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Issue 14 - January / February 2009 - Prose
The Gift by Jamie Mollart
I put the phone down, already feeling hollow and shocked, forcing back tears that stacked against the inside of my squeezed-shut eyes, like snow piled against the outside of a winter-sealed door.
“She’d want us to go,” my sister said later, and I felt only anger rising, because how could she know that. I didn’t; there was no way either of us could ever know.
Amongst the resentment and confusion and the struggle to comprehend, I forced myself not to think about it, but to trundle on. Focusing on forward. But, there it was. There was no way to make that statement. No way. Because despite everything- the blood, the genetics, the DNA- the unswerving reality was that she was a life unknown to me. Separated by geography and my own self-indulgent ignorance of my extended family.
It was unfair to make that statement. I kept coming back to that. To say it, meant presumption. It meant speaking for someone else and that person was dead. It needled me. More so than it should have. She’d want us to go.
What was this sensation buried behind the requisite remorse, sorrow, loss, grief, fear, mortality, emptiness, sadness? I knew. It was guilt. An awareness that I’d missed an opportunity. I mined the words of condolence written to my Uncle; by people I didn’t know, telling of things she’d done, that I’d never known of. I thought of the times we’d met as adults and counted them on one hand. As a child she is there in my mind, raven hair and a smile. Soft words and dark eyes. As an adult she is but a brief moment. A glimpse. When I thought of her, my head span like the first cigarette of the day.
“Here Comes The Sun” played as the wicker coffin was carried past us. The squeak of shoes on polished floor, the creak of the wickerwork. In there. She was in there. Floating on the shoulders of people I didn’t know.
So many bodies crammed into the crematorium, they had to sit on the floor. And even then I felt like a fraud- sitting on a wooden bench, clutching the order of ceremony, the picture of her made soggy by hypocritical tears. Physically comfortable, as those who knew her better than I ever did were squatting on haunches and kneeling on dead legs all around me. Here comes the Sun, little darling. And I say…
I stole a look at the back of my Gran’s head, her hair a grey halo, her body shaking with silent, dignified tears and learnt that I was at the age where people would start being taken away from me. I felt them. Like trying to hold onto sand.
Beautiful words from her sister, more eloquent than I could ever dream of composing. The essence- Why is a story any less well formed when it is short? Can something not be perfect in its conception without enjoying a long duration? Why is it assumed that all films must be ninety minutes? Think of “Meshes of the Afternoon”. A flower on a long driveway and a mirror for a face. Everything she said meant something else, too.
And in the claustrophobia of other people’s memories, with them tightening all around me, choking me until I pleaded to get up and run, I saw the truth of it and half remembered a quote from George Orwell about using two words when you can use one.
Outside, I hugged my Uncle and he sobbed on my shoulder. I could feel his chest rise against mine and the shiver in his breathing. His hand gripped my back and I looked over him at the fingers of trees prickling the flat, grey sky. Winter light. Compressing, distorting distance. When we pulled apart the shape of his eye sockets rested on my shoulder like a moist accusation. I expelled myself from the group and lit a cigarette, struggling with the flint through gloved hands. The flame burned bright in my face, bleaching out my view of the world in a diamond flare, and then the wind catching it, flickered and blew out.
Later, the anonymity of night hanging over everything, I left the main road, turning onto a pitted track. My headlights insinuated themselves through the sentries of trees. A wheel caught in a rut, the CD skipped, “He didn't see her anywhere/ He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide/ Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate”
I parked under a canopy of branches which scratched their tips along the roof of my car. Stumbling towards the bank of the lake I pushed my hands into my pockets, turned a piece of lint between my fingers.
Along the path; darkness punctuated by lanterns, voices behind me. On the beach people were gathered in groups, stakes of fire along the waters edge.
I joined my parents, my mum squeezing my elbow. I smiled at her, a watery, thin smile. We were given paper lanterns sealed in plastic and the rain began to spot as we wrote on them. Messages. I hesitated. Unsure. And then I scribbled in a hand that wasn’t mine, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”. We struggled with the wick, the rain trying to beat us, to take this away from us, and then it caught, the lantern filling with a deep, stuttering, asthmatic breath. I felt it tugging at my grip, lifting it, so let go and it went. I tilted my head back, drops of water flecking my face and the inky blackness of the sky was filled with lanterns. Hundreds of white paper lanterns, the flickering heart of the flame within each inexorably pulling them upwards. The wind ushered them and their direction changed: an exodus above the dunes of the lake. I realised I was holding my breath, looked around and saw that everyone else was too. There was no sound; nothing at all, not even the lapping of the water, the rustle of the trees, the shifting of sand under our feet.
And all the time I’m thinking, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Not for anything I did, but for wasting you. And I’m thinking, this is my gift to you, this view, what I’m looking at now.
Up and up. One by one their hearts stopped, the lights blinking out in the sky, until there was only one left. For an age it continued up and up, impossibly high, fainter and fainter, and a couple of times I thought it had gone, strained eyes squinting until it flickered again, so high. And then it simply wasn’t there any more, and the sky was full of stars.