Dead Secret E-Book

Deveney Catherine

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Growing up wasn't a process; it was a moment. It was the moment I watched Daddy die. Everything began to unravel then.' When their father dies of a sudden heart attack, sisters Rebecca and Sarah Connaghan set aside their differences and return to the family home in Glasgow. Then Rebecca finds letters between her father and the mother she barely remembers that cast doubt on everything she's been told about her family. Reeling from confusion and grief, she sets off alone for the remote Highlands village that may hold the key to the past. Above all, she is determined to prove the innocence of her father - the beloved, silent man she once thought she knew, now accused of a terrible crime.

Leseprobe

DEAD SECRET

Catherine Deveney

For Peter Black Rafferty. A daughter’s song.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

FRIDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

SATURDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

SUNDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

MONDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

TUESDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

THURSDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

FRIDAY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Also By Catherine Deveney

Copyright

FRIDAY

CHAPTER ONE

Growing up wasn’t a process; it was a moment. It was the moment I watched Daddy die. Everything began to unravel then. Not slowly, like rows of neat knitting pulled stitch by stitch, but quickly, in great big, uneven chunks that left ragged, unruly holes.

Even now, I prefer to say that up until he died, we all lived a life full of secrets rather than a life full of lies. “Lie” is such an ugly word. And so deliberate. It wasn’t like that.

I didn’t want him to die, but I particularly didn’t want him to die in that dingy little upstairs hall of his. You’d think it would be irrelevant, that only the dying would matter. But it was so enormous that all of it was important. It mattered that he was lying on that grubby, beige-coloured carpet; that there was a seeping stain on the wallpaper above his head. It mattered that the white paintwork was chipped and flaking, that it was pockmarked with spots of primrose yellow from a past life. It wasn’t a good enough place for anyone to die, and certainly not Daddy, but then you don’t get to choose, do you? None of us gets to choose. All he could do was die and all we could do was watch.

I used to think life was about options. Brown bread or white? Coffee or tea? Rent or buy; bus or car; sink or bloody swim. The minute he died I knew choice was just an illusion. All of it. Endless options making you feel in control and none of them worth a damn. You can choose white walls over primrose yellow if you want. But you can’t choose between living or dying. Once you know that – I mean really know it – you can’t ever be a child again. And when Daddy died, for the first time I really knew.

Strange the way I keep calling him ‘Daddy’. Like one of those upper-crust girls who has a father with a fat cheque book. But we never had any money and I never called him that when he was alive. I called him Da mostly, though I jokingly called him Pa for a bit after we watched an old episode of The Waltons. We hooted at the sickly, saccharine nonsense of it all. But I, who hooted loudest and with most derision, loved that family. I never stopped to work out why.

It was only after he died that I sometimes called him Daddy. Just in my head. Just in private. When he went, I grew up in the way I saw the world. But I became a little girl again in the way I saw him. Right from the start, I knew for certain that even when the funeral was over, even when things seemed to be normal again, they never, ever would be. You have to understand. He… it… this… all of it… was that important.

He was all Sarah and I had. My sister Sarah is four years younger than me and was only a few weeks old when Mother died. Sometimes, I think she’s lucky that she never knew her at all. For me, trying to remember Mother is like a puzzle that never stops nagging. Sarah doesn’t have to bother. Over the years I’ve tried and tried to bring the fuzzy images in my mind into sharper focus. I remember she had a coat with a fur collar that she wore in winter, and I remember being carried in her arms once and laying my cheek, stinging with cold, against the soft fur and falling asleep. The scent she wore was trapped in the fur and in later years I identified it as the scent of roses. Maybe that’s because I went into a chemist shop once and sniffed every perfume bottle in the shop, and when I sniffed one of those old-fashioned bottles of Yardley’s English Roses, my stomach lurched. But that’s all that’s left of her. A vague scent. I can’t remember her face and I can’t remember her voice. There has to be a reason for that.

Mother had remarkable power for a dead woman. She was the source of all secrets in our house, the well from which they all sprang. Da never spoke willingly about her to Sarah or me. We knew better than to ask. But I couldn’t help wondering whether he thought of her in his dying moments. Whether, as he lay there in a silent carousel of summer heat and pain and chipped-paint squalor, he remembered something else, a time when the carousel had spun to music. He loved her once. I know he loved her. Even knowing what I know now, I don’t think he ever stopped.

