Words at a Wake

“I hate to say this,” said Olivia’s cousin Maxine, who had a habit of saying things she hated to say that would have seemed to be borderline masochistic if she didn’t enjoy it so much. “But to a large extent, and I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, he was the architect of his own misfortunes!”

     She was speaking to Olivia’s neighbour, Edna, a timid, but thoroughly nice little woman, who had been put in a thoroughly awkward position, but to her credit, said, “Well, I always found him a perfect gentleman!”

     Of course the remark wasn’t meant for Olivia’s ears. Maxine seemed to be afflicted by the not uncommon assumption that the bereaved lose their sense of hearing. That they were so wrapped up in their loss (and if they were not, they ought to be!) that nothing else came to their attention.

     Though they rarely met, she hadn’t been surprised when Maxine turned up at her father’s funeral. She was the kind of person who believed in blood being thicker than water and all that, and had to show her respects.

     What respects, thought Olivia, looking at Maxine in her elaborate mourning with her perfect make-up (though subtle, of course, as befitted the occasion). 

     Sometimes the worst kind of grief is the one that’s tinged with an element of relief, because that brings guilt in its wake, frothing and clinging. Olivia was relieved, as well as grieving. She couldn’t help it. She knew her Dad wouldn’t have minded. He had even said – and oh, dear God, she wished he hadn’t! – “You’ll be better off when I’m gone!”

     His arms had been the first ones to hold Olivia with love and tenderness. Her mother had suffered from acute post-natal depression. Later on, when Olivia was old enough to understand, she had spoken frankly about it, and her daughter had admired her courage. She told herself that she couldn’t really remember her early infancy, despite what some claimed in their autobiographies and memoirs, but there was still some sweet echo of a voice saying “Don’t fret, chick. Dadda’s here!” and of the way he held her, firmly, and yet as carefully as if she were a piece of precious porcelain. 

     Her mother got well again, but decided against having any more children. Some, including Maxine’s mother, used to issue warnings about only child, lonely child, but Olivia wasn’t a lonely child at all. She had good friends, loved her kindergarten, and had great fun bossing her dolls around. Above all she loved her parents. Both of them, with all her heart, and yet there was still something very special with her Dad. He shared her love of the silly and the slightly surreal, and made up the most wonderful stories. Her Mum loved them as much as she did, though she often said she didn’t know where he got the ideas from. But she also said, “You ought to publish them.” He shook his head vigorously, making the little curl of hair that kept flopping down onto his forehead bob up and down. He had no interest in being an author. They were for Libby. That was what he always called her. When she was very little, she had trouble pronouncing her “v’s” and her Dad had said, well, that’s nothing to be upset about! Despite some warnings to the contrary, before very long she could pronounce them perfectly, but the name stuck. 

     Somehow, he spoilt her rotten, but didn’t spoil her at all. She remembered that when she was a teenager, and eager to follow the fashions and fads of some of her classmates (who, of course, had those hypothetical other fathers and mothers who allowed everything!) he had said, “Listen, Libby, if you want to dye your hair purple and yellow, that’s fine with me, though I daresay your teachers might have something to say about it! And as for your clothes, well, folk have had more than their fair share of things to say about mine!” He had a taste for what he called “interesting shirts”!  “But I’m telling you now, no tattoos and no piercings. Well, okay, ears are fine,” (she’d had that done already, with her parents’ permission) “but not in places you – might prefer to talk to your Mum about. “

     Of course she had railed, but had also breathed a secret sigh of relief. The thought of having a tattoo done freaked her out. Now she could say quite truthfully that her Dad wouldn’t let her! 

     When she began to have boyfriends, he tried not to be all Victorian and over-protective, and yet when her heart was first broken, Libby was comforted beyond all measure (though of course she chose not to admit to it for a while!) that her Dad meant it when he said she was far too good for that silly boy. 

     Growing into adulthood, at first she was angered that others criticised her Dad, but with reluctance, and keeping it to herself, she supposed she could see why. Or see why others felt that way. It was true he wasn’t particularly ambitious. He still had pretty much the same position in the engineering firm where he worked as he’d had when she was born, though everyone spoke highly of him. He wasn’t always careful with money. Oh, he didn’t go on massive spending splurges, and rarely spoke a thing on himself beyond necessities, but he often presented his wife and daughter with presents just because, as he said, he felt like it and they deserved it, and was incapable of seeing a TV appeal without contributing to it. 

