5am

A 5am wakeup call. A low rumble, rising. Rolling, crashing, shattering, like a great flake of a cliff coming away and tumbling into the sea. It subsides into silence.

My eyes open in the attic. Everything is very still. First thought: what’s happened to the dog? A pause, to put on a dressing gown, to not be the first one that finds her.

Sounds of doors opening and bare feet on wood. Coming out behind Brother, who is calling into dark space, “You alright?” Then the lights come on and we can survey the devastation. Mum stands in her nightgown and socks at the edge of a sea of books that has pushed their bedroom door open. In it, carried by the wave, are a lamp, picture frame, planks of painted wood...we follow with our eyes up the stairs to realise that the wall-mounted bookcase, handmade by our father and a fixture on the wall for as long as the attic’s been converted, is no longer a fixture on the wall. The top and left-hand-side of the frame hang at a crazy angle; the rest is gone, vanished onto the floor beneath all its former contents. Sister and Dad emerge from her room and the bathroom respectively. I can only see their feet.

Stupid words; “How did that happen? How did she do that?” I am still thinking the dog knocked it down. Was she jumping up? And then the realisation; the crash of heavy, heavy things onto her furry mat, the place the dog always sleeps, in front of Mum and Dad’s room, right at the bottom of the attic stairs so I have to step over her every morning. I imagine I can see her legs sticking out of the rubble. Dad says it:

“Where’s The Dog?” Sister’s feet ask.

“She’s under there,” Dad’s feet reply, in the play-mean way of his role of ‘hates the dog’.

Sister shrieks, as she is wont to do; her role is ‘loves the dog sooooo much’ because it is ‘hers’, bought for fifteen Irish punts at a farm fair on a family trip home because she shrieked and cried when told she couldn’t have it, but she never actually takes it for walks or feeds it. She punches Dad in the arm, shrieking “What a horrible thing to say! Don’t even joke!” before going straight back into her room. That’s her excuse. She doesn’t go looking for the dog. She doesn’t come back into this story.

We are still asking though, Where is the dog? and I still think I can see her under there. The rest of the house is very still between our words, without the patter of dog feet.

“I didn’t hear her run away,” I offer as a statement. I hope someone will correct me. Dad does.
“I did.” Relief.

“Did she get out of the way?” Mum asks.

“She did for me,” Dad’s feet say. “I came out for a pee.”

“She got out of the way?”

“I came out for a pee.”

“She normally doesn’t get out of the way for anyone,” Mum observes. “She lets us step over her. She never normally moves.”

“She must have known something was going to happen,” Dad chuckles, and his feet turn back into the bathroom.

“She doesn’t normally move, because she knows us,” Mum recalls, looking at us on the attic stairs. “I always think she’s a very trusting dog.” Mum’s eyes shine with the happiness of the words. Mum’s role is ‘loves the dog and dotes on it like a child’, because unlike the lot of us it is grateful like a child should be. She calls it petal, dahling. She used to call me that. It’s a reminder of how ungrateful I am every time. It’s true though – I have to step over the dog every morning, while she lazily looks up at me with one sleepy eye open, pleading with me not to step on her, crush her small bones.

Brother sits down on the stairs and starts picking up books. The cleanup has begun. I ask Mum what frame was it because I heard breaking glass and she should be careful. I am master of the obvious. Mum steps forward as my brother is stacking books, and pulls out the frame. I groan; it is the framed photo of a younger her I had made up for her fiftieth birthday. It was on the wall under the shelves. It is now covered in broken glass, which Mum diligently adds to by picking more off the floor and collecting it on top of her sixteen-year-old face.

“There’s not enough room there, pass the books up to me,” I tell my brother. Again I am master of the obvious. Dad comes back, and we work in almost-silence, picking glass, stacking books, moving pieces of wood. I squat near the tops of the stairs as my brother piles books at my feet, and I arrange them in piles down the edge of the stairs near the wall. I do it like they are bricks, to avoid them falling when the dog brushes against them, or one of us knocks them with our tired feet in the morning. It is interesting to me what titles I have missed, as I normally spend time standing in front of the bookcase, searching for something to read. Now, they are literally at my feet and, as I pile them, sorting the biggest ones to make foundations for each pile, I make a second pile of things I’d like to read. I hadn’t noticed most of the titles I find. It makes me feel sad about books in bookshops.

“It must have been waiting to fall off,” most of us comment at one point or another. “It’s funny really, because I’ve been taking books off rather than putting them on,” I say at least twice, without really thinking. We will never know what was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I find keepsakes, little treasures amongst the books. A father’s day card with two photos of Sister and Dad inside it, one of them where she is comically bigger than him; a trick photo from a place in Ireland I can’t remember. He’d have been grumpy, dismissive when she suggested it, but found it funny all the same, and probably smiled broadly and happily to himself as she gave it to him. He is always grumpy, but occasionally he smiles and we know he loves us.

There is also a box of photos. I sort through them and find pictures of when the attic was new. It was already cluttered with the junk of life not yet sorted into purpose-built shelving. The light from the attic windows looks dated, like a piece of history. The chairs and tables still have Mum’s hand-sewn cushion covers on them before she replaced the whole lot, and my brother’s room doesn’t yet have the furniture she hunted down for him; the right table, the right sideboard.
I find a book on pregnancy and childbirth that is set out like a child’s workbook; fill in the boxes with your answers. I find old birthday cards for Mum. I find picture books about photography, and a pamphlet of box brownie pictures, and show them to my brother as he heads back up the stairs to a few more hours sleep, having finished picking up the books. He works hard.

Without a grumble we have finished cleaning up; the remainder of the shelves have been lifted off the wall and taken down, handed from brother to father, and the books and glass have gone, and The Dog’s mat shaken out. Dad has told us to leave the rest for the morning and gone to bed, Mum has gone to check on the dog, who had realised something was about to happen, and had taken herself downstairs before it did. I supposed it must be like waking up seconds before your alarm clock goes off, and not knowing why until you hear the pips, feel the iceberg hit.

I take my haul of books that I had not really found, but rather had been oddly presented to me, back up to my room, looking back down at the now oddly empty space in front of the staircase. I can hear dog food being shaken into a bowl in the kitchen, the soft kiss of my parents’ door unclosing itself as it always did just after you had shut it. Sister’s room is silent.

I leave the door open for The Dog, who comes up four minutes later and lets me stroke her as she goes to sleep by my bed. She is calm as anything, and oblivious to the morning’s work. I write this down and watch the sun rise, bringing the first bus of the day rumbling towards us.