The Darkest Secret (6 page)

Someone's been training the staff at the morgue. It's not wall-to-wall counsellors or anything, but the receptionist walked me to the waiting room rather than waving me to a seat and the room itself has a relatively comfortable sofa rather than the usual rock-hard NHS benches. The table is scattered with helpful leaflets. I half expect them to have titles like
So You've Lost Your Dad
, but the patronising touchy-feelyness of the People's Princess era has passed and we're on to Plain Speaking for Hard-Working Families now. I leaf through a
Guide to Services for the Bereaved
as I wait. It's divided into sections like ‘What Is Probate?' and ‘Choosing a Funeral Provider'. I'm sort of glad it'll be a few more years before I need to know about this stuff. Robert, as Dad's solicitor and Simone's father, has been named as executor. All I have to do is say whether the man on the slab is really my father.

And all the time, I'm watching myself; studying Mila in Mourning and wondering at my emotions, because as far as I can see there aren't any. Just curiosity. Fascination at doing something I've never done before, that no one I know has ever done. All I feel is the occasional faint surge of anger. Here's the thing I know so far about death. All those things you've put to the back of your mind, the things you've decided it's best to just ignore because protest has got you nowhere, they come creeping back around your barriers when someone dies. All my resentments at his failures and his neglect and his selfish choices that I'll never be able to call him on now: my brain seems to be cycling through them like a couple in a traffic jam, going ‘and another thing, and another thing'. But missing him? No. You know why? Because there's nothing to miss. It's one of those things that people don't get about the children of divorce. I did most of my mourning when I was nine years old.

The door opens and a woman in a white coat appears. I assume she's a doctor.

‘Camilla Jackson?' she asks.

I nod. Put down
Post-Mortems Explained
and look at her.

‘I'm Dr Badawi, the duty pathologist here. He's ready for you now,' she says, and gives me a neat little smile that must have taken years of practice to get right. I don't know if they have bedside-manner lessons in med school these days, but this smile is familiar to me. Not too jolly, not too mournful, sympathy denoted by a tiny head tilt but never a stray into overfamiliarity. Keep the rellies calm, it says, and we can keep the interruptions to our working day, these irritating hold-ups in the important business of chopping and slicing and sawing the tops off skulls, as brief as is humanly possible. But it feels weird, the way she calls him a ‘he', as though there's a human being waiting beyond that door on the other side of the corridor, rather than a quietly decaying corpse.

She leads me to the viewing room, talks as she goes. ‘We've just left his face visible,' she says. ‘It's standard practice. I'm afraid it's all rather clinical in there. But don't be afraid. It's not the way it is in the movies. There's only him. But I'm afraid quite a lot of people find the whole procedure distressing anyway. You'll let me know if you feel faint or… anything, won't you? We have chairs in there, if you need. I'll come in with you and let you have a look, and then I'll ask if it's him by his full name and all I need you to do is give me a yes or a no. Is that okay?'

‘Yes,' I say.

The room's not the way I'd expected.
Silent Witness
and all those movies are big fat lies. It's a normal hospital consulting room, two wide doors to let trolleys and fat people through, walls as plain and white as a chapel of rest, not a single distinguishing feature apart from the body on the trolley that sits in the centre of the floor. He's covered in a sheet, which has been turned back to reveal his face before we entered. None of that your-dinner-is-served theatre you see on the TV. Just… my father, dead.

For a moment I don't recognise him. Death slackens the face, shows up the bones beneath. His jaw has travelled backwards with the help of gravity so he looks as though he has no teeth. But then I see that it's him, five years older, hair a little longer as if to compensate for the fact that it's further up the crown of his head, what looks like a little network of broken veins on the upper parts of his cheeks. I stare. And stare and stare. My mind is blank.

‘What did he die of?' I ask.

‘We can't say yet, I'm afraid,' she says. ‘We'll be doing the PM once you've identified him.'

‘Hazard a guess?'

‘Sorry. Can't do that. Procedures and legal stuff. Can I ask you, is this the body of Sean George Jackson?'

I nod. ‘Yes.'

