Chapter 28
28
THE WAY WE WERE
Laura and I hug on the doorstep of the house that was like a second home to me during my teenage years. Of course, the intervening thirty years have seen lots of changes to the O’Hagan home. The walls are no longer rag-rolled and stencilled to death as was the style in the nineties. There isn’t the faint smell of Regal cigarettes in the air – which were Kitty’s poison of choice back in the day. She gave up smoking almost twenty-five years ago – which makes her death from cancer all the crueller to wrap my head around.
But even with the changes, I would know in a heartbeat this was the O’Hagan homestead. The same, if slightly dated and faded photos of Laura and Conal as children hang on the walls. Kitty loved a good family photo and she most certainly did not believe in hiding them away in albums or boxes. Her love for her two children was displayed, sometimes garishly, on her walls. It feels comforting now, somehow. Like it proves she lived and she created her own story and her own family – both of whom are now parents themselves and standing in front of me as fully grown adults, as Daniel and Lazlo eye each other suspiciously from either side of the room.
It really doesn’t feel like all that long ago that we were lounging in Kitty’s living room, listening to the radio and telling Conal it was ‘girls only’ and he wasn’t welcome. We made such a big deal of it, when the truth was that back then Conal didn’t want to spend time with us. He was usually just popping his head around the door to tell us to turn the music down, or ask if any of us were heading up to the shop and if so, could we bring him back a Crunchie. I’m pretty sure that in 1992 Conal O’Hagan survived on Crunchies and hot buttered toast and nothing else.
A hundred versions of him, along with a hundred versions of his little sister, smile down from the walls now – in the hall, the living room, and the kitchen. Dressed like mini-adults for special occasions, Conal in a full three-piece suit for his First Holy Communion while Laura had the best of everything for hers. She had a long dress, gloves and even an umbrella. It’s only when I got older that I realised how hard Kitty would’ve had to work to afford that on just one income – but she was a strong and fearless woman and she was determined no one would see her children as disadvantaged in any way by the absence of their father.
I spot a picture of both of them at the beach. At a guess I’d say Conal was maybe nine or ten in the photo, making Laura seven or eight. He’s standing proud on what was clearly a windy day – his dirty fair hair blowing in the breeze – wearing a pair of what can only be described as budgie smugglers. While Laura is in a lemon-yellow swimsuit with a white waistband. Both look absolutely frozen and yet are grinning widely at the camera and it hits me square in the feels. Behind that camera Kitty would have been smiling back at them, encouraging them to grin and making them laugh in the way she always did. They might be fully grown now, but that sense of joy was something Kitty instilled in them every day of their lives.
‘I think that particular picture can be safely stored in an album,’ Conal says, cringing. ‘The eighties really were interesting times for fashion.’
‘You telling me you don’t still have a pair of those to wear when you go to the pool?’ I grin.
‘Dear God, no!’ he says and there’s a pause where both of us know we could make some sort of flirty comment in the way adults do, but are also aware of who the other is and how this might not be particularly appropriate in the current situation.
‘Speaking of interesting times for fashion,’ Laura says, ‘look at this.’ She points to another framed photo on the wall in the kitchen and there we are – three tragically uncool teenagers with bad perms, jeans that came from Dunnes Stores when anyone with any true fashion sense was wearing Levis, and brightly coloured T-shirts. We had scrunchies in our hair and braces on our teeth and we look not dissimilar to street urchins. Laura, Niamh and I are sitting side by side on Laura’s bed – an open copy of Smash Hits in front of us. It is far from a remarkable photo – nothing more than a snap that if taken today would be instantly deleted but Kitty had put it in a frame and had hung it on her wall because I think she realised it isn’t the quality of the photo that really matters at the end of the day. It’s the people in it.
‘There are worse atrocities in the living room,’ Conal laughs. ‘You may live to regret slagging off my fancy swimming trunks.’
‘I already do,’ I say, imagining what horrors await me.
‘How about I put the kettle on and we decide how we’re going to tackle this?’ Laura says and Conal and I nod. Daniel just plonks himself down at my feet and promptly closes his eyes, having decided there is minimal craic to be had here.
‘I sorted some of this paperwork into piles,’ Conal says. ‘Mum did a surprisingly good job of tying up loose ends and getting her affairs in order. I should’ve known she would.’ He gestures to the kitchen table on which rests four stacks of letters and documents.
‘She probably didn’t trust us to get it right,’ Conal adds with a smile that is clearly hiding his grief.
‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ I say as I sit down and start examining the pages in front of me. ‘She just knew this would be hard and she wanted to make it slightly less so for you. That’s all.’
‘She shouldn’t have been worrying about this in the last few months though,’ Conal says and his voice cracks – at which I feel my own heart crack a little.
