I got it. Mum took Lewis and Verity into the lounge.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello!’ shouted a voice of immodestly robust proportions. ‘To whom am I talking?’ the booming voice demanded. It was Aunt lisa. We’d left a message at the only contact address we had for her, two days earlier. She was in Ladakh, a place so out of the way it would take several international airports, a major rail terminus and substantial investment in a network of eight-lane highways to promote it to the status of being in the middle of nowhere.
‘It’s Prentice, Aunt Ilsa.’ There was a satellite delay. I was talking to what I suspected was the only satellite ground station between Islamabad and Ulaan Baatar. There was a lot of noise in the background; it sounded like people shouting, and a mule or something.
‘Hello there, Prentice,’ Aunt lisa bellowed. ‘How are you? Why did you want me to call?’ Perhaps, I thought, she’d been taking steroids and they’d all gone to her vocal chords.
‘I’m ... there’s -’
‘- ello?’
‘- some bad news, I’m afraid.’
‘What? You’ll have to speak up, my dear; the hotelier is proving refractory.’
‘It’s dad,’ I said, thinking I might as well get this over with as quickly as possible. ‘Kenneth; your brother. I’m afraid he’s dead. He died three days ago.’
‘Good God! What on earth happened?’ Aunt lisa rumbled. I could hear shouting. The thing that sounded like a mule went into what appeared to be a fit of coughing. ‘Mr Gibbon!’ roared Aunt Ilsa. ‘Will you control that fellow!’
‘He was struck by lightning,’ I said.
‘Lightning?’ Aunt lisa thundered.
‘Yes.’
‘Good God. Where was he? Was he on a boat? Or -’
‘He was -’
‘ -golf course? Mr ... hello? Mr Gibbon had a friend once who was struck by lightning on a golf course, in Marbella. Right at the top of his back-swing. Bu -’
‘No; he was -’
‘ -course it was an iron.’
‘ -climbing,’ I said.
‘ -number seven, I think. What?’
‘He was climbing,’ I shouted. I could hear what sounded like a fight going on at the other end of the phone. ‘Climbing a church.’
‘A church?’ Aunt lisa demanded.
‘I’m afraid so. Listen, Aunt lisa -’
‘But he wouldn’t be seen dead near a church!’
I bared my teeth at the phone and growled. My aunt, the unconscious humorist.
‘I’m afraid that’s what happened,’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘The funeral is tomorrow. I don’t suppose you can make it, can you?’
There was a noise of some Ladakhian confusion for a while, then, fortissimo; ‘I’ll have to leave you now, Lewis -’
‘Prentice,’ I breathed through gritted teeth.
‘ -Our yak has escaped. Tell your mother our thoughts are with her at -’
And it was goodbye downlink.
I looked at the phone. ‘I’m not sure you have any to spare, aunt,’ I said, and put the phone down with a feeling of relief.
‘I need a drink,’ I said to myself. I strode purposefully towards the lounge.
Lewis had been marginally more sensible than me, later on, that night before the funeral; he’d gone to bed one whisky before I had, leaving me in the lounge alone, at about three in the morning.
I should have gone then too, but I didn’t, so I was left to get morose and self-pitying, re-living another evening in this room, another whisky-connected two-some over a year earlier.
‘But it’s not fair!’
‘Prentice, -’
‘And don’t tell me life isn’t fair!’
‘Aw, think, son,’ dad said, sitting forward in his seat, clutching his glass with both hands. His eyes fixed on mine; I looked down, glaring at his reflection on the glass-topped coffee table between us. ‘Fairness is something we made up,’ he said. ‘It’s an idea. The universe isn’t fair or unfair; it works by mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry ... Things happen; it takes a mind to come along and call them fair or not.’
‘And that’s it, is it?’ I said bitterly. ‘He just dies and there’s nothing else?’ I could feel myself quivering with emotion. I was trying hard not to cry.
‘There’s whatever he left behind; art, in Darren’s case. That’s more than most get. And there’s how people remember him. And there might have been children -’
‘Not very likely in Darren’s case, was it?’ I sneered, grabbing at any opportunity to score even the smallest rhetorical point over my father.
Dad shrugged, staring into his whisky. ‘Even so.’ He drank, looked at me over the top of the tumbler. ‘But the rest,’ he said, ‘is just cells, molecules, atoms. Once the electricity,