I hadn’t realized that he was in pain, that he felt ill, that he was feeling his mortality. As he walked away from us towards the train station, Hebe, who was attached to my front in a baby-carrier, kept straining round my shoulder to look at him.
‘What are you looking at, you funny little thing?’
I turned and I watched Dad walk away, whistling.
He died two days later of pulmonary complications.
I called a cab and took the paintings back to his flat. I realized that I wanted to be able to sit in his home as it had been for as long as I could.
I spoke to the female priest at St Mary The Boltons, the church around the corner from my old primary school, the church where we had held the funeral service for my sister, twenty years earlier.
‘Of course your father can have his funeral here,’ she said. ‘You are part of this community.’
I spotted a Post-It note attached to the notepad when I put down the phone. ‘Thank you, Gav’, it said. The note was written in pencil, in what looked like my father’s handwriting.
Most likely it had been written by Dad’s friend Tim, who had stayed over on the last night, sleeping in the spare room, leaving in the morning before Dad woke up and died.
Thank you, Gav, for letting me stay the night; thank you, Gav, for putting on a really fun party; thank you, Gav, for the drugs and the good times.
But it really looked like my father’s handwriting.
Perhaps he had left the note for me. Perhaps he knew.
Thank you, Gav, for forgiving me for all the things I did.
I took the Post-It note and stuck it in my wallet.
Sarah came to the flat. We sat opposite each other on his sofas, the paintings rehung on the walls above us, the knick-knacks in the tray on the table between us. He was dead but his flat was unchanged. The only things that were different were that the lock on the bathroom door was broken and the ring I had taken was still on my finger.
Sarah was tall and too thin in jeans and white plimsolls. She scratched her arms compulsively and talked about the parasites that lived under her skin. She was Dad’s best friend and his best customer. He still did her hair and still sold her drugs, grinding Pro Plus tablets into the cocaine he sold her and charged her too much for. He told me this was because he cared about her and the adulterated cocaine was better for her health.
‘He wanted to be buried with Candy’s ashes, he told me that,’ she said.
I’d never spoken to my father about his wishes.
If he was going to be buried, it would have to be in Brompton Cemetery, close to the King’s Road.
‘I’m a King’s Road cowboy,’ he used to say.
They only do burials once a week at Brompton. You have to pay upfront. There are fewer than a hundred plots left. Marchesa Casati and Bernard Levin are buried there, Polish fighter pilots and suffragettes. He’d fit right in.
The cemetery director was an Australian who only had one arm, the loose end of his green linen shirt folded up neatly. He showed me the plot where I could bury my father. It was near to the pathway, so the joggers and the new mothers pushing their prams would be able to see him. A social spot, with Chelsea football ground just behind the wall. He’d be able to hear the crowds on match days.
I spoke to the man my father rented his flat from. He was called Anthony. ‘There are ten days left on this month,’ he said. ‘Everything will have to be cleared out after that.’
Mike came to the flat with me the next day. He went into my father’s bedroom and washed out the champagne bucket that was on the floor next to his bed. It was half filled with yellowish bile. Had my father vomited, got up, gone to the loo, died as he sat there? Had he felt ill, had he known he was dying?
Mike left me to get home to our baby.
I went to my dad’s bedroom and I lay on his bed. His bedclothes smelt of stale sweat.
There was an old wooden dressing table with a grey marble top. The dressing table had lots of drawers into which he had stuffed photographs, letters, undeveloped rolls of film. In one drawer I found a cache of photographs of his ex-girlfriend, Julia. He had kept them all this time. Maybe he really had been in love with her, I thought as I sat on the floor and looked through them, unsticking them from each other, arranging them into neat piles. Maybe she had been the great love of his life. She’d certainly made him very happy. But after six years together she left him for a younger man. It broke Dad’s heart. He listened to Bryan Adams ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ on a loop that whole summer.