At first neither Sarah nor I realised that Da was suffering heart failure. He was weak and shivering with cold, despite the sticky heat of the warmest June in years, and there was sweat on his brow. He gripped the wall to get to the toilet to be sick, and on the way back, he lay down in the hall. Sarah and I tried to coax him back to bed, but though he wasn’t a big man, he was solid. There was no way we could move him without help.

I don’t think he knew where he was or what he was saying. There were a few words that didn’t make sense, then he seemed to focus on us. “Love,” he said, but his eyes said more. When I re-run that scene in my mind now, I always reply. I say, “I love you too, Da.” But I didn’t then. I was too busy trying to pretend it wasn’t the end.

He retched weakly. I took off his pyjama top to sponge the thin sickness that trickled from the corners of his mouth; little rivulets that ran into the folds of his neck. I only minded because I knew he would. He was such a private man. So very, very private. But by then he was already slipping in and out of consciousness. The journey had started, or maybe ended, and he was past caring.

At first there had been all that panic. Get the sponge, feel his pulse, call the doctor. Stop it happening. Take control. I always feel compelled to push myself forward as the strong one. But I’m a bit of a fraud, as you’ll find out. I may be the eldest, but Sarah is the natural coper in our family, not me. I dialled 999 but Sarah was shouting to me from the hall that he was getting worse and I ended up crying down the line in panic, unable to speak. “It’s okay,” said the operator, “just tell me where you are,” and I sobbed the address into the mouthpiece. She didn’t know what I was saying. Such a kind voice she had. Patient. Asking me to take my time, to repeat it slowly.

It was worse afterwards when the terrible stillness came, when we knew there was nothing else to do but watch. His chest was like a slowly deflating balloon, sinking lower and lower with each breath. His skin became paler, almost translucent, as his breathing dropped. My heart began to thump, beating faster and faster as his slowed, and for a moment I had the strangest sensation that his heartbeat was transferring into my body. Neither Sarah nor I spoke. I sat and cradled Da’s head in my lap and listened as a distant siren came closer and closer.

Sarah let them in. Their feet thumped on the wooden stairs as they ran up and I could feel the vibration running through the floor. They were quite gentle as they moved me away from him, but firm too. While they worked on Da, Sarah and I sat on the stairs like two strangers in our own family’s house. Like it was nothing to do with us, really.

I watched them through the bars of the banister and I wanted to ask them why they were bothering with all that equipment, why they were rushing and pushing and pulling. He was gone already. They might make his heart work like a mechanical pump but we knew he was gone. Well, I did. I seldom know what Sarah really thinks.

I could see the barrel shape of his chest and the little hairs inside his nostrils and the slackness under his chin. It looked like Da from the outside but whatever had been inside, whatever spark had fuelled the engine room of Joseph Connaghan, was gone. There seemed no point in all that commotion. It was only later that it felt important they had fought for him and shown that he mattered, that he wasn’t just some random old man. That we hadn’t given him up willingly.

They wouldn’t let us travel in the ambulance. I kept asking why they wouldn’t let me be with him but they said it was better not to. Maybe they thought I’d go crazy if I suddenly realised I was shut in the back with a corpse. A couple of women from further up the street had come out onto the pavement and were standing in their slippers, looking down the road at the ambulance. And Mr Curtis from next door, of course. Mr Curtis watches everything in Rosebank Street.

Mr Curtis shrinks when people talk to him. He looked like he wanted to run back inside and peep from behind his curtains when one of the ambulance men shouted to him to ask if he could drive Sarah and me to the hospital. Normally I’d have been angry. I don’t like people organising me. But I didn’t say a word. Neither Sarah nor I could have got behind the wheel. We did the whole journey in silence. “I hope…” he began, as he drew up outside the hospital, and then he looked at me and trailed off. I banged the door shut and ran inside, leaving Sarah to mumble thanks.

A nurse showed us into a waiting room at the hospital. Sarah stood silently. I walked up and down. The walls were pale yellow, the curtains lemon with streaks of lime green. They made me think of a soft drink we used to order on holiday abroad, a lemon soda that was served with rocks of ice and twists of lime in the glass. Funny what your mind thinks of in a crisis. Sarah’s eyes followed me everywhere I went in that room.

