Puccini's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page B

have no intention of seeing it; I want to think it’s just a container of no further use, of no more interest than an empty eggshell. But I want to see his hands. I must see his hands one last time, so that’s another bloody thing I have to arrange.
    I brace myself to get on, to concentrate on the surfaces, and I decide to begin with the topmost layer, the room he lived in: taking down the signs of his routines, assessing the objects he touched four days ago, disturbing the last air he breathed. But all I see is how immutable his things are and how eloquent, on the subject of his loneliness and my neglect. His ‘effects’ exude the silent loyalty of a bereaved dog; there is something stubborn in their failure to reflect that the life they belonged to is over. A
Radio Times
lies on the edge of the hearth by the armchair, folded over to last Wednesday where
Countdown
is ringed in a shaky, ragged circle. The armchair is like an animal’s bed, layered and bumpy with extra rugs and cushions, as squashed and favourite as a nest lined with scraps. It still harbours the crumbs he let fall, still waits for his backside and thighs to hover and fold and collapse into the two channels in the seat. Everywhere, on chair arms and light switches and door handles, there’s a waxy patina of grey, the pewtery shine of gentle fingers depositing their oil so imperceptibly there is something sinister in it.
    I have not yet dared open a cupboard or a drawer. I start with the sideboard, expecting its shelves to harbour sauce bottles stuck onto spilt syrupy rings, and I am amazed to find instead row upon row of smooth glass paperweights with chips of coloured glass trapped inside that look like petrified anemones or bunches of tight stone flowers. There must be over thirty, each one different, each placed on tissue paper. He never deliberately collected anything, nor was his life prone to the incidental accretion of cherishable objects. I want to ask him where they came from, and why, when dirt became invisible to him elsewhere, he has not let it touch these. I see his hands again, turning each glass sphere in warm soapy water and drying it, holding it up to the window to catch the unchanging colours, placing it on fresh paper. Small rays of a simple, ritual happiness in taking care of them still shine from their surfaces. I tell myself that he would like them set aside and kept apart from the grime elsewhere in the house. In death, he is full of preferences and reasons; in guilt, I am full of consideration for them.
    And so, I go up to the attic to see if there is an empty box up there for the paperweights, and now I have got myself into something. There are no boxes, at least not empty ones. There are boxes and tea chests, full mostly of papers thrown in anyhow and spilling over the edges, with shadows of dust sloping into their depths like a powdering of charcoal over white hillsides. There are scrunched-up piles of cloth on the floor, heaps of unrecognisable shapes wrapped in newspaper and pushed in one corner next to suitcases; there are dust-sheets, a yellow-grey glacier of newspapers in a slow slide against the wall, a row of jars. A thousand doomed mending jobs flung through the barely opened door have landed across the camp bed or have missed it and hit the floor: bits of lamps, a bag of old plugs, coils of flex ending in wire tongues, chair legs, wallpaper, linoleum off-cuts, picture frames with broken glass, an open box full of tools fused together under a coat of rust like handfuls of sifted sand. Standing up here under the attic skylight at the back of the house, I realise I can hear the sea, and then everything in the room seems to have come from there, thrown up in great freak waves and deposited to rot: the washed-up relics, ruined and stranded after the tide.
    I turn to go back downstairs but I know I can’t. I can’t go on clearing out his sideboard, emptying his fridge, sorting his clothes, with all this waiting above. I