Lemon Bleach and Lavender

You could say that he had stars in his eyes. A vacant stare, lost to the beauty of the stratosphere, seeing but only looking within, to the darkness there. It was a glorious night, the sky awash with light not from earth but from the heavens, pin pricks in an inky canvas, arrowheads through skin. Over the course of the evening the low slung moon had swum lazily across the sky, and now sat comfortably in the blue, smiling down at the world beneath, both charmed, and oddly sinister. Behind the man were murmurs, and a scene almost biblical was brushing against him, but barely registering. He gave them shadow, set against the window as he was, imposing in the rift. He also gave them shelter, from the emptiness of the night. 

‘He always loved you, you know.’ There was another man just inches away, lying ragged upon a bed too big for his frailty. The figure at the window turned, to catch, finally, what the dying had to say. The frosted pupils were focused upon his daughter now. ‘…In his own way’. And then silence. Suddenly no-one was moving. Even the grandfather clock languishing in the semi darkness, for a beat, failed to tick. ‘Perhaps you just found each other at the wrong time, for both of you.’ His words, so urgent before, feverish, were now dead weights on his tongue, dropping soundlessly to the carpet. He groaned, dragging himself upward, and it was too the ceiling that he made his last address. ‘You could have been happy’. His voice was kind, and full of pity. But it was for the old man that all the pity in the room was now felt. It hung, pungent and embarrassed, congealing, septic. Even the hand now gripping her fathers arm was full of it. Because they knew then he wouldn't understand. He would never understand. 

It took a long time for the younger man to pull himself away, away from his forlorn fantasy’s, memories, and into the even grimmer present. It was not the quiet, meagre sobbing. That had been going on a while. It was the joyous squawk of the telephone, its keys slightly flat. But there was no-one there to answer, and everything was still. The clock ticked without urgency. The lights inside where not switched on. No one wanted to move, to change anything, and so they ignored the sound, the tin in their ears, praying that it would go away. The sole occupant to which it could have any meaning was gone, swept into the sunrise of that cold winters eve. A heavy weight on an empty bed. Gone forever. At that moment, the man on the bed, wrapped in tat and glasses skewed, seemed more real to them than their own selves, still alive beside him. Grief was starting as it always does, the dead gifted the identities of the living. No husk wanted to move, until someone else came in, and did the moving for them. The calling, shifting, weighed down lifting. The bureaucratic nightmare that is death. The final punch in the gut of a man who wished to remain anonymous. 

Perhaps to his discredit, the night had passed quickly. He had done as told, followed the mourners as lettered, hugged his friends and kissed his mother. She had shrunk beneath him. When finally he left, stretched tired but electric in the ragged dawn, the door had muffled his passing into the night, and no-one sought to join him. He crossed roads, and toured past houses. The streets where slick with oily black, save the street lamps, and leaves stained their bloody light, and guided him forwards. When he reached his own home he felt almost sick with relief, to be in a house for the living. And then sick he was, into a cistern meant only for piss. 

The days after stretched heavily. The first night he had woken sodden, shivering but soaked in sweat, skin on fire and heart cold, and empty. This would repeat itself, a pattern that marked each sleep long after his father was cold in the earth. Each day posed a new challenge, more tired eyes to labour over problems scaled to monstrous proportions by grief and funerary time constraints. He spent more hours with his family that week than he had since he was a child, but the meetings obligation soared any reconciliation until days later, when came the final chance before the funeral. On that last day he found himself on a greying sofa beside his sister. She rocked a cat gently upon her lap, and he rocked alone. It was the first he had cried, and she would help him, long after that, tears becoming as common as they had been undesirable. When he had stopped, she handed him a tissue, and sat back with as open a look as a person can have. In the long conversation that followed they did not discuss what the old man had said, nor the arrangements that would tidy up his passing. Instead, they took stock, considering like children how far they had come, and what that great expanse of time had in store for them next. 

'I'm moving abroad'. She had emigrated now to a chair by the window, and, curled back, her legs rapped around one another and a cigarette cradled between her red lips, starred intently at him for the first time. She said it quite matter-of-factly, as plainly as possible, but still his mind grappled clumsily with the news before forming a response. He felt betrayed, but more than that disappointed, that all these years it had not been him she had stayed for. The fear of impending loneliness, a loss of yet more family obliged to stay, made him cold. But God forbid this be articulated. 'You should do what you think is right', he said. He did not wait long enough to see the hurt he felt reflected back at him. Instead, the man fled upstairs, and hid where the sick parody had started, in his fathers room. It had been cleaned, the bed stripped, the sickening stench pasted over irreverently with lemon bleach and lavender. The hush of the space was unbearable. He did not stay long. 

The day of the funeral started as it would end, grey and unpromising. Mourners filed into a rain scrubbed church, toy soldiers in uniform black stacked into pews and dialed to sing at appropriate moments. He had not been asked to give a eulogy, but his sister had. Unlike him, grief suited her, because she had nothing to feel guilty about. Instead she was serene, and spoke beautifully, practiced as a poet. You would be forgiven for thinking she often lost a father. He was used to such petty thoughts. Once finished he slid with ease onto the hushed streets outside, and as the memory of the sound rolled through him, took to watching the people drifting by. The man had bid his sister farewell before the funeral, and so it was she he lost sight of first, snatched away by a taxi and the promise of a brighter tomorrow. His mother hung from the arm of an uncle, and pretended she could not see him. He did the same. A cousin he had never met disentangled herself from the group, and offered her condolences. That made him cry, welling up over his best suit. Awkwardly she walked with him to his car, and watched him drive away. Years later that same cousin would invite him to her wedding, and he would attend, and drink champagne and laugh and feel well again. But for now, she could not have made less of an impression.

He never attended the reading of the will. The thought of benefiting from this death seemed perverse to him, the memory of a relationship disarrayed by the presence of an ulterior motive. The fear that his attentions had not been kind. But benefit he would, a child full of self-righteous principle, but not enough to fail to cash the check. He would spend a portion on himself, and a portion on visiting his sister. Their relationship, he knew, could not survive the parting, reliant as it was on forced interactions and dogged attempts on her part. And survive it must, for his own selfish sake if no others. The sky his flight departed from was a deep, crystalline blue, clear as water but revealing nothing but air for miles beyond. This was the night sky that lulled him to sleep, slowly filtered into nothing on his long journey across the Atlantic. It had only one focal point, a fragment so small that few eyes and fewer lenses could remember it. A lone star had nestled within the seascape, and would remain the rest of the night. It lay there, uncomprehending of the changing world around it, of the darkening sky. 

A final clarification is in order, before this story closes. The old mans final words had not been ramblings. Their meanings cut deep into every being present in that room, and would cut deeper still as their ramifications rippled further, into the negative space of his after life. But nor are they the business of this reader. And so let us instead be resolved that the next time the hero of our story stared intently at the heavens, it was to a better end.