Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

I looked at the garden and wondered if it hurt to drown. The day before, I’d gone into the bathroom and run a sink full of water. I had put my head into the water and opened my eyes and looked at the black plug and the chain with the bubbles on it. I had tried to breathe in some of the water. Not so that I died, but because I wanted to know if getting water down the back of your nose and into your lungs was painful. My lungs wouldn’t let me do it. I coughed, and my eyes stung and streamed.

Now, I thought. Now while the house is quiet I will get out of my bed and try it again. Just so I know. But before I could move I heard Barbara getting up, heard the shower go, and the plastic rustle of the curtain. I lay down and thought about Donald’s hair waving in the water and blue light starting to glow from the ends of his fingers and toes. I thought about his hands resting on the mud.

I could only imagine two kinds of water. Bright blue, clear and tropical water with orange and yellow fish in it. Hawaii water, like the pictures in Donald’s books. And the other kind – the water at home kind, which was not as good and must have been disappointing to him if he hadn’t expected it. Black water with flashing jellyfish throbbing through it like glow-in-the-dark party condoms. Flasher – which is also the name of Donald’s favourite kind of fish, a little thing that pretends to be a leaf by floating sideways, and frightens predators by turning its lights on and off whenever they come near.

Some time later I was standing on a kitchen chair having the hem of an old black skirt taken down. Barbara knelt on the lino and I saw the stripe of grey at her hairline where her roots were coming through. She pinned without touching me and I asked about what it meant when they say someone is going to be buried at sea.

Barbara didn’t answer me. It wasn’t because her mouth was full of pins; she looked at me and then put the pins in her mouth. It was exactly the same as Chloe pretending she was too busy to answer the phone.

‘Other side,’ she said, and motioned for me to turn around.

We went to a garden outside a crematorium. The neighbours were there. Uncle Ron came late and missed most of the words. He wore a navy blue pinstriped suit and a shirt that was ironed perfectly. He looked smart and fat. Barbara asked him if he had a woman, and would he like to bring her to the house for the sandwiches afterwards. He hugged her and gave her an envelope. She wouldn’t take it off him. At the time I thought it was cards – we’d had lots of cards through the post – but now I think he was trying to give her money towards the funeral. She shook her head and he didn’t protest, but put the envelope in the back pocket of his trousers and didn’t mention it again.

It was a windy day and when it was time to shake out the container into the little sloping garden, the grey powder flew back at us into our eyes and mouths.

‘Jesus,’ Uncle Ron said, under his breath, and rubbed his face. My mother blinked and did not flinch. I licked it off my lips and tried to catch some of it to put in my pocket. I didn’t like the garden: I wanted to put Donald somewhere better. Somewhere near water.

There was a party afterwards, in the house. People sitting on the arms of the chairs and standing in the kitchen. People behaved like they always do when a person dies – even though it only happens once or twice in your life, you see it so often on the soaps that you’re trained in what to expect and what to say and it comes natural. It’s easy.

Later, Uncle Ron slipped me a five-pound note and told me I could stay at his new flat if I wanted, in a few months, once he’d got things under control.

‘Any time, chickadee!’

This is what happened to Donald. He left the house at three in the morning with the tartan-patterned thermos and my old black PE bag. These are more or less facts, because it is a fact that those things were missing from the house and we never got them back.

He was wearing beige trousers, black wellington boots, a blue and grey cagoule and a brown jumper. He had the finished Secchi disks with him and some bamboo cane from the garden. Barbara’s bank statements showed that he stopped for petrol at Lancaster services and paid for it with their Switch card at 4.18 a.m.

The man who served him was twenty-three years old. His girlfriend was pregnant and he’d taken a temporary job doing the night shift at the petrol station to earn extra money. He worked in a betting shop during the day. He was so tired he had to telephone the garage to see if he’d had a shift on the night the police were asking him about. He didn’t remember Donald, or any of the other customers. He didn’t feel qualified to comment on Donald’s state of mind.

We didn’t feel qualified to comment either, but it should have been comforting to know that on that night Donald was not memorable. Perhaps Chris (I’ve given him that name – the police never told us) would have been more likely to remember a man who was muttering to himself, raving or weeping, or who seemed not to know what name to sign on his receipt. There was the implication, we thought, that by doing this investigation there was doubt about Donald’s intention. He hadn’t driven a car for years, they said, what was special about today?

I wanted to tell them about the Sea Eye – the deadline fast approaching, the last days of feverish typing and retyping, scribbling and research until late into the night. There were findings to write up, and evidence to collect: this was not an elaborate suicide note. When I began, Barbara looked at me and shook her head slightly. No, she was saying, we do not talk about those things outside of this family.

The boat had been propped in its metal trailer in Donald’s friend’s front garden in Morecambe. He crept onto the drive while it was still dark and took it away. Craig and his wife didn’t hear his feet on their gravelly drive, nor his engine as he towed it off. They didn’t report it stolen until eleven the next morning – long after they’d noticed it missing. They wanted to have a proper breakfast first. It wasn’t worth so much to them. Craig said they only kept it because Donald had promised, many times, to take it off their hands. He was planning to ‘work on Barbara’, although those words don’t sound like any I would have heard my father say.

This was a slightly dishonest thing for Donald to do and this part troubled me for a long time. It was an act that didn’t seem to belong to him, or what I knew about him. Sneaking out in the quiet grey of dawn to steal a boat that had been promised to him anyway.

‘If he’d have asked,’ Craig said to us one afternoon, ‘I’d have gone out with him. Took him wherever he wanted to go.’ He drank coffee in Barbara’s kitchen, leaning against the sink.

Things were different afterwards: there was no more anxiety about people turning up unannounced.

‘What was he after out there, do you know, love?’ Craig asked.

‘He just liked getting out and about,’ Barbara said, ‘and didn’t have a realistic understanding of his own capabilities. It was a night and day job, looking after him towards the end.’

‘You did what you could.’

Barbara murmured something, topped up his coffee and the man left, blame clinging to him like a thread. He was feeling responsible. Like a murderer, perhaps, even though he’d probably never raised a hand in anger in his life. You could kill someone without even touching them though. I knew that better than anyone.

Maybe Donald forgot the time, and expected his friends to be up and eating breakfast. He might have tried to knock on the door, and getting no answer, decided to take the boat anyway. Or maybe, practising what he wanted to say in the car on the way there, he grew suddenly shy and promised himself he’d make amends later. This trip had been a long time in the planning. There were manuals in his room about outboards and currents, tide-tables and maps of the bay.