Imogen Greenberg

Extract from Jetsam

Rhea was walking home from the swimming pool when she got the call. 

It was early summer, dusk, the evening stretched out languidly. The streets were empty and the moon hung low, suspended just above the rooftops. A supermoon, they were calling it on the news. It was enormous, almost grotesque, its shadowed craters glowing against a pale sky just dipping into darkness. Two women stood on the pavement ahead of Rhea, craning and peering over houses for a view of it. One of them had no shoes on, and when she saw Rhea looking, she smiled conspiratorially, like she’d been caught. 

Rhea loved these moments, strange and rare as they were, the quiet thrill of them. She’d been in this city nearly a decade and the monotony grated on her sometimes. She’d heard friends and colleagues speak about it as an exhilarating place where anything could happen, something new every night, but those things never seemed to happen to her. Why was that? Why did things always seem just out of her reach? 

The barefoot woman put a hand on the other woman’s lower back. A silent message passed between them. They retreated down a side passage, the barefoot woman inching gingerly, the other one shepherding her, and disappeared behind a red door. Rhea felt a deep, aching nostalgia watching them. Though for what, she couldn’t say. 

She pulled out her phone. Two missed calls. Number withheld. She’d applied for yet another no-hope job. Maybe it would be good news this time. They called again and she picked up. A woman, clipped and hurried, asked if she was speaking to Rhea. 

‘Yes. Speaking.’ 

‘I’m so sorry—’ the woman began. But Rhea didn’t need to hear any more, she already knew what this was about. She’d been waiting for this call for over a decade. She’d imagined how it would go so many times, where she’d be and how she might feel. She had thought all those plausible scenarios she’d rehearsed might make her immune to the thing itself. But it was still a shock. 

Her father had been in and out of hospital for years. Every time he’d vanished down the labyrinthine bleached corridors, with that awful strip lighting, she’d held her breath, waiting. In the early days, when she’d still read the books well-meaning people pressed into her hands, she’d been warned that too long spent around the expectancy of grief could lead to a sort of complacency. The perfume of dread, one book had called it; always there, impossible to smell after a while. ‘Gross,’ she’d said to her father, as she sat on the edge of his hospital bed, reading choice passages from the stack of books and shiny leaflets on the bedside locker.

All this time, she had been terrified it might happen when she wasn’t there with him, or worse – though she could never admit it – when she was. She’d lived with the guilt of not wanting to see that, even if it meant leaving him on his own. 

But he wasn’t in the hospital, he was at home, and they’d spoken the day before. He was in good spirits. He’d said the doctors were remarkably pleased with his results, given the fact he still had a death sentence hanging over him. She’d even heard him take a tight, gasping sip of something and told him off for drinking.  ‘Ah, what’s the point of being a medical marvel?’ he’d said, ‘if you can’t toast your own success?’ 

Rhea stood in the street; phone still pressed to her ear. There must be some mistake. The doctor on the phone must have confused her father with some other patient. They weren’t at this point, they couldn’t be. She wasn’t ready. How could she explain to the tired, harried doctor who probably had a dozen other patients waiting, that this was all wrong? 

‘Hello?’ the doctor said, ‘are you still there?’ 

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’ve – could you say that again, please?’

The doctor took a breath, as if summoning her patience, and repeated. An unexpected turn, the district nurse called the paramedics, nothing they could do. 

‘This must be a terrible shock,’ the doctor said. 

Rhea couldn’t summon a response and the doctor seemed to take this as an invitation to give more detail, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. 

‘Heart attacks aren’t unusual in the circumstances. The paramedics tried to revive him, but then they found a DNR on his person and they ceased resuscitation.’

His person. Is that what he was now? A cold, passive being. She imagined him sprawled on the linoleum floor of the kitchen, like a bad cartoon. Perhaps they’d left a chalk outline, so she could trace the last moments of his life with her fingertips, try and be there with him. She should have been there. The slick guilt came surging back. 

‘Thank you for phoning,’ she said, ‘I appreciate it.’

The doctor started to explain how she should proceed, but Rhea hung up. She stood in the street, she didn’t know how long for, her phone held limply by her side. Staring at the moon. This great alien mass that seemed remarkable to her just five minutes ago. 

She walked home, darkness creeping in earnest now. What an idiot, to think she could outrun this day. There would be things to do. People to ring and to tell. The thought of the next few weeks swelled in her chest and she pressed hard on her breastbone, as if she could ease the pressure. 

She wished Eloise was here. She’d know what to do. 

