A Tale of Two Halves

I knew death like something scrawled on the back of my hand. Nostrils that once flared at the smell of hot coffee, soon became immune. Ears that once twitched at the sound of inconsolable sobbing, the babble of my aunts fighting over worthless heirlooms, and arguments seeping through the floorboards, soon became attuned. And a tongue, once unfamiliar with all the jargon around death, soon absorbed every word thrown at it: coffin, cremation, funeral.

  And I never dared to err from this familial instinct to move on. 

  It all stemmed from my mom. She was the best at it. Being the eldest daughter, the equivalent of the blushing bride at a wedding, she was forced to run around, topping up glasses, furnishing the guests with unfunny anecdotes, and watching, with a restless eye, as the appetiser trays browned off in the oven. They would’ve been so proud of you, Missy, so proud. No-one gave me a second thought. They never did. 

  I don’t think my mom was ever quite herself after, though. My eldest sister, Margot, became something of a mother to all of us: she was the one to get Mom out of bed and walk me to school every morning. In doing so she had put down a marker in history, so that whenever she graced us with her presence - grotesquely, imperiously skinny - we had to act as though we were permanently indebted to her: Yes, thank you, Margot, for taking out the trash that one time when you were fifteen, we are eternally grateful. 

  She had no choice anyway. We had no dad, and, consequently, we had no mom. That’s what set Mom off, I think: Dad walking out on us. Okay, yeah, I’m a cliché: My mom and dad never saw eye to eye. My mom’s favourite pastime, if she wasn’t cowering under a mist of Valium, sticking her chocolatey fingers into some mail-order cake, was working out how to exact her finely-choreographed revenge on her husband, and make up for all those years of torment, humiliation and filth. I don’t know why she took so long. The only way to slay an alcoholic is by creeping up behind them and swinging a wine bottle and cracking their skull open. It would be like mutilating a florist with a pair of hand pruners or bludgeoning Ernest Hemingway with his beloved typewriter. 

  It’s fair to say, though, that while Mom has managed to bequeath to her children an almost soldierly urge to grit our teeth and keep on moving, she had somewhat failed to evenly apportion her hate of her husband across the family. Margot obviously shared the same dislike as my mother: she lost pretty much all of her teenage years picking up the pieces after my father left. My brother, Harry, seemed, which was often the case with Harry, resigned from the smallness of the back-and-forth bickering and felt a sense of haughty elevation in doing so. My other sister, Eleonora, one of the most forgiving people I had ever met, took the same view as me when it came to my dad, in whom I recognised a version of myself: an unashamedly roguish, bomb-dropping alcoholic. I was as cynical as they came, and I wasn’t going to take everything Mom said at face value, even though we weren’t allowed to talk, let alone think about the man. But Dad wasn’t going to stop there. Even from the other side of the country, understood to be living with the crocs in the Everglades, continued to send shockwaves our way. Even after he died. But it was okay because that’s what a funeral is for, isn’t it? To bring closure, quell any ill feelings? Dad didn’t even have that. We were simply told to forget. But we couldn’t. 

  It’s part of the reason why I was so desensitised to death. Death I could deal with. It was the zombies I could not stand. 

  This wasn’t just the case with my dad, though, as I’m about to tell you. Dad was a missing piece in one hell of a puzzle. Even before he died, there was always something gnawing at me from inside: an unpluggable gap, a gaping vacuum. It was probably because I wasn’t meant to enter this world alone. I was supposed to have a twin, as Mom, Margot and Harry kept telling me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

  Because it’s a compelling image, isn’t it? My mom, on the day of my birth, almost twenty years ago, in a mess of bedsheets; the promise of a newborn, my twin, who should have landed, with a soft thud, in the swaddling cloth at the bottom of a Moses basket, falling into the cold silk of an oak coffin. I often imagined where they would be now. A dancing princess. A warpaint-smeared, tousle-haired brother. One minute, fuchsia pink. The next, iridescent blue. They sometimes perched themselves on my right shoulder: a fey, white-winged, harp-toting cherub. And then, for dramatic, though surely necessary effect, I flicked them off their little resting place and watched, as if in slow motion, as their porcelain body shattered everywhere. 

  ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Thredson, one of your children is growing considerably faster than the other,’ my mom’s obstetrician would have said, as though he could see my fingers resolving into a Travis Bickle formation on the X-ray monitor. He would be telling the truth. My devil horns were growing even then. In the womb.

  Most killers wait a few years before they make their mark, zero in on their first victim; snare and skin their first bunny rabbit. It took Richard Ramirez twenty-four years. 

  But me? Well, I’ve been killing since before I was born. 

  I wouldn’t have known this, if my family had just kept their mouths shut. I was left in a permanent state of paranoia, dissatisfaction, soul-searching: Who was this twin destined to be? They were the ghost eating at the dinner table, the ghost helping Mom to deadhead the rose bush. It’s like they were really there; a near-perfect delineation of a character that had come from years of family exposure. And I would never forgive them for it. I hated them for it. They had even planted an orchid in the sunroom to remember them, not that they existed, of course. 

  You should do the same for your Ted, Mom said, unhelpfully euphemising death. 

  A new euphemism was coined every week it seemed. Oh, I’m sorry about your husband, they might say as they admire the urn, or I’m sorry to hear about your husband’s passing as they choke on a devilled egg. They expected me to live in an eternal state of purdah; where I would wilt in the armchair between going to open the door to another word of condolence, or another blueberry cobbler. But I refused to grieve. I wasn’t going to become the bloodshot twentysomething keening over her dead cat in her beautifully noir apartment; no, that just wasn’t me.

  My funeral director - who made me an exceptionally good coffee by the way - told me death resembled something of a power outage: immediate farewells that leave so many shadows behind, snuffing out every chink of hope as the loved one goes. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. Candles were burning bright, animals were beginning to emerge from winter hibernation and flowers, glossy and pert, were finally starting to flourish again, nature wearing its new-found beauty with the pride of a rousing peacock.

Where the naysayers were expecting me to cry and crumble, I was bright and brave, and where the Jehovah’s Witnesses expected me to sleep and feel sorry for myself, I was darting around the house, blithe and bouncy as a spring rabbit. Important to stay busy, they would say, as though I needed to keep occupied, lest I combust; a downfall spun faster than a rabid hamster. But this, I suppose, is how one feels when they start a new job, or move to the other side of the world. I was finally free. 

  Well... Not quite. 

  I suppose what the funeral director meant was that when a person dies, it’s the sense of closeness you had with them that dies too. All the memories - a Jackson Pollock of laughter and excitement - gets touched with an unmistakable shade of blue; a brush-stroked smudge of periwinkle, like a newspaper left in the rain for too long. 

  The physical closeness, of course, goes too. But this wasn’t the case for me. What better way to hold onto the memory of your loved one than to keep them with you, once they had gone beyond the veil? Why pour them into an urn when you can continue to run your fingers through their hair or trace the grooves of their skin - even when they’re dead? Yeah! Dead! Too right! 

  Forcing open the corrugated door, the cellar shimmers a bright, unforgiving white. My husband of twenty years, flashing a different colour between every shard of light, was finally a fabular whole. 

‘Hello, Ted,’ I begin, lifting his limp arm with all the brio of a ventriloquist holding his dummy, planting a kiss on his blood-drenched cheek. ‘I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.’