The Language of Dying (2 page)

We talk for a while about all the other relatives that we may have to call: your ex-wife – not our mother, she is long gone in so many ways – the fabulous aunts in London, friends from your time in Australia and Nepal, cousins in Spain and a half-sister in Brighton; all people we claim to love but rarely see. We don’t talk about us, though, because neither of us really knows what to say, so we laugh and smoke and eat more biscuits and pretend the years haven’t divided us. Eventually, she has to talk about you. Everything else has run dry for now.

‘Do you think he’s scared?’ Penny’s voice is small, as if her words will run along the corridor, dance up the
stairs and seek out your ears. ‘He must be, mustn’t he? He must have been scared all this time.’

‘Maybe, Penny. Maybe a little bit. Sometimes.’ I smile at her and hope it’s comforting. ‘But he’s a very unusual man, isn’t he, Pen? He says he’s not afraid. And I think I believe him. I think I do.’

I search inside myself and double-check the words against the facts. Yes, I do believe it. Penny won’t though because Penny won’t see beyond her own fear. That’s why Penny, for all her glow, will never see anything through the window but the fields. Still, I try my best to explain.

‘This disease he’s got is nasty. I think maybe worse than most other cancers. He can’t eat. He can barely drink. But Dad has just got on with it. I can’t explain, but if he’d been terrified it would have been so much more awful. It’s made it …’ and looking at my sister and her glow I almost laugh at the irony of my next words, ‘… easier for me.’

We are saved from continuing by the doorbell, and I let Barbara, the district nurse, in and introduce her to Penny. Penny’s voice becomes more clipped, her accent more refined as she slips into her Gucci persona. If I didn’t love her I would tell her that it does her no favours. She is better being just Penny –
Lady Penelope
, as you used to call her way back when.

Barbara’s voice is beautiful, though, even when she introduces me to words and phrases that I don’t like,
that I don’t want to learn. She has a soft voice, like honey on a raw throat, the lilt of a West Country accent echoing inside it. And she is kind. Her kindness radiates from her thick-waisted, no-nonsense body as she squeezes my hand.

‘I’ll just pop up and check he’s comfortable. The morphine driver should be taking care of any pain and the night duty team will refill that when they come later.’ Her ruddy face stretches into a smile and I wonder how a person’s mind must work to make them do a job like hers.

‘I’ve still got all his liquid stuff. What should I do with it?’ I say. ‘Can you take it?’

‘No, love. You’ll have to drop it into a chemist. They can take it from you. I’ll get the home carers to call in later too. See if he wants a wash.’ She rustles up the stairs.

Penny looks at me and I know what she’s thinking. What should we do with the morphine when the boys come?

*

Eventually Barbara comes down and whispers quietly that you are weaker than yesterday, but why don’t we poke our heads round the door while you’re still awake? There can be no more excuses and I head up the stairs, Penny following me. It is a little surreal, this turnaround. My big sister – always the one who went first, always
the bravest – following me up the stairs, her head down. For the first time in a long time I know that Penny needs me. She needs my strength. She needs me to take the
hard
for her and make it easy.

The corridor seems longer than it has for years. Penny’s feet follow mine along the uneven floorboards until we arrive at the door. Penny’s nose wrinkles slightly as we step through the doorway and I kick myself. I’d forgotten the smell. There is a scented candle burning on the window ledge and flowers on your desk, but they can’t hide the smell of the cancer, a bloated fart hanging in the air. The smell of rotting that escapes with every acidic burp emitted from your poor insides. I look at Penny and squeeze her hand. I wish I hadn’t chosen a Christmas candle to burn.

You are propped up on your pillows, your arms out over the duvet and it seems that even since yesterday, even since
I’m not so good today, sweetheart. I’ve called the doctor. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while
, weight has escaped from you, evaporating into the smell that is getting heavier. Your teeth fill your face, your cheeks eat into themselves. Still, you smile a little and raise a hand.

‘Hello, darling.’ Your voice is thinning. I watch you as you hold her hand and I smile sadly as she cries, awkward and uncomfortable. I realise how far along this journey we’ve come, me and you. On our own. It’s an unintentionally secret thing we’ve done. These last few
months can’t be put into words for someone else to take away with them. And maybe that’s why Penny is crying. Because sometimes easy isn’t best.

