Twenty years is a long time

Today is 20 years since my father passed away.  I was 14, he was 49.  It's a long time.  There are a lot of things in my life, and in the world in general, that he has missed out on.

We are having a memorial this weekend to finally inter his ashes - he's been on the shelf and in the shed for 20 years, poor guy!  It's funny, I don't miss him constantly, it's not like a pain or an ache, but more like a sensitive muscle that just twinges every now and then if I think about it or move the wrong way...

He would have been a great Granddad. He would have been a menace on Facebook.

Anyway, in the spirit of remembrance, here's an unfinished piece I wrote a couple of years back about the day he died.

The end of the chapter

It’s winter.  The air in her bedroom is cold, but R is warm, sandwiched between several layers of duvet and the womb of her waterbed (don’t hassle her, it’s the ‘90s, they were cool then).  It’s morning, early, but not too early, quiet but for the click-click-click of the dog’s claws on the wooden floor of the hallway.  He wants to go outside and R can hear him but she doesn’t move just yet.  It’s the last Friday of the school holidays (dogs have no respect for weekends and holidays) so she’s savouring her lie-in.  One arm snakes out from beneath the covers to grab her current bedroom book (she has three on the go – one for the bedroom, one for the living room and one for the bathroom) and flick on the bedside light.  She is quickly drawn back into the world she reluctantly left the previous night, when her eyelids could no longer resist the beckoning advances of her cheeks.

The dog is still pacing the hallway.  He whimpers a little under his breath in the hope of promoting action, and possibly breakfast.  R hears her mother sigh; can picture her pushing back the covers and throwing on her grotty old sheepskin slippers and a baggy jumper.  She pads softly down the corridor, past R’s room to the kitchen and opens the back door – top bolt, bottom bolt, lock.  Dog is released and relieved, and R is off the hook for now.

R’s mum (everyone calls her J) treks back down the corridor and R wonders idly where she slept last night.  R’s father’s snoring has been getting worse the last few months, and more often than not J abandons the master bedroom and sleeps in the relative peace of the spare bedroom next door.  R is 14, and still entitled to a generous share of self-absorption, so doesn’t really wonder about this arrangement.

I’d like to leave her there, warm and cosy in her bed, with nothing more to worry about than how long her bladder can hold out before she has to get up.  But this is not the end of the story.  This is the end of a chapter, and a childhood.

“R!” Her mother, calling her.  I’m almost certain R rolls her eyes a little as she covers her ears with the duvet and turns a page.  She’s about six pages from the protagonist’s shocking discovery, but six words from her mother are about to change her own life forever. 

“R, I think your father’s dead.”

Her body is galvanised into action before her brain has had time to register the words and she leaps from the bed in one fluid motion which, another time, would have impressed and surprised her.  She gets as far as the corridor and stops, the impulse which has propelled her this far stalling, as she realises she has absolutely no idea what to do.

She meets her mother by the telephone table, their faces matching shades of grey-white, their eyes alarmingly wide.  They don’t speak or touch.  J picks up the phone, dials a friend, and then the doctor; R picks up the dog and hugs him, mainly to stop her arms feeling so useless and awkward.

A few second, minutes or hours later (time passes strangely for a while) the friend arrives, the doctor arrives, an ambulance is called (rather uselessly really, and against her mother’s advice). Aunties are phoned, a coroner, as the ambulance men exit the bedroom solemnly confirming what everyone knew, that there is nothing they can do.  They, or perhaps the doctor, offer to remove the body, and this again spurs R in to action.  She has to see for herself, it’s very important although she can’t explain why.

The body is lying on the bed.  It looks like her father but it isn’t.  He looks like he is sleeping, but he isn’t.  She knows this because he is too quiet and too still – Dad was never quiet and still while he slept.  One time he hummed Amazing Grace in his sleep; another time he nearly punched her mother, trying to save her from the underwater swans, apparently; always he snored, twitched and muttered.  This is not her father.  Her father is gone.

As the ambulance men remove the body that is not her father, her mother sits down with the coroner.  R, desperate to do something, anything to stop her feeling so useless, offers to phone people.  Her mum accepts, gratefully, and R takes the phone and her mum’s well-thumbed address book into the bathroom.  She’s not sure why she is in the bathroom, but it seems as good a place as any.

For the next couple of hours R works her way through the alphabet, feeling guilty as each person answers brightly and hangs up crying.  R has not cried yet. 

Aunties arrive and seem to fill the house, though there are actually only two of them.  G, at 37 still the baby of the family, twelve years younger than her big brother, copes by cooking.  L, the middle child, copes by cleaning.  R is not sure how she copes, but she does.  There isn’t really any other option.

The day before the funeral they go to see the body.  Again he is too still, too quiet.  R knows that under his best suit he has been cut open and laid bare, investigated intimately and dispassionately to get to the heart of the matter. And the heart, it seems, is (or was) the matter –R rolls the unfamiliar words around her mouth – coronary arteriosclerosis.  It sounds more grand and exotic than ‘heart attack’.