It was not until I entered the house that it even truly struck me. We went to see the flowers at Mrs. Duncan’s and I realized which house – directly opposite – of course I recognized her, fifteen to twenty pounds’ worth ordered that morning for good neighbourliness. You see the lady “through the wall” hadn’t been keeping well and didn’t answer his knocks (for help) against it, so he struggled across to the Duncan’s – how? – down the gravel driveway, the green-painted iron gate was probably pulled across, down step after step. Their light was on as they were waiting up for their daughter to arrive from England and he collapsed into her arms, the back of his neck soaked. She towelled him off, yet did not phone for an ambulance immediately, calling my Mother instead, then the doctor, not Doctor B because she didn’t like him, but the other young one from A who arrived before my Mother, then the paramedic who reaped only praise and the woman ambulance-driver who slammed the doors in my Mother’s face. The response to her objections that she wanted to be with her father-in-law inappropriate mirth: “I thought you were just another neighbour”.
My Father was called off the shift when his condition started to deteriorate and how the old progenitor muttered in that final half hour about R having to come over to trim the hedges. Groaning and being forced to let go, fighting hard. My Father has seen so many die that he knew he was in pain, chit-chatting to distract him. He didn’t want to nor did he expect to die, not really. Dad told me it would not hit him until the tasks are completed – the house being empty will show that he’s gone. He won’t be seen shuffling up for his pension or down to the grocer’s with the collected money for his tins and his comforting booze, always wearing the same old hat, green with a leather band, the grotted-up old dark navy coat and the grey trousers. He won’t pop over for a few quick words about problems with his insurance or TV license or bills and then leave.
The house had not been redecorated since my Granny died. I remember when he came across: “It’s Chatty” he whispered. She had drawn her last breath next to him in the bed. He even cradled her dentures in cotton wool inside a decorated box at the bottom of the wardrobe. Most of the furniture left after she did, the purportedly valuable, certainly the antique, leaving nothing but an outline on the wallpaper. So I held on to what was meant to have been a second edition Burns’ collected works. He kept asking for them back, but my Dad insisted that he would only sell them for drink, which I took absolutely literally (in the narrow-minded fashion I often do) refusing to relinquish them to the last. He had mentioned the books again during my penultimate visit home. They were to be kept in the family. I didn’t seek his permission, a niggardly thing all in all, but the infamous incident had poisoned my mind against him for years – it was frightening and in the taut sphere of family matters blame festers when the issues are not confronted (and when is anyone comfortable enough to confront them?). I underestimated his love for the Bard until confronted by the relics he had cared for: a newspaper clipping of Tam O’ Shanter, a tartan-bordered postcard of the poet’s house with a quotation from A Man’s a Man for a’ that and a further photograph of the cottage covering a ventilator, cut so precisely that we could not take it down (and why should we destroy the final tribute to his ingenuity when everything else had been stripped bare?).
The grandfather clock was replaced by a shambolic white cupboard in the hallway, other objects and ornaments fallen to the sound of the gavel, time passed, but it ebbed and flowed around that house. The television that was in my bedroom when it was still mine and I hadn’t left for the continent was stored there. As was gradually revealed to us he never threw anything out: her button box; cardboard containers with rusted tacks and paper clips; a coffee jar with a red plastic lid filled with what looked like clear hair gel, but turned out to be wallpaper paste kept over from God only knows when. G could have run around to his heart’s content, picking up bits and pieces. The garden, reached by a brick-edged slab path and surrounded by low box hedges, was hopelessly overgrown. It held a midden [compost heap] and rows of lettuces, tatties and strawberries. The back path, which hadn’t been stripped of trees to protect, screen and hide, was well-trodden. I’d deliberately go along there to see him digging knowing no one else had the right. The hedge clippings piled high. One of his neighbours had a plastic greenhouse. Slowly, only straw littered the rich earth, a few pathetic leaves growing wild and peppered with caterpillar holes. I always remembered it was his plot, walking there with Tighson [my border collie] and THAK. I always looked out for him on his bench or at his kitchen window, but rare were the sightings. Then my return trips became more and more infrequent, even more seldom the wanderings that way. These were the days before council houses went on sale to their tenants, before they were tarted up, anonymized and “upmarketed”. Before the statutory double glazing and the removal of the stiff metal frames.