Penny doesn’t sit with you long. ‘He’s ever so tired, isn’t he?’ That’s what she says, wiping her tears away. She says it to me as if you aren’t even there at all. Perhaps she can’t see you underneath your fading body. Her eyes plead with mine. ‘Maybe we should let him get some rest? We can come back up later.’ She speaks too cheerfully as she says goodnight to you, her plumped-up lips barely coming near your plumped-up pillows.

She scurries out and I smile at you and you smile wearily back as I stroke your hair and kiss your dry, rotten mouth. ‘I can see you in there, Dad,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t you worry. I can always see you.’ I stay there for a moment, your warmth and mine mixing in the small space between us and when I straighten up your eyes are shut and your breath slow and I wonder if I even said the words at all.

Afterwards, Penny and I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine and eat more food, taking trays into the
living room. There is toast and biscuits and cheese and ham and pickles and two tubes of Pringles and we scoff them as
Eastenders
plays out its drama in the background; the familiar voice of strangers a comfort, unreality soothing us for a while. We both continue to eat long after our hunger is gone and soon the bottle is nearly empty. My head is buzzing pleasantly, the world shimmering at the edges. I’m not a good drinker, not like Penny. But I think she’s a little drunk too. Her feet are up on the coffee table next to the surviving crumbs of our feast and her head lolls sideways against the brown leather.

‘I would have had him come and stay with me; you know that, don’t you, sweetheart? But with James being so little and the au pair living in, it would have been …’ Her petite shoulders shrug as if the rest of the sentence is so self-explanatory she needn’t waste her breath on the words. I’m tempted to say,
It would have been what, Penny? Too hard?
but I swallow my sharp tongue along with my sharp white wine, letting them both fizz angrily inside. I could say those words. And they would be true. It would have been too hard for Penny. And there’s the dry fact and no anger will change it and that’s why I stay quiet and keep my understanding silent. Different horses for different courses. You were always going to come here. Back home with the middle child. The pivot, the hinge between the
normal
of Paul and Penny and the strange, mad world of the boys; sometimes tilting this
way and sometimes that. In both camps and yet neither.

Penny is still talking and making excuses that aren’t needed, but she needs to hear them out loud in order to believe. She talks and I find myself drifting. I’ve always drifted. Sometimes there are just too many words filling up the space and not enough emptiness left for thinking. I keep a little emptiness inside for when I need it.
She’s off again
. That’s what you used to say, way back when.
Hey
,
Lady Penelope. Nudge your sister, she’s off again
. And then you would laugh.
In a world of her own, that one
.

Time is surreal. I can hear that laugh as if it were yesterday and in the same instant I can see the years ahead in which I will never hear it again. I squeeze my eyes shut let the drifting take over.

They think I’m a dreamer, Paul and Penny. They think I don’t live in the real world, and maybe I don’t. Maybe I’ve avoided that, because if I cement myself too firmly in the
here
, then the thing outside the window, the thing in the field, will no longer exist. And if I were to allow that then it would be lost to me for good. I know this as surely as I know you are dying and that
you
are nearly lost to me for good. Nothing I can do will change that.

But, despite my empty thinking space, despite Penny and Paul’s sideways glances and rolled eyes over the years, it was only me who understood the seriousness of things a year back when your swallowing problems began. It was only me whose insides screeched with the
knowledge of your life’s unravelling. It was only me who asked the questions and wanted to hear the answers. I can see the irony, even if they can’t. My
own world
is more real than theirs, even if I am lost in it. I don’t hide behind my cars and my clothes and my plumped-up lips.

Yes, you were always going to pack up your small flat and come back home. Because I think maybe you are a drifter too. We understand each other.

The silence breaks my thoughts and I realise that Penny has stopped talking and is looking at me, waiting for an answer. I have no idea what she has said and I know that she knows I’ve been gone
in a world of my own
, so I just smile and she smiles back. She runs one hand over my head gently, as if the four years between us are still a huge divide and she is still my big sister rather than a woman I once knew. But still, I am happy that she’s here. It’s a big warm rush coming out of me, like waters breaking and I look at her and think how I have envied her and hated her and avoided her over the years and yet here we are. Sisters again.

