by Louise Beech
‘Who are you?’ I asked him.
Be you, I thought. If you must die, be you when you do. Be the name you were given at birth, the name that will one day be recorded as your death, even if it must be today.
‘I’m Henry,’ he said. ‘And she was … my tiger … my Catherine…’
I was no longer in the sticky leatherette chair but curled up in the faded one in my father’s study. I held Dad’s cushion to my cheek and wore a yellow-and-white-flowered party dress. I was ten. It was my party. Everyone was looking for me. I could hear them in the hallway. Uncle Henry suggested to the guests that I might be in the shed, that it was my favourite place. When they went looking for me, he came into the study. He towered over me. He wore my ‘I’m Ten Today!’ badge on his checked lapel. He smiled. He wanted me to sit on his knee and kiss him for my birthday, but I wouldn’t. Not in my father’s chair. There was too much sadness there already, too much pain. I couldn’t bear the weight. It pulled me and pressed me into the chair. Into my dad’s chair.
Into the chair in the crisis-line booth.
‘Just a kiss from my tiger,’ he was saying. ‘Just a birthday kiss.’
‘No,’ I said now. ‘You’re Sid. You’re not Henry. I like Sid; I forgave Sid.’
‘I’m … Henry … that’s … my name … Catherine … was … my tiger.’
‘No,’ I said.
I was in my father’s chair and there was snow sticking to the lattice window. Henry had gone. He did not come looking for kisses in the study or take me to see Geraldine in the shed because she was gone too. They had both gone, and Catherine-Maria as well. They were all gone.
The snow had covered all the footprints.
‘Honest … today … my name … Henry…’
‘You left,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want you to be back.’
Why would I have written it this way? I was no poet or artist. I could not have chosen these words and I would not read them now. Would not accept them.
‘I … loved … her…’
I retched spoiled milk and half-chewed biscuit all over the desk’s surface. The pen slid through the slime. The word ‘honest’ on the pad drowned under the waterfall. Christopher touched my forehead and said something I couldn’t hear. He tried to take the phone from me, but I snatched it back, held it to my chest and shook my head, spit flying from my mouth. Jane’s face appeared. She was large, fuzzy at the edges, and her words tumbled over words, none recognisable to me.
‘You took my name!’ I screamed into the receiver.
I sank to the floor beneath the vomit-covered desk. Milk dripped over the edge, fat, rancid tears on the leather chair.
‘I know who you are! I know all about the pictures you had!’
‘Katrina … what … are…?’
‘I know you,’ I whispered, kneeling, curled.
‘I … don’t … understand…’
‘Don’t you dare pass out! Don’t stop talking. Live, you bastard. You wait for them to come and revive you. Talk to me in your stupid, pathetic voice! Live with it like I have had to!’
‘Katrina…’ The word was faint.
‘I’m not Katrina, I’m Catherine-Maria. That’s who I am. Remember? And I’m not your daughter, and I’m not your love or your tiger. I was Catherine-Maria. Don’t say my fucking name ever again.’
I thought he was laughing or coughing or maybe retching until I realised he was crying. Slow, pathetic gasps of breath. Slower, slower, slower.
‘Why the fuck are you crying?’ I demanded.
Christopher touched my arm and sank to the floor next to me, my vomit on his sleeve.
‘It’s him,’ I said.
‘Give me the phone, Katrina,’ said Christopher.
‘Forgive … me….’ begged the man I’d called Sid and let in.
‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God.’ I held my head, rocked on my knees.
‘Katrina.’ Christopher prised the phone from my hands and put it to his ear. He put his other hand on my back. ‘I can’t hear him breathing anymore,’ he said after a while. ‘I think he’s gone.’
‘No. Call him, check, shout for him.’ I had forgotten how to breathe.
‘What should I call him?’
‘You know his name,’ I said.
‘Henry,’ said Christopher into the phone. ‘Are you still with us?’ He looked at me. ‘I think I can hear breath. Henry…’
I grabbed the receiver. ‘Are you there? Are you still there, you bastard?’
