Dust to dust

Our silences began at the same time. Both insomniacs, we would wander the house in the middle of the night until our paths crossed unexpectedly in the kitchen, blinking at each other in the fluorescent light. He would see my move-smoothed clothes, I the furrow on his brow. Neither of us had slept a wink, and neither of us would until further admonishment came our way from an unsuspecting family member who kept more respectable hours.

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I took the 7am coach to Heathrow. I slept maybe three hours the night before, one on the bus, and none on the actual flight. On the bus, I thought of the many stray dogs I had adored and claimed as my own, and missed grievously when they would eventually disappear. We saw him in another neighbourhood, my mother would inevitably tell me, my father nodding in chorus. I would childishly curse the fickleness of my would-be pets and exercise my own in forgetting about them. It was not until years later that my mother would confess the scenes of gore she had seen; the death and disease she did her best to keep from me. The murdered schoolgirl she never let me speak about, as if non acknowledgement would banish her in some way. I listened to the hum of the wheels with no inner monologue, nothing to say, struck dumb with the weight of how fiercely and unjustly my parents loved me.

When I met him he was already gone, eyelashes long and black, curling out over a beard and mustache which were close to being snow white. The wrinkled hands which could not button his own shirts close, which he would ask me to do. I thought I had got wiser at keeping my own silences to myself, but I forgot I had started out in good company. While I tried to shove down the truth of the enormous, monstrous love I had for him, my fingers patted down pockets and straightened collars and buttoned things close, trying to seal them shut.

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The peacocks arrived before we did. My feet felt like they were cracking open on the stone floor of the cremation ground, but there they were, tossing their heads back with mythological arrogance, walking right next to the burning pyre, cawing that godawful sound, more daring than I was, less silent than I was. My first introduction to a cremation was the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a film I remember authoritatively stating: “The pyre of a Hindu funeral burns from dawn until dusk.” Which was nonsense, of course, we set out at 3 o’clock and returned at about 7. Back at the house, five cups of tea, not six, his old tattered house slippers no longer by the bedside, an empty chair, an empty room. I had not known that there could be anything worse than the silence, but here it was, its replacement: this deafening sort of finality, an emptiness that threatened to devour.

An empty kitchen, silence finally broken. That night, I kept vigil all alone.