‘You have to see it as an act of love,’ I say, and swallow hard to keep my emotions in check. ‘My boys are grown men now, but I know as long as I can, I’ll do whatever possible to smooth their paths. That’s what your mum was doing. She was just being the great mum she always was.’
As Laura sits mugs of tea down in front of us, I see Conal wipe away a tear as if he’s embarrassed to have let his guard down. I can’t help it – I reach out and give his hand a squeeze of reassurance which earns me a smile. I can still see traces of that Crunchie eating, smelly boy he used to be, but I also see the man he is – older and wiser – but with the same piercing blue eyes that used to make me feel as if he had X-ray vision, and the same full lips that…
I shudder. My libido has been absent without leave for the better part of a decade and it chooses now, in front of the grieving brother of one of my oldest friends, to walk back into the room, shaking her thang and hollering for attention. What the hell have Gabby and her magic healing stones done to me?
Suddenly I’m not sure if the rising heat in my body is a hot flush, a feeling of intense attraction or Satan opening the trap door to the fiery pits of hell to drag me in for being wholly inappropriate in front of a bereaved man.
I pull my hand away as if I have been burned, because I do feel as if I have been burned. But I have to play it cool and keep my shit together. I have to not think about his eyes or the warmth of his skin when I touched his hand.
‘Did Niamh message you back yet?’ I blurt, a little too loudly, turning to Laura, desperate to change the subject.
She shakes her head. ‘She hasn’t even read it yet. Maybe she lost her phone? Left it in Sonas or something?’
I momentarily get my hopes up.
‘But no,’ Laura adds. ‘She messaged me last night, didn’t she? I don’t know, Becca. But I hope she’s okay.’
I push the worry down, even though it feels a little overwhelming.
‘Will we start with this bank information?’ Conal asks, thankfully distracting me from my spiral by bringing us back on task. ‘From what I can see she had everything up to date but obviously the bank needs to be informed she’s gone and the account needs to be closed.’
‘Where do we even start?’ Laura asks.
‘You have Kitty’s death certificate?’ I ask, knowing how surreal this sounds. I remember picking up a copy of my father’s and really trying to wrap my head around the finality of it. Seeing his name printed on it, his life and death summed up in two words on one page. Subarachnoid haemorrhage. A bleed on the brain. So catastrophic that he never really stood a chance, the doctor had told us. He had looked so peaceful for someone who had undergone something the doctor described as ‘catastrophic’. In time, I was grateful for that.
The worst bit about picking up his death certificate was having to hand it over to my mother. I felt as if I was breaking her heart all over again. There I was, confirming her worst nightmare had come true.
None of it felt real. I was not grown up enough to deal with it. I’m not sure any of us are ever really old enough to deal with the death of a parent. I don’t think it’s possible.
Laura nods in response to my question. ‘Conal registered her death.’
‘And one of you is executor of her will?’ I ask.
Conal nods in reply.
‘It’s relatively simple a task,’ I say. ‘On a practical level anyway. Emotionally it’s tougher. But first go through your mum’s accounts – see if there are ongoing payments which need to be transferred, cancelled or paid off. Then it’s a matter of providing proof that your mum has passed away – so the death certificate – and the bank looks after the rest.’
‘I don’t feel ready,’ Conal says in a small voice that reminds me we are still little more than the children of our parents, wanting to be loved and taken care of.
‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. I cried in the bank when I was helping Mum sort out Dad’s affairs. I cried in a lot of places. It was the worst time. Worse than my divorce by far. The staff were so kind though. That helped. I suppose they deal with this sort of thing all the time. And I tried to look at it as a way of taking care of Dad, like he used to take care of me.’
‘I understand that,’ Conal says. ‘You’re right.’
I’m looking at him when I hear the chair Laura has been sitting on scrape back loudly. This causes Daniel and Lazlo to launch into a volley of barks that would wake the dead while Laura shouts over them, ‘I’m so sorry, Becca. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘What?’ I ask, genuinely confused. Why is she apologising to me?
‘Here you are helping us, and I didn’t… I wasn’t… when your dad…’
Oh. That’s why she’s apologising.
Daniel and Lazlo are harmonising beautifully now and Conal and I are trying to quiet them. I turn back to tell Laura this isn’t about me. It’s about helping her, but she is bolting from the room and even though Daniel is doing his best to drown out every other sound in the entire universe, I hear Laura sobbing loudly as she runs from the room.
‘I’ll go after her,’ I tell Conal, as he manages to soothe both dogs into submission with a sneaky custard cream.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ I say, because I have realised that Nelly, the elephant in the room, is done with us ignoring her.