Dead Secret (6 page)

Even I can see we look alike. Same coppery highlights in
shoulder
-length brown hair. Same colour and shape of eyes. Here she is again, her arm looped through Da’s. And here, on her own, making kissing gestures at the camera. Kath, Lochglas Bay, it says on the back. And here, leaning against a wall with a sultry smile. Look at her, the way she pouts so provocatively, so aware of her own power.

I suppose it sounds strange to say I had never seen a photo of Mother until now. But anything is normal when you don’t know any different. There is no point trying to relate what I tell you to your life. Unless you are an outsider too.

There are letters too, still in their own, smaller, original envelopes. On some of them, I recognise Da’s distinctive,
old-fashioned
, looped hand. For a moment, I finger them hesitantly, uncertain whether to read them. It’s not just about privacy. If I read a dead man’s letters, I run a risk. Whatever picture they give me of Da, it will be unalterable. He won’t be here to explain or to expand. Whatever they tell me will be fixed in time; fixed in stone.

The letter slips from the envelope. There is still time to put it back. I can walk away, keep
everything
intact. But I know I won’t. I need more than I have, and I have to be willing to lose everything to get it. I unfold the paper. Basildon Bond; azure not white.
Da always used azure. It is dated 1966 and there is a Glasgow
address
at the top, an address in the west end. My eyes scan over the page quickly but I know before I even look that it is to my mother. I can scarcely breathe. The voice of a dead man talks.

I fold the letter, put it back into the envelope, a feeling of guilty unease rising inside me. It feels vaguely distasteful, like rifling through someone’s underwear drawer. But I swallow it down like bile, that unease, unwilling to let scruple supersede gut need. I need to know… everything, anything. I take another letter out of an envelope, and then another, and another, opening them, reading them, folding them again almost mechanically. Da’s tone undulates through the letters, shifting and reforming like shapes in a kaleidoscope; bright as shooting stars in one, dark and sombre the next. Even back then, when they were alive, she didn’t make him happy.

The letters cover a six-month period and towards the end, in May 1967, they had obviously decided to get married. A
summer
wedding. Da talks of an old house they are to buy together
in Lochglas that is dirt cheap but needs renovation. In one, he talks poignantly of an aunt dying; in another about a trip to the cinema. Banal talk nestling up close to serious talk of living and dying and loving.

And through it all, an unfamiliar voice: the voice of the lover from my father’s lips.
‘When I held you, down on that shore at
Lochglas
,’
he writes in one,
‘I sensed for the first time in my life that there was some purpose, that there was something eternal as the rock on which we stood. I’m no poet, Kath, I don’t know a clever way to say this. But I just felt certain in that moment that though I’ll die some day, nothing can ever take away what I feel for you. It will be somewhere out there in the atmosphere, always.’

I keep that letter in my hands for several minutes, staring at it. Reading, then rereading the words.
Somewhere out there in the atmosphere, always.
The voice of other people’s love is a foreign language, one you can’t understand unless you share the same country. It’s a language that lovers use to exclude the rest of us from the intimacy of their own private world. This I hear in my father’s voice as I read, and somehow, hearing a part of him that I never knew makes me feel estranged, creates a barrier even more brutal than death.

And then, at the back of the bundle, letters in another hand, a bold, careless scrawl scratching untidily across the envelopes. Only a few, far fewer than in Da’s writing. I take the first one out: black ink on rose-coloured paper. The paper is creased in four, as if it has been folded and unfolded several times. It is only a page of a letter; the rest is missing.

Someone – Da, presumably – has doodled at the side of the page in blue ink, as if they have been reading the letter and become lost in thought. There’s a little hat on the page, like one he used to draw on the side of newspapers when he was doing the crossword. I refold the page, take out another letter in mother’s scrawl. I don’t recognise the address. Bayview, Lochglas. There is no date. The voice is so different from Da’s. Not burning and intense but flippant, playful – maybe even a little heartless.

I stare at the letter. What is she talking about? An accountant? Da wasn’t an accountant. He was a bus driver. He had always been a bus driver. My eyes keep darting back and re-reading the sentence.
You know you accountants are loaded
. Whose life is this unfolding in front of me? Who is this stranger I called Da?

The letter sits discarded on my lap as a memory suddenly puffs from the chimney. One of my earliest. Me, trying to climb up the steps of Da’s bus. I must have been about three. Da was sitting at the wheel in the depot in Larkfield in Glasgow when Peggy and I called in. Peggy was behind me and put her hands under my armpits to lift me up the step, but I screamed and twisted and waved my legs in the air.

“Self!” I’d shouted furiously at her. “Self!” I remember getting even crosser then, because Dad and Peggy had laughed.

I always hated being laughed at. I had run to the front bus seat and buried my face in the cool leather, sobbing angrily. Da came to me then, lifting me up gently and sinking his face into my hair, whispering soothing words as he held me. Then he’d blown raspberries in my chest and thrown me in the air, and I had giggled and shouted “more”, until I finally put my arms around his neck and nestled in.

He worked on the number 34 route that passed close to our house and sometimes, on the way home from high school, I’d let other buses go past until I caught Da’s. But sometimes, I’d get Khadim’s bus. Before one-man operation came in, Khadim used to be Da’s conductor but then he had to retrain as a driver. He used to tell me he had arrived at Central Station in Glasgow one freezing November day with five pounds in his pocket and
big dreams. Not so different from Grandpa Connaghan. The five pounds, anyway. I used to look at Khadim dishing out bus
tickets
and wonder what happened to his dreams.