     She knew it bothered her mother a bit, as she said, they were reasonably well-off, but not millionaires, and she wished he would realise that they had all they needed, and that sad as it was, you couldn’t help every starving child or neglected puppy in the world. 

     But he respected her, as well as adoring her, and knew her advice was good, and that acted as a brake on his more extravagant impulses. Well, at least most of the time. 

     One thing he was quite adamant he was going to spend money on was their 25^th wedding anniversary. Their Silver Wedding. He bought his beloved Lynne a beautiful silver locket, and took her for a holiday to a hotel in the country called the Silverdale. 

     Olivia was watching a show on TV that she would never watch again when she received a phonecall from the hotel manager. He broke the news as gently as he could, but there’s some news that can’t be broken gently. Just as they were sitting down to their special anniversary dinner, and the waiter had brought the champagne, Lynne, who had been laughing and joking and flirting with her husband like a young girl, as he gazed at her adoringly, had slumped from her chair. She had suffered a massive heart attack.

     Olivia rushed to the hospital where the kindly hotel manager, who said she only needed to contact him for any help, had said that she had been taken. 

     She arrived too late. Her husband by her bedside, holding her hand and whispering words of love and reassurance, Lynne had died.

     From that day on, thought Olivia, he had looked lost. That was the only word for it. Hopelessly lost and knowing he would not be found again. A frightened little boy in the guise of a man suddenly aged. Even then, he did his best to protect her and to not let it show, but she knew. Of course she knew.

     She was never quite sure, and perhaps neither was he, if he took a conscious decision to turn to drink, or if it happened entirely of its own insidious volition. She never saw him drunk, nor even, except very rarely, smelt it on his breath, but she knew. Who am I to criticise, she thought. I have a glass or three of wine more often than I should. She knew, of course, that it went well beyond that. But the thing was, he was a functioning, a fully functioning drinker. 

     He wasn’t sacked from the engineering firm. On the contrary, they had recently raised the prospect of promotion once again. And he had refused once again.

     “I’m leaving them, anyway,” he told Olivia, “Oh, not with any acrimony or anything like that. They’re a good firm to work for and have always been very fair with me. But I’ve decided I want to be my own boss. Well, joint-boss, anyway!” He smiled, and that was something he didn’t do very often, now. “Luke is starting off a business of his own – lighting, home décor, that kind of thing.” Luke was, as he liked to say, his oldest and closest friend. Both were, supposed Olivia, true. They had been at infant school together – but had only met up again recently. And though he got on well with people and was popular, he’d always set more store on family than friends. She’d been introduced to Luke, and they were on perfectly civilised terms. But somehow she couldn’t quite like him, and suspected it was mutual. 

     Still, she had been by no means against the venture. On the contrary, she thought it might do her Dad good to have his life take a different direction. She knew he would never “get over” his loss – she wasn’t sure if she ever would – but a new focus and new responsibilities could be positive, couldn’t they?

     The trouble was that like so many people who hadn’t experienced it her Dad under-estimated just how hard it could be being self-employed. But Luke knew all about it. He’d told him. He’d been brought up in a family business. Later on, Olivia found out that was in fact, not entirely untrue, but it had been a small sweet shop that had closed and been sold for a loss after only two years. 

     She would have been the first to admit that she didn’t know any more than her Dad did, but when she went to the shop herself only a couple of months later, to buy some light fittings she needed, it hit her horribly in the face that this wasn’t working out. There was a large display devoted to “ambient lighting flowers” that was gathering dust, despite them being reduced to £5 each which, Olivia suspected, was less than they’d paid for them. The ceiling almost seemed to be sagging under the weight of chandeliers that were far too big for most rooms, but her Dad had to regretfully admit that he didn’t have the fittings she wanted. “Sorry about that, chick. We must have sold out.” She suspected that though he was no liar, the truth was more likely that they had never bought in. Something so prosaic had no place in the Lurex Lighting Emporium. At first that name and the attendant coincidence had proved too good to be true. Her Dad’s name was, indeed, Rex, and put the two together, well, half of “Luke”, anyway, and you got – Hey Presto, Lurex! Even Olivia had thought, in passing, that it was clever. But a word associated with a certain type of lady’s top proved more of a cause of derision than admiration. 