The man I’d called Sid and let into my heart moaned. He was trying to talk but the noise was all ‘s’s and ‘e’s, and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know. I remembered how easy it had been to pretend he’d never existed. How I’d rewritten him, edited him out of my life, scratched him out altogether with a child’s red crayon, helped by my mother’s removal of all his pictures, his belongings, by her telling me to forget him and then never uttering his name again.
But I could not delete him.
‘I think he’s going, Katrina.’ Christopher dropped the phone between us and held my face with both hands. ‘How do you want this to end? You have to live with it – not him. You have to do whatever you must to cope with this after today.’
How was I supposed to do that? How could I find any peace? I had to stop erasing, stop editing, and let the words find their own way in. It was his story. I only had to decide if I could get through it to the last page. Deal with what was written there. The man who had stolen my name, who had sneaked into my trust with his own fictional one, could now barely say anyone’s name. Only that he was sorry.
A knock sounded at his end and then muffled voices.
‘Sid,’ I called because I couldn’t say that other name.
A single, laboured breath. Banging on the door. Another breath. The voices on the other side of the door stopped. It wasn’t Sid who had asked for forgiveness. There was no more breath. It wasn’t Sid who was dying. No more breath. It wasn’t Sid. A crash. A door banging against a wall. Tramping feet. Christopher held my hand.
‘Henry,’ I whispered.
No breath. Voices. Other voices.
‘Henry, I forgive you.’
Christopher opened my fingers and removed the phone. I surrendered to the words of the paramedic telling me Henry had gone. I staggered past Norman and Jane into the whiteness. There was a sudden bleeping in my pocket. It was my phone. I pulled it out.
It was a text. My mother.
It said, simply, ‘I’m sorry.’
26
Keeping the ghosts away
Another dream that was a memory:
Anna, my childhood friend, lay at my side. For a moment, we were on the sofa together, entwined in my sheets, the DVD digits colouring our breath in the icy living room ghostly green. I closed my eyes and snuggled up to her. She thawed my toes and fingers.
Then we were no longer in the post-flood flat. My sheets dissolved, became a daisy-covered duvet. The wallpaper melted, as mine had done in the rain, and turned into soft lilac paint. We were in my childhood bed. It was warm. The darkness safely cocooned us. The rest of the house was quiet.
‘Are you asleep?’ Anna asked.
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘You?’
‘Of course not,’ she giggled. ‘How could I ask if you were?’
I smiled. ‘I knew that.’
‘Let’s tell ghost stories,’ she said.
I paused. ‘I can’t be bothered.’
‘You mean you’re scared.’ Anna shoved me. ‘Big scaredy-cat. Go on. Let’s make up the creepiest stories we can. Imagine if … I know! We’re lying here and we hear the door handle rattling. Dead soft at first, and then super loud. And then the door opens! And—’
‘No,’ I cried.
‘What?’ Anna’s voice was confused in the dark.
‘I don’t want to do ghost stories.’ I hated them. Always had. I was never sure how real they were.
‘OK, OK. Don’t know why you’re scared, though. I alwa
ys feel dead safe in your house.’
‘Do you?’ I was surprised. I didn’t. I had done, once upon a time, but now it seemed a different place, and I wasn’t sure why.
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘But that’s probably cos of you.’
I smiled.
‘I still miss Geraldine,’ she said.
My throat felt tight.
‘Tell me again how she got away?’
I buried my face in the duvet. I couldn’t remember. There was just a feeling. A feeling that churned my stomach and heated my cheeks. I knew it had been last Christmas. What had I told Anna? She probably knew more than I did. She had my memories. She was the teller of stories.
‘Can’t be bothered,’ I said.
‘There are no ghosts here, you know,’ said Anna.
I wasn’t sure.
‘Are you asleep?’ Anna asked after a while.
I pretended to be.
‘I know you’re still sad about Geraldine,’ she whispered, her breath on my cheek. ‘I think that’s why you don’t talk about her.’ She paused. ‘When we’re older we’ll get a house together. Just me and you. That’s what friends do. No one else. And we can have a rabbit if you want. It’s dead weird, but I had a dream the other night that we did have a house. But it got washed away like Noah’s Ark. And we were dead sad. But it didn’t matter cos we had each other.’ Anna’s voice slowed as sleep took her over. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it matters where you live, as long as you’ve got the right people with you. That’s what keeps the ghosts away.’
