Yours,
Iris
Eight months after
Dear Iris,
I’m sorry to hear that your dad passed. Ivy’s agent let me know a couple of days ago. I mean this sincerely, if there’s anything I can do, please let me know. That includes coming to London and helping out with the funeral arrangements and anything else that needs taking care of. It’s easy being a writer because I have the creative licence to cancel meetings and put back release dates to suit what needs doing, so don’t feel that asking me to come down would be too much and an inconvenience. It wouldn’t.
I think Ivy may have put Keane into a book. There’s a side character called Pierce in her Retford Murders series. He’s a detective who the main character has brief conversations with when they pass at the station. Pierce is a good character, steady and stable, until the second to last book when he leaves his new wife for another woman. The other woman’s ex-husband ends up murdering Pierce – I wonder if your sister helped herself feel at peace with it that way? I’ve added characters into books that have a passing resemblance to people I know so I can enact some sort of come-uppance.
I regularly put my brothers in my books, usually really irritating side characters. No one would ever know, but it makes me chuckle.
I’m going to go off topic, because I think you need to see that seas can be wider and calmer than the one you’re currently sailing, and tell you about my brothers.
Finn is the eldest. He’s married to Ruby – they had a pretend relationship to help her out and give him a buffer from an ex-girlfriend who was a bit too persistent with Finn, but it ended up being very real. Ivy was part of the wedding, which was done in secret but we have photos, which I’ve printed and sent with this letter in case you hadn’t seen them.
Finn went to university but dropped out after a year because he’d started a brewing business that went viral. He’s really goodwith business and planning, and also really good at making beer. The brewery is run separately to the distillery, which is in Puffin Bay and Finn’s baby. He oversees the brewery from a distance but is still the creative person and decides on what direction to take the business, along with the board of directors.
The distillery is smaller and I don’t think Finn wants to expand it like he’s done with the brewery. He forages for the botanicals himself a lot of the time and is really hands on with the process. He likes the island life though – he’s the reason Rowan and I ended up moving. We all invested in the distillery to spread the liability from being solely Finn’s and decided to move with him as there was no reason not to. Finn’s probably the sensible one, kind of. Our dad wasn’t around when we were growing up and if our mam had boyfriends, we never found out about it, so Finn kind of thought he was the responsible one. I think he and Ruby are expecting a baby, but they haven’t said anything yet. I was round at their house the other morning and I heard her vomiting and Finn was talking like he was really concerned – they didn’t know I was there but that’s another story.
Rowan’s my twin and he’s my exact opposite. We’re identical. Monozygotic twins, so truly identical. Our DNA is almost the same – we did have this checked, so any child of Rowan’s or vice versa, would be the same as my child – if any children are ever blessed with having me as a father (the arrogance in that is a joke, by the way). But as people we’re really different. I’m an extrovert, he prefers to be behind a computer screen. I’ve never met a person I didn’t like – at least at first; he’d rather not meet them in the first place. He's really grumpy; I don’t think I’ve ever been described as grumpy in my life.
We are similar though, and not just with how we look. We can both hyper focus on one thing. Roe will code for hours and have no idea how long he’s been there for and I’ll write for hoursand only realise how long I’ve been there for when I’m hungry and I’m drinking a stone cold mug of tea. We’re both creative, just in different ways. Neither of us like people who aren’t up front and honest and we’re both suckers for a sob story.
It's funny watching him at the moment, because he’s falling in love with his housemate who he’s pretending to dislike even though she’s lovely. He keeps getting jealous because I’m friends with her, and I can tell he’s worried that she likes me more than him – which wouldn’t be difficult because I’m a lot less grumpy than him and I smile more – but he won’t admit it. I get the feeling at some point he’s going to explode and hopefully she won’t reject him. I don’t think she will, because I also get the feeling that she actually really likes him, maybe more than that.
We had a few years when we didn’t live near each other. Finn was in Manchester, which is where the brewery is set up. Roe was mainly in Dublin because he can work from anywhere and Dublin’s one of his favourites, and I was hanging around London and Edinburgh, sometimes Cardiff. But once we visited Puffin Bay, we all fell in love with it.
