will need to ring Khadim, Shameena’s dad. Obviously, she won’t be phoning home to tell him. When Sarah comes back, the two of us will go and speak to Father Riley, Pa’s parish priest. I don’t want to go. I have, as you will find out, a bit of a thing about priests.

Another puff of smoke from the memory chimney. Smoke from a strange fire, this one, a fire that has slumbered for many years, neither fanning into flames nor quite dying into soot and ash. The childhood memory of a strange night when the police turned up here, on the doorstep of our council house in Govan. I had almost forgotten about it, but then it comes in my head so suddenly that I begin to wonder if I have made it up. Perhaps it is not real memory at all.

I cannot be more than five or six. It is a hot night, a bit like
tonight
. At least in my memory it is. Sarah is asleep in her cot and Da has insisted I go to bed too because I have school tomorrow. But I can’t sleep. Earlier, we’d been out playing in Elder Park, and the evening sunshine is still streaming in the window, a river of light flowing steadily through a crack in the curtains.

There is steady breathing coming from Sarah’s cot as I toss and turn, and eventually I get up to ask for a drink of water. I am
hoping
Da will sit me on his knee and tell me a story about his parents’ home in Donegal. Like the one he told me about the tinkers who came to the door with a bundle in their arms and asked for a
penny
for the baby. Grandma said she had no pennies and they said they’d put a curse on her. She died young, so maybe they did.

But just as I come out of the bedroom, the doorbell rings. Da opens the door. I am watching from the upstairs hall, holding on to the banisters and peering through the slats. I think I
remember
the prickle of the carpet on my knees where I am kneeling, but how can I be sure? Did I really feel the prickle of the carpet, or have I just made that bit up? And if I made that little detail up, how do I know which other bits I made up? How much can we rely on memory?

Da has his back to me and doesn’t spot me, but as the door swings open I see the two policemen in uniform standing on the mat. They seem alien, the door like a barrier between my world and theirs. I want Da to close it, to keep the policemen on their side, in their world.

“What do you want now?” he says, and I remember
thinking
that Daddy must feel as I do because he doesn’t sound very friendly. He leans his head momentarily on the door. “When is this going to stop?” he asks, his voice low and fervent.

One of them murmurs something I can’t hear and then the other says, “It would be better if we could come in.” This second one looks at Da as if he doesn’t like him. Da says nothing, but he stands back from the door and opens it wider, watching silently as they file past him. Then he follows them into the sitting room and shuts the door. The paint on the back of the door is
beginning
to peel, separating like the skin of a partially peeled orange.

I sit at the top of the landing, looking down the stairwell into the hall below. Why do the police want to talk to my daddy? They frighten me with their hats and their uniforms and their strangeness. I resolve to keep an eye on that door, watch for it opening. Perhaps if I stare hard enough, I will actually see the paint move as it peels. There must be a precise moment when it curls back from the door. Like the moment blades of grass push further through the earth as it grows. My forehead rests against the slats of the banisters until the sharp edges begin to hurt. It is when my eyes are closing that the door handle suddenly turns, making me start. I move back slightly. I can hear murmuring and then the door swings open.

“We’ll say goodnight then, Mr Connaghan,” one of the
policemen
says.

Da doesn’t smile. “So I won’t be hearing from you again?” he asks.

One of them – the surly one – shrugs, but the other says, “Highly unlikely, Mr Connaghan. Unless, of course, we get any new evidence.”

Da nods and opens the door. He looks perfectly normal as he sees them off, but when he shuts the door, I see him lean back against it. His head tips back and it seems as if his knees are
giving
way under him. His shoulders heave as if he is crying. I have never seen him cry. It frightens me and I run back to bed.

He never mentions it in the morning, though when Auntie Peggy comes to take me to school the two of them have a
whispered
discussion that becomes quite heated. I don’t hear most of it but at the end Peggy starts raising her voice and saying, “Look, just accept that’s the end of it,” and he says, “Peggy, there will never be an end to it.” I ask Peggy what they were talking about when we walk to school but she just says, “Nothing for you to worry about,” and we stop at the shop to buy crisps for playtime.

That day we have plasticine at school. Blue plasticine that we roll into big meaty sausages before singing, “Five fat sausages sizzling in a pan.” Miss Stewart says the plasticine should be brown for sausages, but I prefer blue. I remember it is the day we have plasticine at school because that night, I really want to ask Da about the policemen, but I end up telling him about the blue sausages instead.

When I think back to those first years in Glasgow, I
remember
uneasiness. Not unhappiness, but uneasiness. Whispered conversations between Da and Peggy. An almost instinctive
understanding
as children that there are things we mustn’t ask about, things we mustn’t talk about. An awareness that the Connaghan
family is a little different from other families. Maybe that’s why, later, we got on so well with Shameena’s family, the Khans. They were different too. Different for different reasons, but we pulled together in our shared sense of being outsiders.