The nurse came in, closing the door gently, precisely, behind her before speaking. The doctors were still working on Da but he wasn’t responding. Did we want them to continue? Bloody stupid question. There was no point in saying yes because he was gone. If he wasn’t, they wouldn’t have asked. I suppose it was her way of giving us a decision, letting us take control of the goodbye, but by then I already knew there was no such thing as control.

I looked at Sarah. What exactly were we meant to say? No, it’s all right nurse. It’s only my old dad rasping out his last. Tell them to go and have their lunch break. I know I shouldn’t have taken it out on her. She was nice, really. But who would want to say no to a question like that? And what was the point of saying yes? “How can we answer that?” I snapped at her. Sarah apologised for me. I hate it when she does that. She can be so bloody prissy sometimes, Sarah. “It’s okay,” said the nurse, and she touched my shoulder as she left.

He was laid on a white sheet when they finally took us to see him. There was another sheet over him but his chest was still bare and I wanted to pull the sheet up to keep him warm, protect him from the chill of death that rippled through the 85° heat. I could scarcely breathe in that heat, but I still looked at him and felt cold. Grey stone, snow dusted; ice-cracked earth and lichen stiff with frost. Extra socks. I wanted extra socks for my dead father’s feet.

I think maybe the nurse had combed his hair because it was slicked down neatly where usually it had a mind of its own and sprouted in unruly bushes in different directions. His hair was white and without the animation of life he suddenly looked so old. He was sixty-eight but he could have been more. I wanted to tell the nurse that wasn’t how he looked. It was only a month since I had left for a summer season in Brighton. He could have passed for ten years younger then. But nothing stays still for long. Everything in life shifts beneath your feet like moving grains of sand.

I don’t know why it mattered to me that the nurse should know he didn’t usually look that old. Except that as soon as he was gone, I felt the need to make him exist in people’s minds, make them understand the real Da, make them love him as I loved him.

But then I looked at his face as I bent and kissed him one last time, a face so familiar and yet now so unfamiliar, and I felt the solid base of my life suddenly shift and tilt.

The real Da. I ran a finger gently down his cheek, still soft with the leftovers of life. There had been so many mysteries in our young lives, and while Da was alive it hadn’t really mattered. Or so I’d thought. We had him. It was only now he was dead that I began to wonder if I had ever known who the real Da was, if I had ever really known him at all.

Secrets. Secrets. Sss… secrets. They have lapped back and forth inside my brain for five years now, ever since Da died, constant as the tides. My understanding has ebbed and flowed steadily too; sometimes it reaches a peak, like the spring tide, when the water is high and deep and complete. I try to hold onto it, the completeness of that understanding, but somehow it always drifts away from me again, receding far out into the distance as if it will never return.

All I know for certain is that in the week from Da’s death to his funeral, from kissing him in that hospital bed to laying him in the ground, everything changed. One week, yet it forced me to face a lifetime’s denial. I had always known the secrets were there. Da’s death just forced me to face them.

Growing up, Sarah and I were affected differently by the mysteries of our family life. For me, they produced a kind of emotional restlessness, an inability to stay still and relate to people. Maybe I was frightened that if I stopped, I’d have to think. Sarah was frightened to do anything other than think. I got itchy feet and my sister became trapped in a padded cage, craving safety and security. Sarah and I were always opposites.

It was only after Da died that I came to understand the wasted years. The flitting from job to job. The lack of direction. The men. I think I always wanted to know about Mother. On some subconscious level, perhaps I did know. Perhaps the awfulness of what happened was locked somewhere inside me, a kind of suppressed, intuitive knowledge. Either way – knowing or not knowing – I was always going to be rootless. If I wasn’t certain where I came from, how could I know who I was? You can call it amateur psychology if you like, but these things matter. Of course they matter.

It wasn’t until the truth came out that I finally learned how to stand still. And maybe how to stop being mouthy and lashing out at people I care about. So many milestones since then, important things that Da has missed. With him gone, nothing is ever complete now; nothing is ever truly whole. At the age of thirty-three I’m finally going to graduate and Da won’t be there. And Sarah is about to have her first baby, the grandchild he’ll never see. I miss him. We miss him. We’ve never stopped missing him.