When I got on his bus, Khadim would wink at me and let me off the bus fare. Sometimes, he and Da would give each other lifts home if they were changing over shifts, and if he was on Da’s bus when I got on, he would come and ask me about school. He had a sailor’s legs for a swaying sea, Khadim, standing firm against every lurch and jolt of movement.

He used to joke that I shouldn’t be carrying French books home, that I should learn a proper, useful language. Here, he said one day, and took out a pen from his pocket and tore a little page from the notebook he always kept in his pocket. He wrote carefully and handed me the paper. ‘Teach Yourself Urdu’.

“Good book,” he said, and nodded his head. I told him saucily that I’d think about it if I ever wanted to go and live in
downtown
Calcutta like him. And Khadim had shaken his head and said Calcutta was in India, not Pakistan, and didn’t Western schoolgirls know anything? But his inky dark eyes had danced as he turned away, and he went and said something to Da at the front of the bus that I couldn’t hear, and they had both laughed. I liked Khadim.

Da did too. It was funny really, because Da didn’t have much experience of “coloured fellows” as he called them before he met Khadim. He never saw a black man till he came to Glasgow from Donegal. I think, if he was honest, Da was a bit wary of cultures other than his own, but he had a natural sense of justice that cut through all of that.

The day Da’s friendship with Khadim was really sealed was the day a couple of young guys got on and started messing about
with Khadim. You could see they were trouble from the start with their Doc Marten boots and their hard, slitty eyes. Da had just taken over the shift and was dropping Khadim off in
Pollokshields
. Khadim was standing at the front talking to him, still with his uniform on. I was reading a book on the bus that day so I don’t know how it started. But all of a sudden I heard one of them say that black bastards like him were taking jobs from white men, and why couldn’t he go back to his own fucking country, and in the end Khadim said he was going to have to ask them to get off the bus if they didn’t stop.

“Get aff the bus?” said one of them, getting up and digging his finger into Khadim’s shoulder. “Who’s gonna make me get aff?”

The bus suddenly jolted as Da slammed on the brakes. He jumped out of his cab and said quietly, “I am.” A current ran through the bus, all eyes swivelling to the front. My heart
hammered
. I wanted Da to get safely back behind his wheel. The two of them looked at Da in surprise. But Da wasn’t a big man, and after the momentary surprise, they turned to one another and sniggered. Da said the bus wasn’t going anywhere until they got off, and for a minute it looked like it might get nasty. A toddler began crying loudly at the back of the bus and an old woman with a shopping bag on her knee stuck her oar in.

“Yous are a disgrace,” she said. “Jist get aff and gie’s a’ peace. That wean’s screaming because of yous.”

“Fuck off, grandma,” one of them said, but then this big guy appeared from upstairs. He was enormous.

“The driver’s tellt yous two to get aff, now get aff,” he said. “Because see if yous don’t, ahm gonnae put you aff maself. Now move it, ya wee shite bags.”

They weren’t going to argue. But on the way off, one of them went up and stuck his face right into Khadim’s, and for a minute I thought he was going to headbutt him. But then I saw his lips move and the next minute a great gob of spit had landed on Khadim’s cheek. They jumped off the bus and ran.

For a second nobody moved. Then Da jumped up angrily like he was going to give chase, but Khadim put out his hand and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. Da looked at him and Khadim shook his head and muttered something, and Da climbed back into his cab and the engine started up again. I saw the spit on Khadim’s face begin to trickle down and felt my stomach heave. I took out a tissue and handed it to him. He accepted it without a word and wiped the slime from his face, and everyone on the bus looked out of the window in embarrassed silence until the old woman with the shopping bag said, “Y’alright son?” though Khadim was in his forties.

It was the day after that Khadim invited us all to his house for the first time. Da and Khadim seemed like a definite partnership after that, thought they made an odd combination. The wee, square, dark-haired man with the faint Irish burr that had never quite left him, and the big Pakistani with a long white beard and a round, curry gut.

I always wondered why someone as smart as Da ended up driving buses but I assumed Grandpa had never had enough money for him to stay on at school and needed him out
working
. He never liked his job much, but whenever I suggested he do something else he just said what else was he going to do at his time of life, as if he didn’t have a choice. But why would you drive buses if you were an accountant?

It always pained him that I went from one temp post to
another
.
He wanted me to go to university, make something of myself, and I always assumed it was because he never had the chance. I wasn’t interested. I was smart enough, but though I never knew why, I just didn’t feel settled enough to have
ambition
. I didn’t know what I wanted from life enough to go out and get the qualifications to do it.

Qualifications. If Da really had been an accountant, he would have to have had qualifications. I lift out every drawer of the bureau, sifting quickly through the school reports and the photographs, the bills and accounts, and finally come to a large brown envelope on the bottom. I lift out the single sheet of parchment inside and my eyes dance down the page as the key words leap out. My heart skips a beat. Glasgow University. Joseph Connaghan.

The date suggests Da would have been twenty-eight, a
mature
student. National Service accounted for some of the time after he left school. But had he worked after that to pay his way through university? And how had he and Mother met? I stare at the parchment and then slip it back into the envelope, feeling sick and confused and vaguely betrayed.