***

Rhea spent her childhood holidays with her grandmother Eloise, starting from the summer her parents separated. They’d hashed out a hasty custody arrangement that for some reason – she couldn’t imagine her father asking for this – had left Rhea with him for the long summer holiday. Rhea’s mother pretended this was a great concession, and promptly booked herself an all-inclusive resort. She remembered being dropped off, standing on the doorstep as her mother walked down the garden path without looking back. Kieran packed up the car, and they drove to Eloise’s cottage, perched on a peninsula overlooking a wide sea. 

That first summer, Eloise stitched Rhea back together with her father; she’d been shy around him since the separation. They built a rope swing on the old apple tree. He taught her to snorkel and to bird watch. She called him a twitcher and laughed at his shorts, the way they fell down over his narrow hips. They spent long afternoons playing on sand spun like golden sugar; the tide leaving wet ripples curved along the beach. Standing in the shallows, the water like ice; her father swinging her up and over the waves, pretending he was going to throw her in. The hot, fermented smell of sun and salt. 

Over the years, Rhea looked forward to those weeks more than anything. Eloise wore linen and hemp in oatmeal and sky colours, stiff cotton aprons and workman’s trousers rolled up over wellies. Her body loose, face turned up to the sun from under her wide-brimmed hat. She was so enduringly unembarrassed. Being around her made Rhea feel free, from the scrutiny of school and her mother, and a vague sense of other people’s disapproval. For six weeks, nobody cared, and she could be anyone. 

Her last summer at the cottage, she was fifteen. She’d been squabbling with her father constantly. He said she was just a hormonal teenager, and it made her so angry, the way he said ‘just’. In the car driving down, Rhea changed the radio station, and he flicked it back, rolling his eyes and muttering. Bare-legged in shorts, the fabric of the seat rubbed the back of her knees raw, and she rested her feet up on the dashboard. Kieran shouted at her to find some manners and swiped a hand at her. He nearly drove them off the road. They arrived at dusk. Eloise took one look at their hot, furious faces and burst out laughing. 

‘There’s only one person I know with a worse temper than your father, and it’s you, my girl.’ Eloise held Rhea too tight and kissed her on the top of her head. 

Without saying anything, Eloise took charge of Rhea, keeping her and Kieran apart like warring siblings. Teaching Rhea to drive in empty car parks, swapping places so she could practise changing gear. Ushering Rhea into the greenhouse to show her how to prune the prize roses. 

The weather got hotter. Eloise said it was unnatural, unprecedented even, but Rhea liked it. She put on a bikini and lay out on the lawn, the stubble of grass itching her back. She fell asleep. When she woke, blinking at a blue sky, her mouth was gummy and sour. The sea shushed below her and the gulls cawed from the roof; and then the hum of an argument, stretching out of the kitchen window behind her. The voices of her father and grandmother came into focus. She tuned in to the low, muttered back and forth, their voices tight with concern. They obviously hadn’t meant for her to overhear. 

‘It’s not right – of course she should know – Kieran, really – how long can this go on? Well, shall I tell her?’

Rhea stuck her head through the kitchen window. ‘What? Tell me what?’

Her father looked stricken, caught. 

Eloise slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on old people,’ she said. It was obvious, for all her stern words, she’d never intended to tell Rhea anything.

‘What?’ Rhea asked, looking from one to the other. A pained look stripped her father’s face of all of its warmth. 

‘For god’s sake, Kieran, just tell her.’ Eloise glanced at Rhea. ‘Go and put some clothes on.’ she said. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear this with your tits hanging out.’ 

Rhea laughed, but neither of them did. Her stomach lurched. Was something really the matter? She pulled on her father’s old shirt, and went around to the kitchen door. She sat at the table next to Eloise, who took hold of her hand and gripped it between bony fingers. 

Her father sat down and, addressing the tablecloth, stumbled awkwardly through the tentative diagnosis he’d been given. He tripped over the gaps, the unknowns, loose maybes and some days that the doctors had outlined. Rhea looked at him and willed him to look back, but he didn’t. She ran outside and down to the beach and waited for him to follow her, but he never did. By the time she came back it was dark and he was in bed. 

‘We thought you needed some space,’ Eloise said, and Rhea didn’t understand how they could be so fucking stupid, how little they all seemed to know each other suddenly.  

Rhea refused to go back to the cottage the next year. Eloise cried down the phone that she just wanted one more summer with her granddaughter. ‘Before you’re all grown up and you forget about me.’ They both knew the panic threading Eloise’s voice was for Kieran. Rhea felt like that too, at first, like every moment with him might be a last. But the exhaustion of living like that had caught up with her too quickly. Their relationship was as tetchy as ever. It was the only normal thing they had left. 

