How to Fake Being Tidy by Fenella Souter

Author:Fenella Souter [Fenella Souter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

And in many ways, we were alone from then on. The glue that had held us together, the warm mother-glue that binds and strengthens, nurtures and guides, had dissolved. We were no longer a family but three atomised individuals, hidden from each other in our impenetrable shrouds of loss. It wasn’t that my father was unloving or uncaring. He just didn’t seem to know what was expected of him. He was in his seventies by then—we were the children of his second marriage—and he was supposed to have died first. He simply wasn’t prepared for the way things had turned out, couldn’t take on the burden of responsibility. He had his own grief to deal with. When we had come home that bleak night, he had poured us glasses of port wine and brandy, for the shock. Beyond that, he was lost.

My brother, at eighteen, was still trapped in his closed and surly late-teenage years. We must have spoken about what had happened—did we?—but I don’t remember what we said. He seemed to cope by not allowing himself to think about it and by going out a lot. I cried. Woke up crying every morning when the nightmare proved to be real, wept in the shower, where the torrents of water failed to drown my sorrow, had to be excused in class (an understanding nod from the teacher), cried if anyone said anything kind to me, cried as I cooked dinner, cried as I lay in bed. Cried over the unfairness of it, cried from the aching longing. In the early days, it seemed like this thing just had to be endured and then it would be over and my mother would be back. For a long time I rejected, like so much gristle, the indigestible fact of death. I tried to dodge the fresh, ever-repeating shock of her permanent absence.

I went from feeling like an average girl to a marked one. The girl whose mother had died. The girl without a mother. It was my first, though not last, piece of ‘bad luck’ in a hitherto privileged and untroubled life in a benevolent world. I felt sorry for myself, because other people couldn’t feel sorry enough. No one can about another person’s tragedy. My friends’ mothers were kind, but they could never love me as my own had. And perhaps I seemed too old to be ‘mothered’ by somebody else. I wasn’t.

At home at night, the house seemed very quiet, although as the months went on my father and I began to spend evenings together in comfortable conversation, sitting on either side of the fire. He missed having my mother to talk to. Unfortunately for the men of the house, I had by then moved out of my cordon bleu phase and moved into an ascetic hippie vegetarianism. Evening after evening, my father politely ate his way through curried lentils and brown rice. He never said a word but I could tell he was quietly relieved when my brother was there to make his one dish, spaghetti bolognese.

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