But then love clings on, doesn’t it, Dad? Even when by rights it has no place left to be, love is hard to kill. Like life. And sometimes, like life, it takes you completely by surprise.

*

There are enough bedrooms, but Penny and I choose to share one bed, enjoying this closeness that both of us are too afraid to mention in case it crumbles, its solidity
unsure. The duvet is pulled up under our chins even though the room is too hot. The heating throbs through the pipes, gurgling like the slowing blood in your veins, both determined to keep you warm and alive for as long as possible. It won’t be long until my skin starts to itch with sweat, but I don’t mind. We are all cold in the end.

Penny is talking and I am determined not to drift, but to listen, to feel the glow that escapes with her words as she recalls incidents from so long ago. Lying there, we remember and laugh and it feels so good, mainly because I know that it will never be the same again. It is bittersweet. As you let go, so shall we. Buried in the scent of fresh sheets and the warmth of my sister, I store each second safely away so that I can savour this time in the years to come.

Still, tonight we talk about the old days and pretend they were as funny then as they are now. The times when you were really drinking hard, after Mum had gone and you had remarried and we were living through the ‘Shetland experience’ as Davey refers to it.

Yes, you were –
are,
not were yet – a drifter. Only a drifter would think it was a good idea to take five children and your new wife to the middle of nowhere and that it would pull you all together instead of ripping you apart. But then, if you pour vodka on your cornflakes every morning for four or five years, you’re going to have a lot of crazy ideas. A drinking drifter, that was you, our dad, way back when.

I don’t even know what Penny is trying to say, but we are laughing so hard I think I may wet myself. And then I spoil it.

‘I wonder if Dad can hear us laughing.’ The words come out with a giggle, but the sound is wrong. We quiet down after that, the atmosphere broken. I feel like we are in a bubble in the bed, a moment of
alltime
, not just then or now or in the time when you are no more, but all of it together, inseparable. For a while we say nothing, just listen to each other’s breathing and the rustle of eyelashes betraying wide-awake eyes.

It’s Penny who cracks the silence with her soft voice, but this time we don’t laugh. We talk about the night Mum left us. Not when she died, like you will soon, but when she just upped and left.

Penny sniffs a little, still recovering from all the belly laughing and I fight the urge to squeeze her tight. There, in the dark, the years have evaporated and she is just my big sister lying next to me, all natural and glowing and undamaged by life.

‘What happened to you that night?’ I can almost hear her brow furrowing in the sound of her voice. She’ll regret that, my empty thinking space says. More lines, more injections.

‘What do you mean?’ My eyes adjust to the dark and I make patterns out of the shadows and shapes of the plastered ceiling. I think it’s human nature, isn’t it? To look for patterns or meaning in things? That’s what Penny is doing now.

‘You were almost hysterical. We found you out in the field in the middle of the night. You must remember.’ She pauses, maybe doing a little drifting of her own, back to that night. ‘I woke up and you weren’t in bed. What made you go outside? You never said.’

‘I was ten, Penny.’ I state that as if it is enough, and maybe for Penny it is.

‘Were you looking for Mum? Did you think she’d change her mind and come back for us?’ Penny has found a pattern, a meaning that she can understand, and she keeps hold of it.

‘Probably. I don’t remember much about it.’

‘You are a funny one.’ Her voice is more settled. ‘Took hours to calm you down. You kept getting out of bed and going to the window.’

She sighs and we drift into our own worlds. Bubbles within bubbles. She has accepted my lie because it fits in easily, but it’s still a lie. I remember everything from the night our mother left. How could I forget? It was the first time I saw it. Lying here in the dark, in this moment of
alltime
, I let the memory run into my skin.

*

There are a lot of jazz records played in our house, it is the one tenuous bond Mum and you share beyond alcohol and the call of wild blood; a love of music that blares and dances and laughs like you do. Like you do in the good times. There’s a lot of jazz and a lot of rows and a lot of broken glass hidden amongst the books and
the university papers and the vodka and wine bottles that make up your lives.