Nirvana Bites (28 page)

During the days of siege, we had all opened up about intimate details of our pasts. It was amazing. I'd known, lived and worked with these people for years. Yet I was shocked to learn the extent of the damage and pain we had managed to accumulate between us. I suppose they must have felt the same about me, which gave them the ammunition to pressurise me to attend my father's funeral. As a rule, I don't react well to pressure. It just makes me even more stubborn. But it was true. It was time we all reassessed our priorities.

They each had a different take on it that was characteristic of their own perspective on life.

Gaia – ‘It's karma…one funeral straight after the other. You can't deny your own karma, you know. It'll screw you up…' Robin – ‘When all's said and done, he was still your father. Going to his funeral will just be an acknowledgement of the blood tie. No more.' Frank – ‘Go just to see the old bastard dead and buried. You could always spit on his grave…or dance on it…' Mags – ‘It'll grant you closure. You'll be able to move on more effectively.' Ali – ‘Go. We'll all come.'

It was Ali's argument, terse though it was, that swayed me in the end. The fact that they were prepared to put themselves through that for me. Hadn't I just exposed them to an ordeal none of us could ever have imagined a few weeks earlier? If I hadn't taken on Stan and his sordid little secret, Nick would still have been alive and none of us would have been together to have the discussion in the first place. Yet there was not one single word of recrimination. In the midst of all that intrusion, grief, trauma and raw emotion, not one of them pointed so much as a single finger in my direction. How do you account for that? This was the sort of unconditional love most people talk about getting from their own family. Yet none of us had had that experience. Life may have been shit enough to rip Nick from us, but at least it had given us each other.

I reluctantly agreed to go to both funerals. I wasn't happy about it. But then there seemed to be precious little to be happy about in those desiccated days.

36

HOW DO YOU
dress for a funeral? Would it be the same if the funeral was your father's as it would be for a good mate who happened to be a flamboyant transvestite? My hand hovered over Kate's interview suit, which I still hadn't returned, but I couldn't bring myself to take it from the hanger. What the hell. I chose my black-leather mini-skirt, corset and jacket. Minus the handcuffs, which were presumably not still attached to Stan's ankle. Well, the outfit was black, wasn't it? The others gawped a bit, but said nothing.

I dragged out the time, keeping my friends waiting. The last thing I wanted was to be early and have to deal with my living relatives as well as the dead one.

The service was already under way by the time we parked the transit in the leafy car park at Brenchley Gardens. The others followed me into the chapel. We slid into the back row. It was a tawdry little affair, with only a dozen people present apart from us.

In the front row, I could see Kate wearing a black pillbox hat, her shoulders rigid in her tailored jacket. It looked like she'd forgotten to take the hanger out. My nephews, uncomfortable in their Sunday best, fidgeted between their parents. I couldn't blame them. Even the vicar sounded bored and unconvinced. I watched Kate's hand flick out and slap her nearest son on the knuckles, all the while looking straight ahead.

In the row behind them sat three elderly men and one woman, looking vaguely dusty, as though they were left over from some previous funeral. I didn't recognise any of them. My eyes flickered over the coffin to the pews on the other side. Only one seat was taken, by a burly man with short blond hair and wearing a badly cut suit. Next to him, in the aisle, was a wheelchair. From behind the occupant looked shrivelled. He was slumped, his head lolling. At first I assumed it was another geriatric crony of my father from the nursing home. Except his dark spiky hair, so much like my own, revealed him to be closer to my age. Two years eight months older than me, to be exact.

I felt a tightness in my chest as I realised I was looking at my brother Len for the first time in nearly two years.

Len had always been the sensitive one. Physically delicate and with no hard emotional shell to protect him, he couldn't take the punishment like the rest of us. We were all protective of him, even Dennis. But to our father, his sensitivity was effeminate and weak. A direct affront to his manhood. Yet no matter how vicious and cruel the treatment, Len always made excuses for his tormentor. He tried so desperately hard to please, yet everything he did just seemed to infuriate our father more, as though he couldn't bear the love and had to try to destroy it.

In the end, I don't think he ever did succeed in destroying the love. But he did destroy the soul. Len was first sectioned when he was seventeen. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Or maybe it was a combination of his suffering, the psychoactive drugs and the shock therapy. Either way, Len's psychosis took off into the outer limits and his previous sweet and gentle self has never been seen since.

I used to visit him regularly at first. Most times, he didn't recognise me – either because he was too drugged up or because I was part of the interplanetary conspiracy to evacuate Earth and leave him behind. On the occasions when he did know who I was, it just seemed to make him more distraught. Seeing me didn't seem to help him. And it tore the guts out of me. In the end, I slackened off to every few months, then once a year. The last time I had seen him was on the eve of the millennium, when he'd been in zombie mode.

I wondered whose idea it had been to get him along here today. Kate's, no doubt. With Den acquiescing as usual. Did she not see the callous irony of a man, institutionalised for over fifteen years, getting one trip out – to the funeral of the person who had robbed him of any chance of a normal life?

I realised with a jolt that the service had finished without me registering a single word. The coffin was held aloft on the shoulders of six sombre-faced men. I wondered if they had an allowance for osteopaths' fees. Behind them, the mourners trailed, self-conscious in their roles. Kate didn't so much as twitch an eye in my direction, but I could tell from the particular set of her mouth that she'd seen me. Dennis nodded at me, then registered what I was wearing. His eyebrows shot up, as he yanked his sons by the wrists to rush them past me before I could contaminate them.