As soon as we entered the back door we were hit by the stench of rotting fish, three kippers, neatly wrapped in paper. Everything was completely normal, except that he wasn’t there. He had a plate full of jelly (bright red), banana slices decorating the top and sprinkled generously with sugar. The washing that he could still manage to do himself rather than sending over to our house on the pulley, a couple of pairs of socks and some underpants. The tap was dripping, some washed dishes on the draining board, neat and tidy. The first disturbance throwing out the dead flesh and pouring the contents of the sugar bowl into an ancient tin of a type no longer manufactured. Then into the living room, his chair almost next to the TV so that he could make out something of the picture, his long, slender table by the settee on which a pillow and blanket were draped, pushed back as if he had just got up for a pee, the remote control lying useless, his glasses folded, his newspaper and an almost-finished packet of Rennie indigestion tablets, everything else exactly as it had been forever and ever since Chatty’s death, all the original fittings intact. His bed unslept in. A packet of Player’s Navy Cut with butt-ends saved up to be thrown out, the whole interior nicotine-yellow, layer upon layer discolouring everything, even the glass in the frame protecting the peacocks embroidered in silk I have fallen heir to.
I hadn’t stepped into the bedroom, back room or bathroom for more years than I can recall, yet I immediately knew they hadn’t changed: the plastic fish-panel decoration above and below the handle of the kitchen door, the toilet with the flower transfers, the black marble-effect wallpaper in the bathroom with the mint-green border, the white porcelain, the Mabel Lucie Atwell verse with the little boy, rosy-cheeked and dripping after his bath, wrapped in a blue towel, his hair black and tousled, the back room with the Singer sewing machine operated by a treadle, the views of Loch Tummel, the bedspreads, the “Oriental beauty” postcard winking seductively, the silver-look brush with insets of flowers, wardrobes full of new pairs of trousers and immaculately pressed jackets. We were astonished: why did he never wear them? His silk dressing gown, worn dragons between shoulder and lapel, distinguished tassels hanging from the belt. My Mother told us that she had just cleaned it ready for his admission to hospital for the operation to remove the cataracts. He was bitterly disappointed when they informed him the intervention had been left too late or some such equally pathetic excuse, that he would be left to go blind. My Father sighed that he had been fed up and that ultimately the heart attack had been preferable to years of suffering. It’s true, yet Death is never a welcome visitor. I had wanted to unlock all the stories from his head. He had travelled the world in more innocent times and had recounted all his infamous scrapes, such as when he and his shipmates sneaked into a mosque and were caught out, lucky to escape with their infidel lives. Or the stories of Japanese executions with the prisoners buried up to their necks, their exposed parts smeared thick with honey and giant ants released to devour them. He also told tales of battle action, his whisky-slurred voice imitating the cadences of his submarine commander. Then there was the Danish girlfriend (he lived up to the sailor’s motto “one in every port”) in Copenhagen. Her father was actually Norwegian, owner of a shipping line who wanted my Grandfather to marry her. They were inseparable during his stay there, the badly scratched and dented Carlsberg tray with the mermaid on the rock testimony to his continued affection. He outlived his wife and younger son and a trace of him remains in G who has inherited his dark brown eyes, the shade a perfect match.
A bright yellow bucket once used to hold emulsion had been placed under a small bedside table in lieu of a chamber pot. In the drinks cabinet cocktail sticks with horses’ heads rested in wine glasses. The striped shopping bag was consigned to eternity in a black bin bag along with the hat in which a few grey hairs still lingered. The grotesque “let’s make soup” wallpaper in orange and yellow with salt and pepper shakers, half-peeled onions on chopping boards, radishes and egg whisks. The coal bunker, the lilac tree. Looking over the lawn, a memory of Chico, his Pomeranian, who danced round and round in feverish circles whenever excited, entered my mind unbidden. We would take him for walks together with our own Pomeranian, Sheila, up the big banking and along to “echo point” where he would shout for me. I was his “little princess” – he had always wanted a granddaughter as all the other children were boys – and he also took credit for my interest in foreign languages, having taught me some phrases in French whilst I was at primary school.
