Page 16 of Pictures of Him

There’s even a mild camaraderie between the three of us as we watch the pallbearers take their places behind the coffin, lifting it to their shoulders in one practised move. Dead parents will do that. The knee-jerk shock of a coffin will do that. Momentarily we stand united in the face of this new truth, the woman who gave birth to us trapped within a shining wooden box.

As we process down the aisle, I search the pews for my friends and find them sitting together near the back of the church. There’s Jack in his sharp black suit, Celia next to him in neat navy blue. Alexa catches my eye as we pass. She is wearing huge, glittery earrings and I love her for it, the disco element to the funeral. We three siblings sit in the front pew, my mother’s coffin stationed unnervingly close, just to our left. Try as I might to concentrate on the vicar’s words, I am tugged right down to the ghost train of memories I wish more than anything to avoid.

The gloom was all mine after my father died. I wandered, desolate, through a house that seemed unfathomably celebratory. My mother and sisters, always exclusive, were now permanently together, laughing and gossiping in the kitchen, while the contents of the ashtray rose higher and the empty wine bottles behind the bin grew into a glass army. Food was generally an irrelevance: my teenage sisters were always on diets and my mother rarely ate, not that I saw anyway. When my father was alive, he would peer into the fridge and fling eggs, cheese, ham and tomatoes onto the table.

‘What shall we make, kiddo?’

It was omelettes mostly, or toasted sandwiches, but he took the snack repertoire to the grave with him andafter he died I lived on toast. I was bewildered by my loss, the senseless, raging pain. The parasitic loneliness. That’s when the pinching began, pinching and pinching, harder and harder, hidden away in my pale blue bedroom until a network of bruises had spread across my inner arms. It wasn’t a cry for help – far from it; all I’d ever wanted was to escape my mother’s notice. More it was an addiction to physical pain, the delicious feeling of hurting yourself until your eyes stung and all other thoughts faded away to nothing. I can remember that feeling even now.

I found out the truth about how my father died hours before I was due back at school. My mother was with her friend Marianne, midway through another long lunch. I could hear them talking, laughing, clinking glasses as I approached the kitchen:Salut!– the toast Marianne always made whether they were on tea or vodka.

I was about to go in when I heard my name.

‘Darling,’ Marianne said as I loitered by the kitchen door. ‘I do think Lucian’s a bit of a worry. He’s so thin and he seems, well, desperately unhappy.’

‘Of course he’s unhappy. He just lost his father.’

I heard the metal click as my mother flicked open her Zippo. I imagined her lipsticked mouth drawing in the smoke, eyes closed.

‘It’s dreadful for you all, I know. But Henry and Lucian were so close. I wondered if it might help him to talk to someone. You know, a professional.’

‘And what’s a shrink going to say to him?’ The anger in my mother’s voice seared beneath the door.

‘“Your father killed himself, did he? How do you feel about that?”’

The shock realisation was as if someone was holding my head beneath a torrent of icy water. Not a heart attack as I’d thought, but a choice. He chose to leave me. Sitting here between my sisters two decades later, it occurs to me that they would have known exactly how my father died and that perhaps not telling ten-year-old me was an act of kindness. I realise that my mother, who now lies metres away, as lost to me as he was, must have been hurt by his death, must have felt her role in it, and was perhaps, in some way, ashamed.

The wake has the surrealist tinge of a nightmare, a champagne-soaked party for four hundred in my mother’s thin, tall brown-brick four-storey. I was last here at sixteen and I am knocked back by its familiarity, the permeation of Acqua di Parma and venom sprayed like blood into the soft furnishings.

My mother’s so-called friends, a conveyor belt of age-defying sexagenarians, queue up to greet me.

‘The black sheep returns,’ they crow, one after another, and it’s a while before I get to my friends, crammed into a shrunken circle in the farthest corner of the drawing room.

‘How’s it going?’ Jack asks, embracing me for the second time today. ‘Anyone called you a cunt yet?’

‘All right?’ asks Harry, gripping both my shoulders and looking into my eyes for a moment too long. He is dressed in a black velvet suit and hand-made snakeskin shoes, like a 1970s pimp. Alexa once told him it made him look like Keith Richards in his South of France heyday and he’s been wearing it on repeat ever since. Beside him is Ling, in a narrow black dress and high shoes, dark hair coiled in plaits on top of her head. She looks beautiful and somehow much older than her twenty three years.

‘I’m sorry about your mother, Lucian,’ she says in her quiet, formal voice.

I’m about to make my standard quip – better off without her – when a wave of regret rolls over me, here in my dead mother’s house, a place where I once lived too. The memory comes, as it always must, of the last time I stood in this drawing room, painted lemon yellow back then.

My mother, drunk, wavering on heels, a fierce rage in that feted face: ‘How dare you blame his death on me? How dare you?’

And me, with the certitude of a sixteen-year-old: ‘Because you betrayed him. You cheated on him.’

She never forgave me; I never tried to understand.

‘Me too, Ling,’ I say instead. ‘I’m sorry too.’

Harry ensnares a passing waitress and takes two bottles of champagne.

‘Grieving son right here,’ he says, pointing at me by way of explanation.

He refills our glasses and there are moments of reprieve now, whole minutes that could almost pass for any other day. The usual tensions are there – Alexa looking too pretty, too seductive in a dress that, now she has removed her jacket, turns out to be backless. Celia, another pretty girl, but with a tendency to dress like her mother, tries so hard to blend in with us, and it is always the act of trying that sets her apart.

She is asking Alexa about her book, which the rest of us understand is the last thing Alexa wants to talk about.

‘It’s going fairly well,’ she says, trying – and partially succeeding – to keep the hostility out of her voice. Nowriter I’ve ever met has wanted to discuss the writing process at a party.

---