I wondered if I should try to contact her and tell her that he had died, invite her to the funeral. I had not always been kind to Julia, I knew that. I had blamed her more than him for what had happened, when really he was the one at fault. He was the adult, and she’d had a hard life too. But still, they had not been in touch for years and I decided I did not want to invite her.
Maranda flew in from Los Angeles, leaving her eighteen-month-old daughter, Biba. She’d been in London only a couple of weeks earlier for work. She was a successful hairdresser now, booked for luxury advertising campaigns and fashion magazines, travelling the world as part of the entourage for big Hollywood films. Maranda, Dad and I had met at Claridge’s hotel, where she was staying. Dad was so proud of us, I was deputy editor of ES Magazine, Maranda had an expense account which meant she could pick up the drinks tab. Dad ordered champagne and gave her his gold chain, something she had always coveted.
‘Here you are, my darling. But don’t get too hung up on it. Don’t worry if you lose it, it’s only a necklace.’
Maranda could only stay for a couple of days; she had to go back to LA before the funeral because she had been booked for a commercial. We sat in his flat together, sisters who did not know each other, and I told her to take anything she wanted. She took a lot of Dad’s hairdressing equipment, including the big bronze boot that he’d kept his hairbrushes in when he had the salon in Knightsbridge.
‘I cleaned this so many fucking times, I have to have it.’
Chryssoulla came over. She had been with us on the holiday in Tunisia, the daughter of friends who had a jewellery shop on the same street as Dad’s salon. She was Candy’s age. She and Dad were great friends; he was like a second father to her – he had done her hair for her wedding. She lived in Athens now and it was pure chance that she had happened to be in London. We sat in Dad’s living room. We went for dinner that night with Maranda and Sarah, to San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge. There was a time when Dad had gone there for lunch every day. He always had asparagus risotto. He and my mother had their wedding reception there when I was two months old.
The restaurant had become a parody of itself, like those Dolce Vita restaurants in Rome. The owner, Mara, was old and confined to her bed. Princess Diana, who loved the place, was dead. My dad, who loved the place, was dead. Maranda and I ate all our food, even though it was not good. Chryssoulla hardly ate. Sarah didn’t eat at all. I wondered if she had found a new cocaine dealer, or maybe she still had some left from the last time she’d seen Dad. We drank a lot of wine and went back to Dad’s flat afterwards, playing his rave compilation tapes, dancing in the living room. Sarah put a lace doily on her head and pranced around, no rhythm in her long arms.
‘Dad would have loved this!’ I shouted, sure that he was sitting on the sofa, watching, laughing, holding his walking stick, poised to stand up and join in.
Anthony called again. He wanted to come round and see the flat. He said he needed to work out what needed to be done to get the place ready for new tenants. I had been living in a limbo state halfway between reality and dream, death and life, imagining that I would always have his sofa, his bed. I had organized the printing of the order of service and the readings, I had taken his new black suit and a white shirt, still in its plastic dry-cleaning sleeve, to the undertakers so they could dress him. I crossed things off my list and added new ones: canapés, gravestone. But I had not organized clearing the flat.
At night
I would come home and sit in the dark next to my baby whom I had not seen all day.
My mother said maybe you should stop drinking so much.
I sat in his bed and wrote him a letter. I cried as I wrote it. ‘I love you so much, Dad. You went too soon, Dad.’
The wall separating life and death suddenly seemed very thin; there was a door in that wall, a handle that you could turn, open the door and walk through.
I finished writing the letter and I folded it many times to make it magic.
I found his hairdressing scissors in the wooden box in the living room, along with a grey plastic comb, a cut-throat razor, loose blades. He would need his scissors.
