Authors: Kate Eberlen
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that. For me, it wasn’t the words so much as seeing Kev and Dad together, and knowing how happy that would have made Mum. At the end, a
moment of reflective silence was broken by a small voice, surprisingly loud and clear next to me.
‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!’
There was something about the seriousness on Hope’s face and her stout little frame, with her fingers doing the twinkling actions she’d learned at school, that would have made it
comical if it hadn’t been so moving.
When she finished, everyone clapped, but unlike Kevin and Dad, Hope didn’t bask in the attention. She didn’t actually seem to notice it.
‘What about you now, Teresa?’ my aunt Catriona called out. ‘We haven’t heard anything from you.’
To be fair, she probably only meant to give me the opportunity, but she made it sound like I didn’t want to contribute.
‘I can’t sing,’ I protested.
‘That all right, Tree,’ Hope chimed up. ‘Everyone has things they’re good at and things they’re not so good at.’
Which sounded so much like Mum that everyone except Hope laughed.
‘OK. This was Mum’s favourite poem,’ I said, wondering why I hadn’t thought of suggesting it for the service.
‘“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow . . .’
As I spoke the words, slowly and evenly, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice and do her proud, I wondered whether Mum had yearned for peace and solitude away from the constant noisy chaos
of our family. And as I looked around the faces of her friends and relations, I thought that we were all perhaps thinking that the poem described a kind of heaven for her, which made us feel calmer
about the whole injustice of it. That’s probably why people talk about the consolation of poetry.
When I’d finished, the room was quiet.
‘Bedtime,’ I said to Hope, taking the opportunity to say our goodbyes before the singing inevitably started up again, along with more drinking and the potential for the mood to
switch from affection to umbrage in a single sentence.
Hope spotted the butterfly in the corner of the bathroom window when I was giving her a bath. One of those white ones with a tiny black spot on each wing. Cabbage White.
‘Want to get out,’ she said.
So, without thinking about it really, I opened the window, and the butterfly flew into the dying light.
It was only when I knelt down again and started lathering Hope’s hair that I wondered how the butterfly had got in. There was a buddleia in the back garden which attracted butterflies in
the summer, but usually those were orange, and I’d never seen one in the house before. Wasn’t it a bit late for butterflies anyway? Perhaps it had come in to get warm?
Or perhaps the butterfly was the sign I’d asked Mum for, and all I’d done was let it out into the cold.
The morning after, while Dad was still snoring upstairs, and Hope was watching
Teletubbies
, Brendan came over from the Travelodge and reported that Kevin had already
left for the airport.
Apparently there’d been a big row in the church hall a couple of hours after we’d gone home, when Kevin got up the courage to announce that Shaun, the man who was sharing his room at
the hotel, wasn’t in fact a colleague en route to a business meeting, but his partner of two years, a partner, he’d shouted tearily, who he couldn’t even introduce to his own
family at his own mother’s funeral!
The fact that Kevin was gay didn’t come as much of a shock to me or Brendan (or in truth, I suspect, to my father, who’d always been suspicious of the dancing) but to come out at a
funeral, Brendan said, well, it just wasn’t on, was it?
Dad, now twice the mawkish victim, had wailed to Father Michael, ‘I’ve lost my wife and my son on the same day!’
So that had given Kevin the opportunity to list all the resentments he had harboured since adolescence. Ironically, it was Shaun who saved the day, arriving in a taxi and scooping Kev off back
to the Travelodge after hearing his belligerent meanderings on the phone.
He seemed like a decent enough fella, Brendan said.
It did cross my mind afterwards that maybe Kevin had, consciously or unconsciously, created the opportunity for a dramatic exit – he’s always been theatrical – to relieve him
of any familial duty. Or perhaps it never even crossed his mind, as it didn’t seem to cross Brendan’s, that there were three of us with a sister about to be only five years old and a
father who was a drinker.
‘I wanted to talk to you about what’s going to happen with Hope,’ I said, trying to broach the subject.