I woke up and I was on the sofa. Alone. The DVD digits said 4.56. Fern was sleeping quietly in her room. I wanted to go home. I just wasn’t quite sure where that was. The flood hadn’t washed it away; the ghosts had.
But I wasn’t afraid. Anna was right. The right people keep the ghosts away. And the blackest ghost of all had finally gone.
27
A snowy funeral
Fern poked her head around the bathroom door and, speaking around a pink toothbrush, white froth dribbling down her chin, asked who Uncle Henry was.
She spat into the sink and shouted over the water that I’d never mentioned him before. I heard the toothbrush drop into the mosaic jar where it had always belonged. She came back into the lounge for my answer.
I didn’t have one.
In the cracked mirror above the oven, black clothes drained all colour from my face. I patted my cheeks to add pink. Not even Fern’s gold beads tied in a stylish knot above my chest lessened the pallor. The dress was hers, too: Prada, exquisite and rich ebony. She’d received it during a two-month relationship with a much older man, on a trip to Paris.
‘So who was he?’ she repeated.
‘Just a distant relative,’ I finally answered. The word ‘just’ was as feeble as the words ‘I’m fine’. ‘I’ve not seen him for a long time. I’ll tell you about it one day, when this one is done.’
When he’s buried, I thought.
‘Was he one of those uncles no one talks to? The kind who gropes you at family events and wears too-tight slacks and always dances to “The Birdie Song”?’ Fern wrinkled her nose. ‘Like my Uncle Nick – or Uncle Tit as we call him; he kept pawing me at a wedding, saying he was adjusting my sash.’
‘Yes,’ I said, sadly. ‘One of those uncles.’
‘So why go to the funeral?’ Fern stood beside me. Her bathrobe was tied with the gold belt that had accompanied last night’s outfit for the newspaper Christmas party. She moved my hair behind my ear. She was white fluff to my black satin. Light to shadow, yin to yang. We were opposites that fit perfectly together, despite our fall-out. If I could forgive my mother, I could certainly forgive Fern.
‘And why are you so sad if you didn’t know him?’ she asked.
I leaned into her hand. ‘It’s always sad when someone dies.’
I wondered if it was. This certainly didn’t feel like when my father had died or when I saw Nanny Eve in her coffin on the lounge table. Nanny Eve had always said that death was the great equaliser. She used to polish Pure Mary and say we all had to face it, whoever we were, whatever we’d done.
‘I suppose.’ Fern kissed my cheek and switched on the kettle.
I flattened the disobedient hairs of my left eyebrow. ‘Aunt Mary will be sad,’ I said.
Cut into warped segments, my face in the broken mirror looked curiously like hers. In my sadness, I became her. Time and pain twinned us. The fourteen-year-old Catherine who had enjoyed her comfort must now offer it. Henry was her brother. She would need me today.
And I’d have to see my mother.
We’d not seen one another since Henry’s suicide, and I dreaded it. We had spoken on Wednesday after her texted apology. In the street outside Flood Crisis I’d rung her. Running away from that last phone call, passing through the light and dark created by the streetlamps, realising now how that very first call from the man I thought was Sid had broken the seal on my locked-away memory, I’d sobbed to her. She hadn’t cried. She hadn’t said sorry, not in words, but she’d promised to try to be some sort of a mother.
When we talked again on Thursday, I told her how I’d spoken to Henry, thinking of him as Sid, several times at Flood Crisis. Told her that must be why the hidden memory had finally broken out – something about the sound and cadence of his voice that my unconscious mind recognised, allowing those events of my ninth year to reveal themselves once again.
I told her, too, that not only had I been witness to Henry’s passing, but I had forgiven him. She had fallen silent. I wasn’t even sure I had forgiven him. With my returned memory came the realisation that my mother had liked Henry. I recalled how she had flirted with him when he came to stay after my father’s death. Whatever she had loved about my dad, she must have seen in Henry, despite how very different they were. Perhaps she had needed his affection, his attention, and inviting him for my sake had been merely an excuse.