Amelie, who runs the local pub here, is a long time family friend. She grew up living next door to our cousins who were from Oxfordshire, and for whatever reason she decided to up sticks and move from London to Anglesey and take on the wreck of an old pub. She’s been in Puffin Bay for five or six years now and the pub which was just a shell of a building when she moved in, is now the centre of the town. We visited one summer with our cousins and all their kids and Finn liked it. He’d pretty much burned himself out with the brewery, and wanted to be near the sea, so he bought an old farmhouse, its land and all the outbuildings a ten-minute walk from Amelie’s pub while we there that weekend and that’s been the start.
Puffin Bay is my home now. I haven’t bought anywhere yet. I’m still living in Thane’s lighthouse, but it isn’t permanent. I’mjust not sure yet what sort of building I want as my home and there’s no rush to choose. But here, by the sea, is great for my writing. The words come easily here and I can get lost in the worlds I create, which sounds like some sort of illness when I put it like that.
I think that’s why Ivy and I got on so well. We understood how insane it is to lose yourself in a world that is completely made up, becoming immersed in characters and situations that are completely make believe. While writing fiction doesn’t change worlds or keep people safe like Roe does with some of his work, or employ hundreds of people like Finn. But maybe by writing our books, we give people an escape – I know my books won’t be studied at college or university - although I think there is a degree in crime writing now – or be used to study society in half a century’s time, but maybe it gave a reader the chance to escape for a few hours and maybe that’s enough.
What about you? Tell me about your friends and London. Tell me about your photography. I did find out that you won an award a few weeks ago – you kept that one quiet.
If you need a friend to help with your dad, let me know. I mean that. I’ll be any help that I can.
Yours,
Gully
Dear Gully,
Thank you for your offer to help. My father’s sister has stepped in to support which has been a godsend. They weren’t close but she’s a nice person and I think she realised I was flailing in that boat, so she’s stepped in and helped out. The funeral was last week and went as you’d expect – a church full of my dad’s business associates and murmurings about the will and who was getting what, and then more loaded questions about where mymother was. The answer to that is she’s still in Cape Cod and my father is now generously funding round the clock nursing care until we reach another end.
This year has been only endings and no new beginnings. I keep waiting for the start of something to replace what’s been lost, but nothing comes.
I fly to America and Cape Cod next week. Now Dad’s gone and the funeral’s done with, I need to focus on Mother. I spoke to her yesterday – I wouldn’t say we had a conversation as she isn’t capable of it, just a few words and sounds.
My mother has drunk since I could remember and not just an afternoon gin and tonic to celebrate four o’clock arriving. Wine was always her poison, wine and sherry and sometimes port, but a lot of it. She could get through a bottle like I would down water after a run (not that I’ve done any running recently) and seem like she was stone cold sober, which is a dangerous place to be.
There’s a theory that alcoholism runs in families – maybe more through examples being set rather than genetics, who knows? I’m a photographer, not a geneticist. It doesn’t run in ours. My mother’s parents drank moderately. My dad’s parents only drank on special occasions, which included Sunday lunch, but only a glass of very nice red wine, as my grandmother used to put it. My dad enjoyed a pint or a glass of whisky, but never at home. Ivy and I did what you’d expect of our age and era.
My mother – Denise – is an anomaly. She’s lost herself in alcohol since I can remember, taking to her bed early in the evening was the only sign she’d had too much, but doing that every afternoon for years catches up with you. She had her first hospital admission five years ago. Six stays in rehab and four more admissions later and I think we’re at the conclusion that she’s chosen her own adventure and this one doesn’t end with happily ever after.
Do not feel sorry for me. I know that it’s shit that I’m going to have lost my sister and both my parents in the space of a year, give or take a few months, and there are some days right now where I feel like I’m in a very dark long tunnel at the end of which there is no light, but since Dad passed away, I’ve felt lighter.
