Gift: A Son's Story (extract) - Clearing the loft

In continuing with the final draft of 'Gift', I've reached the point where I'm clearing out my mother's bungalow following her death.  I'd been putting off going in the loft, knowing it was an emotional time-bomb with the things stored in there: stuff of mine from childhood and from my marriage... plus some things from dad's room in his last care home, stored up there and not touched since his death thirteen years earlier.  Finally, the day comes to deal with it...

On May 10th - two days before my birthday and three days after the anniversary of dad's death - I decided to deal with the loft.  Russell was going to bring the van over to help me get the stuff down and move it to the flat.  But he rang me in the morning to say he was really sorry, he couldn't make it.  He wasn't feeling good and was going to take a day off from it.  So... I was on my own.  The toughest day.  But maybe it was for the best.  I went to the hire place and rented a van for the day.  I drove to the bungalow.  I went in.  I made a cup of tea and drank it.  Then I opened the hatch.

            Surprisingly, it didn't take me too long to get the stuff down.  It wasn't as much as I'd remembered.  From my childhood, there was a box of games - Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble, Frustration - plus some comic-book albums, all from the late '60s and early '70s: Dandy, Beano, Whizzer and Chips.  A box of all my notes and essays from university.  The 'wedding' box, which I kept sealed.  Then there were a couple of folio cases full of all of my pieces of writing, going right back to when I got my first typewriter in 1975: play scripts, stories, lyrics - plus a hand-written draft of an autobiography I'd started when I was 18 (it wasn't very long).  There was a cheap acoustic guitar that mum and dad bought me for Christmas when I was about ten.  I'd tried and tried learning it, but found it too difficult - but it had followed me around ever since, from London to Devon to Kent, from house to bedsit to flat.  As I picked it up, I noticed that the neck was coming apart from the body.  The heat of many summers up there had dried it out.  It was the first big test of my resolve.  One tiny bit of effort and the neck snapped off with a discordant twang of the strings.  I took it out and threw it in the dumpster.

            Then there was dad's box - the bits from his room at the final care home, chucked together by Russell the day after dad died.  Thirteen years ago virtually to the day, and unopened since.  I pulled off the tape seal and lifted the flaps.  The first thing to hit me was the smell.  The sour, pungent aroma of nicotine.  A smell that I forever associated with him, right from childhood.  It was so characteristic of him it almost came to define him.  Like me, he was white-haired by fifty - apart from the orange streak from the cigarettes.  Orange in his hair, orange on his fingers.  On the ashtrays, the window ledges, the basin rims.  The marks on the edges of tables and shelves.  The marks on his lips, too, and in his stubble.  The tang of it, wherever he went, whenever he was near.  In his clothes, on his breath, in his rooms.  In his laugh.  In his cough.  In his voice.  The smoke that came out of the urn that day in Devon, when we scattered his ashes.  The way it had made us laugh.  All of it came back to me in that moment.

            The box mostly contained paperback books - the westerns and war novels he loved to read.  Then there was a jar half-full of boiled sweets, congealed by age and heat into one mass of coloured sugar.  His white tea mug, still stained from his last cuppa.  His comb, with a few loose white strands.  A nailbrush and nail file.  His glasses - the lenses opaque with finger smears.  His finger smears.  A bag of soap.  A couple of ashtrays - a glass one and a tin one - with ash still in them (when I was a kid, he 'collected' ashtrays and glasses from pubs he went to, so we always had plenty of each).  A yellow tin biscuit barrel -  almost full of biscuits.  He used to have lots of sweets and biscuits at the end - for the sugar, when he didn't have drink.  I went to take one of the biscuits from the tin, but it crumbled to pieces in my fingers, like it was made of sand.  There was a postcard to him from mum, from a holiday she'd taken in Scotland in 1999.  He was living in a home in Canterbury then, just opposite the cricket ground.  I remember taking mum over there on the evening of their wedding anniversary that year, and we all went to a local pub to celebrate.  Some of the care workers from the home came with us.  It was a month shy of my fortieth birthday, and around the time I met the woman I later married.  On one of my last trips out with mum, just a few weeks earlier, I drove through Canterbury and went up past that home and the pub.  I mentioned that evening to her.  But she couldn't remember.

            Finally, there were a few books that dad's best army pal, Derek - Phyllis's first husband - had given to dad on one of his visits.  They were all connected to the army.  Histories of The Household Cavalry, regimental periodicals, etc.  Apart from these, I put all the books in a separate box for a charity shop.  Then I resealed dad's box to take home with me.

            It took me until mid-afternoon to get the stuff sorted through.  The only things left in the loft were bits of old carpet and some boxes of wall tiles - stuff that had been there when mum first moved in, almost a quarter of a century earlier.  I shone the torch around in there one last time, seeing the dust motes drifting in the beam of light.  Her dust.  His dust.  My dust.  Ashes and dust.  What it all came down to.  How it all ended.

            I pulled the hatch shut behind me and began to load the van.