the one missing

I can remember every day dragging but you know, we both know, that when I write the recollection will come in flashes. Brightest colour flashes.

I'm sitting right here, right at this undersized table, staring vacantly at the screen and my father calls to tell me Grandad's dead. He was taken into care on New Year's eve, moved to hospital a few days later and, being that age and this time of year, I couldn't say I was surprised.

I can say that I was shocked. So shocked that I stared at the wall for a full ten minutes before I even began to react.

*****

I guess it's like knowing there's a leak in your ceiling, that everytime someone spills water in the bathroom it gets damp downstairs. We all know it's there and there's a thought, nay, a certainty that one day we really ought to get around to fixing it or something's gonna go wrong but still, when the almighty crash happens and you find your iron clawed tub on the living room floor because you left the tap on - shock.

It's like contents insurance for my student house. It's like getting cancer from smoking, or having to sign over a grand in backdated rent because, secretly, I hoped they'd just never notice.

Why do the things you expect still hurt you that way?

*****

Euchre. My family's game. My grandfather's game, and every time he dealt a joker he'd make hearts trump and every time he'd win.

I've never played before, it seems years since anyone has so I am taught, and play opposite my father, in the place where he sat.

*****

And there is someone missing. Not just in the euchre pairs but in the car, where I sit on my own instead of on his lap and in his house, where my parents sleep in his separate bed and downstairs, I lie rigid, imagining the moment his face will come round the side of the door, his gentle voice to tell me a story.

It is sad, not because he's gone but because I am a child again, and he has always been gone. I miss him, not as an adult, not as a young woman with a degree in the making and my own place and my own life, but as a child.

He hasn't been here for years but I want to be sat on his lap, I want to be read to, I want to come upstairs to find him sleeping in my bunk bed and smell his smell on the pillow.

The one missing has been missing for years, and I miss him more now, not because I thought he would come back.

I thought I would go to find him.

*****

The funeral is the brightest January morning, in a hospital chapel that is small and peaceful and the buzz, such as it is, is that the organist from the cathedral will play. And she does, the Dark Isle and songs of Scotland and in the midst of it, the Saints.

how I'd love to be in that number, when the saints go marching in

And it's a lovely service, they say, the eulogy my mum and I wrote together is read, how he worked and where and how hard and for how long and that he liked cars and to read and to play the accordion and mouth organ and the names of we fortunates who survive him.

It reads as if my mum and Alice sprung into being from the earth. It reads as if he'd never married, which is how Granny wanted, as if he'd never loved a woman in his life.

*****

The burial at Holm, blinding, freezing sunshine, so close to the sea you can smell it, the green grass and the earth and the whiskey my cousin passes round and down he goes, my family and his friend carrying the coffin, then the earth.

The earth. And it's really, really over this time. And I never went to find him, like I always said I would, and he never knew me like I hoped he might.

****

And his friend, his Bruce, tells us about the nights of talk and hip flasks, cards and my grandfather on his stool, playing tune after ditty til morning, with everyone praising him. And my grandfather, walking for miles each day. And my grandfather, taking a knife and pulling the peel off an apple in one long spiral. And talking about his family.

And the last photo I took of him, last summer, my grandfather, walking away.