It’s five years this summer since he died. It’s not his anniversary that has made me relive everything so intensely these last few weeks, made me write it all down. I am not a great one for anniversaries; it is the everyday absence that is most painful. No, it’s hearing Shameena Khan’s new recording of Puccini’s arias. She sent it to me in the post with a note, explaining what I already knew: that the roots of this recording went back to Da’s funeral. Every time I listen to it, I feel inspired to write down a little more of what happened that summer.

It was so beautiful when she sang for Da. I think of rain after drought when I hear those opening notes, of water pattering gently on scorched earth. There is nothing quite like music for making part of your life come alive again and re-run like a movie reel in your head. The record you danced to the summer you were sixteen. The song you got married to, or made love to by candlelight. Or in the case of Puccini, the music you buried your father to.

Shameena Khan was – is – my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were schoolgirls. Nowadays everyone has heard of Shameena. But she was only just breaking through on the opera scene five years ago when she flew up from London to sing at Da’s funeral. There can be few of us who were in the church who didn’t guess what a career Shameena had before her. For me, nothing could ever compare to the way she sang that day. It was music to live for; music to die to; music to make the carousel turn.

Her singing fused with something in me that day, something that is gone now and will never come back in quite the same way. It was a moment where love, and pain, and insight, and beauty, suddenly melted into one another and bubbled up as something new, a brief, transient glimpse of infinity. Such a voice. The recording is wonderful too, really wonderful. I am listening to it now, as I write. It is as much my tool as the keyboard I type with.

The power of the music is pumping up the room, taking every inch of space and making it swell, the way a sponge swells in water. It fills me too, until there is nothing left of the present, nothing left of now. There is only yesterday. In every note I can see the summer Da died, and smell it, and touch it. More importantly, I can feel it. At times I even find myself slipping back into those strange, one-sided conversations I had with him in the week after he died.

I am right back there, caught in the strange, stifling heat of that June, while the music washes over me, a warm, rhythmic, rolling wave of memories.

CHAPTER TWO

Tinned chicken soup is death food. We eat it the day Da dies. I watch the pallid, glutinous mass of it slide reluctantly from the tin in a solid lump and squelch into the pot. Aunt Peggy is shaking the tin hysterically, like it’s someone’s shoulders. No soup for me, I tell her, but she carries on shaking. Peggy never takes no for an answer.

“Best to eat,” she says briskly.

Christ.

Peggy is Da’s younger sister, the closest Sarah and I ever got to a mother. I’ll never forget the way she looked this morning as she walked with Uncle Charlie down that peppermint-green hospital corridor towards me. It made me think of a miniature doll Da gave me once. It was free on the cover of a magazine I had nagged him to buy me, a little Japanese doll with a white porcelain face, but when I unwrapped the cellophane, the doll’s arm had fallen off. Peggy looked like that: face like chalk and broken.

I put my arms round her and neither of us said anything but I could feel the tremor that was invading her thin body as she clung to me in the corridor. She’s the only one of Da’s family left now. “Oh Becca…” she whispered finally. “To come home for this…” She moved out of my arms and grasped my hand. “At least you were here.” I suppose it was just guilt that made me wonder if there was a reproach hidden somewhere in there. Home for Da’s death, if not his life.

All those years away, working in one lousy hotel after another. I’d only got back again two days ago. Brighton this time. I’d lasted a month. It was supposed to be a receptionist’s job but I’d ended up working the bar and cleaning rooms and waitressing. The day they told me the breakfast chef hadn’t turned up, I told them Superwoman hadn’t flown in either and left. I told Da I was coming home to see him before taking something else, probably in Bournemouth. We had talked about going for a holiday together in the autumn, maybe Italy. The brochures are still tucked down the side of my unpacked case. The case is lying open on the floor of my bedroom, the clothes strewn over the lid, straggling remnants of a life that no longer exists.

Peggy is fussing now. I watch her opening tins, and cutting bread, and clattering pots in the cupboard. She pulls out a battered old milk pan with a twisted lip that has a strip of congealed milk down one side where the pan once boiled over. She shakes her head. “Ah, Joseph Connaghan,” she says tearfully, picking up a scourer from the sink and scrubbing vigorously. Charlie touches her shoulder and she momentarily lays her cheek on his arm. Peggy never lets Charlie do anything in the kitchen and I doubt he’s ever ironed a shirt in his life. But she doesn’t shoo him out today as she would normally. He stands beside her at the sink, buttering bread clumsily on a board. It’s his way of talking.

