64
TULLY
Mum didn’t come to the funeral. Under the circumstances, it didn’t feel like the greatest idea. Dad would probably have been disappointed about that. Tully had to say, there was a bit of a thrill in being able to disappoint him from beyond the grave, after what he’d done.
She and Rachel and Heather occupied the front pew of the church. People gave them a wide berth – offering just a polite smile or brief condolences – which was fine by Tully, but also a little disconcerting. It took her a little while to realise that in fact there were only a few faces she recognised in the crowd. Mary and Michael, Elsa and David. Most of the others were colleagues or old uni friends of Stephen – people Tully might have met once or twice but whose names she would struggle to conjure up. How often had she taken pride in how wonderfully civilised her family was, how they knew the right way to behave, the right way to do things? It turned out they were so civilised they didn’t have a huge number of good friends.
It was a funny thing, attending the funeral of a man everyone thought was a hero. Several people volunteered to speak when Rachel, Heather and Tully said they were too traumatised. All were good, competent speakers. They put on a good show. Which was appropriate since, as it turned out, putting on a good show was all Dad really cared about.
Heather was clearly uncomfortable in her role of grieving widow. Several times when people approached to offer their condolences she said, ‘Well, we really weren’t married all that long.’ Once she even said: ‘Offer them to Pam, she was his real wife.’ Her odd comments were attributed to grief and shock or, later, at the wake, alcohol.
There was plenty of that; they’d made sure of it. It was the one thing they’d all agreed on when they’d met to organise the wake. It was at Dad and Heather’s house, and there were plenty of capable people, like Mary and Elsa and a swarm of Mum’s friends who’d offered to order the canapés, the flowers, even clean the house for the occasion. They’d taken the ladies up on all their offers, but Tully, Heather and Rachel insisted on purchasing the alcohol themselves. It had been a surreal experience, the three of them wandering around the bottle shop, each with a shopping cart, tossing bottles of booze in without thought or hesitation. Every now and again one of them looked at their cart, and then the other two, and decided they didn’t have enough and went back for more.
Eventually, when the wake was over and the guests had departed, Tully sat in the living room with Rachel and Heather and the gigantean pile of booze and they had to concede that they might have gone a little over the top.
‘We can return it,’ Tully suggested.
‘We’ll get through it,’ Heather replied.
She opened a bottle of red and filled up their glasses. Tully’s was still half full of white, but she just shrugged and drank it anyway.
‘A toast,’ Heather said, raising her glass. She sounded different, her accent a little broader, her words less carefully enunciated than usual. Probably the alcohol. ‘To shitty fathers.’
Tully looked at her. ‘Your dad was shitty too?’
She swallowed a large mouthful of wine. ‘Still is.’
‘But I thought he died?’ Tully tried to recall the circumstances of his supposed death. ‘In a . . . a car accident?’
‘I just said he died because it sounded less shameful than saying he was in jail,’ Heather said. ‘But there’s no point in lying now, is there?’ She smiled, one of those heartbreakingly sad smiles. ‘He killed my mum. That’s why he’s in there.’
Tully sat up. For the first time all day, she put her drink down. ‘Wow. Heather, I’m so sorry.’
Heather waved this away. ‘He was always abusive. For as long as I could remember, I was afraid of him. He could be nice, sure, but I never knew when he would turn violent.’
‘That’s awful,’ Rachel said, also sitting forward.
‘Were you afraid of Stephen when you were growing up?’ Heather asked.
‘Not at all,’ Tully said. ‘That’s the strangest part. How could we not have known?’
‘I suppose some people are masters at keeping it hidden,’ Rachel said.
‘It’s a trait of Dad’s that we inherited, Tul.’
‘But not anymore,’ Tully said.
Rachel and Heather nodded. ‘Not anymore.’
65
RACHEL
One month later . . .
‘Hi,’ Rachel said from the doorway of Mum’s room.
Mum looked over at her blankly, which was a little frustrating, as it was the third time Rachel had visited in as many days. Since Dad’s death, she found she couldn’t stay away.