In the days after Da died, my memory frustrated me. It sent out these puffs of smoke, like a series of signals that I could not interpret. What message was my subconscious trying to give me? Try as I might, I could not remember Mother dying. There was no trauma there to be discovered. Not like there was now for Da. I couldn’t remember her being ill. I couldn’t remember being told she was dead. I just remembered knowing that she was gone.

We moved to Glasgow from the Highlands after she died, and in my head, there is only our city home: the cramped
two-bedroom
maisonette in Rosebank Street. It’s a street that never seems to house any adults, only rangy, mean-looking dogs, and packs of straggly-haired kids. Down one end there was an
enclosure
for the wheelie bins, and up the other, the street’s status symbol: Mr Curtis’s beige Skoda. In later years, Da’s battered
Fiesta
sat alongside, and the drug dealer at number 56 got a white Ford Capri.

Nothing of the Highlands – no matter how hard I try.
After
Da dies, the memory chimney belches out smoke in its own shape, in its own time. However hard I try, I seem unable either to stoke the fires or dampen them down. The earliest memory I have is being lost in a huge department store in Argyle Street, not long after we arrived in the city. It was a few weeks before my fifth birthday and I had to start school soon. Da and I had gone for my uniform. I don’t know where Sarah was. Peggy probably had her. Looking back, I don’t know how Da would have
managed
without Peggy. Anyway, it was a rare treat because it was just me and Da.

I was standing next to him at a counter when I saw a whole display of Matey bubble bath close by. The bottles were like
little
sailors and I started to finger them, thinking how much I’d like one, but knowing without asking that there wouldn’t be any money for it. I shifted them all on the display, arranging them by coloured tops, creating little groups of friends. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept watch on Da’s black jacket. But when I looked up, I realised with a jolt of panic that his black jacket had been replaced; there was a woman in the black jacket I thought was his.

I ran then, through the store. There was a doorman in a white coat who tried to take my hand but I screamed and screamed for Da. That’s how I know that I understood Mother was gone. I never screamed for her.

Da came running at the noise, cheeks pink with
embarrassment
, and I threw my arms round him and sobbed into his legs. He held me close, then, and said that I must never be afraid if I found myself alone. He would be somewhere close by because people don’t just disappear. I knew that wasn’t true but I was comforted by it anyway. “I’ll never leave you,” he had murmured, stroking my head. “I am always near.”

Afterwards, when he’d calmed me, he took me to the sweetie shop and bought a whole bag just for me. Lemon toffee
bonbons
, dusted with pale yellow icing sugar that I sucked from my fingers. “Do I have to share with Sarah?” I asked immediately, but Da shook his head. The bag made my pocket bulge, and I kept one hand in Da’s and one hand in the open bag, sniffing back the shuddering remnants of tears and then popping the sweets into my mouth.

In my whole life, I only remember Da mentioning Mother off his own bat once. It was the day we went to Charlie and Peggy’s silver wedding anniversary party. I was ninteen. I wore a
close-fitting
green dress, with thin, delicate straps and an embroidered bodice. I bought it from a catalogue and paid it up over ten weeks at three pounds a week. I don’t wear dresses much, but as soon as I saw that dress I knew it had my name on it. I have never been able to throw it out, though it has long gone out of style. When I slipped it on, it was like slipping on another
personality
. I felt more alive, more vibrant, more confident.

Da certainly thought I looked different. I remember coming in the room and seeing a look of shock that blew across his face and disappeared again like a passing breeze.

“You look so like her,” he said, almost to himself. His face had turned pale.

I said, “Who?” and he said, “Your mother.”

It was such a shock to even hear him use the word “mother” and my heart skipped a beat.

“What was she like?” I said quickly, so, so quickly before the moment got swallowed up.

“She was… she was…” he said, and for one awful second I thought he was going to cry because he gave a little gasp, like a stifled hiccup.

“Am I really like her?” I asked, and he said, “On the outside anyway.” Then he turned so that I couldn’t see his face, and he put his shoes on, and I knew that was the end.

“Come on,” he said, before I could ask anything else. “You know what Peggy will be like if we’re late.”

Years later, when we were sitting the two of us with a bottle of wine between us, laughing about stuff me and Sarah had got
up to, I brought Mother up and said I wondered what she would make of us now. Da didn’t get angry exactly, but the atmosphere in the room changed.

“Why have you never spoken about her?” I asked, because I had drunk two thirds of the bottle to his one third. My heart beat a little faster even hearing the question out in the open. I’d waited all my life to ask it.

“Lets not talk about that, Becca,” Da said, his smile fixed. “Let’s not spoil tonight with sad memories.”

I shrugged and got up to make coffee and by the time I came back, Da had switched on the television and we sat in silence, watching a late-night comedian who didn’t make either of us laugh.

And now he’s not here. In my head, I hear his voice in my ear, just as it was when I cried into his coat as a lost child. “People don’t just disappear, Becca. I am always near.” But he did, didn’t he? He did disappear. Maybe that’s why there was such a sense of betrayal, of abandonment. Parents spend their lives creating
security
for their children, reassuring them that the world is safe. Their death is the ultimate admission that they were lying all along.