7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  Bright, dancing stars appeared and a rising blackness began to eclipse my vision. Mum had told me that Dad had blackouts. Was this what was happening? A sharp turn of my head snapped me back to consciousness and that was the moment I realised what Dad had left me, and what my inheritance truly was. Dad wasn’t walking beside me – he was buried inside of me. He was never going to go away. He was never going to leave me. In the shadows of the graves, I knew that whatever darkness he had felt I felt too. That was our connection and it always would be.

  And that is when it happened. I stroked my face and there they were. I wiped them away across my cheek but they kept on coming. I licked them from my lips and tasted their salt. It seemed as though I was melting and thawing. All around me the natural world was protesting, and so was I, and I couldn’t stop. I did not want to stop. I kept on crying until my howls, drowned out by the wind, subsided and stopped.

  I made my way back to Nolly.

  ‘Good grief,’ she said at the sight of me, my mascara probably smudged across my face. I couldn’t help laughing.

  As I wiped under my eyes with my fingertips, Nolly announced that perhaps it was a good time to go and find a café that served a proper cream tea.

  *

  That night I dreamed of Dad. In the dream I thought to myself that I had been waiting years to see him, and it was finally happening. I was sitting at Grandma Westbourne’s table. She was busy at her sewing machine. Dad was sitting sideways on my lap, and he wore a long, white robe. I was surprised he wasn’t wearing his suit, and thought it was a bit clichéd that he was wearing white but, even so, I was glad that his robe must mean he was an angel. I took in his profile and somehow knew that he was unable to speak so I said nothing to him. Dad sat there on my knee, and I could feel the real weight of him and I knew, I really knew, that he was there.

  *

  Mum bought a car on hire purchase and became the giddy owner of a blue Mini Clubman. When she picked up the car from the lot she said the salesman had to remind her what the foot pedals were for, she hadn’t driven for so long. We took the car for a ride and Mum drove aimlessly around the streets, excited by the prospect of having wheels.

  ‘Your dad taught me to drive. He couldn’t believe it when I passed, he didn’t think I had it in me. One time there were police sirens and he thought they were after me because I was a bit all over the place when I was learning. We never had so many arguments as when he was teaching me to drive.’

  She turned the corner and I tried to ask a question about Dad. Why, after all these years, did I find it so difficult? A voice inside of me told me to ask away. One of the things I had never asked, but had always wanted to know, was where he was cremated and if there was a headstone or a plaque, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it – as though to talk about Dad diminished him, made him too everyday.

  ‘You’re a really good driver, Mum,’ I said, instead.

  ‘You know, I’d really gone and forgotten how much I enjoyed it.’

  She smiled and pressed a little harder on the accelerator.

  I thought of my brother and sister, who had got on with their lives, and wondered if they’d asked questions without me knowing – maybe they had enough answers. Rob had formed a record company in London. Susan was still, miraculously in my eyes, going out with Greg, the same boyfriend that Dad had known. They had moved to London and she had got a job as a dresser in a major theatre, the start of great things, according to Greg. Their lives had taken shape.

  Mum started a diet and began to study the lonely-heart columns of the Manchester Evening News. Together we tried to read between the lines of the brief descriptions and figure out what the men were really like.

  ‘Sunlight and the Black Sea are both medically proven to help psoriasis. Maybe one day I’ll make it there,’ Mum said, as she unpacked her old sun lamp.

  ‘Where is the Black Sea?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, some place abroad,’ she said. ‘Somewhere foreign.’

  She sat in front of the small, conical lamp, exposing various parts of her skin for ten minutes at a time. Dust whorls floated into the air as the orange light landed onto Mum’s blemished skin. She hadn’t used the lamp since Dad died. As I watched her, odd and alien in her tight, elastic, green goggles, attempting to get rid of those red, raised patches, with their silvery, white scales, I felt guilty that I had always hated her psoriasis, as though she had deliberately made it an extension of herself.