My mother told me that, despite being his only remaining immediate relative, Aunt Mary wouldn’t claim Henry’s body or accept any responsibility for him. So the funeral would be arranged by whoever did so in such circumstances.
‘He doesn’t even deserve that’ said my mother.
An official contacted them on Friday and suggested that, since no one had come forwards the council would incur the costs of a basic funeral. If they were not paying for the funeral, they would get no say in how it was arranged.
‘I only ask that you make it as soon as possible,’ Aunt Mary had apparently said.
My mother stated that she could endure the funeral and acknowledge his death, if I would please not say fuck in the cemetery. In those words, I saw our future; it would be difficult, sometimes impossible, always intense, but we would be OK.
‘Be sad then,’ said Fern now, on this Tuesday a week before Christmas. On the morning of Henry’s cheap funeral, six days after his self-written but unrecorded passing. ‘But don’t torture yourself. There are happy things, like that Christopher at Flood Crisis.’
‘I’m not going back there.’ I rubbed concealer under my eyes to hide the dark rings.
‘To Flood Crisis?’
‘I’m done with crisis lines. I’ll call Norman tonight and tell him I’m not going in tomorrow. I’m tired of death and trauma and abuse. I should join the living now. I didn’t die last week, did I?’
‘But you’ve always said you want to help people.’
I sighed. ‘I do. But maybe I need to … I don’t know.’
Fern made us tea and handed me the black MENSA mug that I could never remember the origin of. ‘What the hell happened last Wednesday, Cath? You said there was a bad call. You’ve been avoiding talking about it all week.’
‘I was sick. There’s a nasty bug going around. Volunteers are sick of Christmas.’ I put two spoonfuls of sugar in my tea, needing sweetness to negate the sour day.
‘I know that’s not it,’ said Fern gently.
‘Another time,’ I said.
When I tell you
about Henry, I thought.
‘You should’ve spoken to Christopher.’ Fern smiled. ‘He called again last night. Why don’t you talk to him? He sounds worried about you.’
The tea was too hot and burned my throat. ‘Look, some stuff did happen while you were away, you’re right. And sometime I’ll tell you. But I have to get this funeral over first. OK?’
‘I know what it is,’ said Fern, dipping a digestive biscuit into her drink.
‘What?’ My throat constricted.
‘Does this Christopher wear stone-washed denim?’
I laughed. ‘I wish that’s all it was.’ I emptied my undrunk tea in the sink. The steam misted the cracked mirror, obliterating my image. ‘Right, do I look presentable for a funeral?’
She stood back, cocked her head and nodded. ‘You look gorgeous.’
I wrapped my arms around my chest. ‘I don’t want to look gorgeous. There’s a corpse no one likes.’
‘You should keep the dress; you fill it better than me.’
I wondered if I had time to put on my blue suit instead. ‘I can hardly walk in this skirt. It’s all wrong.’
Fern smoothed it flat, her red nails like ladybirds. ‘Did you know funerals are one of the best places to pick up a date? Remember that Neil guy with the huge hair? I met him at Scott Smith’s funeral.’
I shook my head and put on last year’s dark-grey coat, fastening the buttons up to the collar. I realised there was little point in the black dress when it was minus two outside and no one would even see it beneath the coat.
‘There’ll probably be only me, Mother, Graham, Mary and Martin. Don’t think Celine will come to this one.’
‘Don’t mention that bitch’s name to me,’ said Fern.
In a bleak mood on Thursday morning I’d let slip that Celine had told the paper about Fern’s column. Perhaps I’d wanted to cause trouble. Perhaps I’d thought Fern deserved to know. Fern had stormed into her bedroom and made some changes to the column she was about to submit.
On Saturday I saw the amendments.
‘I’m surprised your editor ran it,’ I’d told Fern as I read the piece over muffins, trying not to choke. Perhaps he’d felt bad over his hasty treatment of Fern and allowed her a little creative freedom in compensation. ‘But I’m glad they did,’ I added. Celine won’t be, I’d thought.
