The Consequences of Love

by Gavanndra Hodge

  We sat in our uncomfortable seats and listened as the machine whirred into life. We watched as your coffin moved towards the red curtains and passed through them into the furnace beyond. I was sure I could hear the roar of newly fed flames, even though the song ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ from the film Dirty Dancing was playing very loudly.

  We got back into the hearse for the final drive home. There was nothing in the boot of the car now; the wreaths were burnt along with you.

  The car pulled up outside our mansion block. It was lunchtime but I didn’t feel hungry. The thing we had all been dreading, anticipating, planning, was done and now we were expected to get on with our lives.

  One of the funeral company men opened the door for us and we got out, my father, my mother, me. The other man approached us. He was holding a rectangular wooden box – your ashes, I realized, and I wondered if they were still warm, like a freshly baked loaf of bread.

  The man stood in front of Mum and held the box out for her to take. She looked at him, looked at the box, seemed confused at first, and then her face crumpled into pink wetness.

  Dad stepped forwards. He took the box, tucked it under one arm and placed the other hand on the smart funeral man’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for everything you’ve done today, mate.’ He handed over a pre-folded twenty-pound note.

  ‘Come on, my darling,’ he said as he walked towards the front door, you snug under his arm.

  Mum and Dad bought a beautiful Chinese box made from golden lacquered wood inlaid with floral patterns. The box was waist height and had a big bronze key with a silky red tassel. They filled this box with all the things of yours that they could not bear to lose: your favourite soft toys and the hood of your pink coat.

  They put the box containing your ashes on the mantelpiece in the living room and they kept the Chinese box in their bedroom.

  We put you in wooden boxes, Candy. We locked you away.

  1

  2014, London

  It is a chilly Tuesday in half-term. My daughters and I have been in the Horniman Museum admiring animals stuffed over one hundred years ago and fixed in dramatic poses. After an hour of chasing my children, shouting their names – ‘Hebe! Minna! Come back here!’ – I want to go home, but as we walk to the bus stop they spot the playground and insist on staying out a bit longer. I relent: better that they are outdoors than at home watching television. I buy a cup of tea from the lady in the corrugated hatch and settle on the low concrete ledge at the edge of the sandpit, watching my two girls. I watch them play and fight, fight and play, climb, swing, laugh, cry. They are three and six, so interwoven with each other, physically and emotionally. They share a bedroom; they loll on the sofa together, eat together, argue and tease, laugh and cuddle. And while I am sitting there, watching them, thinking of cheerfully mundane things like what I might cook for dinner, I have a realization that is like a shot of frozen air into my veins. My realization has different parts, a beginning, a middle and an end, but these parts hit me all at once, with no beginning, middle, end.

  I realize that the age gap between my girls is almost the same as the age gap between me and my sister. I realize that what I am so enjoying watching, this connection between them, was something that I must have once had. I realize that I can’t remember ever having that. In fact, I realize, I can’t remember my sister, not at all. Apart from one moment: her death.

  I sip my tea, trying to return the warmth to my body. I don’t like the ice in my veins, the numbness in my fingers. Life is good. I have a job, a home, a family. I feel safe and loved. This desolating fear, this belongs to the past.

  We get the bus home. I feed my children, bathe them, filling the bath with sparkly unicorns and plastic dinosaurs. I put them to bed, do their stories. Hebe can already read to herself; Minna prefers to pretend to eat the pictures of food in her favourite books, sweets and ice-cream and multi-tiered Moomin birthday cake. I sing to them, kiss them, tuck them in. Once the girls are settled I cook dinner. My husband Mike comes home from work. He edits the New Review magazine at the Independent on Sunday newspaper, the place where we first met, when I was a features editor and he was on the arts desk, an email-heavy office flirtation that segued via snogging in the back of a minicab on the way home from the Christmas party into marriage and children.