I feel a sudden lurch of sorrow somewhere deep inside. Ah, there you are, I think. I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to come. Sean George Jackson. No longer here. I wonder what you were thinking, when you died? Did you know that this was it? Did you think of us, at all?

‘You can stay as long as you like,' she says, kindly. ‘Some people find it helpful.'

‘No,' I tell her. ‘No, I'm done. Thank you.'

He texts his ex-wife when he gets an opportunity to be by himself in the annexe under the pretext of checking that all is well. The inflatable mattresses are still in their boxes, all five of them; he'll be having a word with the staff about ticking things off on lists when he gets back to the office. As he closes the door and cuts off the sound of the pneumatic drill they're using at Seawings next door, he realises that he's in relative quiet for the first time since he got out of the car. Another thing I'll have to have a word about, he thinks. Once I've done this.

‘When did we agree I was having the girls this weekend?'

The reply comes in in less than a minute. She's clearly been waiting for him. Which means that she's done this on purpose.

‘Do I really have to keep your diary for you still, Sean? This is the standard schedule.'

He inhales sharply through his nose. Bloody women. It's just typical
of her to sabotage his plans like this. She's bitter still, six years on, and she can't resist just having the odd go when she gets the chance.

‘As the keeper of my diary you know perfectly well that this is my birthday weekend.'

‘Yes! The girls are really looking forward to celebrating with you!'

‘But I…'

He stops, deletes, starts again. Must not give her any ammunition.

‘I'm delighted to see them, of course. But I thought we'd moved the weekend.'

‘No, we didn't.'

‘Yes, we did.'

‘I'm sorry you don't want your daughters interrupting your birthday, Sean. It's a terrible inconvenience, having leftover children, I know. Sadly, the court thinks you should have access. If you didn't want to step up and do your bit you shouldn't have asked for it.'

He gasps out loud. ‘I don't – God, you bloody – ugh!'

He shoves the phone back in his pocket. She's done this on purpose, he knows she has. Heather is beyond anal about dates and times and places; always has been. Used to strike people off invite lists for being late more than once. The odds on her forgetting a date she made a big deal of every year for twelve years are so minuscule a bookie would refuse to offer them. He goes back to the kitchen to face the music.

India and Milly are perched on chrome bar stools at the kitchen island, eating toast. They're still wearing their bikinis, Milly's a size too small, the breasts she seems to have suddenly sprouted in the month since he last saw her threatening to spill out into the butter. ‘Girls,' he says, ‘can you get a bit more decent before the guests arrive?'

They turn and gawp at him. ‘What are you saying?' asks Milly. ‘That you're hanging around with kiddy-fiddlers?'

He refuses to rise. Milly and her mouth. She likes to provoke and provoke, and always feigns amazement when someone eventually reacts. ‘I'm just saying that bikinis are for beaches and swimming pools,' he says. ‘You need to cover up when you come into the house.'

‘Frankly,' says Claire, coming into the room, ‘I don't think those bikinis are fit for public display at all. We should get Milly a one-piece, really. There's a bit of an abundance of flesh going on there these days.'

Milly's jaw drops open and her eyes fill with tears. Oh, God, the sensitivities of teenage girls. But really, if she doesn't want people to comment on her weight, she should try eating less. Now he looks, he sees that there's a roll of fat coming on to the small of her back. Sean doesn't approve of women who don't look after themselves. It's the least they can do, frankly. Claire's gone up a dress size herself since she had the twins, and he's not happy about that, either. Milly will be a size fourteen soon if she doesn't watch out, and then no one will ever look at her apart from the chubby-chasers.

Milly bites into her toast and stares at them both like they've sprouted extra heads.

‘Maybe a bit less toast and a bit more exercise,' he says. ‘That'll probably do it.'

‘Yeah, fuck you,' says Milly. ‘Maybe you could do with a hair transplant.'

‘And crowns,' says India. She always backs her sister up when it comes down to it. It's a horrible little nation of two they've got going there. He sometimes feels that they've formed a consortium against him. Oh, well. You can't help it if your kids get bitter after a divorce. They're so self-centred it would never occur to them that their parents have a right to happiness. ‘You can totally see those cigars on your teeth these days.'

Claire purses her lips. You shouldn't let them talk to you like that, the look says. They're guests in my house.