Rhea went to Spain with her friends instead. She got so drunk on the beach one night, her friends called an ambulance. The paramedics rolled their eyes and told her in halting English to drink lots of water. But some conscientious girl had already told her parents and Rhea’s father got wind of it. He’d just started another round of treatment. When she came home, she went straight to the hospital and curled up at his feet on the hospital bed, embarrassed. He stroked her hair and called her a fucking idiot. 

‘Why would you want to put yourself in somewhere like this?’ he said, gesturing to the peeling walls and the IV drip looming over his head. ‘It’s no fun, chick.’

It never left her. How easy it had been to forget, drunk and washed up on a beach somewhere else entirely, but she behaved herself after that. She understood she had to be responsible, to wait nicely like a good girl for her father’s death. The doctors had been clear there was no recovery, it was just a waiting game.  

***

‘He never thought he’d get all that extra time with you. It’s a blessing, really’

Rhea heard that particular line, or a variation of it, over and over again in the days following the phone call from the doctor. The news spread through the veins of the family. Phone calls, cards and flowers trickled back. 

She’d driven up to her father’s house as soon as she got home, racing north against the darkness. She spent the journey fighting vivid images of what she’d find when she got there. The chair he’d collapsed out of, overturned. The scrapings of his last meal in the sink. A visceral reminder that he was eating, breathing, shitting just hours ago. 

But when she arrived, it looked entirely as it should. Too clean, in fact. His newspapers folded on the side table in the front room, and the chairs tucked neatly under the kitchen table.  Had some thoughtful paramedic, or perhaps the district nurse, cleared up? She’d never know. She walked around, turning on the lights. Her footsteps echoed on the floorboards into empty rooms. 

It was like her father had simply evaporated. But where had he gone? She couldn’t work that part out. His sickness had been a weighty thing, made up of long words and boxes of pills and an entire village of nurses and carers, doctors and helpers. But his death had been silent. Unimaginable. He had vanished. 

She lay in the single bed of her childhood and wrote a long to-do list. She contacted the rest of the family. She cancelled his future appointments with specialists, because she knew the hospital was bad at disseminating its own information. Too much paperwork, never enough time. She remembered to email her manager and explain she wouldn’t be at work for a while. Then she set about her new full-time job of arranging a funeral that they’d had ten years to think about. The only requests Kieran had made were all absurd suggestions, obviously designed to make Rhea laugh. As if he couldn’t quite contemplate the one party he wouldn’t be at. 

The next day, she sat in the undertaker’s office, struggling to pay attention. There were samples laid out in front of her and she was supposed to pick one. Warm oak. Oak veneer. Fresh pine. She knew what her father would have said; put me in an Ikea flat pack and send me on my way. 

Her phone vibrated, an excuse to leave. She went out into the street and watched the stop-start traffic and the shuffle of mid-morning shoppers. She checked her phone. 

Are we still on for later? 

For a strange, absurd moment, she didn’t know who’d sent it, even though his name was right there. Calum’s message arrived from very far away, a place where her father was still alive, and Rhea could sometimes pass a whole day without thinking about him. The audacity of all that idle time. How many dates had she been on with Calum, getting to know him slowly, keeping him at arm’s length? She’d never replied to his last text, sent in those precious last hours before the phone call; before she tipped out of kilter with everything that had come before. 

She tried to compose a reply, deleted it and then started again, only to write the exact same thing. It turned out there was no good way to tell someone that your father was dead. 

I’m so sorry, I got caught up in a family thing, I’ve had to rush back. I owe you a large drink. Are you free next week? 

It was evasive and unconvincing, but she sent it anyway. 

As she chose flowers and readings, managed warring aunts and spoke to caterers, she thought of Calum often. It surprised her, given how unsure she’d been about him before. Or perhaps it was how he felt about her that she found so unknowable. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes. It’s not that she was obsessed, smitten, whatever you’d call it; she was too old for that now, maybe. It was just the closest distraction. She thought about him as she stood in the crematorium, all glass panels and pale wood, wearing a black dress that didn’t fit her anymore. And she felt guilty – more fucking guilt – that she couldn’t just focus on her father. Be here with him, one last time. 

She hardly listened when the lawyer read her the will, which saw the contents of Kieran’s estate pass to her. She had known it was coming, but she didn’t want to hear it. It just sounded like more fucking admin. More paperwork, more hassle. 

By the time she pulled out of her father’s driveway, there was already a For Sale sign up. At the end of the road, she looked right and left, the indicator ticking. There was an opening in the traffic, but she didn’t take it. She just sat there, the tick-tick-tick of time passing. If all went to plan, she wouldn’t see any of it again; the yellow walls of her childhood bedroom, the deep indent in the chair her father sat in as he did the crossword, the corner of chequered linoleum she’d pulled up inch by inch as a toddler. 