  One evening Mum and Maureen from next door went to the pub, where Mum met the man whose lonely hearts advert she had replied to. According to Mum, the man had become drunk and maudlin and had cried. She and Maureen couldn’t stop laughing as they recounted the story of taking the man home and pulling his boots off and putting him to bed. ‘It was a right palaver,’ Maureen said.

  ‘My husband was the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I overheard Mum tell Maureen, who insisted that Mum should keep on looking for a man, as she was only forty-five and had years ahead of her.

  The maudlin-man experience didn’t stop Mum. I was relieved as she circled other lonely hearts with her red Biro. ‘I might even put my own advertisement in, one of these days,’ she said.

  *

  The airport is a bewildering affair. I would never have known which queue to stand in if it wasn’t for Nolly, who has done all this before. She can’t believe that I’m off to India and that I’ve never had a curry. An image of Mum devouring those greasy onion bhajis that she said played havoc with her diet settles in my mind. I watch the thin air hostesses as they pass smartly by on their sharp heels and think about Dad’s mistress and wonder what happened to her.

  I look around at all the families and wonder what ever happened to my childish idea of studying other people’s fathers. Had I ever really got anywhere? It seemed that no dad was the same. I didn’t know anyone with the ideal father, they just didn’t seem to exist – nor did mothers for that matter. But all the fathers I’d met seemed absent, in one way or another – more so than mothers, which seemed to make sense. I think of all the mad fathers and violent fathers and unfaithful fathers and silent fathers and flirtatious fathers and kind fathers and cowardly fathers that I’ve met and I know for sure that Dad was the best one of them all.

  Nolly mentions that we’re flying east but I’m not really sure whether she means the Middle or the Far East. She says that I can look at her guidebook on the flight. I like the idea of finding out everything in the air – between two worlds.

  I buckle my seatbelt and look out of the window. Nolly has given me the window seat. As the aircraft taxis onto the runway the drone of the engine fills the cabin. I imagine that all the passengers are thinking about what they are leaving behind.

  *

  Out of the glove compartment you take the Basildon Bond writing paper and lean the pad against the steering wheel. You explain as clearly as you can your reasons. Under no circumstances do you want your wife to think your decision has anything to do with her.

  You finish the letter and fold it neatly in half and put it in the envelope, sliding your tongue along the bitter seal. You address the envelope to your wife and place the letter on the dashboard where the person that will find you will clearly see it. At least it will be a stranger finding you – though a pang of guilt passes through you for the inconvenience you will have caused.

  How methodical and organised you are as you attach the length of hose firmly to the exhaust pipe and push it in through the slightly wound-down back passenger window. It is as though all your life has been heading towards this moment. It seems more real than anything you have ever experienced. You fill in the gap between the car frame and window with bunched-up newspaper. You don’t want any gas escaping. Nothing should go wrong this time.

  You step into the car, settle onto your seat, pull the door shut and turn on the car engine. You are not sure how long it will take, this journey, but you have taken the precaution of filling the tank with petrol so you will get wh
ere you want to. You feel a pang that this car doesn’t really belong to you, but feel better when you think that the company will get it back soon enough, in much the same condition as you were given it; only a few extra miles on the clock.

  You see caught in the passenger seatbelt a few strands of Ann’s long brown hair. She is better off without you. They all are. Brynn, Rob, Susan, Ann. You hope that they will understand it was the right thing to do. You would only end up being a burden to them.

  Working backwards, rewinding time, thinking of your father and you still feel the weight of his letter in your hand, begging to see you and you still feel the blow at the discovery that he had never been far away at all. Your mother, you have always blamed her for that, but you have done nothing but disappoint her and this is just more of the same. You see Vera, your sister, as a child again, laughing, pulling you out of the fireplace after you’d fallen, backside landing onto hot coals. She’s pulling you out, but it’s no use. This is all you can do.

