My auntie was my best friend when I was little. We lost her to suicide when I was 10, though she struggled with her mental health for many years. I didn't understand what happened to her for a long time, and I was so young that I didn't really know how to grieve. This piece is about how I remember her.
Blue Front Door
My auntie's house had a blue front door.
It was up a dilapidated, old, winding staircase; its stone chewed away by moss and ivy; its cracks inhabited by dandelions and wild heather. In my memory, it stretches beyond the tops of the tallest buildings, up into the clouds. Perhaps it was the toll it took on my four-year-old legs, clambering up to her door.
The walking and the aching was worth it though, because the moment she opened that door, you were greeted by a barrage of dogs and cats crowding around your ankles, purring, barking, licking. She had three cats and two dogs. Finn and Max were Belgian Shepherds. Malinois. I think that's what people call them nowadays. I regret to say I don't remember all three of the cats' names. One was Felix, and one was Jasper, though the third name escapes me now. Alfie, maybe, or Charlie or Tabby.
Further in, there was an aquarium, teeming with fish of all kinds. We had a fish from that aquarium at home, because he kept eating all of the other fish in the tank. He was a year older than me, and he died when I was 17 because his intestines started to well up and fall out.
I remember her house because it was teeming with life. It has an ocean-themed bathroom, as many houses in the early 2000's did. The walls were covered in photographs. Pride of place, however, was reserved for the painting. It was one of my paternal grandfather's - her father's. Two lions basked in the shade of the acacia trees, a male and a female. He always painted from photographs he had taken himself, so I'm told. Our painting was of a buffalo, which we'd named Buffy, and my mam liked to tell people that his eyes followed you, no matter where you were in the room. They were artists, my dads' side of the family. My dad even sold his drawings to pay for rent at a boarding house when he first moved to the UK.
He doesn't draw anymore.
My aunties house had a blue front door.
It was a snow day, and climbing up those stairs was like a deathtrap. My dad sat in the car, watching me. I told him school would be closed today. When I knocked, she didn't answer. Peculiar, especially, because she always came to the door with the dogs and the cats. Finn had gone when my auntie broke up with Paul, but she had Lulu then instead. I'm told she was a very aggressive dog, though never with me. My mam likes to say I could fling my arms around her neck and she wouldn't flinch.
My dad waved at me just to walk in. I frowned. But the door was unlocked. I shouted out, voice wavering, that I was here. My auntie replied, telling me to come upstairs to her bedroom. I'd never been in there before. You don't go into adults' bedrooms - unless you're at your friend's house, and she's showing you that her dad keeps his underwear under his pillow. My dad had gone by then though, so I pulled the door shut and made my way up another set of stairs.
It was dark, and she was hunched over by an alcove in the corner. Lulu was lying there, panting on her side. I watched with quiet anticipation, cross-legged on the floor beside her. As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I noticed the squirming pile on the blanket in front of me. I'd never seen puppies this young before. I didn't mind much, watching the puppies be born, but it was really gross when Lulu had to eat the amniotic sac. My auntie told me that it would help her gain some of the nutrients back, but if I didn't like it, I should look away. I didn't.
My aunties house had a blue front door.
But we didn't visit her house anymore.
My mam took me to the 'hospital' every Wednesday after school. We'd listen to Heart 80s on the radio on the way, or sometimes Heart 70s, if there was an ad break. I'd been told that my auntie wasn't very well, so we would be visiting her there until she got better. I didn't like it there. I didn't like the way people looked at me, reaching out to touch me, a silent question on their lips: what are you doing here? I saw them at bus stops and in doorways, even years after the last time I went there.
My mam and my auntie taught me how to play blackjack on a round table in an all-white bedroom some days. She could shuffle cards in such a way that she could 'bridge' in both directions, which is something I have been trying to teach myself ever since. On other days, the adults would chat whilst I watched my auntie knit, though the spark I had always known in her had gone. She was subdued, nothing like the woman who always had a comeback for my dad and could open a bottle of beer with her keys.
She got better, and for a while, she lived with us. I don't remember much about this time, but I do remember my mam complaining that my auntie had taken all of her clothes out of her wardrobe and replaced them with her own. My memory gets pretty fuzzy after this, I think she had to go back into hospital.
Sometimes, when I heard my parents fighting, I would hover by the top of the stairs, maybe even peek through the banister. On one of these occasions, I heard my mam say something about my auntie trying to get run over, and the police had to take her to hospital. It wasn't something I understood yet, nor was it something I understood for a long time.
My aunties house had a blue front door.
And the paint had begun to peel away from it. My dad unlocked the door, and let us in. There were no animals to greet us, and the front window was crawling with flies. I sat on the sofa, and my parents carried things to the car. There was a picture of me on the wall, it was from before I had freckles. How I had grown up. I was 10 by then. They took the painting with the lions down to the car. It hangs on the landing now, my mam doesn't like them to be able to see Buffy.
I took a wooden egg off the mantlepiece. It had a painting of the Kenyan bush wrapped around the outside. My mam banned me from taking it into the house. It had a silhouette of a bird painted on it, and it's bad luck to have pictures of birds in the house. It lived in the cupholder in the car for the next few years. Whenever I got to sit in the front, I would take it out and press the cold, varnished wood into my palm. I don't know where it is now.
My mam had told me, of course, that my auntie had died. But what she said was that she'd gotten too ill, and they couldn't make her better. I don't think I reacted at all. I don't think I've cried for her still, more than a decade after we lost her. For the last few years of her life, she wouldn't let us take pictures of her, because she'd broken her nose. The particulars of her face have faded into the blur of my memory now, but people still tell me I'm the living spirit of her.