Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog by Emily Dean

Author:Emily Dean [Dean, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Amazon: B07L6KYSC7
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2019-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

8 January

‘Tell me about Jerusalem, Em.’

I decided she was unlikely to buy the ‘absolute pile of shite’ line, so opted for the truth.

We were at my mother’s house in Muswell Hill for our postponed Christmas. Adam was bouncing Bertie on his knee; Giggle was pacing around, high on the scent of turkey, cynically working my mother’s tendency to over-indulge his endless appetite.

My dad started talking about Jerusalem. I wasn’t sure he had actually seen the play. But that was the kind of detail that rarely bothered him. ‘An extraordinary performance. Mark Rylance is easily our greatest living stage actor,’ he said grandly, letting out a large fart that no one acknowledged except Mimi, who gave an elated gasp.

Rach grinned at me. My mother was stirring the special gravy she always made from a yellowing Delia Smith newspaper cutting. The tree was buckling under the weight of the bizarre decorations she had kept since our childhood. We never had red baubles. Instead there was a blue Afro-wigged angel, a little photo Rach put in a tiny frame of me having a tantrum and a miniature African wood carving of a naked woman that our grandmother gave us one year.

It was hot and noisy in the small kitchen, with an orchestra of competing voices. Rach looked weary.

‘Do you want to come and sit up here, Rach?’ I suggested, and she nodded, slowly mounting the three steps up into my mum’s living room area, cluttered with chipped bowls of potpourri, theatre prints and Mimi’s drawings. She sat in the battered chesterfield chair gifted to my mother by Lynsey several years ago, which now had exploding innards held together by gaffer tape. ‘That chair is SO our family,’ Rach said once. ‘Decaying decadence. You can hear it screaming, “How have I ended up in this weird place?”’

She glanced at the continuing discussion about Shakespeare in the kitchen. Comforted to have it in the background but wanting space from it sometimes. Just as it always was.

‘You see, YOU get me,’ she said, of the subtle rescue mission.

‘We get each other,’ I replied.

Mimi urged Rach to open her long-overdue Christmas presents. Rach took her time over it, partly because of her diminished energy but also because that was how she approached everything. With deliberation, rather than frenzied gorging.

She got to my gifts: a gold necklace, a cashmere top and the hairdresser vouchers for a cut and highlights.

I had started to panic about the hair vouchers the night before, wondering whether the escalating events of the previous week had rendered the present wildly inappropriate. ‘You’re about to have chemo and lose your hair, here’s a tasteless reminder of the life you’ve left behind!’ I considered removing the envelope with its silk bow from under the tree. And then decided that would be not be in keeping with the way Rach was dealing with this – wanting to stay positive, talking about the future.

‘Thought it would be something to look forward to after … everything,’ I said awkwardly as she opened it.

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