‘She’ll get over it sooner than you think,’ Brendan said. ‘Kids do.’
He was a father with two little ones of his own now so he knew about these things. And he lived on the other side of the world. What did I ever think he was going to do? But it would have been
nice if someone had just asked if I was OK.
I left it to the last minute to cancel my university place. Not because I forgot, or was distracted, but because I think I was hoping for some kind of miracle.
I waited until Dad and Hope took Brendan to the airport, so I was on my own in the house.
The woman in the accommodation office was brusque. ‘It’s terribly short notice.’
‘My mother died, so I’ve been busy with the funeral,’ I told her.
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
I hadn’t yet worked out how to respond to people saying that. ‘It’s all right,’ didn’t do it. ‘So am I,’ sounded impertinent.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. Which wasn’t right either.
There was an embarrassed pause.
‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to refund the deposit unless we find someone else to take the room,’ the woman finally said. ‘Which I have to say is very unlikely at
this point. Obviously, I’ll inform you if the situation changes.’
‘Thank you.’
I put the phone down and that’s when I cried. Great, wracking sobs. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t just the end of my dream. It was Mum’s dream too. Going to
university had been our project.
I don’t know how long I wept, sitting in the kitchen that felt so empty without her, until I finally stopped and found myself staring at the plate that said,
Today is the first day of
the rest of your life.
It says in all the books about bereavement that when a small child loses a parent, the worst thing you can do is change things. You’d think that a fresh start or a change
of scene would be a good idea, but it says not. The child’s had enough change. What they need is a bit of stability. I suppose that’s how it was for Hope with the plate.
I put it away in a cupboard, but Hope noticed as soon as she came in and demanded its return. So it remained on the knick-knack shelf in the kitchen. And sometimes it made me rueful, and
sometimes it made me depressed, and other times I felt so angry I wanted to smash it on the floor, which are all stages of grief, according to the books.
It’s difficult to look cool with your mother trailing behind you carrying armfuls of items she’s purchased for your student life, like scatter cushions, a first-aid
kit, a desk tidy and a toilet brush in a ceramic holder.
When my possessions were finally heaped in the centre of the room, the three of us stood for a moment at a loss for anything to say. It was just a room, with a single bed, a built-in wardrobe
and a desk, the last but one along a corridor of similar rooms, all with open doors awaiting their new occupants. It was on the second of four floors, so didn’t have as much of a view as the
showroom in the prospectus, but it was at the back of the building, away from the road. My father and I stood looking out of the window, staring at the branches of two large trees whose leaves were
just beginning to turn brown.
‘At least you’re not on the ground floor,’ my mother said. ‘Let’s get this lot put away, shall we?’
My father and I exchanged a rare moment of understanding.
‘I expect Angus wants to arrange things his own way,’ he said, with a gentle but determined shove of my mother’s arm.
‘Oh!’ Her eyes were suddenly watery as she realized the time had come, sooner than she’d anticipated, to say goodbye. ‘Shouldn’t we at least buy him
lunch?’
The finishing post kept moving away. My heart sank at the prospect of trawling around the locality peering at menus, with my father taking out his glasses and reading the dishes out loud. But I
said nothing. Another hour or two of embarrassment was preferable to parting with the lingering guilt of not behaving properly.
My father checked his watch. ‘We’ve only got another twenty minutes’ free parking.’ The car was parked underneath Sainsbury’s.
‘Well then.’ My mother stood on tiptoe to peck my cheek, holding me at arm’s length for a moment, as if making an assessment. As usual, I felt I had been judged slightly
inadequate.
Over her shoulder, I noticed a girl with pink hair and a rucksack stop outside my door, look at me, then at the number on the door, then at the piece of paper in her hand, before moving on.
I was expecting my father to shake my hand like one of his golf-club cronies, when, out of nowhere, he produced an orange plastic carrier bag. ‘You have to spend a fiver to get the free
parking . . .
I pulled out a bottle of champagne.
