So I get a daughter on the sofa and manhandle her into loving me a little: Rebecca who is so dippy and kind, or Emily, the cat, the Daddy’s girl; a bit hopeless, a bit cold, and her Hegarty-blue eyes the place where my heart founders most. We cuddle up, and there is messing and chat, then there is shouting about homework, or uneaten food, or bedtimes, and at half past nine, when the shouting and the messing is over and they are asleep, I start to prowl.
They don’t really want me, I think. They are just putting up with me for a while.
Sitting room to living room to dining room to kitchen, a single flow of space around the stairs; the ground floor is open plan with a small study tucked on the other side of the hall door. If Tom comes home I will go in there. Some nights I go online. But mostly, I write about Ada and Nugent in the Belvedere, endlessly, over and again.
At half past eleven, Tom puts his head around the door and says, ‘Don’t stay up all night!’ and when his footsteps are gone, the world is mine.
And what a crazy world it is!
There are long stretches of time when I don’t know what I am doing, or what I have done-nothing mostly, but sometimes it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was. I might have a bout of cleaning around four. I do it like a thief, holding my breath as I scrub, stealing the dirt off the walls. I try not to drink before half past five, but I always do drink-from the top of the wine bottle to the last, little drop. It is the only way I know to make the day end.
Late at night, I hear voices in bursts and snatches-like a radio switched on and switched off again, in another room. Incoherent, but quite cheerful. Stories bouncing off the walls. Scraps of lives, leaking through. Whisperings in the turn of a door handle. Birds on the roof. The occasional bleeping of a child’s toy. And once, my brother’s voice saying, ‘Now. Now.’
I listened for him again, but he was gone.
As I open the fridge, my mind is subject to jolts and lapses; the stair you miss as you fall asleep. Portents. I feel the future falling through the roof of my mind and when I look nothing is there. A rope. Something dangling in a bag, that I can not touch.
I have all my regrets between pouring the wine and reaching for the glass.
Sometimes, I go up to look at my bed, without me in it. Tom sleeps on his back. He does not snore. Sometimes, when he is sad in his sleep, he turns on his side and his hands gather under his chin. My husband, twitching as he dreams.
Tom moves money around, electronically. Every time he does this, a tiny bit sticks to him. Day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Quite a lot of it, in the long run.
Liam, my brother, spent most of his working life as a hospital porter in the Hampstead Royal Free. He pushed beds down corridors and put cancerous lumps into bags and carried severed limbs down to the incinerator, and he enjoyed it, he said. He liked the company.
I used to be a journalist. I used to write about shopping (well someone has to). Now I look after the kids-what’s that called?
Tom had sex with me the night of the wake-as if Liam’s death had blown all the cobwebs away: the fuss and the kids and the big, busy job and the late nights spent strenuously not sleeping with other women. He was getting back to basics: telling me that he loved me, telling me that my brother might be dead but that he was very much alive. Exercising his right. I love my husband, but I lay there with one leg on either side of his dancing, country-boy hips and I did not feel alive. I felt like a chicken when it is quartered.
7
BUT LET THAT wait. Let the poor chicken wait awhile.
Here I am on the Brighton line, on my way to collect my brother’s body, or view it, or say hello to it, or goodbye, or whatever you do to a body you once loved. Pay your respects. It is a mellow autumn day. I look out the window and am surprised that the Downs exist. There has always been something childish about England for me.
Haywards Heath
Wivelsfield
Burgess Hill
Hassocks
Names so silly and twee they must be made up. The constant surprise of this land, that it is actually green and actually pleasant. That it is actually there. It moves past me, but at different speeds. In the middle distance a swathe of countryside moves serenely on, while the far hills run backwards slightly, in a narrow strip. I try to find the line along which the landscape holds still and changes its mind, thinking that travel is a contrary kind of thing, because moving towards a dead man is not moving at all.
Then my sister Bea rings.
‘Hello?’
‘Are you on roaming?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, if you’re in England you’re on roaming.’
‘All right, I’m on roaming.’
‘Well, I won’t run up your bill,’ she says. And she starts to talk.
Some ancient impulse of my mother’s means that she wants the coffin brought back to the house before the removal, so Liam can lie in state in our ghastly front room. Though come to think of it I can’t think of a better carpet for a corpse, as I say to Bea; all those oblongs of orange and brown.
‘It’s a carpet,’ says Bea.
And I say, ‘Oh come on.’
‘Just do it,’ she says.
‘Do it?’ I say, meaning, I’m fucking paying for it.
‘It’s how Daddy would have wanted it,’ she says, meaning, I am the keeper of the flame, and I am so furious with her that I can not hear what I say, or what she says for another little while as the countryside, in all its different speeds and directions, runs past the window and we fight our way back to safe ground.
She is right, of course. Daddy grew up in the West-he always knew the right thing to do. He had beautiful manners. Which, if you ask me, was mostly a question of saying nothing, to anyone, ever. ‘Hello, are you well’, ‘Goodbye now, take care’, the whole human business had to be ritualised. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’, ‘Put that money away now’, ‘That’s a lovely bit of ham’, ‘It is your noble call’. It bored me to tears, actually: all that control. The dignity of the man somewhat undermined by his crazed rate of reproduction. Daddy died of a heart attack in 1986, and mourners laughed about it in the church porch, like he had worn himself out with too much shagging. ‘He would have been so proud to see you all,’ one of the neighbours said. ‘So proud. Sitting in a row, like steps and stairs.’ I did not say it, but I did not think so-not particularly. I did not think he would have been particularly proud.
He did have beautiful Irish. The language was a romantic place, for him, and it is the place where I love him, even now.
He wasn’t the worst. Daddy was a lecturer in the local teacher training college, so, between the long holidays and the short hours, he was often around; marshalling, ordering, directing traffic; carrying in boxes of winter vegetables from the early morning market like he was running a summer camp and not a family. Though all this must have stopped sometime too-by the time I was in secondary school we lived on sending the twins down to the corner shop for rashers; Ernest or Mossie jingling the change in his pocket to see if there was enough there for a fry-up. None of the Hegartys was mean. Even I, the coolest of the Hegartys, am not stingy. This is more than a social thing, it’s like a religious taboo; a mean person still makes my skin crawl, I have to turn and look the other way.