The Language of Dying Read Free Page B

things? That’s what Penny is doing now.
    ‘You were almost hysterical. We found you out in the field in the middle of the night. You must remember.’ She pauses, maybe doing a little drifting of her own, back to that night. ‘I woke up and you weren’t in bed. What made you go outside? You never said.’
    ‘I was ten, Penny.’ I state that as if it is enough, and maybe for Penny it is.
    ‘Were you looking for Mum? Did you think she’d change her mind and come back for us?’ Penny has found a pattern, a meaning that she can understand, and she keeps hold of it.
    ‘Probably. I don’t remember much about it.’
    ‘You are a funny one.’ Her voice is more settled. ‘Took hours to calm you down. You kept getting out of bed and going to the window.’
    She sighs and we drift into our own worlds. Bubbles within bubbles. She has accepted my lie because it fits in easily, but it’s still a lie. I remember everything from the night our mother left. How could I forget? It was the first time I saw it. Lying here in the dark, in this moment of
alltime
, I let the memory run into my skin.
    *
    There are a lot of jazz records played in our house, it is the one tenuous bond Mum and you share beyond alcohol and the call of wild blood; a love of music that blares and dances and laughs like you do. Like you do in the good times. There’s a lot of jazz and a lot of rows and a lot of broken glass hidden amongst the books andthe university papers and the vodka and wine bottles that make up your lives.
    We are living in Surrey, in the house you inherited from your parents and which I will eventually buy from you. It’s large and untidy in a pleasantly middle-class way, but isn’t quite big enough for our ever-growing family and the piano and the various rabbits and hamsters we collect. We are a dysfunctional clutter of children who play within its walls when school is done. Paul, Penny, and gradually I, begin to suspect that although we speak as politely as the other children in our suburban grammar school, our home lives may not be quite as ordered as theirs. We don’t invite friends round and we decline invitations to tea. We do these things without consultation, each sibling owning their individual moment of revelation. My moment comes when you collect me from school one day. I am six, it is the seventies and things are ‘looser’, but even then all the other fathers either have their shirts tucked all the way in or hanging all the way out, their clothing delineating their political sway. Your shirt, though, is somewhere in-between, ignoring your politics. A bit of it is crumpled into the waistband of your trousers, but most of the back remains untucked like the boys at the big school wear them. I know that it’s wrong in a not-quite-right way and then I realise that is the same for everything in our family. Not-quite-right, not-quite-wrong. Too many cracks mar the surface.
    I don’t look at the children and parents casting sly glances in our direction.
Is he drunk?
I can feel the hum of their whispers with every footfall. At least you are there to collect me while Mum sways to jazz in the garden and doesn’t work on her university thesis. You don’t leave us. You will never leave us.
    Our mother loves babies and even as children we know this. She loves the touch and the smell of them. She loves their wriggling need and the way the crying stops when she wraps them to her thin chest. Of course we stop crying. Two parts breast-milk, one part raw spirit is what flows out of her and into us. She delights in babies, our mother, but not in motherhood. She has no interest in that. Children with
minds of their own
and a will separate to hers exhaust her. When we get to the foot-stamping age her love affair tires and it becomes time for another, fresher, smaller child to satisfy the aching place inside her only an infant can reach. Paul is the first to be discarded and then Penny, and then me.
    By the time the boys come along