‘Nancy? I’m sorry to disturb you . . .’ Conor says.
‘What? Who is that?’ says a voice in the darkness. But it isn’t my mother sitting up in the bed. It’s my father, and he looks just as surprised as we are to find him there. Nancy sits up seconds later, lifting her eye mask and removing her earplugs before squinting in our direction. When she sees Dad in the bed next to her, she practically leaps out of it.
‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ she whispers in our direction.
‘Yes, it is,’ Dad says with a sigh, before holding his head in his hands.
The idea of my divorced parents sharing a bed leaves me speechless.
Conor clears his throat again. ‘There’s been an incident . . . and I think it might be best if you both come downstairs to the kitchen when you are . . .’ I fear he is about to say decent. ‘Ready’ is the word he settles on, and we leave them to it.
Back downstairs in the kitchen, the mood has changed from disbelief to fear. Nana has been covered with what looks like a red-and-white tablecloth, and my sisters are staring up at the chalk poem about our family.
‘The chalk was in her hand,’ Rose says.
Nana’s handwriting is beautiful and very distinctive, the poems in her children’s storybooks were all handwritten with ink. I used to try and write the same way, with sloping joined-up letters, but it never looked as good. Nana had an explanation for that, just like she did for everything else: ‘Of course we all have different handwriting. Just like fingerprints or DNA, it’s to remind us that we are individual beings. Our thoughts and feelings are there to be expressed and they are our own: unique. I don’t feel the same way as you about the world, and that’s fine, we’re not designed to always think and feel the same. We are not sheep. Agreeing with someone about something is a choice, try to remember that. Don’t waste your life wishing to be like someone else, decide who you are and be you.’
‘I’m not convinced that the poem was written by Nana . . .’ I say. ‘I don’t think this looks like her handwriting. Maybe someone just wanted it to look like—’
‘It’s impossible to know who wrote this for sure,’ Rose interrupts.
‘But why would Nana write that?’ asks Lily. ‘And if she hated us all so much, why invite us here?’
‘I’m not precocious,’ says Trixie, my precocious but wonderful niece, staring up at the words written about her. It’s almost a relief when my parents enter the room, looking like a couple of teenagers who’ve been caught behind the bike shed.
‘Oh no,’ Dad says, rushing to Nana and pulling back the cloth that was covering her. His reaction seems staged, and I notice that the dog starts to growl again.
‘It’s going to be okay, Frank,’ says my mother, coming to stand by his side, still wearing her black silk pyjamas. Her matching black eye mask that she can’t sleep without is still on her head too. ‘We’ll get through this, together.’ It feels like an odd thing for her to say, given they’ve spent most of the last twenty years apart. I wonder whether she might still be drunk.
We watch as my parents embrace in front of us for the first time since 1988. People hold on tighter when they think they are losing their grip. The moment is punctuated by a full stop in the shape of a crying teenager.
‘I want to go home,’ Trixie sobs.
‘Why don’t you go and watch TV in the lounge?’ Lily suggests. Television has always been a surrogate parent in my sister’s house, but she looks cross when Trixie turns to me for reassurance.
‘Everything is going to be okay, I promise,’ I say, wondering if it’s a lie. ‘It’s very sad that Nana has passed away and we’re all going to miss her. You go and turn the TV on, and I’ll come and join you in a minute.’ People tend to see what they need to see and hear what they want to hear, in my experience. Trixie nods, wiping away yet more tears with the sleeve of her pink pyjamas before leaving the room.
As soon as she is gone, the discussion about the chalk poem on the wall continues. I listen while they all bicker about what it means and what we should do, unsurprised that nobody asks my opinion. As the youngest in the family, I’m quite used to nobody really caring what I think. I zone out a little, and notice the eight jack-o’-lanterns still sitting on the kitchen table. They all have such scary faces, which Nana must have spent a long time carving. There are pumpkins, squashes and turnips because, like always, Nana liked the tradition and folklore of Halloween more than the commercial version of her favourite day.