Van Gogh’s Cornfield*...........................1

My dad’s in there. The thought was intrusive and glued my eyelids open. I knew I didn’t want to watch those pall-bearers carry out their morbid task, but I did anyway. Was it an urge to stop them? Was it an urge to see him one last time? Was it maybe just a sense of gross curiosity, like how I watched someone burn an ant with a magnifying glass once and, though horrified, let them simply because I had never seen something writhe around in such helpless pain before? I couldn’t identify whatever it was that made me look. I just did.

It was over quicker than I thought. The journey of box down hole seemed like one of such finality that nobody questioned it. This wasn’t like weddings, where you could speak now or forever hold your peace and nullify a small fortune in cake and chiffon with a single shout. No, everyone here had just come to the unanimous decision that burying him underneath a heap of earth to decompose forever was the best way to go about this.

We heard the echo as the pallbearers gave up and the coffin made the rest of the journey alone. This was it. Tears were crawling down my face but I couldn’t feel them coming out. My eyelids had unstuck now; I was overcome with the urge to look literally anywhere else. The sky, deceptively cheerful, was huge and cavernous above me. I was more trapped here in this wide open space on the top of a hill than I ever had been behind a closed door.

As he dropped out of sight, my father dropped out of their minds; some other formalities proceeded after this which I couldn’t quite remember. Perhaps there was food at some respectable inn. Maybe there was a plate of roast lamb in front of me. I ignored it all. It didn’t matter.

Nanna, at some point later in my life, told me that funerals didn’t have to be sad. At this point she was at a ripe age where funerals outnumbered birthday parties and weddings, and had appointed herself natural authority on the matter. The reason why the sun shone at a funeral was because “you’re moving on from one life into another, dear, the same way you go from being a boy to a man to a husband.” After this piece of wisdom she had turned around, firmly indicated that there would be no more questions, and poured herself a generous glass of gin. That was an affectation of Nanna’s- she didn’t actually enjoy drinking that much, but thought turning to the decanter would disguise the dampness on her face. Not pointing it out was one of the ways I repaid her for all she did.

Some few years after that, when I was old enough to shave but not enough to smoke, I re-entered my father’s room. Thus far it was in a limbo between sepulchre and spare room. Nanna only went in to clean it, never to use it, and so we decided we’d let some unfortunate acquaintance face it someday and feel emptiness crawling on their backs in our steads. When I entered, none of Father’s things had been removed. There hadn’t been a single challenge to his old principles of neatness. Nothing spilled out as in Mother’s room; this was its straight-backed counterpart, coats and shirts lined up soldierly in the wardrobe and colognes queueing across the mantle of the fireplace. 36

His bed was made, but the sheets, if you squinted, held some sly allusions to an adult man.

I noticed a book in its dust-jacket on the nightstand bisected by a tasselled bookmark, its journey towards completion orphaned by my father’s abandonment of his own. As all children are, I was curious about my father- the only difference was that he hadn’t been there to answer my questions. I could well have disturbed the book in hope of finding answers inside, some infallible guide to being a gentleman. I left it there. It was a testament to his life, not mine.

Noticing the gramophone had been what stopped me from leaving. Its presence was like an old family cat, the gentle twists of its neck having the bearing of a tail. The flare of its horn was more comparable to the head of a lone daffodil, sprouting proudly into emptiness. An affront to silence.

This affront I accepted. I wound up the gramophone’s crank to the right, hesitantly at first, until the repetitive motion worked its spell on me and I wound and wound until it would no longer yield. I set the crank free, released the brake, and the record that had been resting on it for years began to play again.

The gramophone wasn’t like a human, whose years of emptiness and mourning could be disguised by a brave face. The music was juddery initially, slow, scratchy. It was a few moments until I realised the slowness was real: this was the waltz song. The troubadour to my ghostly father and his ghostly wife.

I picked up the hands of imaginary parents, and began to dance.

Timing was something I had to learn on my own. Eternity wasn’t something I had earned yet; I was still confined to the revolving of days and nights. Though I was changing physically now, I probably couldn’t change as drastically as Mother and Father had. They no longer needed shoes or hardwood floors.

The sun was dimming through the gap in the curtains outside. I completed the circle myself, the ambassador of a lost genetic sequence to the world of the living, and stepped in circumferences. And I danced, and danced, until I felt like my head was going to explode.

Eventually the record whirled into silence. The needle hovered at its centre, dipping down and up again like a reluctant paddler. I returned it to its original place. Then I left Father’s room, and never went back.