‘But that’s . . .’ Much more than a fiver, I was about to say. Of course it was. ‘. . . very generous!’
‘Don’t drink it all at once!’
Seeing him beaming with the success of his surprise, I remembered that he was once a person who was capable of having fun.
We all went down to the front hall together.
‘Got your keys?’
‘Yes!’
‘It’s the start of a new future for you,’ my mother began, then trailed off and I knew she was actually thinking about Ross’s future, which had been taken away.
‘Work hard!’ said my father.
‘I don’t think I’ll have a choice about that!’ I replied, which seemed to please him.
I stared at their backs as they strode away, her camel coat and his blazer marking out their class and provenance against the backdrop of urban graffiti. Then I went back up to the room, feeling
strangely empty. Freed from the suffocation of my family’s grief, I’d been hoping to create a new identity for myself, but, strangely, it felt as if there was nothing at all inside
me.
The girl with pink hair was Sellotaping a piece of paper to her door that said
Nash’s Room
in large, bold handwriting.
‘Bit institutional, isn’t it?’ she said, throwing open the door to show me her room, which had an extra window because it was on the corner of the building. She’d already
hung up a mobile type of thing, with mirrory bits that caught the weak rays of autumn sunshine and made a fluttering pattern of lights across the grubby beige carpet.
‘I’ve lucked out, right?’ she said. ‘Didn’t even have a room yesterday but someone dropped out at the last minute. Nash, by the way. Short for Natasha.’
I nodded at the notice on her door.
‘Duh!’ She tossed back her pink hair in a dramatic way that made me wonder if I was supposed to remark on it.
‘Angus,’ I said.
‘Seriously?’
Was it such an amusing name?
‘It sounds Scottish,’ she said, explaining, I suppose, that she hadn’t detected a Scottish accent.
‘My father’s originally Scottish.’
‘So what shall I call you?’
Clearly Angus wouldn’t do.
At school we knew each other by our surnames. I was Macdonald, so people shortened it to Mac, or sometimes Farmer. I wasn’t going to tell her that.
‘How about Gus?’ she suggested. Nobody had ever called me Gus. I quite liked it. My new identity had a name.
‘Gus, absolutely,’ I said quickly, offering my hand to seal the deal.
‘How tall are you?’
People think it’s OK to ask that question even though they’d never dream of asking how much a fat person weighs, or even how short a short person is.
‘Six foot four.’ I couldn’t think of a question to ask her.
‘I would offer you coffee,’ she said. ‘If I had any coffee.’
‘Do you drink champagne?’ I heard myself asking.
‘What a ridiculous question!’
My father would be horrified at the idea of me opening the bottle before six, and drinking it warm from china mugs off the wooden cup tree my mother had supplied, but that made it taste even
better.
‘Divinely decadent, darling!’ said Nash.
She was a bit like Sally Bowles in
Cabaret
. Not that she looked like Liza Minnelli, in her baggy black parachute suit and plimsolls without laces, but there was something of the same
self-conscious eccentricity. It crossed my mind that she might see me as the innocent, possibly gay, Michael York character just arrived in the big city.
‘What are you studying?’ I asked, wincing at the prosaic quality of my conversation.
‘Guess!’ she said, lying back on her bed, which she’d already made up with black sheets and a red duvet cover. There was a poster of Che Guevara just behind her head.
‘Politics?’
She looked surprised.
‘English and Drama, actually.’ She peered at me intently. ‘Psychology?’
I was flattered if that was how I appeared to her. I liked the idea of looking like a ‘Psychology’ sort of person. ‘Medicine.’
‘Oh. You must be clever.’
‘Not especially.’
‘I’m going to be an actor,’ she announced.
Perhaps wanting to appear a little mysterious, I said, ‘I’m not sure what I want to be.’
She laughed.
‘What?’
‘You’re going to be a doctor, obviously!’
Hearing it from someone I’d only just met, at the beginning of my new identity, the inevitability depressed me.