Diane looked at me for a response, but I felt as if someone had merely opened the door to an empty room. I didn't feel anything. It simply confirmed that during my life my father had already been dead to me. After breakfast, I walked to the local telephone box. My mother answered the phone.

"What happened?"  I asked.

"Your father had a heart attack.  It happened this morning, around two…" said she in her domineering voice.

On hearing another voice in the background, I interrupted,

"Who else is with you?"

"Your auntie Gladys.  Do you want to speak to her?"

Gladys must have been standing close to my mother, because almost immediately she broke into the conversation.

"Hello Ronald," she began, then without pausing for breath launched into an interminable barrage of endless patter, like the clatter of rain on a tin roof. When I could bear it no longer, I interrupted her.

"Where is he now?"

"He's at the hospital. They've been very, very good," she said, following with  more empty patter.  Nearly seventy, I thought, and still she talks too much and thinks too little. I raised my voice to get a word in: "Well I couldn't do anything for him when he was alive, so there's nothing I can do for him now that he's dead." Gladys responded angrily,  "Oh, we have to bury the hatchet at times like these." Such words, I thought, from a woman who had metaphorically buried a hatchet in three dead husbands. I slammed the receiver down and left that red cell of hell. Instead of making the necessary self-adjustments over the years, my father had by choice burned the family's boats, so to speak, severing normal communication with each of his five offspring.

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