Sarah was waiting for me in the cab.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said. She had a tennis racket with her, for some reason.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’
The funeral parlour was on the Fulham Road. I now understood the geography of these things, hospital, funeral parlour, church, cemetery: all within ten minutes’ walk of each other. Hidden pathways that only light up for the bereaved. The funeral parlour had glass windows so the immediate activities were visible to the people walking past, people who were not thinking about what wood to use for a coffin and whether to have shiny brass handles. At the next desk along was a woman who cried even as her credit card went through the machine. After she went they said to me, ‘She’s lost her baby. That’s always the worst.’
This time the funeral men led me and Sarah through a door into a back room. More doors led to more rooms. These were the hidden spaces.
‘He’s in there,’ they said, and one of them turned the handle and opened the door, so all I had to do was walk through.
Dad was in a coffin on a plinth, pushed up against the wall. He looked dapper, his grey hair brushed and fluffed.
I went to him; I looked at him; I laid my hand on his chest, solid and inanimate. I looked at his face, the familiarity of it, the little hamster pouches of fat, the flatness of his top lip, the grey of his eyelashes.
I retched with sobs.
‘I love you so much,’ I said.
I tucked the letter and the scissors into the front pocket of his suit. The funeral directors had Candy’s ashes, and there was space for them at the foot of his coffin.
He had a small, quiet smile and his brow was smooth. I had not seen him look so untroubled for years. I knew that the funeral directors could do all sorts of things with the faces of the dead, but could they really make him look so content? He was not scared of death. And since Candy had died he had never been sure where he wanted to be more, there or here. He had given me twenty years and now he had gone to her.
I opened the door for Sarah.
She stood next to me and held my hand. Her fingers were bony and strong; she ground my knuckles together as though they were marbles.
‘He looks happy,’ she said.
‘He does,’ I said.
Sarah paid for Dad’s last party. It was held at the Orangery in Holland Park, after his funeral in St Mary’s and his interment in Brompton Cemetery. There were canapés, champagne, beautiful flowers, a soundtrack of Rolling Stones and early nineties acid house music. Everyone got drunk; we even had gatecrashers, people who turned up because they’d heard there was a good party happening, free booze and food, no problems getting in. Dad would have done the same. Once the last bottle had been drunk, the final stragglers, the ‘die-hards’ as Dad would have called them, went to Pucci’s where we drank more and smoked and when someone offered me a line of cocaine I did not decline, even though I had a one-year-old baby at home. It seemed like the right thing to do, an act of homage. The night before dad died, they told me, he had taken cocaine, MDMA and smoked a couple of spliffs. He was having a party with his friends, playing two stereos at once, different music, had the telly on with the football as well.
I took the cocaine and felt the fireworks in my body and at the end of the night I went back to his flat and slept in his bed. My friend Lorna insisted on staying with me. She didn’t think I should be on my own. I am not scared of my own ghosts, I thought, but I didn’t say it and I was glad of the company.
I found the number of a man with a van who did flat clearances.
We talked through what I needed.
‘I’ll bring the truck,’ he said.
He was Australian too. He was called Mark. He wore a blue Aertex shirt, cargo trousers and builder’s boots. I made him a cup of tea, which he sipped quickly as he looked around the flat and worked out the scale of the job. I had taken home what I wanted, including the new television and Dad’s diaries. I had given Sarah his crystals for her children, who’d loved him too; I had given Pucci’s son Rufus his fantasy space station paintings. My mother had taken some of his nicer clothes to the charity shop. But there were still so many things to get rid of. Broken pans, stolen candles, porn videos, cushions and throws, house plants, six cans of steak and kidney pie, out-of-date medicines, bowls and bowls of photographs of me, him, Candy, the young girls he had supplied with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes.
We worked room by room, taking boxes and furniture down in the lift and throwing them into the cage on the back of the van. There were so many lovely things, beautiful mirrors, ornaments, his dressing table with the grey marble top which he had filled with mementos of lost loves. Lovely things that no one wanted and I could not take, lovely things that were him, his life, his joy. It broke my heart again and again to see them tumbling into the truck, becoming rubbish.
Anthony arrived while we were still clearing out.