  We eat roast chicken and share a bottle of red wine. I tell Mike about the museum and how the girls never seemed to be in the place where I last saw them, always running away, so curious and bold. We laugh about this and clean the dishes. We watch television, we go to bed, embrace before we fall asleep. And when I wake I still can’t remember my sister. I can’t remember my sister’s voice, I can’t remember a conversation with her, a moment we played together, even though I shared a bedroom with her until I was eleven. I have a photograph of her in which she wraps her arms around my waist and looks up at me. I am wearing headphones, my red Walkman hanging from the waistband of my shorts. I remember the feeling of those foam headphones against my ears, a squeaky sensation, almost like fingernails on a blackboard. But I can’t remember how it felt to hug her, her arms tight around me, mine around her. And if I can’t remember Candy, who will? We live on in the memories of those who love us, and I can’t even perform this basic familial duty. I feel guilty because of this, on her behalf, but I also feel sad for myself. I had a sister, but I have lost her, twice, once when she died and again when I forgot her.

  The really crazy part of all this is that I have an excellent memory. As a schoolgirl it was almost photographic. I could read an essay twice and then regurgitate it in an exam, one word leading to the next like fingers over piano keys. I can still remember the lyrics of nearly every song I listened to in my teens and twenties. It freaks out my husband when we drunkenly watch Top of the Pops reruns late at night and there I am, singing along to ‘Marlene On The Wall’, a song I haven’t heard in three decades. I can remember what I ate for lunch with a friend years ago, even what we talked about. I can remember how my father’s fingers felt against my neck when he did my hair on my wedding day, his belly pressed against my shoulder, his breath phlegmy and laboured, he was concentrating so hard. These are precise physical memories, traces of the past left on my skin, my father standing right by me, a man who died in 2009.

  Yet there is this swirling, vertigo-inducing void where my sister should be. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed it before, right there in front of me all this time. And now I have I cannot stop thinking about it.

  We all responded differently to Candy’s death. I remained numb, frozen by the shock of what I’d seen. This feeling did not fade; instead I adapted to it, like a sapling growing around a metal spike, making it part of who I was, not realizing this wasn’t how a fourteen-year-old girl was meant to feel – detached and disconnected, unable to think about the sister I had lost without seeing a desperate, dying child.

  My mother was not numb; she was raw. The love was still pouring from her and she needed somewhere to direct it. So she chose religion. That is what she saw when she stared out at the choppy North African sea. God. She found comfort in this new-found belief in the afterlife, a spangled heaven where Candy now was, and where Mum would find her again, one day, when the hell of this earth was left behind.

  My father’s approach could not have been more different. He chose a path that was seductive and familiar, one that he had been walking for many years. It was no surprise, really, that he was unwilling, unable even, to let himself feel the anguish of grief. He had never been able to endure emotional pain, and he knew the most perfect way to escape it.

  2

  1982, London

  When I was seven years old I was shown a fire-safety film at my primary school in Chelsea. The teacher turned off the lights, pulled the curtains shut, and we all sat cross-legged in the dark on the floor, so close together our knees touched.

  In the film it was nearly Christmas. There were presents under the tree, all wrapped with shiny ribbons and fat bows, presents of dif
ferent sizes and shapes. The fairylights twinkled, on and off, on and off, even though everyone in the house was asleep and no one was there to see the lovely tree magically twinkling in the darkness. At the plug socket the wires were frayed, the plastic sheathing gone to reveal copper that sparked and hissed, tiny fireworks of blue and gold that leapt all the way to the presents, wrapped in crisp, flimsy paper that caught light. And so the fire began, a burning tree, the curtains catching and exploding, a silent blazing and smoke creeping under doors, up stairs, into the bedrooms where the children slept, a boy and a girl in neat single beds, the smoke curling into their nostrils and mouths, choking them while they dreamt.

  The mother woke up and shook the father. They covered their faces to leave the bedroom as the fire lapped up the stairs; they ran to the children’s bedroom and shut the door behind them. The children were coughing, half awake, the fire outside the door. ‘Don’t touch the metal door handle!’ shouted the father, and then, weirdly, in the film there was a scene in which one of the children did touch the door handle and they screamed as their skin melted and stuck to the hot metal. But this must have only happened in the imagination of the father, or one of the children, because then we watched the family crouching low, beneath the smoke, crawling on their unburnt hands and knees to the window. The father opened the window and they inhaled great lungfuls of cool, clean air. They shouted for help and the lights in the houses opposite came on so we knew that the fire engines would be on their way soon and no one would die.

