Breaking Light by Karin Altenberg

Author:Karin Altenberg [Altenberg, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

9

Uncle Gerry’s death was awfully plain. He just slipped away one day, sitting in his chair. A coward sneaking out of the back door without saying goodbye. It was an aneurysm, Dr Lennon confirmed, and, rather unimaginatively, blamed the bottle before adding that it might just as well have been the liver. ‘Quite rotten through,’ he said. ‘Must have been in excruciating pain.’

To Gabriel, the episode was disappointing. He had been cheated of what was supposed to have been the most devastating and significant moment of his life. It did not occur to him that the loss had already seeped into him and that he had lived with the anger, grief and absence for almost a year, ever since the episode in the pub on the moor. He had carried the unbearable for so long. The actual death – the stiffening corpse in the surviving armchair – was just something that had been left behind, a somewhat awkward legacy that one didn’t quite know how to deal with – like the cottage with the books and records and stuffed birds and the old tweed jacket, which Gabriel took to wearing. At the funeral, as he carried his wreath to the newly filled grave, Gabriel was struck by the futility of this conventional gesture; it did not seem to match the shadows in his own heart. The whole thing had been confusing – too confusing to know exactly what it signified.

*

The memory of Uncle Gerry still enraged Mr Askew. It had occupied his mind for days now. Why could those blasted memories not leave him alone? He stomped along Market Street with anger in his step. ‘What if I, too, had taken to the bottle, like the two of them? What then, eh? Eh?’ he muttered to himself, making a couple of schoolchildren step off their scooters to giggle and point. And then, halting at the street corner, he stood, shaking his head like an old horse, and said, ‘I suppose I am to blame. I should have done something. But no one told me what to do. No one ever told me anything.’ How easily we betray each other, he thought. And, most frequently, most devastatingly, we deceive those closest to us. Was there supposed to be some kind of awful symmetry to it? That kind of betrayal was like suppressing one’s own origins, like detaching our life from its force and context. That’s when we split in two, so that we can never be whole again. Never be one. ‘And yet,’ he muttered aloud, ‘we are told we must learn to forgive, to overcome, to bridge and create order out of chaos.’ When I try to imagine harmony, all I remember is a palm pressed into mine like a gift – or an offering: the unexpressed loyalties and tenderness of my childhood.

Suddenly appalled, he straightened himself up; in another minute he might have cried – there at the corner of Market Street and Gorse Lane. A grown man like himself.

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