Anthony was loose-limbed, fake-tanned, with thinning dyed black hair.
‘This place is a fucking tip,’ he said.
‘We are just finishing up,’ I said.
Mark, the man with the van, watched Anthony.
‘Look at what’s he done to the kitchen surfaces,’ Anthony said, stroking the cracked Formica with his manicured hand. ‘And there are cigarette burns in the carpet.’
‘Dad was here for ten years,’ I said.
Repairs were never done. Anthony was always aggressive with Dad. It was one of the few things that used to get him down.
‘This whole place is going to need ripping out,’ he muttered.
We walked up the carpeted stairs, Anthony first, me next, Mark following. There were long rectangular shapes on the purple-painted walls where my matriculation and graduation photographs had once hung. Dad had been so proud of me for going to Cambridge. He told everyone I got a first, even though I only got a 2:1; told everyone I was the editor of ES, even though I was only the deputy.
I watched as Anthony examined the bathroom door, the cracks in the wood where Sarah had bashed at it with the bronze elephant, the bronze elephant that was now on a bookshelf at home. My clean home where my husband and my baby lived, a place that had become so distant in my mind, like a faraway planet.
‘Dad was locked in the loo when we found him.’
‘This bathroom,’ said Anthony.
The carpet around the base of the loo was crisp and yellowing from Dad’s misdirected piss.
My soul hurt.
We went into the bedroom. Dad’s bed was next to the window, which was half grown over with ivy. I knew what it was like, to lie in that bed and look out of that window. This was one of the nicest views in the flat, and for a time it had been mine.
I’d lived with Dad for a couple of years before moving in with Mike, and this had been my bedroom. In the evenings, when Mike would come round after a late night at work, when I would already be in bed, reading, Dad would let him in and invite him to hang out downstairs.
‘Come and sit with us, have a drink,’ he would say, and Mike would look through into the living room where three pretty Chelsea girls in their early twenties were sitting on the sofas, smoking, drinking cheap wine, snorting cocaine.
‘No, thanks, I am going up to see Gavanndra.’
‘Oh man, she’s got you pussy-whipped!’
; At our wedding in a converted youth hostel in Devon my father gave a speech. ‘Hello, my name is Gavin and I am an addict. Oh no, wrong meeting!’
Laughter.
‘We are here because of Gavanndra and Mike. They have something so special, something that I never had. Apologies, Jan!’
Laughter, even from my mother.
Dad liked to lie here and watch the birds through the greenery.
The bed was stripped; now it was just a stained mattress. The old duvets and pillows, the towels and sheets had been thrown away. The truck was nearly full.
‘This bed isn’t ours. This bed will have to go.’
‘What?’
‘This bed, and the one in the other room, you have to get rid of them.’
‘I’m sure they were here when Dad took the place. I’m sure they’re not his. This place was semi-furnished, wasn’t it, when he took the place?’
‘I’m telling you that these beds have to fucking go. You need to sort this out. We’ve given you loads of time. What have you been doing?’
‘I … My …’
‘This place is a fucking disgrace. Your father was a slob. Disgusting. Don’t imagine for a moment that you will be getting any deposit back.’
‘My …’
My father is dead.
I looked out of the window, saw the truck outside, the rubbish cage filled to the brim, all his lovely things.
Mark was standing in the doorway.
Where was Dad? I hoped he wasn’t watching this bit. I hoped he had gone by now, found Candy and the others. Andy; all his friends.
Mark stepped into the room. He walked with grace and confidence. ‘Are you all right?’ he said, looking at me.
I shook my head. That was all I could do. That was the honest truth.
‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ Anthony said to him.
Mark didn’t stop walking until he faced Anthony, nose to nose. ‘This girl’s father has just died. You are a fucking bully. You know who is disgusting? You are, mate.’
Anthony’s mouth quivered like he wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say.
The Consequences of Love Page 20
