Extract: Brian Dillon's mother died when he was 16, his father five years later. In this extract from his memoir, In the Dark Room, he writes about how his family home became crowded with memories.
The morning after my mother died, I walked the five minutes to the nearest newsagents and bought a magazine. It was a Thursday morning in June 1985, and that was what I did on Thursday mornings in the school holidays. I didn't know what else to do. I could not bear to stay in the house, but also (and here is the source of one minor shame) I wanted to read about the events of the previous weekend, when the global spectacle of Live Aid had glimmered in the corner of the living room of the house in Kerry, near her family home, where we had been holidaying when she was taken ill. I had watched it, thinking: everybody I know is watching this, and none of them, outside of my family, know that my mother is about to die. Leaving the house (in my memory, there is nobody else there), I dreaded meeting our neighbours, and so looked straight ahead, avoiding a glance into the gardens on either side of the road. Returning, I rushed to my room and lay for hours on the bed, reading. I didn't want to move from that spot. Outside the bedroom, I knew that things were taking their course: my father was making arrangements; my relatives in Kerry were perhaps already on their way to Dublin; in a room, somewhere - still at the hospital? at the funeral home a short walk from the hospital? I had no idea - my mother's body lay waiting for the funeral the following morning. But for those few hours, none of that really impinged: I was alone in a room, for the first time in weeks. The previous day, my two brothers and I had been brought from the hospital to an aunt's house, where we had sat on a sofa for the whole afternoon, silent. My memory of that week is made almost entirely of space, not words.
A house changes after somebody has died: there is suddenly too much space. We all know the symptoms of that change. We set an extra place at the table. We leave empty for months, even years, a chair in which the deceased used to sit. We imagine that at any moment the lost loved one will appear in the room (the air, the light, the whole room would subtly alter). These phenomena are familiar to the point of cliche. So well-known, in fact, that even in the shock of our bereavement we are surprised (in my case, embarrassed; shame seems to have covered for every other emotion) to find ourselves succumbing to them, as if we feel our grief must, surely, be more original than that. When nothing is said of the absence at the heart of the house, these lapses multiply; if only we could name the emptiness - we do know, after all, its name, her name - we would surely be better able to navigate round it, to keep moving. But we keep finding ourselves stranded in these ludicrous poses, like a photograph from which one figure has been erased: four dummies with nothing to say to one another.
Such is my memory of my home after my mother died. The house seemed to fracture. It no longer enclosed a world, however fraught, but a collection of discrete cells, places where, one would now always be reminded, something had taken place (before, the semblance of a continuum; now, a constellation of vanished moments). In the evenings, I retreated to my bedroom. My brothers started to do the same, until my father, one night, called us back to the sitting room and told us that now, more than ever, was a time to be together, not to wander off on our own. (It was, I think, one of only two moments when he managed to speak to us about what had just happened: the previous night, as I lay in bed waiting for the light outside to disappear, he had come in to ask us to pray for our mother.) I think he may have succeeded in dragging us back into an amputated family group for a time, before a routine set in which saw us dispersed about the house again.
Five years later, and the house seems to have been waiting to spring this scene on us again: it is morning, and I have gone to bed late, after taking a day off from university exams. I wake, groggy, to find that Kevin, the younger of my brothers, is standing at the bedroom door, and seems to be saying something about the police. (Did he say: "Something terrible has happened"? How else would you say it? How did he, as he climbed the stairs, begin to formulate that sentence?) Something has happened; but there seems to have been a mistake. He says a name. It is not my father's name. They have got the name wrong. Or they have got the man wrong, the family wrong, the house wrong. It's the wrong day, the wrong city, the wrong country. They've arrived, somehow (and now it starts to seem unlikely, this clerical error back at the station), at entirely the wrong conclusion. That is to say: they have got the wrong dead man, and the wrong place. But my brother seems sure: sure they have made a mistake, but not the mistake I hope they've made. I imagine my father coming home, through the garden gate, to be told that he's dead: greeting his uniformed visitors in a light tweed suit, as if he knew he'd need to look respectable. My father is dead. No, my mother is dead (I know because I was here: I lay here, in this room, on this bed, the morning after she died). But my father is dead too. In a second, I am at the end of the bed, dressing. All I can think is: what do we do now? What exactly are we supposed to do now? So I start swearing as I'm dressing; cursing this morning, this place, right by the window, where I am standing dressing, again, too early in the morning, just like the last time. It is as if time has described a devious spiral and returned me to this point in space, where it will demand of me, again, that I stand here, then go downstairs, where I assume somebody will take me to a hospital, again.
The scene shifts to the hall. At the front door, a man and woman, uniformed, are standing, and I know as soon as I see them that there has been no mistake. The man is holding a small card in a plastic holder (a union card, I think) on which I can clearly recognise my father's signature, and so I listen without objection as they give me the news. My father collapsed, 10 minutes from our house and was dead, of a heart attack, by the time he'd been taken to hospital. Soon, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, and neighbours are making phone calls (to my father's sister, to my mother's sister) and demanding that I drink the glass of whiskey somebody has just set down in front of me. Before long, uncles and aunts have arrived and are making plans to take us to the hospital, to phone the same undertaker who dealt with my mother's funeral. But all I can think of is what has just taken place in the hall: that moment of confusion as I came down the stairs, before seeing the two figures in the doorway, when the future seemed to depend on the empty hall itself. For the briefest moment, that space might have contained anything at all; the possibility of a grotesque mistake, of a violent or lingering death, of time turning away from the course to which I am now trying to accommodate myself.
Three years after my father died, I am standing in the same spot in the hall, waiting to leave. Nothing has changed, except that everything has grown a little shabbier, somehow darker, and smaller. Everything depends once more on this threshold, between the house of the past and what is to come. But by now I am so tired of the house, so sick of its constant shuttling between past and present, so weary of the memories that are everywhere crammed into corners and drifting, untethered, across its floors, that I will gladly leave it to rot. The house, my mother had always insisted, was cursed. But the malediction, it turned out, was mine, and it was retrospective. I had simply never known how much I hated it, till the morning I abandoned it.
In the Dark Room: a Journey into Memory by Brian Dillon ( Penguin Ireland, €22.99)