     Still, a business can weather an unfortunate name, and even some unwise purchases. But this one didn’t. Luke decamped with such money as was left. He wasn’t much better at crime than he was at running a business, was soon caught and sentenced, but all the money – not that there was much left of it – was gone. 

     Her Dad had to sell the lovely family home where he and Olivia and Lynne had been so happy. One day he said he would never forgive himself, not with all the memories there, and the next he said it might be for the best. Olivia wasn’t sure if he really believed either.

     It did, for a while, now he was living in the little bungalow, mean that even when he had paid his debts off, he had some money. 

     And he began to spend it. Some on drink, and a great deal more on gambling. Olivia had always known that he “liked a flutter” as people said, but it had never seemed a particular problem.  Indeed, he had even said, though he liked the local bookie, “You’ll rarely see a poor bookie, Libby, and that tells you something!” She couldn’t help feeling herself partly to blame, as she had helped him finally get online. It had seemed like a good idea. And yes, he did join an online forum for people who shared his interest in transport, and at first, at least, wasn’t averse to airing his views on the news, though he had no time for malicious keyboard warriors. Then he discovered online gambling sites. Of course he didn’t discover them, he had known they existed; nobody could watch commercial TV without knowing that! But one night, when he couldn’t sleep, as he often couldn’t, and there was, by some oversight (or over-drink) no booze in the bungalow, he decided that it might pass the time for a while. He told Olivia about it, and at first she wasn’t unduly worried. Or so she told herself. He even had a good win, and promptly got her a present with it. 

     But before long he was spending hours on end in front of the screen, or on his phone, and though he had some more wins, they were outnumbered by the losses. He still looked lost, but there was also a glazed look on his face, an impatience when he was away from his gambling, and once, when Olivia had asked him – trying to be casual and non-judgmental about it, though now she wished she hadn’t been – if he’d had any decent wins, he looked genuinely puzzled and said, “I don’t know, love. I don’t really keep a tally of it. It takes my mind off things.” His expression didn’t look as if it did. But of course, he wasn’t playing at the time. 

     Olivia began to hate the alibi slogan of When the Fun Stops, Stop, that flashed up in an almost playful yellow font at the end of gambling adverts. So far as her Dad was concerned, the fun had never started. 

     He was a man who found it hard to hide things, but she was pretty sure that the situation was far more grave than he let on. He was still her devoted Dad, and when she came round to the bungalow, he gave her his full attention – or he appeared to. She knew, underneath, that it was only a kind façade. I ought to do something, she thought. He’s a grown man, she thought. 

     A silly, trivial thing made her aware of what, underneath, she’d known all along. She used the last of the milk in a plastic bottle when she was round at the bungalow to have a coffee with him. Yes, he made a point of having coffee and milk in the house. Though he had never been a tidy man (and she took after him!) there was no obvious sign of hoarding or squalor – the bungalow wasn’t immaculate, but well within the bounds of, in itself, no cause for worry. She went to put the empty bottle in the recycling bin, and saw a whole layer of unopened envelopes from the Housing Association and the Utility Companies and the bank and the local council. I should say something, she thought, but then that other voice said, he’ll think you’re checking up on him. And she didn’t want to fall out with her Dad. 

     She could work out only too well what had happened without there being witnesses – at least witnesses to the last part of the horrible drama. After the terrible news had come about him being knocked down by a car she went into the bungalow, her own eyes glazed with grief, and saw something that he had opened, possibly thinking that as it only had the name of a firm and an innocuous PO Box address it was nothing to worry about, and it was from the bailiffs, and there was a great deal of red lettering on it, and warnings about an imminent visit that could only be prevented by paying an amount of several thousand pounds. There was also an empty whisky bottle on the table. 

     She bore the car driver, who seemed utterly traumatised by the incident, no malice at all. As the witnesses had testified, he wasn’t to blame. He wasn’t exceeding the speed limit, but her Dad, for once, with a determined, desperate effort, well and truly drunk and not just dulled, had walked straight into his path. He never regained consciousness.

     Olivia tried to blank out her cousin Maxine’s words, tried to ignore the supercilious woman in her immaculate warning, and thought, no, if you want to blame anyone, blame me. I was too scared of a scene, still too keen to be my Dad’s pet to say anything, when I know damned well that I should have done.

     She wanted to weep, but it seemed as if she had out-wept herself, turned into someone hollow and haunted.

     But then she heard a voice that was not Maxine’s, a dear, kind voice.

     “Don’t fret, chick. Dadda’s here!”