Megan Voysey-Braig won the European Union Literary Award 2007/08 for her novel Till We Can Keep An Animal, which has just been published by Jacana. This is an extract:
“It’s your mother. There was a break-in.” William’s voice falters, trips over his words, dissolves into choked silence.
“What happened, Dad? Just tell me, please!”
William hates feeling weak, especially in front of his daughter, he is her father, he had shared the job of answering her questions, he has to know how to tell her, he has to be brave enough. He tenses his muscles, clenches his jaw around the words that threaten to blow the top of his head off.
“The intruders, they had a gun, shot her, I am sorry sweetheart but she didn’t make it.” He can hear Imogen drawing in deep breaths, shallower, quicker and quicker, shorter and shorter.
“Imogen?”
“Dad, I have to go.”
The phone goes dead in his ear. He didn’t expect that response, he didn’t know what to expect. This was foreign ground, an alien-inhabited landscape, an atmosphere made up entirely of ammonia, and temperatures that would melt the skin off your bones.
I see that he has written an appointment down for the cleaners on a crumpled piece of paper. They will arrive armed with bleach, industrial-strength carpet cleaners and polite detachment, wiping me out, making it all as it was before, early tomorrow morning. Not many crime scene cleaners around, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to make a living out of cleaning the pulverized remains of others. Why has he neglected it? I would’ve been on my hands and knees with a wire brush just like my mother used to, cleaning up after everyone. I couldn’t have stood the mess for a minute. I would have
made our home right again before the day was out. He hasn’t even thrown that chair out yet and I doubt he will. He is developing some morbid attachment to it.
He sidesteps it every time he has to go to the kitchen to look at food he isn’t going to eat, holing himself up in his study, where he only has to worry about putting his books back on the shelves, ordering the desk drawers again. Is my sense of time questionable, am I being too hard on my newly single husband, expecting him to heal this sudden hole by the time the sun rises again? It feels like decades have passed, it feels like life has been very long and just a second lived at the same time. I don’t know where I have been, nor where we could be possibly going, our separate ways, alone.
He pushes himself away from his desk and makes his way to our bedroom, taking the bottle with him. He gets under the covers, lying on his side and fumbles his way through the dark for the bedside light. He has forgotten to take his glass with him and chases a Valium with a gulp of Scotch straight from the bottle. I can see this makes him feel even more lost and hopeless. He will be on the street soon, he thinks, a man who loved his wife so much he couldn’t live without her. “The loss turned his mind,” all the old neighbours will say and they might bring him a solid meal on Sundays.
I watch him toss and turn and wait for sleep, the bed is too big for him, I know, and I can count on one hand the nights we’ve slept apart. He turns the light on and then off again, sipping Scotch and taking another Valium. A pain like that will need something that will make a horse lie down — something my grandmother would say, though her pain was only ever physical, life being too hard to worry about things like emotions.
“You have to harden up, Sarah,” she always said. “No use crying over turned milk.”
“Isn’t it spilled milk?”
“Either way, you can’t use it or you won’t like it!”