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frightened to laugh. There had been rows before, of course. It wasn’t that. There had been objects thrown and broken, whole days of grand opera at numbing volume. But until now, 5 Seaview Villas had soaked up the arguments and held them in its walls, like the damp. The poisoned air in the house, bloated with spent storms, at least had not escaped, at least nobody
knew
. But this? Such unadorned madness would not be missed by anyone passing by on the road. It was not a busy road, but that was not what mattered: here was her mother out of doors in a rag of a dressing gown soaked in red paint, hair felted to her scalp and her eyes lost in hatred, in front of ‘B A S T’ seven feet high on the garage door. It was insane and shameful and worse than that, public, and she did not even appear to care.
    A memory of
Turandot
’s jagged music was still sounding in Lila’s head, reverberating like hollow pain. How shrill and untrustworthy those voices, what lies they told. Love made nothing clear or right. It did not triumph. As she looked at her mother standing on the driveway—ridiculous, filthy, defiant—Lila loved her with such a surge of want and pity and rage that she again wished her dead. This wasn’t love the way an opera would have you believe it. The real thing was far too big a mess to fit to music. Lila leaned back against the wall of the house feeling the cold stone scrape against her spine, and buried her face in her hands. Real love could annihilate the beloved; there was in it something smirched and lethal.
    When she looked up, she was alone. A pattern of footprints and flicks and scratches like fallen red petals and twigs trailed up the side of the garage towards the back garden. Once again
Turandot
wafted out from the house. Lila didn’t much mind. It sounded almost like a return to normality. The rasp of the music and the lies it complained of were preferable, in their way, to silence.

    i ’ve been up since six, unable to sleep. I’ve got an ache in my legs and grit on my feet, as if I’d been walking about all night. The house is warmer than it used to be—all houses are—but all day I’ve felt the need to keep moving. Done a bit to shift the stuff in the kitchen. Oxfam, mainly.
    I get to the undertaker’s late. It smells, in a chemical kind of way, layered, as if each smell oozes into another, higher one that is trying to mask it. The premises are done out in pale grey and lavender. The carpet has a pattern like scattered pins and there are misty photographs on the walls of mountains and sunsets and rainforests at dawn. I’m put in a waiting room with quilted armchairs and tight arrangements of artificial flowers in ugly colours—turquoise and ultramarine—and boxes of tissues. Wherever you look there are bibles. I wait while they dress him in the clothes I have brought and then they come to tell me he is ready.
    He lies in a coffin in a room without windows. There are more chairs and acrylic flowers and bibles, but I don’t take in any more detail than that. It’s cold. The air-conditioning makes distant, electrical lapping sounds and in the glowing yellow light everything in the room looks buttered. I want to see his hands. One rests over the other across his torso and they look hard and waxy now, but I know them. I saw them lift teacups, wipe his moustache, wash carrots under the garden tap, but the surprising trust I feel about these hands means, I suppose, that they must also have spooned food into me, picked me up after falling, tidied my fringe out of my eyes, though I do not remember. It’s an odd thought that his hands won’t move again.
    I pull up a chair and look at him hard, and am relieved to see that all that was important about his face is gone. He’s aged, but considering he is dead he really doesn’t look bad. What I am looking down at, dressed in a suit and tie and pillowed in wads of gleaming artificial satin, is not him. But it’s a good thing to be reminded of who he