As we grew older, the gulf between our father and us widened. Perhaps it was our changing bodies that alienated him, our inevitable evolution. He would pass our bedroom door with his head turned away and his eyes almost shut, as though he had no wish to see the chaos within: And chaos it was, clothes lay jumbled on the floor, washed stockings and other intimates hung from the shower rail, and our dressing table was crammed with pins and hairbrushes and curlers and bottles of old hairspray we had stolen from our mother. It was around this time that he bought Nuisance, an African Grey parrot, whose real name was Colonel Bird but was quickly renamed by my mother who found his incessant squawking unbearable.
In the evening around the dinner table, our father ate in thoughtful silence, his body bent over his food, while our mother and Agnes prattled about the day. We respected his position; we understood that we could not be there if he was not, and yet somehow we could not gather him in, make him part of us. Now I sometimes wonder if he ever thought of a son, a boy with a mind as calculating as his, who might have sat at his end of the dining room away from the candelabrum and the silver vase from which blowsy roses discarded their petals on the polished depths of the table.
~~~
After our father died, it was decided that our mother, Agnes, Nuisance, and I would return to Scotland to live with our grandmother. There was a reason for this, for only days after the funeral, it transpired that our beautiful house, Number 25 Long Street, with its teak front door and bougainvillea-draped veranda did not actually belong to us at all, but to the mine for which my father worked. We were given a month to pack up, for already a new accountant had been appointed in Scotland and was heading over the sea to take our place. My mother, weakened by the loss of her husband and the further discovery that she had no home, took to her bed.
Agnes and I wandered about the house, uncertain of what to do. We had never applied ourselves; we were utterly unaware of how the world worked. Instead of clearing cupboards and donating furniture and sorting through the clutter that filled the attic, we took refuge in the garden, Agnes on a rug in the small orchard, and me on the swing. Fat wasps delved into the flesh of the fruit; we tread warily in our bare feet for the ground was littered with decaying plums. We ate mulberries until our mouths and fingers were stained almost black and the day had dissolved into evening, the pale ice cream sky melting above us. We waited until bats had begun to swoop and dive and we could smell the night-flowering jasmine commingling in the air with the scent of apples. At last, cold in our thin dresses, we would go inside to find the kitchen empty and Nuisance hissing in his cage; for even our maids had disappeared when our father had died. Agnes proved more practical than I; she cracked eggs into a bowl and scrambled them up with milk and butter and served them on bread she had toasted beneath the grill, but I could do nothing because I had never even opened a tin before and could not make any sense of the can opener and its bewildering mechanics.
~~~
Grief struck us all differently. My mother, as to be expected, just gave up. And Agnes, despite being the younger sister, began to step forward. Not obviously to be sure, but as the days passed, her proficiency became apparent. In all decisions, it was she we deferred to. I would stand there helpless, as Agnes mulled something over, her crammed teeth chewing her bottom lip.
And what of me?
At our father’s funeral, I did not cry (for how can you grieve for something you think you have barely known?) but even as his coffin disappeared under a layer of crumbling red earth, it began. The counting. At first it helped me sleep, that slow ascension of numbers, but as the days passed, I found myself counting other things too, putting order in the world. Five opalescent flies lay dead on the bathroom windowsill. There were thirty steps to the front gate. Two bottles of milk were delivered each morning to the porch. One box of ladyfingers lay in the larder with twenty biscuits inside. Nuisance ate fourteen sunflower seeds in four minutes. I was 5,206 days old. It had been three and a half days since our mother had spoken a word.
~~~
The Mine organized a removal company to pack us up, and when the men arrived, they moved through our home like locusts, wrapping everything from old chutney bottles in the larder to my christening spoon. At first Agnes and I followed them around, trying to help but the men seemed not to see us. Moreover, they moved with ferocity we were unused to, an intent, which frightened us and sent us out into the garden again.
On the second evening of the removal, we came inside to discover that the kitchen had been packed up, and we had no plates or forks or even pots. Every cupboard was bare and dusty and smelled already like a house that had been left untouched for a long time. We opened all the doors and stared into those dark spaces, examining with care all the things we never knew about our house — the bricks beneath the sink were soft with moss; mice had evidently shared our home with us, for little droppings lay scattered like crumbs all over the cupboard floors. That night we scoured the pantry and made a feast of raisins and biscuits, of old chocolates still in their wrappers but now gone pale with age. We opened a jar of jam and peeled off the wax and scooped the fruit out with our fingers. We closed our mouths around the cool of the tap and drank the water like that. Afterward we crept through the rooms where the furniture had been wrapped in rugs and wooden crates stood stacked ready to be shipped.
About Sam Grieve