He never says much, Charlie. He just seems to spend his life serenely absorbing all Peggy’s high voltage. She generates all this crackling electricity that blasts out heat and Charlie simply sucks it all up and transforms it into light. He’s Peggy’s light bulb. Or maybe her fuse. She’d combust without Charlie.

I think Peggy would have liked children but it never happened. She had three surrogate kids instead: me, Sarah and Charlie. She helped Da bring Sarah and me up, and when we weren’t around, she channelled everything into Charlie. She made him dinners that would feed a ravenous navvy and when he sat down to one of her mounded plates, we’d tease him and ask if it had been a hard day in the trenches. Charlie would just smile that slow smile and sprinkle salt liberally over the heap without looking at us. Actually, he was a nine-to-five man who worked as a clerk in an accountant’s office.

Sarah is sticking close to Peggy as always, organising bowls and spoons.

Dutiful Sarah. Without saying anything, I go up to Da’s room to phone Shameena, conscious that I am being furtive, sneaking away. For some reason I always tend to do things as if they are a secret, even when they aren’t. That’s one thing about the Connaghan family that you really need to know. We are a family who operates on secrets. We understand them. We are comfortable in their silence…

The memories after he dies come unexpectedly, like sudden little puffs of smoke from the chimney of my brain. The first comes when I am halfway up the stairs. I am seven. It’s late in the year because the fire is full blast and the wind is rattling the loose casement in the sitting room. I am sitting on Da’s knee after my bath and the cheap, rough weave of his work trousers scratches against the skin of my bare legs as I wriggle in his lap. Sarah is playing with a bucket of bricks across the room.

Tentatively, I put my hands on his face. For a moment, my curiosity makes me see only his features, not my Da. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. I trace the contours, my soft fingers running down the stubble of his cheeks like velvet down an emery board. It feels strange, rough. Where do they come from, those dark hairs? I wonder, prodding them, trying to push them back into the pores.

It is like the exploration of a blind person: the fingertips run over the mound of Da’s cheeks, up over the bridge of his nose, halting at the hard, knobbly, uneven ridge in the middle. I press hard.

“Ouch!” says Da.

Startled out of my own little world, my eyes dart up to his. He is suddenly Da again and not just a series of features.

“Ouch,” he repeats, rolling his eyes in mock agony.

I giggle and press again.

“OUCH!” he yells, and I laugh uproariously.

Sarah drops her bricks at the noise. She pads across the room and leans on Da’s knee, trying unsuccessfully to swing her leg up.

“Up!” she demands, her soft blonde curls falling across her face. “Up!”

Da lifts her with one arm, moving me onto one knee and her onto the other, tucking each of us into the crook of an arm. We look at each other across the divide of his chest. In our house, there is always one between two. Always a half instead of a whole. Da kisses the tops of both our heads. Daddy’s girls. He is all we have. Neither of us wants to share…

His room feels cold with absence. Such stillness. The conversations in my head begin almost immediately. Where are you, Da? I find myself talking to him as if he will answer, searching as if it is impossible that he really is gone. I keep walking from room to room in his house. He is in every one of them and yet in none. In here, he is in the indentation of the pillow, where his head lay only this morning. He is in the discarded washing and the slippers that peep from under the bedclothes. His body lies in the hospital morgue now. But where has the rest of him gone?

“Rebecca!”

The voice startles me.

“Rebecca!”

It is Peggy.

“The soup’s ready,” she calls.

I look around the room before closing the door. It is dusty, stuffy, the air stale with trapped heat. But still it makes me shiver with his absence.

In the kitchen, Aunt Peggy pours the soup into the bowls with a ladle while the rest of us watch silently. My body and mind are in disagreement. My stomach is churningly empty, and yet I don’t want to eat. It doesn’t seem right. It’s so cruel the way the world simply keeps on turning no matter what. On the way home from the hospital, the car had stopped at lights and there was a young couple standing on the pavement, framed in the car window. She was laughing, her arms wrapped around his waist, her eyes raised to his face teasingly. He bent down and kissed her lightly on the lips. It was bewildering this happiness, this intimacy. I wanted to bang on the window and tell them. Don’t you know? Don’t you understand? Da’s DEAD.