It didn’t matter, they were just things. Everything had to end sometime. She accelerated onto the main road, took a left at the lights, and headed for the motorway. She sped up, desperate to get back, racing against the nagging feeling that she’d left something behind. 

She tried to slip back into the life she’d had before; going to work, cooking dinner with her flatmate. She knew, intellectually, that this happened to thousands of people every day. So why was everyone behaving so strangely? 

In a meeting at work, someone asked her a question and before she could answer, her boss cut in to explain that Rhea had had time off recently and wasn’t across those details. Her boss gave Rhea a reassuring smile, as if she was supposed to be grateful for this intervention, but she felt so angry. She wanted to stand up and scream. Why was she even here? What was the fucking point? None of it mattered even the slightest. 

Four days after her father’s funeral, she met up with Calum in a pub on the canal. He arrived with a grin and kissed her on the cheek. Such an adult gesture; forthright, but strangely tender.  

‘How are you?’ he said. 

‘Fine, thanks, you?’

‘Is everything okay with your family?’

She flushed. What must he think? She should tell him, but she could just imagine his face. Horror and embarrassment, head-tilting pity. 

‘Yes, sorry,’ she said, ‘the usual, I won’t bore you with it. Families are only ever as interesting as your own involvement in them, right? From the outside, they all look the same.’ 

‘Only the happy ones, according to Tolstoy.’

‘Oh really? I wouldn’t know.’ 

‘Sorry, I’m a pretentious twat. Would you like a drink?’

Calum talked easily, one anecdote to the next, but she couldn’t focus. It was like she was underwater, swimming up for air. He offered her another drink and she hesitated a moment too long before she said yes, that’d be nice. 

He grinned. ‘Nah, let’s call it a night.’ 

He walked her out and down to the street corner, neither sure which way the other was going. He turned to her. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? You seem a little distracted.’ 

‘Hmm?’

‘Look,’ he said ‘I’ve really liked hanging out with you, but if you’re not into it anymore, that’s really okay.’ He winced slightly, ‘I get it. Sometimes these things just don’t, you know, click or whatever.’ 

‘No, that’s not it.’ 

‘Right. It’s just—’ He stopped, waited for her to say more, but her brain was moving achingly slow.  

‘I actually really like you,’ she floundered. ‘Really. And I’d like to see you again. Really. If you’d like. I’m sorry, I know I’ve not been great company.’ 

If she didn’t tell him now, wouldn’t it be so much worse if he found out later? 

‘The thing is, my father’s dead. Died. He died. That’s where I went. I’m sorry I didn’t say. I just—’ She looked anywhere but at him as she tried to put it into words: the bare, hollow feeling inside; how the low lighting in the pub made her want to shut her eyes and never open them again. Finally, she looked up. 

He blinked hard. ‘Well, fuck,’ he said. 

Of course, the only thing worse than a psychopath who lied about a dead father was a noxious over-sharer who word-vomited the fact that her father was dead. She wanted to take it back, or just leave without hearing him try to wriggle away from her. 

‘I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this stuff.’ He made a funny gesture with his hands. He had a strange look on his face, but as far as she could tell it wasn’t the pity she’d been expecting. It was something more like puzzlement. And she recognised that deep bafflement, she’d felt it since the moment she found out Kieran was gone. Like running her tongue over a gap in the back of her mouth where a tooth used to be. 

‘Look, I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of alcoholic who turns to drink when he doesn’t know what to say. Although, you have met me before, so perhaps that particular ship has sailed. I have an extremely expensive bottle of wine at my house that I’ve been saving. Shall we open it and toast to your father? Sorry. Is that madly inappropriate? I don’t want you to think I’m luring you back to my house with some sort of weird noble gesture to your dead dad, and that I’m actually just trying to get laid. I’m not. Well, I’m not not trying to have sex with you in general, just not right now specifically—’

She took hold of his hand to shut him up. She couldn’t say anything. His face blurred and the streetlights smeared as she held back tears. Weirdly, it was the sanest response she’d heard yet. Kieran would definitely have approved of turning to alcohol at this and frankly, most, moments. And saying it out loud – my father is dead – had she felt a little less lonely?

‘I’d like that,’ she managed to say. She looked at him for a long time, right at him, and the silence was okay. She wanted to reach out and place her palm flat on his chest. To feel his heart moving, quietly, patiently. 

He smiled. ‘Which part?’ he said, ‘The drink or making an inappropriate pass at you?’

‘Both,’ she laughed. 

‘Right. Come on, then.’ 

He wrapped a long arm across her shoulders and squeezed hard.