Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  Dear mummy, try and understand what I’m telling you. Rach makes me giggle and then you tell me off. It sounds silly but it’s true. Love Emmy xxxx

  As important documents went, it probably wasn’t up there with Gandhi’s letter to Hitler, ‘Friends have been asking me to write to you today for the sake of humanity.’ But I liked the oddness of this scrappy torn-off child’s note inside a grand ornate frame. It was exactly the kind of unorthodox detail that would once have decorated my childhood home. And the note managed to sum up the family script I had stuck to for so long. Me casting myself as hapless victim of a hopelessly corrupt justice system, Mum partisan judge unable to control her emotional responses, Rach golden favourite. And Dad, as ever, absent from it all.

  I tried not to see any of us like that anymore.

  But mostly, the note just really made me laugh.

  The renovations meant that I finally had to clear out and wade through my family’s old things, which were shoved away in bags and cases piled on top of each other, a jumble of memories that had felt too overwhelming to tackle until now.

  I started with my father’s books. I had kept a handful of them, including his well-thumbed copies of Philip Larkin and TS Eliot, with scribbles and underlines in the margins. There was an Ian McEwan novel, the first page of which featured my father’s handwritten scrawl, his writing spidery with age. ‘McEwan severs heads with exquisitely good taste!’

  He used to do that a lot, write things about literary strengths and weaknesses in a book, like those handwritten staff reviews in Waterstones. Not as a way of remembering something that spoke to him. It was more as if he was desperately trying to engage the author in debate, vaguely recalling a time when he could swear he had those kinds of conversations in real life.

  There were yellowing cuttings of his glory years, all preserved in scrapbooks by my mum, who was fastidious when it came to preserving our archive. I looked through letters from Gore Vidal and Harold Pinter, as well as Times features I had never bothered to read before. There was an old tabloid article about his now forgotten moment as the first man on British colour TV.

  Some small picture frames were buried at the bottom of one of his cases. There was a photo of Rach sitting on a wicker chair stroking Mimi’s sleepy head, and one of my grandfather blinking at the sun in his beret. And then I spotted a picture of me. I must have been about three years old, dressed in a pink velvet dress, tomato stains on my chin, reaching across to plant a kiss on his face. I hadn’t noticed it in his flat when I was clearing everything out, placing it in bin bags. Perhaps pride had prevented him from putting it on show.

  I found a stack of postcards that he’d sent Rach and me during his absences over the years. He would often sign off with a piece of advice. Sometimes it was a subtle reference to things going on that Mum had obviously told him about. Discreet afterthoughts that he dropped in, aware that he’d relinquished the right to offer direct parental advice.

  ‘Every day is a new beginning and a different kind of failure.’

  ‘Be wary of people who make more noise than impact.’

  ‘Never shed a single salt tear for this departed year. Embrace the crunch of jackboots marching in triumph over its ignominious grave.’

  ‘Mutual stubbornness can become a war of silence. The older wiser person must end the stalemate.’

  I assumed that last one had been an attempt to help resolve some teenage dispute between Rach and me. It felt strange reading it now, given my very own stalemate with him that had denied us a resolution. Perhaps it had been softened slightly, with that brief final glance he gave me.

  I felt a sense of pride, for the first time, looking through these fragments of his exceptional mind. And love. He was undeniably guilty of a lot of things, my dad. But as I’d learned on my week in Ireland, all of us are guilty in our different ways. And none of us are completely to blame.

  There were huge boxes of all my mum’s old photos. Her and Dad starting out on their ill-fated union, with smiles and knee-high boots. Her hopeful glow dwindled in later snapshots, as she juggled children with a man there by accident rather than design. I found several volumes of diaries containing funny things Rach and I had said and detailed descriptions of dinner parties. As well as more painful feelings, highlighting the gulf between the life she longed for and the one she’d chosen with my father. I wanted to give her a huge hug.

  There were entries referring to ‘hours at the bloody Nigerian embassy picking up my SODDING mother. Pissed of course.’ The protest Rach and I left in her bed to sabotage a night of passion. ‘The girls left talcum powder, a Tampax wrapper and a drawing pin for me and John tonight – little bastards!!!’ I found the notebook entitled MIMI’S SAYINGS, its pages filled with her observations. It stopped suddenly the month Rach got her diagnosis. Just a bunch of empty pages, which told a story all of their own.

  My mum had kept all our school reports (although why anyone would archive ‘Emily is totally at sea in mathematics and does little to help herself’ beats me) as well as all the notes Rach and I left each other. ‘Borrowed ya top Em – DON’T BE CROSS PLSE!!’

