‘This is you,’ as usual, Mirabelle looked me up and down before pronouncing my name, ‘Ursula.’
It was impossible to give me an ill-appointed room here. Mine was handsome in the oldest sense of the word. No clutter, no detritus, none of the vague items that can only find space in a spare bedroom. This was a perfect capsule of solid brown furnishings and faded florals. Everything was as I had expected, or at least, gave the impression of being so.
Again, as with downstairs, there were no personal items or photographs, so in that way it was just like home. But Mother never likes to provide a comfortable guest bedroom. ‘Don’t make them feel too welcome,’ Mother always says. ‘Otherwise they’ll stay for ever. Remember Doreen Dellamer!’ This was a lady who worked at the shop. She fascinated me with her fanciful tales of a childhood among duchesses and lords. All children love to imagine they are from a long-lost branch of royalty, an adopted princess waiting to be rediscovered.
‘We didn’t adopt you,’ Mother would say. ‘We tried to have you adopted.’ She’d laughed in that unnerving way she had of making me doubt it was just a joke.
Mother let Doreen go, as she did with so many staff, and when Doreen could no longer pay her rent, Dad moved her into our spare room, previously Mother’s dressing room. Mother was livid and that quickly fermented into basic hatred. One of Mother’s first petty acts after Dad’s death was to evict Doreen. I suppose grief can sometimes make people act in strange, divisive ways.
‘Right, Pandora, now for you.’ Mirabelle grinned as if something was hurting her, which I’ve imagined many times. ‘I’ve not put you and the inconvenience next door to each other. Is that OK?’ She often referred to me as though I was a sort of broken toilet.
‘Fine,’ Mother said.
The faintest cobweb of a smile spun at the corners of Mirabelle’s lips.
They didn’t wait for my response and were already disappearing down the hall but I could hear their undisguised discussion of my faults.
‘When is she going to stop dressing like that? Don’t they outgrow the dying hippy look when they leave university?’ asked Mirabelle. ‘And so obsessed with murders. Head always in some grubby crime book.’
‘Oh, they all go through a dark phase. She’ll grow up soon,’ Mother shrugged. ‘When the money runs out.’
Their voices trailed away down the long, bleak corridor.
There were enough corridors, hallways and rooms at Ambergris Towers that I could escape or hide at any moment. What I didn’t know then was how invaluable that would be for a killer, as well as for me.
Dad had always loved to escape too. In his case, off for a smoke, of course. We all knew it — the crafty Polos hid nothing. He just smelled of tobacco and manufactured sugary mint. But that was lovely: warm, an enticing smell of a life well-lived and conducted with some abandon that never hurt anyone but himself. It would, of course, kill him — indirectly, but still, a death is a death. So really, I suppose he did hurt someone — kill them, in fact. Himself. The one person I loved and who loved me in return. I should hate him for that but I don’t. It just can’t ever seem like it was his fault.
He kicked the habit ostensibly in 1994, but the dark mint scent of smoke still permeated his clothes, his breath, his hair for at least another ten years after he ‘gave up’. It’s an odour you just can’t lose, like death — like grief. The very distinct flavour of grief lingers so long you forget what life smelled like without it.
He tried them all, patches, e-cigs and even hypnosis. He went to acupuncturists, doctors and quacks. But the old analogue cigarettes still drew him in, closer to a rasping death. He always came back to them, like a sad history or a lost love that could be embraced one last time before saying goodbye. It was always one last time.
I would nestle into the arms of that old, wrinkled leather chair down in his shed that Mother had Farrow-and-Balled and I’d watch him at work on his experiments. Bubbling tubes and a rainbow of colourful flasks drew a vaguely Willy Wonka-like portrait of him for my childish eyes. Some dads homebrewed in their sheds, but mine was a chemist, a teacher by trade, and the smell of all those sharp and strange liquids and potions sometimes falls in a chemical wave of memories, washing me all the way back to that shed.
He told me not to tell Mother, which was completely unnecessary as I never told her anything. I can still smell the warmth of an afternoon mixing chemicals with Dad, fag firmly clenched in his tight lips as a dribble of smoke curled up. ‘Wronding,’ he’d call it with a wink — Wrong Bonding.
Mother had the shed demolished the week after the funeral.
My memories have become battered by time and sections have splintered off into the lost shadows of the past. I dream of him often in broken visions, snap shots of a half-invented past.
I’ve taken those fragile elements and stitched the remnants back together to make a new dialogue, one that makes sense to my adult mind. But I know it’s a Frankenstein version of reality. That’s why I never rely wholeheartedly on memory — particularly when it circles a death.
What’s left is a patchwork quilt of a childhood. Perhaps nothing special, but it felt that way to me — or at least, I’ve reinvented it so that it does now.
In the end, he just died — like all of us will. It was a wasteful death. Meaningless. The faceless voices who held the knowledge simply said his massive coronary was induced by excessive smoking. It had spread its weedy tendrils through his lungs and twined deep into the heart of him—infecting, decaying and hardening. How strange that those small paper stubs he left behind had encased such a slow and painful death.
I still feel him with me now, the warm welcoming haze of the nicotine trailing in around me. I can conjure him out of anything or nothing, from simple memories and air. On a grey finish to an evening, as my sky marbles over with regret and time is calling everyone else back home, my mind clouds over with thoughts of him. I can sense him, feel him everywhere. I can look up and see him in a bird, as if freedom has thrown his spirit high on the wind. He is always with me. Except, and I always return to this one single thought, he’s not.
I sat down with my tangled thoughts on the edge of the bed and opened the bedside drawer. Empty. I unzipped my bag and took out his old Bible. I quickly put it in the bedside drawer and closed it. I don’t really read it, but it’s sort of my lucky charm, a talisman if you like. It watches over me in the abandoned dark hours and keeps me safe from whatever might go bump in the night. It’s nothing more than that though. God doesn’t live in my bedside table.
Rule 3: Just like tinned fruit and cream, family and friends often curdle.
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
The bell sounded with a sharp crudeness, as if the house knew the nature of its guests by now.
My aunt had arrived — a real one this time and not so beloved of my mother due to the lack of her own choice in the matter. Aunt Charlotte had arrived on a raft of silk and velvet, fur and largesse. Her voice was an octave too low and her shoulders an inch too broad to be seemly. Occasionally, men had been known to fall in wonder at the sheer Titanic beauty of her well-worn face and untamed hair, but she had never succumbed to anyone’s doubtful charms. She was the old-establishment version of wild and she smashed through any social boundaries with her hockey stick manner and antique furs. She was intrinsically everything my mother had attempted to extricate herself from — a life of old-school affluence that bred bad teeth, frazzled hair and an iron will. The make-do-and-mend rich that had always made Mother crave a disposable world where kitchens were replaced having never seen a meal prepared in them and bathrooms had a makeover after only a few quick years of use. The world celebrated change, but Aunt Charlotte only ever admired staying power. When she bought a kitchen table, it was bought to outlast her, to have the scars of life etched into its surface as deeply as her face. Everything had a history, a reason for being in her life. Her jewellery told a story, histories of by-gone ladies, formidable dames whose artefacts could not be owned without grave and grandiose design. All this and the mingled scent of mothballs and Chanel served to repel my mother with a force so powerful it was impossible to disguise. This was the kind of revulsion only a sibling could truly provoke. Yet, there’s a symbiotic element to their aversion. They both rely on it, expect it. They have sent each other a carefully wrapped dead plant for every birthday in living memory. Mother keeps hers on what she calls her Wall of Death, outside in the garden.