The Language of Dying Read Free Page A

come back home. Because I think maybe you are a drifter too. We understand each other.
    The silence breaks my thoughts and I realise that Penny has stopped talking and is looking at me, waiting for an answer. I have no idea what she has said and I know that she knows I’ve been gone
in a world of my own
, so I just smile and she smiles back. She runs one hand over my head gently, as if the four years between us are still a huge divide and she is still my big sister rather than a woman I once knew. But still, I am happy that she’s here. It’s a big warm rush coming out of me, like waters breaking and I look at her and think how I have envied her and hated her and avoided her over the years and yet here we are. Sisters again.
    But then love clings on, doesn’t it, Dad? Even when by rights it has no place left to be, love is hard to kill. Like life. And sometimes, like life, it takes you completely by surprise.
    *
    There are enough bedrooms, but Penny and I choose to share one bed, enjoying this closeness that both of us are too afraid to mention in case it crumbles, its solidityunsure. The duvet is pulled up under our chins even though the room is too hot. The heating throbs through the pipes, gurgling like the slowing blood in your veins, both determined to keep you warm and alive for as long as possible. It won’t be long until my skin starts to itch with sweat, but I don’t mind. We are all cold in the end.
    Penny is talking and I am determined not to drift, but to listen, to feel the glow that escapes with her words as she recalls incidents from so long ago. Lying there, we remember and laugh and it feels so good, mainly because I know that it will never be the same again. It is bittersweet. As you let go, so shall we. Buried in the scent of fresh sheets and the warmth of my sister, I store each second safely away so that I can savour this time in the years to come.
    Still, tonight we talk about the old days and pretend they were as funny then as they are now. The times when you were really drinking hard, after Mum had gone and you had remarried and we were living through the ‘Shetland experience’ as Davey refers to it.
    Yes, you were –
are,
not were yet – a drifter. Only a drifter would think it was a good idea to take five children and your new wife to the middle of nowhere and that it would pull you all together instead of ripping you apart. But then, if you pour vodka on your cornflakes every morning for four or five years, you’re going to have a lot of crazy ideas. A drinking drifter, that was you, our dad, way back when.
    I don’t even know what Penny is trying to say, but we are laughing so hard I think I may wet myself. And then I spoil it.
    ‘I wonder if Dad can hear us laughing.’ The words come out with a giggle, but the sound is wrong. We quiet down after that, the atmosphere broken. I feel like we are in a bubble in the bed, a moment of
alltime
, not just then or now or in the time when you are no more, but all of it together, inseparable. For a while we say nothing, just listen to each other’s breathing and the rustle of eyelashes betraying wide-awake eyes.
    It’s Penny who cracks the silence with her soft voice, but this time we don’t laugh. We talk about the night Mum left us. Not when she died, like you will soon, but when she just upped and left.
    Penny sniffs a little, still recovering from all the belly laughing and I fight the urge to squeeze her tight. There, in the dark, the years have evaporated and she is just my big sister lying next to me, all natural and glowing and undamaged by life.
    ‘What happened to you that night?’ I can almost hear her brow furrowing in the sound of her voice. She’ll regret that, my empty thinking space says. More lines, more injections.
    ‘What do you mean?’ My eyes adjust to the dark and I make patterns out of the shadows and shapes of the plastered ceiling. I think it’s human nature, isn’t it? To look for patterns or meaning in