It was straight down to the business in hand: my Father being as cold and unsentimental as he could. He loathes hoarding and the task became easier the more we divided up and cleared out. R and I were anxious not to lose anything. I need a house to clutter. The personal items yielded warmth and amusement – a binding force – we each have our recollections of him and we were familiar with his faults, but why condemn him for them? God knows we take after him and back and back all the way to Adam, we are all flawed. Nevertheless the undercurrent of pain threatened to sweep us away, so we laughed. Brave-facing it may be, but living and sharing.
I came downstairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, my Father already in the living room. We drank a cup of tea (THAK’s nickname for our residence “the house of the ever-boiling kettle” no misnomer). A mixture of worry and raking over the past. Stricken by the same affliction, my Father began to look through the hidden photographs. We laughed at how well endowed he appeared to be in his tight-fitting uniform trousers: “He must have gone around half bent most of the time,” my Father grinned.
We joked about the bottle-opener we had found tucked away in a drawer, in the shape of a naked woman it was more schoolboyishly naughty than offensive. “Randy old bugger,” my Father’s comment.
The house soon won’t even smell of him any more, my Father and R are moving the remaining furniture in a hired van, my Mother, B and C ripping out the carpets, workmen will tow away the antiquated fridge and the Tricity cooker before stripping off the wallpaper. The tea towel with the lyrics of Amazing Grace and the staunch piper on the battlements will be unpinned, the curtains released from the grip of their plastic hooks. Not just one life has passed, but an entire way of life, an era preserved in grey matter alone, experience and wisdom, mischief, pranks and wamth, blood, shit and trickling semen, alcohol vapour and lineage, identity running deeper than the fragmented forgetfulness gnawing away at the selfish society we inhabit. Row upon row of tins. R wouldn’t take them no matter how hungry and I wouldn’t rummage through the coat pockets. The silence is more eloquent than the sobbing – it is easier that he left his body to medical science, although the notion of some students dissecting him on a slab without knowing his story is repugnant enough for me not to dwell upon. Maggie’s anecdote about her classmate who had cut the penis off one of the bodies, tying it on a string to swing around her head like some demented trophy a far cry from the reverence the bereaved wish for (the mutilator was expelled for her violation). There was no parting, the leave-taking deprived us.
He came to me in the maternity ward, asking if I wanted grapes to which I retorted that I was not ill, whereupon he returned the next afternoon with strawberries and a tin of cream. Breathe it in deep and never let it go – keep him, this love that you cannot express and which you do not ever want to exorcise – there is no guilt, there is no regret, for why should I cut and dry the man for posterity by hollowing out the substance of his soul. The dew has not yet lifted from the grass and it is 13.25. When I next go back with “eggy pieces” [egg sandwiches] it will be the last time: one last journey to the skip left. I will never be able to set foot in that house again. Others will breathe, but not notice the slightly acrid smell of his. I will be excluded from the dwelling he occupied for over thirty years, longer than I have been on the face of the earth. I wouldn’t want to visit a atranger there, however. The little boley hole under the outside stairs, a miracle of economy. I never had the nerve to look in it: a little, frightening store of evil? No, but a bogey man might want to jump out at you, creasing up at your petrified face. Old deckchairs had been put into retirement there. My parents always had to have the latest things – “better”, “cleaner”, more comfortable – you never see anyone who lets their possessions age with them. My Father who flees from the old-fashioned. Cobwebs hanging like necklaces and sneeze-inducing dust, a few picture hooks and nails sticking out, the fire with its artificial logs and the wooden mantelpiece displaying the knick-knacks of travel and heritage. The newspaper-rack he never had any use for, made with his own tools, like my doll’s house and the sledge. He was skilled and active and his heart must have been resilient to endure the alcoholism (that mellowed) and the fags over so many long years. The concrete floors were painted round the edges (only the rich could afford fitted carpets when he moved in, most lucky to have even a square of fabric), the bedroom particularly striking, the detail of the rings and grain of wooden boards lovingly reproduced – had he done this himself?
During bouts of delirium tremens, Auld Nick would appear to my Grandfather to remind him of his ultimate destination. His fists would clench in rage at the taunting, stretching tattoos as blue as the veins beneath.
A goldfish floating on the surface of a bowl of discoloured water, a cat’s spine snapping under the heedless tyres of a lorry, the gouged glass eye of a favourite bear, the fallen fledgling poked with a stick to swirl with maggots.
[September, 1992]
