each morning, with a pale cup of tea and some cigarettes, is a sort of terracotta orange, with a gold line of paint stencilled around it at approximately head height. The front room is a looming maroon, a deep dark red the kind you haven’t seen since a Twin Peaks hell scene, and upstairs the spare room is brown with bronze swirls crawling up the wall in the vague approximation of a plant. The house was always her project: whenever I would go home, she would explain with extravagant hand gestures, not moving from that dining room chair, smoke spiralling through the air, what the hallway would look like when she was done, and what she’d really like to do with my room – now a spare room – and what to do with the spare room that wasn’t my room, if she had the money, and then ideally the garden, and then of course the kitchen, but—
And then she was dead and we had to paint over it all white to sell it.
My parents are dead and now I don’t know where to spend Christmas. Like, can I go to Dad’s? No. Dad’s is out because Dad now resides on a golf course in Wolverhampton, a golf course that has no official idea about this because when we sprinkled him – a grey, dreary day in February, the first of his birthdays without him – the family neglected entirely to go through any legitimate ash-sprinkling channels, which is why we had to take two cars and kind of sneak down this side road and park nearby, hop through thick grass on a hill, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, passing around the big ice cream tub that had Dad in it, sprinkling that, and so of course he went everywhere, big billowing clouds of Dad all around us, sticking to boots and trousers, clots of grey Dad on the ground. So: can’t go there.
Mum’s is out, because Mum is a slick of grey dust long since lost to the waves who was last seen poured into a shallow hole on a beach in Filey. This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half kilos of ground Mum is a nightmare. Firstly it is never in an urn: the crematorium always presents it to you in a practical-looking if grey-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as a rudimentary spill insurance. Then you have to get the old band together again, i.e. get all of the family to one chosen place to reverently pour dust on the ground. My sister did the hard work of organising this one, getting my two cousins, aunt, my cousin’s two children and his dog, my cousin’s son’s girlfriend who I don’t think ever met my mum so why she’d want to come to a beach in Filey to dispose of her I don’t know but by then we really needed to up the numbers, a couple of Mum’s old friends and also me to a beach in eastern England, the sky so white it was grey, not a scrap of sun, not a scrap of it, and we spent two hours in Filey slowly walking down to the beach, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes urn (someone had to carry that thing for half a mile, swear to god), then fish and chips and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion.
So anyway yeah: Christmas is tricky.
My parents are dead and my dad died when I was 15 and my mum followed suit ten years later. I had ‘completed the set’ by the age of 25, and they managed to split up somewhere in the midst of it, too: they never married but they argued like they had, separating when I was 13. ‘I am an orphan!’ I would say to people, as a joke, and they would go, ‘you’re not an orphan, don’t be sil—’ then realise that yes, actually, I am, and just because I’m not some grubby-faced Oliver-style orphan, flat cap and itchy tweed asking a man for oats, doesn’t mean I’m not an orphan. I’m an orphan. Look it up. I am the dictionary definition of an orphan.
My parents are dead and my dad, especially, has fucked me over because he died before he could teach me how to shave. This is what dads are supposed to do, but he has been dust for four years before puberty kicks in enough to sprinkle me with whispers of neck hair, a formative moustache, general testosterone, so I had to teach myself to do it when I was in my first year at uni. This, for whatever reason, causes me enough shame for me to entirely lose my mind about it: I go to an out-of-town pharmacy to buy a razor and shave gel in secret (for some reason I am obsessed with the idea that someone will see me perusing the shaving gel aisle and go ‘HA!’ and point – there is a whole group of people I half-know with them, in this fantasy, and they all come round the corner to point and laugh at me, ‘HA!’ they are saying, ‘HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SHAVE!’), and I decide to discreetly do a practice shave – on my thigh, where, even in shorts, nobody will know I have done it – in my room.
So here I am with a wad of printed out ‘how to shave’ instructions from wikiHow, and a jug of warm water for rinsing, and a towel, and the door is double-locked, and I have shaved my left thigh entirely, entirely nude. It’s horrible: eerie, actually, too smooth, weak and fragile to the touch, and so immediately after I am done have that sort of dark, grim, post-orgasm feeling of dirty regret: I had a pink, nude thigh and a jug of lukewarm hair water and a hollow feeling inside my body. The warm hair water is a problem – I cannot sprint to the shared bathroom to dispose of it in case the same crowd is there, pointing and laughing, calling me ‘Jug Boy’ or ‘Baby Thigh’ – and so, in what is easily my third or fourth moment of sheer madness in this entire episode, throw the water jug out of the window. The person in the flat below – a pathological smoker, who I think actually was probably smoking out of the window at the exact moment I threw a load of hair water out of it – starts immediately thumping on the ceiling, so I cower on the floor near my bed and stay there, still and silent, for 15 minutes in case anyone comes to my room. It’s there – trouserless, afraid, silent, and with one perfectly shaved pink thigh – that I thought: this is probably a low point, in my life. I entirely blame my father for this happening.
I don’t know: a small part of me feels cheated, I suppose. My parents were old when they had me – Dad, who already had my sister from another marriage, was 42; Mum, a first-timer at 38 – but still, when you sign up to push a baby out of your body and nurture it to adulthood, you are in my opinion signing an invisible contract: I am going to live long enough to see this one through so it can learn to live without me before it has to. It would have been nice for someone to teach me how to shave, or what an ISA is, or how many carbohydrates I should be eating (as close to zero as possible!) before they died.
My parents are dead and the cats are going crazy about it, lost in what’s left of the house. The cats are brothers, Boz and Jez, big beefy thickset tabbies with loud mouths and who lean into tickles ear-first, great cats, wonderful boys, starting to creak a little as we’ve had them since I was 11 but otherwise great, good boys. They are staying with some friends of my mum’s since the death thing happened to her and the friends – a couple – are sending us mixed messages about them, about how happy the animals are and the humans too. The husband is deeply in love with Boz and Jez: they sit on him, he tells us, they are very settled, they can stay with us as long as you need, if you are thinking of putting them up for adoption, he says, he is interested. The wife is calling us at odd times in the afternoon to tell us that actually the cats are deeply unhappy and we need to come get them, stat. Listen, I like being courtside on a slow-moving divorce just as much as anyone but right now, while I’m trying to pick funeral flowers out, it’s less than ideal, so my sister decides to take the cats home to London to live the most luxe life a cat can possibly live in the two or so years they have left. When we take Jez, in a cat box, to the train station, it’s the most he’s ever travelled in his life. Do you know when a cat is really distressed – like, really, really freaked out – they pant? Honestly, it’s fucking crazy. It sounds like a werewolf transformation scene in an especially bogus eighties movie. This cat is panting and panting and panting. The noises coming out of this box, my god. Anyway, long story short: we get on the train, sit at a four-seater table, and then Jez just immediately panic-shits everywhere. Just everywhere. Jemma has to take him into a train bathroom and clean him up with wet wipes like a baby. Boz is chill throughout.
My parents are dead and my sister has gone back to London for the weekend because ‘this fucking shitheap fucking town is driving me deranged’ (my words, not hers) (my sister did NOT say this) and so I am left, alone here, with the echoing floors and the still bristling ashtrays and my mum’s phonebook, carefully handwritten and overwritten and rewritten, years of house moves and name changes and marriages and divorce, with the names and numbers of all her families and friends. And it’s me, my turn – my sister did this when my dad died, it is my turn to do this now – it is my