  When the firemen arrived they uncoiled huge, heavy hoses and sent up shiny ladders which the family climbed down, still in their night things. Their home blazed behind them, lighting up the night, but they were safe.

  At the end of the film the chief fireman, his face sweaty and smudged with black, turned to the camera and addressed us, sitting there in our classroom. ‘Make sure your fire alarm is working! Know your fire escapes!’

  The teacher switched off the television and opened the curtains. I turned to look at my friends, eyes wide with shock. I hadn’t realized I was in such peril. I lived in a flat on the third floor of a mansion block in Battersea. There were no fire escapes, so I couldn’t know them. We didn’t have a fire alarm, so I couldn’t check if it worked.

  After I saw that film I worried every night about what would happen if there was a fire in our flat. There were always things burning at home – candles and incense. There were always people in the sitting room smoking cigarettes. Our sitting room, with its broken light fittings hanging by tangled wires from the walls, the lamps with bits of coloured fabric thrown over them, the silk singed from the heat of the bulbs.

  One night, not long after I saw the film about the house fire, I lay in bed reading an Enid Blyton adventure story I had borrowed from the school library, the pages soft from use, the spine cracked. I had a loose milk tooth and while I read I nudged at it with my tongue, pushing it a little further each time, easing it free. While I read and nudged I listened for my mother in the next-door room. I listened to her sighing and to the creaking of the bed frame. I waited for a few moments before I put the book down, got out of bed, left the room and peered in at my mother. There she was, lying on her side, the duvet making a mountain range of her hips and shoulders. She always went to bed early; all the wine made her tired and clumsy. I shut her door and mine, walked along the hallway, following the noise of the television. Dad was sitting on the sofa. Balanced on his belly were a packet of Silk Cut cigarettes and his grey plastic asthma inhaler.

  ‘Hello, Daddy,’ I said, sitting down next to him.

  ‘Hello, you!’ he said.

  Dad was watching an American film on television. A policeman was hitting a muscly man on the back with a big black stick. Dad put the asthma inhaler to his lips and pressed it down twice. There were always loads of inhalers around the flat, in bowls and on shelves, used ones under furniture and new ones in drawers, funny little alien soldiers. I took the one from Dad’s hand and pressed it, feeling the cold gas on my hand.

  ‘I didn’t have them when I was little. When I was little and I had a bad attack my mum – Grandma – she would lie on the carpet with me and wait for me to start breathing again.’

  I put the inhaler back on his stomach. ‘I’ve got another wobbly tooth,’ I said.

  ‘Ooh, let’s see.’

  I opened my mouth and pushed the tooth out as far as it would go, straining the thin strings of flesh that held it in place until they ached.

  ‘Yucky!’ he said, and before I knew what was happening he had grabbed a canister of squirty cream from the shelf next to him. ‘Open your mouth!’ He pushed the nozzle down and the cream sprayed out, making a gassy churning sound, expanding as it filled my mouth. I was laughing and choking at the same time, trying to swallow the cream as it oozed out of the edges of my mouth. Dad was squirting the cream into his own mouth now, overfilling it so there was a twirling peak, sucking it in. He put the cream back on the shelf. I could still feel the laughter in me and I could still taste the sweet cream. He lit a cigarette and my cat jumped on to the sofa, pressing her body against my leg, vibrating with purrs.

  I loved being alone like this with Dad, late at night.

  The doorbell rang. Dad sprang out of the sofa. He was bouncy and quick, not languid and slow like Mum.

  ‘Come on up!’ he shouted into the intercom.

  He opened the door. I heard voices floating up the stairs.