I can see the steam rising from the soup bowls. Sarah catches my eye, and for once I know for sure we are thinking the same. She picks up her spoon and dips it in, stirring the soup round and round before sipping it. My spoon clanks on the side of the bowl and I swallow the mouthful whole, feeling it scald my windpipe, burning right down to my gut. The pain helps. Tinned chicken soup. I’ll never eat it again as long as I live.

CHAPTER THREE

Shameena’s voice on the recording pushes then pulls me, thrusting me back into the past as the music takes hold, yanking me forward again into the present at the end of each track. I yo-yo back and forward at first, until the spells in the past become longer, drawing me deeper and deeper into the memories and I am no longer conscious of one track ending and another beginning. Figures from the past make cameo appearances in my head, events and conversations, snatches of dialogue: disjointed, disparate, sometimes out of sequence…

Me… Shameena… that first time we spoke about my mother. Shameena was such an important part of my teenage years that she pops up in most of my memories of that time. We were at her house. No, that’s not right. Mine. It was my house, in the bedroom Sarah and I shared. It was when we had those stupid pink floral duvet covers that Sarah insisted on. Shameena and I were lying flat on our backs on top of cabbage roses, one on each bed, giggling. Shameena often made me laugh. There was always a sense of mischief bubbling away beneath her demure façade. At times, her mischief bordered on recklessness and it was that quality that drew us together: we each recognised it in the other. I loved Shameena like a sister. And, if I’m honest, I loved her because of whose sister she was.

Shameena often came round after school because we had the house to ourselves. I liked the company and she liked the freedom. That day, she was making me laugh with an impersonation of Sunday afternoon teas in the Khan household, when her mum and her mad aunties got together and did each other’s hair, and criticised each other’s dress sense, and tried to outdo one another with tales of their kids’ sheer brilliance. The way Shameena switched between Urdu and her own Glaswegian accent was hilarious. When we finally stopped laughing and lay silently gazing up at the ceiling, she asked, “What did your mum die of, Becca?”

“Dunno.”

Shameena stared at me.

“You don’t know! How can you not know?”

“She died when I was four. Da never talks about her.”

Shameena considered this for a moment.

“That’s dead romantic, that,” she said eventually.

“What, my mother snuffing it?”

“No! Of course not! Your dad not talking about it.”

“Is it?”

“I bet he’s got a broken heart and can’t bring himself to talk about her.”

“You reckon?”

“Yeah.”

“So do I, actually,” I said, so quietly that I’m not sure if she heard.

I remember watching Shameena as she sat up and took out a brush, dragging it through her thick, black, waist-length hair. Deftly, she twisted the hair into a rope, then piled it up on top of her head, looking at the result in the mirror.

“Haven’t you ever asked about her?”

“Sometimes.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t say much.”

Shameena twisted her head round to profile and sucked in her cheekbones, glancing sideways in the mirror. “Do you think it makes my face look thinner if I put my hair up like this?”

I considered her with ostentatious care, from every angle.

“Nope.”

She laughed, let the rope fall, and threw a hair scrunchie at me.

“Why don’t you go to the records office without him knowing and look up your mum?”

The suggestion had startled me.

“I couldn’t do that,” I said instinctively.

“Why not?”

“I just couldn’t. It would be like… like… a betrayal.” It was the first time I had articulated the subconscious feeling that to need a mother would be a slight to my father. It was almost as if I was adopted and felt a tug of loyalty between my birth parent and the person who brought me up. But both were my real parents, so why should Da and my mother be in competition? Why did there have to be a choice between them?

Shameena was the first person I phoned the day my dad died. I still remember the sound of her voice when she heard mine: ‘Oh hi, Rebecca!’ I was unwilling to shatter the normality. How luxurious normality is. How underrated. I longed to be there with her, in a moment that was not filled with crisis. A moment that was not now.

You got back okay? Shameena said, and then rattled on without waiting for an answer. Why would she suspect anything was wrong? I had just spent two days with her on my way home from Brighton. Two more days I could have spent with Da if I’d known he was dying. The guilt after he goes is instant, insistent.

There was a strange hiatus before I said anything, before Shameena realised. It can only have lasted a minute… less… but for that short time, I simply surrendered to her voice, to the illusion of normality. She had been unlocking her front door when the phone rang and I could hear she was slightly breathless with running to pick up. My senses felt strangely heightened as I listened to her. I pictured her in the hall of her flat, kicking off her shoes, maybe putting her door keys down on the old mahogany wooden table she has. I could hear the clink of the keys, feel the honey smoothness of the polished wood beneath my fingers.