  I looked through the glittery birthday cards that said ‘WORLD’S BEST SISTER!’ and a stack of photos labelled ‘RACH AND EM’. There was one of us posing by a movie poster for Sister Act at Leicester Square tube, my mother art directing us off camera, as we adopted the tight smiles of hostages in propaganda photos. Rach and I dancing together on her wedding day to Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’, drunk on joy (in her case) and vodka (mine).

  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying firmly advises chucking out stuff like this. You’re meant to edit all your memories into one organised box file. But I decided to flagrantly disregard this advice and put it all in floral boxes for Mimi and Bertie. I hoped they would look through it together one day, and relate to a memory of Rach, not as an angelic myth but as a complex person with a textured backstory – and flaws. She could be overly defensive when criticised, never did have enough faith in her creative talent and was a terrible gossip. She was prone to the occasional fashion mistake, (hello, turquoise silk shirt with diamanté collar), disastrous romance (the man forever known as ‘That AWFUL bloke’) and had an utterly misplaced confidence in her ability to sing ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ in the right key.

  But I wanted her girls to have their very own tapestry of her life, one that they could get to know gradually, in all its gloriously unvarnished detail.

  Cookie Monster had been right to warn me all those years ago. My family was hopelessly, unavoidably, wilfully not like the others. But the stupid blue acrylic fool had forgotten to tell me the most important thing: that was what made them so impossible to forget. I didn’t hear him belting out any songs dedicated to ‘Those Things Like Everything Else’.

  It had taken me a long time to realise that the dog-family kingdom I’d longed to join simply didn’t exist. The idyllic marriage, the golden child, the obedient Labrador – it was all just scenery, an alternative backdrop for the same messy chaos that played out in everyone’s lives.

  My family weren’t around anymore but they had left me with a sense of where I belonged. It was a place where you were allowed to be a little strange. Where no one cared if you took a different path to everyone else. The funny world where the people not-quite-like-the-others lived. I was happy to come home.

  Epilogue

  The Gothic entrance gates clanged as they shut behind us.

  This wasn’t how I’d envisaged introducing my loving hero to my sister and my parents. Him hiding from cemetery staff in a straw tote bag with a bone-shaped treat in his mouth, about to greet three tombstones. But let’s face it, my own meet-the-parents moment never was going to follow the traditional form.

  The sun scattered light through the cedar trees overhanging the paths that took us to my family’s respective resting places. There was a guided tour being shown around, and I watched the group being led to the resting places of writers and artists and a famous Russian spy.
They listened attentively to the guide talking about mausoleums and then a couple caught my eye, conscious suddenly that this historical place had a more intimate significance for visitors clutching flowers and cloths for wiping down headstones.

  But it wasn’t poignant memories that were overwhelming me at this point – more panicked fear that Ray would poke his head above the straw bag, revealing his illegal presence. I imagined the guide dramatically interrupting the gentle Sunday tour, leading Ray and me away shamefaced, as he said into a two-way radio, ‘Suspect apprehended near grave of George Michael’s mother. Currently detained in Top Shop raffia shoulder bag. Back-up requested.’

  I turned away from the tour party, adopting what I hoped was the body language of someone requiring privacy, rather than a woman concealing a contraband Shih Tzu. They discreetly took their leave and five minutes later I felt safe enough to liberate Ray. He chose to mark this moment by cocking his tiny leg against a collapsing angel on a Victorian tomb.

  I clambered up the grassy bank to where my sister lies, and wiped off some bird poo from the limestone block. The words had been subdued by the battle scars of weather, but you could still make out the inscription my brother-in-law chose for her legacy: ‘Full of Life and Love’.

  ‘Hey, Rach. So guess what? I finally got a dog. And I called him Ray, kind of after you. I hope you don’t think that’s weird.’

  Ray was just wrapping up a toilet break. He had adopted that oddly heartbreaking expression that characterises dogs’ bathroom sessions – vulnerability with a dash of dignity.

  ‘Come on, Ray! Come and see Rach!’ I called out.

  He ran, pink tongue dangling out, glossy fur flying, eyes wild with excitement as his tiny legs stumbled up the bank and he settled at my feet, sniffing the faded pink roses I had placed in a little glass bottle.

  ‘Ray, meet Ray,’ I said, smiling suddenly at the utter absurdity of what I was doing – formally introducing a dead sister to a Shih Tzu. But she would have got it. That was the thing about Rach – she always did.

  You can’t alter how your story begins, but you can write the ending any way you like.

  I hadn’t had the usual kind of journey. And the male hero who managed to save me was a little different to the regular romcom kind. But perhaps I had managed to get my uplifting movie ending after all. The one I had written all myself.

  Footnote

  Chapter Seven

  1 Spoiler alert – fuck all.