  On the glass-topped coffee table there were ashtrays, wine bottles, a record sleeve with a photograph of a blue mermaid on a rock, a wooden box with an Egyptian eye carved on the lid, and the scales. The scales were small, solid and nimble, with hinges and pins and tiny chains holding the plates. The weights were metal elephants of decreasing size that could be arranged in a line, like the scene in The Jungle Book. The elephants had been handled so much that the tops of the trunks were rubbed to a bright smooth bronze, while the feet and the legs were black with grime. ‘They are from Thailand,’ said Dad when he found me playing with them one day. ‘They are really old, special, be careful with them.’ Some of the weights were used more than others; some of the trunks were more shiny than others: the gramme, the 5 gramme. Those were the ones that got used the most.

  Two men walked into the sitting room. They were skinny and tall, with tufty unbrushed hair that grew past their ears, pale skin and tired eyes with purple shadows beneath.

  ‘So the Afghani stuff arrived,’ Dad was saying. He was shorter and stockier than them, more energetic, more alive.

  ‘Fabulous,’ drawled Michael, hardly moving his mouth because he had the end of a cigarette hanging from between his lips. He sat down and reached forward to pour wine into a red KitKat mug that had once come with an Easter egg. His slender fingers were brown at the tips.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ he said, spotting me. I’d moved to a cushion in the corner of the room so that I could watch them. I folded my legs under me, so my long white nightie covered my toes.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Well, get it out before everyone else gets here, first dibs and all that,’ said Quentin, who was taller and thinner than Michael.

  The doorbell rang again. Dad went to answer it.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Quentin, blowing me a kiss before he sank to his knees, pulling a black lump of something from his pocket. ‘Daddy won’t mind if I borrow some Rizla, will he?’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ I said.

  A girl arrived next. She had lots of hair, which was blonde and silky and covered the faces of Michael and Quentin when she bent down to kiss them hello. I worried that perhaps her hair might go up in flames when she kissed Michael because the cigarette was still burning between his lips. Some of the tobacco that Quentin was sprinkling on the Rizla paper went on to the carpet when he lifted his face up to her. ‘Hello, darling.’

  They said this a lot. ‘Hello, darling.’ I don’t think the word ‘darling’ meant that much to them. Dad said it differently. He said ‘Hello, m
y darling’ and the ‘my’ seemed important.

  Her name was Sarah but Dad called her Lady Sarah and she always told him to stop being silly.

  She slumped down on to the sofa next to him. She had diamonds in her ears that sparkled like Christmas.

  Dad lit a cigarette and handed it to Sarah. She put it in her mouth and when she took it out the butt was glossy and red from her lipstick.

  ‘Get Lady Sarah a proper glass for her wine, will you? She doesn’t like drinking out of mugs.’

  ‘Oh, Gavin,’ said Sarah, slapping him gently on the thigh, but she looked at me and smiled, as if to say, Yes, I would prefer a proper glass.

  I went to the kitchen. Dirty dishes were half submerged in greasy sink-water. A bottle of milk was open on the work surface and jaunty little silver fish were sliding along the grooves between the tiles. It smelt of week-old cat litter, even though the window was open.

  I got on to a stool and found the cleanest-looking glass in the cupboard. I carried it into the sitting room as though it was a precious goblet. Sarah was standing by the record player.

  ‘Ooh, I love this one,’ she said, slipping a record out of its cover and laying it on the turntable. Dad turned down the volume on the television with the remote control, but he didn’t turn it off, so the people were still there on the screen. The man was in the forest now, his face covered with mud; he was grabbing another man from behind and holding a knife to his throat, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, we could hear music instead.

  I filled the glass with red wine from the bottle that was now nearly empty and handed it to Sarah. I enjoyed performing these small tasks. I knew that if I was helpful and didn’t get under their feet then I wouldn’t get sent to bed.

  Dad was kneeling by the table, reaching for the Egyptian-eye box.

  They all stopped talking and watched, their breath stalled in their throats. He flipped open the lid. Inside was a plastic bag of light brown powder. There was also a smaller bag of white powder that was like icing sugar and a lump of black stuff the size of a plum.