who told me I’d inherited The Gift, passed down through generations of her mother’s family: to see what others could not

They’ll find yu in time, Stanley

Pearline

who suspected what I already knew but did not want to admit, even to myself: that sometimes when I was on my own, I sensed I wasn’t

Pearline

whose votive candles for the dead ancestors she talked to left smoky streaks on the rosebud wallpaper over their bedroom mantelpiece

Pearline

whose favourite calypso song played itself in the middle of the night, waking Clasford in a cold sweat

Zombie jamboree, dat took place in a London cem-e-tery,

Dey were singing ‘Back to back, belly to belly,

Ah don’t care a damn, ah done dead already.’

When he hung up his flannel next to her threadbare green one, stiff and brittle as old cardboard, he heard her snap back,

When it get a hole, then I’ll get a new one.

When he opened the bathroom cabinet searching for aspirin, it was crammed full of her medicine bottles and lotions, ointments and tubes, bandages and plasters

When he rummaged in the wardrobe, placing the armpits of her clothes to his nose, he smelled the noxious legacy of perfume infused with chemicals that had escaped through her pores

Pearline

whose teeth still lay in a solitary clouded glass, like a deep sea shellfish, on the little table her side of the bed

Pearline

whose wig sat on its stand on the dressing table, bought when her hair fell out; and when he buried his face in it, he could still smell Jax’s scalp oil

Pearline

whose slippers were under the bed; and when he tried them on, he felt the lumpy misshapings of her feet, where she painfully walked on the sides of them, where the bunion on her left one made it stick out at the front

When he unrolled her nylon stockings, he saw the saggy stretches from knees and ankles that had swollen to twice their normal size; and when he walked along the hallway, he saw her emergency overnight case parked over by the coat stand, because it hadn’t made it to the hospital in time.

My father’s new bed remains in its plastic sheath. The new bath stands upended in the otherwise empty bathroom. Clothes spill out of scuffed suitcases. Towels and sheets are squashed into plastic bags. There’s a tower block of old boxes: official documents from the years of marriage, houses rented, bought; letters dating back to the 1940s; the passport dated 1956 that he was always going to get renewed for that migration back home that was always ‘next year’ away; the birth certificates, medical cards and dental cards; and, somewhere, a death certificate.

The weight of it all bearing down on us both.