The Language of Dying Read Free

too cheerfully as she says goodnight to you, her plumped-up lips barely coming near your plumped-up pillows.
    She scurries out and I smile at you and you smile wearily back as I stroke your hair and kiss your dry, rotten mouth. ‘I can see you in there, Dad,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t you worry. I can always see you.’ I stay there for a moment, your warmth and mine mixing in the small space between us and when I straighten up your eyes are shut and your breath slow and I wonder if I even said the words at all.
    Afterwards, Penny and I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine and eat more food, taking trays into theliving room. There is toast and biscuits and cheese and ham and pickles and two tubes of Pringles and we scoff them as
Eastenders
plays out its drama in the background; the familiar voice of strangers a comfort, unreality soothing us for a while. We both continue to eat long after our hunger is gone and soon the bottle is nearly empty. My head is buzzing pleasantly, the world shimmering at the edges. I’m not a good drinker, not like Penny. But I think she’s a little drunk too. Her feet are up on the coffee table next to the surviving crumbs of our feast and her head lolls sideways against the brown leather.
    ‘I would have had him come and stay with me; you know that, don’t you, sweetheart? But with James being so little and the au pair living in, it would have been …’ Her petite shoulders shrug as if the rest of the sentence is so self-explanatory she needn’t waste her breath on the words. I’m tempted to say,
It would have been what, Penny? Too hard?
but I swallow my sharp tongue along with my sharp white wine, letting them both fizz angrily inside. I could say those words. And they would be true. It would have been too hard for Penny. And there’s the dry fact and no anger will change it and that’s why I stay quiet and keep my understanding silent. Different horses for different courses. You were always going to come here. Back home with the middle child. The pivot, the hinge between the
normal
of Paul and Penny and the strange, mad world of the boys; sometimes tilting thisway and sometimes that. In both camps and yet neither.
    Penny is still talking and making excuses that aren’t needed, but she needs to hear them out loud in order to believe. She talks and I find myself drifting. I’ve always drifted. Sometimes there are just too many words filling up the space and not enough emptiness left for thinking. I keep a little emptiness inside for when I need it.
She’s off again
. That’s what you used to say, way back when.
Hey
,
Lady Penelope. Nudge your sister, she’s off again
. And then you would laugh.
In a world of her own, that one
.
    Time is surreal. I can hear that laugh as if it were yesterday and in the same instant I can see the years ahead in which I will never hear it again. I squeeze my eyes shut let the drifting take over.
    They think I’m a dreamer, Paul and Penny. They think I don’t live in the real world, and maybe I don’t. Maybe I’ve avoided that, because if I cement myself too firmly in the
here
, then the thing outside the window, the thing in the field, will no longer exist. And if I were to allow that then it would be lost to me for good. I know this as surely as I know you are dying and that
you
are nearly lost to me for good. Nothing I can do will change that.
    But, despite my empty thinking space, despite Penny and Paul’s sideways glances and rolled eyes over the years, it was only me who understood the seriousness of things a year back when your swallowing problems began. It was only me whose insides screeched with theknowledge of your life’s unravelling. It was only me who asked the questions and wanted to hear the answers. I can see the irony, even if they can’t. My
own world
is more real than theirs, even if I am lost in it. I don’t hide behind my cars and my clothes and my plumped-up lips.
    Yes, you were always going to pack up your small flat and