It was boiling in London, Shameena said. Still I said nothing. I imagined the scene outside her flat where I’d so recently been. A haze of heat and city dirt, the drone of London traffic and the steady flow of workers from local offices traipsing into the downstairs deli, leaving with paper bags and polystyrene cups, steam shooting through the lid vents. They would walk past the old man on the corner of Shameena’s street, the one I had watched from her window as he stood with his cap out and his eyes down, leaning on a stick.

He is there every day and people don’t see him any more. He is simply part of the landscape, to be negotiated like the seats of the pavement café, and the restaurant bins in the lane, and the metal grille which is awkward for stilettos. The man wears an old, torn overcoat, even in the heat. It hangs awkwardly on his scrawny frame, like a coat scrunched on a hook. His skin is grey, the colour of left-over porridge, and I looked at him two days ago and wondered how long he had left. Yet he outlived Da. How mysterious life is.

“Rebecca?”

She had realised. Stopped suddenly.

“Is everything okay?”

“No. No… Sorry.”

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Is it my dad?”

I can hear the panic, her voice rising to a squeal. She thinks I am phoning to give her bad news about Khadim.

“No, Shameena, no,” I say quickly. “No it’s okay, it’s not your dad.” The tension lowers at the other end. “It’s mine.”

I was in Da’s room as we talked, perched on the edge of his bed, and I looked at the bedside table with his book spread-eagled on it, open at the page he was never coming back to. Which was the very last word he had read? His reading glasses lay beside it, one leg flailing hopelessly in the air. A thin film of dust lined the concertina folds of the bedside lamp and I ran one finger through it.

There are not many people I have ever cried with, but Shameena is one. We have shared bereavement before. His name unmentioned, his presence towering between us.

Shameena offered to come to Glasgow straight away, but I told her to stay where she was until I knew the funeral arrangements. She had rehearsals to attend. I told her about that awful feeling I had when I looked at Da, the sudden fear that he had been essentially a stranger. The way his death flicked a switch. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know about Mother. I wanted to know about me.

“Death steals people from you, Becca,” Shameena said slowly. “At least, you think it does at first. But gradually, they come back to you and you remember their living as well as their dying. And that will happen with your dad. He’ll become himself again. He’ll come back to you in time.”

“But I’ve lost my chance to find out the truth. He’s gone.”

“No, sometimes death is the catalyst… the start… It’s amazing the things that come out when someone dies. Amazing,” she repeated softly. “You wouldn’t believe…” The line goes quiet. “There is one person,” she continues eventually, “who will know almost as much as your dad did.”

It took me a moment to understand. She meant Peggy.

“Rebecca,” Shameena added hesitantly. “Your dad… he was lovely.”

Her voice cracked and my eyes swelled up painfully with unshed tears until I felt they would burst. I nodded, as if she was in the room, as if she could see me.

“You’ll sing at the funeral?” I asked.

“Of course.”

Shameena has seen more of my dad than her own in recent years. She needs to sort it out. It is a long time since she and Khadim have spoken, a long, long time. But not as long as forever is going to be. For the first time, I understand what for ever really means.

CHAPTER FOUR

Da’s body is to be moved from the hospital morgue to the funeral parlour.

“We need to make arrangements,” says Sarah quietly. She gets up from her chair and fetches her handbag. In my handbag, everything lies in a heap at the bottom: loose coins; old bills; makeup in cracked containers; the scattered remains of a packet of chewing gum; a few shredded paper handkerchiefs. Sarah’s bag is organised into neat compartments. Sarah is a lawyer.

She opens the flap and takes out a small notebook and a pen. Christ. I can’t believe she is going to make a list for Da’s funeral. Sarah catches my look and flushes slightly. Men always find that attractive about Sarah, that shy little blush. Cool efficiency on top but not too scary underneath. They don’t like to be threatened, men, do they? Sarah is a very sweet person. I am not sweet.

We decide that Charlie and Sarah will go to the funeral parlour to speak to the undertaker, while Peggy and I ring round people to let them know. There aren’t many. Da didn’t socialise much and Peggy is the last of the immediate family, apart from one or two cousins. I will need to ring Khadim, Shameena’s dad. Obviously, she won’t be phoning home to tell him. When Sarah comes back, the two of us will go and speak to Father Riley, Pa’s parish priest. I don’t want to go. I have, as you will find out, a bit of a thing about priests.