‘Just do it,' he says. ‘I'm requesting it, so I expect you to do it.'

‘That's not really the meaning of requesting,' says Milly.

‘Okay,' he says. ‘Well, I'm telling you.'

 

He sets the girls on to taking the mattresses up to the bedrooms and inflating them. Might as well make themselves useful. He can hear them padding about over his head, giggling and pulling things about. Outside, someone revs the engine of the digger at the building site next door. A crash, then a chorus of Polish expletives. I must find out how to get some Poles of my own, he thinks. I hear they cost a stack less than your average British brickie, and they don't seem to be stopping for tea breaks every ten minutes. Hurrah for the Common Market. Country's going to be full of Eastern Europeans before the decade's up. Marvellous to have the outsourcing bringing itself to Mohammed rather than having to go and find it. It's been irritating watching all those call-centre savings in action and not having the sort of company that could benefit from the cheaper labour available elsewhere in the world.

‘Well, this is nice,' says Claire. ‘Where are they going to sleep? The maid's room's full of boxes. Not that anybody's going to be getting much sleep with that lot crashing about outside.'

‘Weekend starts tomorrow,' he says. ‘They'll be in the pub by three o'clock. They'll just have to share with Simone, out in the annexe.'

‘Lovely. Yes,
that'll
work.' Her voice drips sarcasm.

‘They'll enjoy it. It'll be like a sleepover.'

‘I doubt Simone will think so.'

‘Well, what else am I meant to do?' he snaps. ‘Any suggestions, given you know best about everything?'

Claire gets the look again. ‘I'm just
saying
, Sean,' she says, in that nasal voice he's learned to dread. ‘I'm going to unpack. Perhaps you'd like to go and check on the twins, if that's not too much to ask? Your
other
daughters?'

She stalks away. He follows her like a smacked puppy and watches as she climbs the stairs. A brand-new staircase, sourced by Linda, the treads made of toughened glass, abraded at the edges to look as though they have been hewn whole from living crystal. Thirty thousand pounds' worth of stairs that will have added a good hundred-k to the asking price. Even though he can't see her face, her very backside radiates offence. How a pair of buttocks can look offended he doesn't know, but there they are, right there, going up the stairs in high dudgeon. Sean flicks a finger at them and pulls a face.

She has settled the twins on a white combed-sheepskin rug in front of the shiny gas firebowl that sits proudly in the open chimney breast. They've knocked the rooms together to create a large open-plan space from two poky ones, but left the fireplace as a focal feature. A spend of ten thousand pounds that will reap another hundred and fifty thousand when the house goes on the market on Thursday. Sean is no longer able to think of houses as places. To him they're bank statements, expenses sheets, 3-D illustrations of investment-to-profit ratios.

He's killing several birds with one stone this weekend: saving a few thou on a rental property and testing out the house's impact value on a tame audience. It's the first time he's used Linda Innes for her design skills, and he suspects it won't be the last. His building team are standing by to make speedy adjustments if anyone notices something they really, really hate, but to his well-trained eye it looks as though every choice she's made has been perfect for the market. She's even picked out the perfect yuppie dream furniture from the warehouse without any guidance at all: the white leather cubic sofas, the fluffy rugs, the coffee table with the glass top and the display boxes beneath, where she's placed souvenirs from seasides thousands of miles from this one: a giant conch, a dried-out rainbow starfish, a lump of coral the size of an ostrich egg. The firebowl is polished copper, the cupboard doors have no handles, the floor is quarry tiles of Aberdonian granite. In a dark and useless corner, a giant Ali Baba pot filled with Brobdingnagian bamboo feathers. Not a place to fall over in, but perfect for impressing your sales director.

The children, however, are not impressed. In fact, they're making a start on redecorating. They've begun with the rug and a set of crayons. Ignoring the A3 sketch-pad that sits on the floor beside them, they sit face to face in their OshKosh pinafores, colouring each strand in by holding it up and pulling a crayon along its surface.

Oh, God. Sean squats down and asks them what they're doing. They look up and beam. ‘Claire?' he shouts. Then, louder, ‘Claire? Who gave the twins a box of crayons?'

That's another three hundred, right there.