I didn't care. My gaze was riveted on Len as he sat, blank-eyed and listless, in his wheelchair, pushed along by the burly orderly. There had never been anything wrong with Len's legs. They must have numbed his mind so much that his body was no longer able to function. I could only hope it was just to get him there that day and not permanent.

We filed out of the chapel behind them. My eyes drilled into the broad back of the minder as the sad little straggle followed the coffin along the paths. We stopped by an open grave. I stood to one side as they did the coffin-lowering routine. I couldn't take my eyes off that frail figure slumped in the wheelchair. The chief mourners did the sniffing and eye-wiping bit before heading off back towards the land of the living. Kate gave me a withering I'll-deal-with-you-later look and hustled the children away. Den did an apologetic half-wriggle, half-shrug in my general direction.

Before the orderly could follow them, I stepped in front of the wheelchair and squatted down. I took Len's limp hands in mine and stared straight into eyes that were mirror images of my own.

‘Len?' I whispered. ‘Len? It's me. It's Jen.'

There was no response. A thin line of dribble hung from the corner of his slack mouth. His eyes were blank and unseeing.

The minder shifted his weight. Before he could tell me about the futility of trying for a response, I tried again.

‘Len! Please. Look at me,' I urged, my voice louder, but with a definite crack. ‘Len! Len!'

There was a tiny pressure on my hands. I returned it tenfold. His eyes swivelled, his breathing speeded up. His head shot up, his eyes cleared and he gasped with the effort of groping through the pharmaceutical fog. He gazed straight back into my eyes.

‘Jenny!' he cried.

His body racked with huge gulps for air, his limbs twitched convulsively. I saw the minder reach into his pocket. I knew without looking that he would have a loaded syringe in there. I launched myself forward and flung my arms round Len's skinny shoulders. He sobbed with the intensity of an unrepressed child. I stroked his back, smoothed his hair and kissed his head as I soothed him in the way I had seen our mother do countless times for all of us.

‘It's OK,' I crooned. It's OK, Lenny. He's gone now. He's gone. He can't hurt us any more.'

The painful sobs began to subside. I drew my head back a little and wiped his eyes and nose with a tissue.

‘He's gone, Len,' I repeated, emphasising each word. ‘We can all move on now.'

He held my gaze just a moment longer, then the lights went out again. His body lost its tautness and flopped back as though someone had sucked his bones out. Where would Len move on to? It was hard to visualise him ever being able to exist outside an institution.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the minder gather himself. I hauled myself to my feet as he pushed the wheelchair back along the path. I watched them recede into the distance.

My cheeks were wet. I hadn't noticed it was raining. I raised my face to look up at a cloudless sky. Cloudless, yet blurred. I snaked out my tongue and tasted salt.

I was crying.

As soon as I realised it, the dam burst. I sank on to the bare earth beside my father's grave and wept until I understood the concept of heartbreak. I cried for Len, for Nick, for Della. I cried for me and for the child I had never been allowed to be and for the pain I'd caused to my friends. I cried for all the sad damaged people in the world who can't break free and who perpetuate the pain and abuse they suffer in their own lives by repeating it on the next generation. People like my father. So I suppose, in a roundabout way, I was crying for him too.

The big fear for people who deny themselves tears is that once they start they won't be able to stop. It's not true, of course. My friends stood back and allowed me the space to grieve. As my sobs abated, they judged the moment had come to change the nature of their support.

Gentle hands pulled me to my feet, enveloped me and held me close. They guided me on to the path and back up towards the chapel. A lively throng of people was already massing outside, ready for Della's funeral. It looked like there was going to be a huge crowd. We walked towards them together. I didn't look back.

EPILOGUE

WE WERE PREVENTED
from making it a hat-trick of funerals: Nick's parents made it crystal clear none of us would be welcome. We held a wake of our own in the garden. I know which one Nick would have preferred to be at.

Stan was picked up for questioning but released without charge. Apparently, it's not against the law to be a prat. More's the pity. What goes around comes around, though. The media got hold of the story. The tabloids had a field day with headlines like
THE MONSTER IN THE MP'S MARRIAGE
and lots of innuendo round phrases like ‘Party whip'. Catherine Highshore made strenuous denials of any knowledge of her husband's proclivities and instructed her lawyers to initiate immediate divorce proceedings. It didn't help. She was forced to resign ‘for the sake of the party'. Stan's career was already history.

Gunther refused to co-operate with the police. They held a
Crimewatch Special
, with the guy playing Nick hanging out in Soho. Several witnesses came forward to say they remembered him sitting in a coffee bar for hours with a bottomless cup of cappuccino. He'd spent the day engaging people in conversation, talking about friends in Sicily and dropping hints about dodgy dealings at the BBC. One woman, a waitress, recalled him talking with a man she later identified as Gunther. They left together. She said Nick had seemed excited. The cops also found a local bondage shop which had a credit-card receipt signed by Gunther for items bought earlier that same day.

So Gunther had had Nick all along. That was his trump card. It was also how his cronies had traced Stan to Nirvana. Not by following us back from Docklands, as Stan had suggested. Nick had gone to Soho to check out Mafiosi, but had bumped into Gunther instead. Coincidence? Or seriously bad karma? You decide…

There was ample forensic evidence linking Gunther with Della's fatal beating. He was charged with both murders and got life. The cops never did find out who took those photos. Gunther refused to say and Stan said he had been too out of it at the time and couldn't remember. I wonder sometimes about the blonde woman Cathy and Pat mentioned seeing with Stan… Some questions are destined never to be answered, I suppose.

The Koi Korner conspiracy was blown wide open in a glare of publicity. The shadowy figures who weren't picked up in the first wave disappeared underground. No doubt they are regrouping and could surface any time now…