Page 2 of Serenity Falls

‘Against my better judgement.’

‘You’re the best.’

‘No argument there.’

Her bedroom door bursts open. I’m enveloped in a tangle of bony teenage limbs and nut-brown hair that smells of coconut, like her mum’s used to.

I reach to the side and grab the shovel I brought upstairs with me.

Yep, soft touch.

‘Go dig up your dead cat.’

Airport Security are remarkably sanguine about Zelda, all things considered.

‘It’s normally ashes,’ says the heavy-set black guy with a bald head and a tattoo poking out of his shirt that reads ‘Britney’ (singer, girlfriend or kid – who knows?). ‘But we’ve had human bones before. A skull once.’

‘Whoah.’

He lifts out Zelda’s small white feline skull and examines it with minimal interest. ‘Yeah. And that wasn’t even the weird thing.’ He places the skull back in the box, cursorily pokes among the other small bones and then closes the lid.

I know I shouldn’t, but I find myself asking. ‘What was the weird thing?’

‘It had teeth like a vampire.’

‘A vampire?’

‘For real.’

I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Rule one in life – even before the stuff about being kind – don’t piss off Airport Security.

‘Wow,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’ Britney guard nods. ‘Working here, it’s like the end of days. We see it all, man.’

I smile again, and five minutes later prove his point as I stand in the X-ray scanner holding up my arms while he yawns and stares inside my body.

It’s not until we’re settled on the plane, Zelda ensconced in the locker above us, that I finally relax and let out a long sigh.

‘What is it?’ Sadie asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘No, really. What are you thinking?’

I turn my head towards her. ‘I’m thinking that I’m glad we had Grandma cremated.’

She pulls a face. ‘Not funny.’

But humour is how we deal sometimes. Or how I deal. Mum’s death is still raw, but humour rubs the edges off the grief. Mitigation. I’m good at that. And grief is a complicated beast. A chimera, composed of many things: loss, guilt, resentment, relief. It bites often and hard. We give the deceased a halo they didn’t deserve in life while we beat ourselves up over every petty argument and harsh word. You learn to live with grief, but it’s a bitter bedfellow.

‘I miss her,’ Sadie says, a small catch in her voice.

‘Me too.’

And even that isn’t the whole truth. I miss Mum, but I won’t miss the daily phone calls that usually ended in curt goodbyes because Mum was lonely, and I was busy. I won’t miss the 3 a.m. dashes to hospital and ten-hour waits in A&E. I won’t miss the helplessness and frustration as Mum’s health deteriorated. I won’t miss feeling like a failure as a son and a father, torn between the demands of an ailing parent and a truculent teenager.

When Mum finally agreed to move into Cedars Wood Care Home after her second heart attack, I’d hoped things might improve. She’d complained, of course – about the food, the staff, her room, the other residents. But Mum was never happy unless she had something to complain about. And she was resilient. She might have looked frail; a wisp of a woman with cotton-candy hair in floral blouses and tan slacks shuffling around with her walker, but that woman was not going to let the small matter of a failing heart beat her.