  The air is filled with the gas and you are going, going to that place, the other side, to the relief of nothing, the best that you could hope for.

  Fragments of your time as a wartime evacuee, a train ride, a man leaning over you, flashes of pain and then back home again, swimming in the Margate sea, dappled sunlight, sand between your toes, a table tennis paddle in your hand and you are pushing, spinning, chopping a ping-pong ball back and to, backhand, forehand, darting about, fine footwork, serving that hollow white celluloid ball, slamming it back to your opponent, the Chinese-looking chap who insisted he wasn’t Chinese at all, a rally of strength, opposing forces, no dead balls, energy in your lungs, the sound of the clear clicking bounce on the table, your wooden handle gripped confidently in your hand like a firm handshake, an extension of you, the red rubber-coated bat as it hits, the glorious sound of the killer smash as it confounds him, you are winning, you are up, the game is on your side. The motion, the excitement, the quick wit, the rush of energy and being presented with that golden trophy declaring you the Junior Table Tennis Champion of Kent and thinking, if only Dad could see me now, if only he could see me now.

  *

  Nolly says, ‘Here we go.’

  We lift off from the runway.

  I look down at the houses, the trees, the fields, the motorways, the roads, the streets, the cars – everything turning into a toy town. All the lives being lived below – happy, sad, indifferent – and all the families trying to get by, and the higher the aeroplane gets the less important everything seems to become, with the solid knowledge that it is possible to escape and to rise above it all.

  I press my nose against the window and take in what I have only ever seen before on television. We are amongst cloud, fluffy and soft and white, like my childhood idea of heaven. I realise how rarely I look at the sky, at all the air and vapour that surrounds us. In India I will turn eighteen, the key to the door. Independence. Freedom. My life may start to happen and I will begin to live.

  It is nearly seven years since Dad died. I read somewhere that every seven years our cells renew themselves and I wonder what cells I have that remain from his time. I can feel the insides of my body shift and reform as we begin to level out above the clouds into the clear blue sky.

  • THE LAND BEYOND •

  I read on the internet that every thirty seconds someone, somewhere in the world, kills themselves. My dad never lived long enough to experience the world of the internet, of smart phones and social media, to know a time where the word ‘depression’ is common currency, though often used superficially to describe a transitory unhappy mood. Perhaps if he was still around he would have found a world that still finds it difficult to talk substantially about mental illness, but that does at least acknowledge that it widely exists.

  I realise now that my teenage concerns that Dad was in limbo after he died were beside the point. It was the people he left behind who were in limbo. I can only imagine the conversation I would have had with my mum, Brynn, about him. She died from a stroke five years ago and I never did find a time that felt right to talk to her about my dad.

  A couple of years before she died, she pointed to the framed black and white Japanese print of a horse, which had become her joke of the only inheritance we had to fight over after she died, and told me that she remembered buying it on the Isle of Wight with my dad. It was an opening, an opportunity to ask her some things, but, just like all the other possible moments that had come about over the decades, I felt my chest restricting, my throat automatically closing and my mouth drying out. It was as though to talk about Dad not only diminished him, but would release something in me that I didn’t want anyone to see or hear. There was one time, though, when I did speak about Dad. Rob was writing a book and he interviewed me about him. As I spoke into the tape recorder, I felt as though I was part of a controlled situation and so the occasion didn’t overwhelm me, but, outside of that, I have continued to find it difficult to talk about Dad to any family members.

  The trip to India with Nolly took place over thirty years ago and, while the travel book she brought along with her described the culture shock we would experience there, I felt a lessening of shock as I moved away from Stockport. From India onwards, I looked forward to all the departures that there would be in the future. I kept waiting to arrive, for something significant to happen. At twenty-three I was living in London, working as a shop assistant in a health food shop. I had spent years doing various jobs or no job at all, working as a tea girl, a cleaner, signing on the dole, constantly moving around and looking for something to do. Working in the shop, I decided that I was too old to reinvent myself any further and that my chances were over of arriving anywhere where I would find some kind of true purpose. It was around this time I saw an advert for courses at a college in East London. I enrolled in A-level night classes in Photography and Film, and a part-time day course in Video.

