Dead in Time

Chapter Fourteen

Auntie Jan already had the kettle on when I arrived. Uncle Duncan was, she said, fractious, and she sent me in to talk to him, impossible to argue with in her crisp efficiency and brand new lowlights. When I said her hair looked nice, she put a hand to it for a moment, as if she’d forgotten she’d had it done.

In the front room, Duncan stared sullenly out of the bay window. The last fingers of sunlight caught the framed photos that lined the walls and—just for a moment—reminded me of Charlie’s boat, filled with those glossy black-and-white pictures of him with The Stones, with George Harrison, Steve Marriott… each shot somehow more pretentious for the fact that he wasn’t posing, per se, but just caught in moments of casual movement. Smoking, drinking, talking… as if they were just the kind of informal shots he had albums filled with. Maybe he did, I supposed, but then surely he didn’t need them blown up and hung on the walls. 

I shook the thought… for now.

“Hello, Uncle Dunc,” I said, pulling up a chair.

He looked at me, his upper lip drawn tight across his teeth and his lower lip jutting out, tongue flexing as he tried to frame what was probably a rude word.

“’llcks,” he said, eventually, the first in a series of tortuous word-shapes, mostly referring to the unappealing qualities of solicitors.

“Well,” I said, having waited patiently for him to finish, “I don’t know about that, Unc. I mean, they must have, if you think about it. Otherwise, who would accountants look down on?”

Uncle Duncan laughed and lifted his hand, hooking onto my arm with his hard fingers. I patted the hand, traced figures of eight on his reddened knuckles, and considered his warm, clammy skin. As a child, I’d known his hands well. They’d picked me up when I fell over, patched up scrapes and grazed knees… shared ice creams and Cornish pasties with me during family holidays.

Mum had split up with my sister, Becky’s, father approximately four months before my birth for reasons that, with that timing, should be obvious. Becky had only been three and, as her dad never really seemed to show much inclination to stay in touch, neither of us remembered him well. He and Mum hadn’t been married—an institution she’d appalled her own mother by expressing intense distaste for—and she’d not maintained many long-term relationships while we were young. I remembered a few transiently affectionate ‘friends’ of hers who’d been around, but Becky and I had been her priority and, once we were grown, I often wondered if Mum had forgotten how to let people into her life. Maybe she just decided not to, or maybe she’d decided it wasn’t worth it. I never knew—never talked about it with her—because she’d have taken it as a challenge, an affront. As if I was questioning how she’d lived her life, judging her success at it.

I couldn’t have hurt her like that.

So, she’d had Becky and I spend time with Jan and Duncan, and Uncle Dunc had been the non-threatening, confidence-inspiring, loving figure of my childhood that I supposed fathers were meant to be. Later, as I grew up, I would wonder about the whole Freudian concept of women’s relationships with their fathers dictating their taste in men, but then Becky had married Mark, a sandy-haired would-be art student she’d met at sixth form college. He’d failed as an artist, but succeeded in fathering her two boys, Ian and Grant, and now they lived near Cheshunt, where Mark worked as an IT consultant.

We had less and less in common as time passed and, every year, there seemed to be something more pallid and stiff about Becky’s Christmas letter. She was a lot like Mum, really. I had no idea whether her life fulfilled her, or why what she thought of as normal—the school fetes and the nativities and the PTA—filled me with a cold dread, but I knew I could never ask her.