Another puff of smoke from the memory chimney. Smoke from a strange fire, this one, a fire that has slumbered for many years, neither fanning into flames nor quite dying into soot and ash. The childhood memory of a strange night when the police turned up here, on the doorstep of our council house in Govan. I had almost forgotten about it, but then it comes in my head so suddenly that I begin to wonder if I have made it up. Perhaps it is not real memory at all.

I cannot be more than five or six. It is a hot night, a bit like tonight. At least in my memory it is. Sarah is asleep in her cot and Da has insisted I go to bed too because I have school tomorrow. But I can’t sleep. Earlier, we’d been out playing in Elder Park, and the evening sunshine is still streaming in the window, a river of light flowing steadily through a crack in the curtains.

There is steady breathing coming from Sarah’s cot as I toss and turn, and eventually I get up to ask for a drink of water. I am hoping Da will sit me on his knee and tell me a story about his parents’ home in Donegal. Like the one he told me about the tinkers who came to the door with a bundle in their arms and asked for a penny for the baby. Grandma said she had no pennies and they said they’d put a curse on her. She died young, so maybe they did.

But just as I come out of the bedroom, the doorbell rings. Da opens the door. I am watching from the upstairs hall, holding on to the banisters and peering through the slats. I think I remember the prickle of the carpet on my knees where I am kneeling, but how can I be sure? Did I really feel the prickle of the carpet, or have I just made that bit up? And if I made that little detail up, how do I know which other bits I made up? How much can we rely on memory?

Da has his back to me and doesn’t spot me, but as the door swings open I see the two policemen in uniform standing on the mat. They seem alien, the door like a barrier between my world and theirs. I want Da to close it, to keep the policemen on their side, in their world.

“What do you want now?” he says, and I remember thinking that Daddy must feel as I do because he doesn’t sound very friendly. He leans his head momentarily on the door. “When is this going to stop?” he asks, his voice low and fervent.

One of them murmurs something I can’t hear and then the other says, “It would be better if we could come in.” This second one looks at Da as if he doesn’t like him. Da says nothing, but he stands back from the door and opens it wider, watching silently as they file past him. Then he follows them into the sitting room and shuts the door. The paint on the back of the door is beginning to peel, separating like the skin of a partially peeled orange.

I sit at the top of the landing, looking down the stairwell into the hall below. Why do the police want to talk to my daddy? They frighten me with their hats and their uniforms and their strangeness. I resolve to keep an eye on that door, watch for it opening. Perhaps if I stare hard enough, I will actually see the paint move as it peels. There must be a precise moment when it curls back from the door. Like the moment blades of grass push further through the earth as it grows. My forehead rests against the slats of the banisters until the sharp edges begin to hurt. It is when my eyes are closing that the door handle suddenly turns, making me start. I move back slightly. I can hear murmuring and then the door swings open.

“We’ll say goodnight then, Mr Connaghan,” one of the policemen says.

Da doesn’t smile. “So I won’t be hearing from you again?” he asks.

One of them – the surly one – shrugs, but the other says, “Highly unlikely, Mr Connaghan. Unless, of course, we get any new evidence.”

Da nods and opens the door. He looks perfectly normal as he sees them off, but when he shuts the door, I see him lean back against it. His head tips back and it seems as if his knees are giving way under him. His shoulders heave as if he is crying. I have never seen him cry. It frightens me and I run back to bed.

He never mentions it in the morning, though when Auntie Peggy comes to take me to school the two of them have a whispered discussion that becomes quite heated. I don’t hear most of it but at the end Peggy starts raising her voice and saying, “Look, just accept that’s the end of it,” and he says, “Peggy, there will never be an end to it.” I ask Peggy what they were talking about when we walk to school but she just says, “Nothing for you to worry about,” and we stop at the shop to buy crisps for playtime.

That day we have plasticine at school. Blue plasticine that we roll into big meaty sausages before singing, “Five fat sausages sizzling in a pan.” Miss Stewart says the plasticine should be brown for sausages, but I prefer blue. I remember it is the day we have plasticine at school because that night, I really want to ask Da about the policemen, but I end up telling him about the blue sausages instead.