  College was an opportunity to watch films and to learn to write essays and to take photographs and make videos. While I had chosen to go to college more out of desperation than desire, I soon found that this ability to freeze, slow down and re-examine time felt like an extraordinarily powerful gift. It was here I met an inspirational teacher, who gave me such a love of film that she changed my life. Discussing films and making films and videos gave me a true purpose, and was something I wanted to pursue like nothing else.

  I applied to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design to study Fine Art, Film and Video. Steeped in angst about what to wear to the interview, my flatmate stole a hat for me. It was a red corduroy flat cap, with daisies along the brim, and she put it on my head at an angle and decided I looked suitably art school material. At the interview panel I presented the videos and photographs I had made and one of the lecturers asked me what else I had been doing since I had left school. I felt embarrassed by my lack of achievements but mentioned India and that I had kept a journal, trying to think of ways I could impress on her that I was interesting and worthy of a place at such a prestigious art school, even though I couldn’t draw that well, or felt in any way like an artist.

  Getting the letter telling me I had been awarded a place melted my recent disjointed past away and the thought of three years ahead, filled with things to do, felt like luxury. It was 1990, the time of grants and fees being paid, the hint of student loans being introduced only towards the end of my degree. Throughout the course, I carried on working at the health food shop on Saturdays and in the holidays. I felt anchored, no longer adrift. Life was stable.

  In the first week at Central Saint Martins we made a video self-portrait. I used the few photographs I had of my dad in a wordless, abstract piece, which never explained who he was or why I was showing the photographs. It just felt the right thing to do, that my identity would always be tied up with his. I returned to my dad for my degree show film. It was a reconstruction of the last day I saw him – his hands on the steering wheel, his car vanishing into the distance.

  Brynn never saw m
y degree film. When we had our final year show at the cinema at BAFTA, I sent her an invite, not imagining she would make the trip, but wanting her to know about it. When I arrived on the day of the show, the person on the front desk asked if I was Ann and gave me a message from my mum that she was sorry but was unable to come. It made me smile to think of Brynn’s thought process in phoning up BAFTA and describing me to the person on the other end of the telephone, rather than phoning me and telling me she wasn’t coming. My sister came though and just before my film came on screen I said to Susan, ‘It’s about Dad.’ Afterwards we never mentioned the film or Dad again.

  When I told Brynn I had graduated with a first-class honours degree, she suggested we should take out an advertisement in the Stockport Advertiser to ‘show that silly school you were never daft.’ By this point, Brynn had met a man she would spend the rest of her life with, not through a classified advert, but in a pub. She gave him the name Bobby, because she didn’t like the one he’d been given at birth – Oswalt. In some ways I always thought of Bobby as her invention. The only similarity to Dad was that he enjoyed crossword puzzles, but really he was as unlike Dad as it was possible to be. He had the word ‘kiss’ tattooed on his inner lip and ‘love’ and ‘hate’ inked on his knuckles. Mum hinted proudly that he had been in prison, though this was never verified. When I first met him, Brynn was disappointed that I wouldn’t smoke his dope with him, something she took up briefly with gusto.

  At Brynn’s funeral, Bobby turned up wailing, in jeans, clutching twenty-four red roses. While Dad seemed to be the image of a 1950’s refined matinée idol, Bobby always reminded me of Oliver Reed in beard-and-drink mode. I think my mum loved him because he didn’t care about any social niceties. He would flick his roll-up ash on the carpet and drive without a driving licence and knock down walls in the places they lived without consulting the landlord. Once my mum phoned me to tell me that she and Bobby had been arrested for criminal damage, and her voice was filled with rebellious excitement as she told me how she’d resisted having her fingerprints taken at the police station and been put in a cell.