Human Remains

relationship with Derek, which faltered. While I wasn’t a gay man, he was, and, as much as he loved me, he wasn’t looking for a female life partner, after all.
    I moved out of his London flat and back in with some friends from college.
    On my twenty-first birthday, still drunk from a whole weekend of partying, I found myself on a train home. Our house was near the station and I’d slept on the train, and what on earth I thought I was doing I honestly had no idea. It was mid-morning and on a normal day my dad would have been at work. Except he’d been off for a month with depression, something my mam hadn’t told me. And I turned my key in the lock and walked into the living room, expecting Mam to make me a cuppa and present me with a cake she would have made even though she wasn’t expecting me to visit, but she wasn’t there. Just him. And he was watching the twenty-four-hour news channel, looking up from it to see me in his living room, his third daughter if he’d only realised, but I was still Edward then – and I was wearing a short skirt and platform heels to go with it. He looked me up and down, his mouth open. And the shock of seeing him drowned me like a cold bath and all I could think to say was, ‘Hello, Dad.’
    He let out a howl of rage and distress, got up from the sofa and launched himself at me. I exited the house as quickly as I’d arrived, tottering up the street back towards the station thinking that he was following me and any minute now he’d strike my head with a massive blow. And when I got to the end of the street I looked back and he was nowhere to be seen.
    When I got back to London I phoned Mam. She was home from work by then and had found him. He was alright, she assured me. But of course he wasn’t. She tried to shield me from all that, but he hanged himself a week later. It wasn’t just down to me, of course, or at least that’s what my mam insisted. Maybe she was being kind.
    She asked me to wear ‘something decent’ for the funeral. That hurt me a lot. I felt it acutely, the loss of my dad whom I loved very much. The falseness of my mam’s approval of who I was was just another sting. My sisters turned against me then, even though they’d known about me changing and both of them had visited me in London and seen the real me. I wore a tailored trouser suit to the funeral and had my hair done for it. It wasn’t my usual look, it was a compromise, but they still didn’t recognise it as such.
    They never spoke to me again, and I barely spoke to my mam afterwards, either. With my share of the inheritance I got the deposit for a house not far from the one we all grew up in. I wanted to feel close to what was left of my dad, who would have been a different man if he’d grown up a generation later, and close to my mam who was ailing now without anyone left to look after. I wanted to help her but we couldn’t be close again, not after all that.
    I thought I was starting to recover from it, I thought I was getting my head back above water, but I had a letter from the NHS to say that they would no longer consider funding my surgery because they were aware that I had the private finance to do it. I didn’t, of course; I’d spent it on buying the little house. I tried to put the house on the market but by then the bottom had crashed out of it and there were no buyers around. I asked my eldest sister for help but she put the phone down on me, and when I went round there she didn’t answer the door, despite the car being on the driveway and the fact that I could hear her kids playing in the back garden.
    I didn’t realise how easy the solution was, not really. Not until someone showed me. All you have to do is go home and close the door. For some people it’s harder – they have to plan, they have to do it gradually. I’d done the hard work all by myself, it was only the little nudge, the little whisper that made me realise the easiest thing to do was to cease to be.
    So I went home, and I closed the door, and waited for the black cloud to carry the sun away.

Annabel
     
     
    ‘Drink this,’ he said.
    I opened my mouth and tried to reach for the cup – glass – to hold it but he held on to it and it bumped against my lower lip and teeth.
    ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Drink.’
    It was cold and it made me cough. When I’d stopped coughing I opened my eyes and looked and he held up the glass again and this time I drank, two or three gulps, cold water going down