by Maria Goodin
“What?”
“Oh, come on, Dad! We all know that what you really wanted was to go to university. And then I came along and screwed up your plans. So now you’re pushing all your hopes onto me—”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is! You’re not scared that I’m going to waste my life, you’re just pissed that you wasted yours!”
I stare at him, dumbfounded.
“Josh, I don’t give a crap that I didn’t go to university, and whether you believe it or not, I have only ever wanted what’s best for you, and I have been trying to protect you—”
“I am sick and tired of you trying to protect me, Dad! I don’t need protecting!”
“Of course you do!”
“From what?!”
“From everything!”
“From my own mother?!”
“Yes, from your own mother!”
He stares at me, waiting for an explanation, but what am I meant to tell him? That she only ever used him as a plaything or to get attention, that she dropped him for the first offer that was slightly more interesting, that I suspected she only ever had him to piss her parents off? I have never, and will never, tell him the whole truth.
When he was little, I used to say that Hellie loved him but that she didn’t have the right skills to be a mummy, in the same way that I didn’t have the right skills to be a chef or a teacher. Later, I told him that she simply couldn’t cope with motherhood, but that certainly wasn’t his fault and wasn’t really even hers. It seemed to soften his sense of rejection, but it was only one side of the story. I feared that the other side – his mother’s utter selfishness and her blatant disregard for him – would have hurt him too much.
It’s been years since Josh asked about Hellie and yet here he is, apparently desperate for a reunion with her. Did I really believe he wasn’t bothered about not having a relationship with his own mother? Did I really believe he’d made his peace with the situation and moved on? How stupid have I been?
“Why did she say you gave her an ultimatum?” asks Josh, his cheeks flushed.
I wrack my brain trying to remember the content of our email exchange.
You chose to walk away, Hellie, so I’m sure you will understand that I am cautious to ensure any future contact is made with a sense of commitment…
It’s difficult to think of it as a choice Jay when I was given an ultimatum…
“I didn’t give her an ultimatum,” I tut, realising what he’s referring to. “I asked her to make a choice – about whether to stay or go. So that neither of us were just living in limbo any longer, waiting to see—”
“So you told her if she wanted to carry on working abroad, then she couldn’t see me anymore.”
“No! No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t like that.”
“That’s how she seemed to think it was.”
“That’s her twisting things, as always.”
“But you told her to make a choice.”
“No. Well, yes, but that makes it sound—”
“Why would you make her choose?!”
“It wasn’t like that! I never made her break off contact! She could have contacted you at any point. She could have seen you at any point! I never would have stopped her, I just told her to stop messing us around—”
“And so you forced her to choose – me or her career.”
“There was no career!”
“But you forced her to choose.”
“She should have chosen you! That’s what I did. I chose you!”
“You had no choice! You were stuck with me!”
“Yes, because she left!”
We glare at each other.
“I didn’t mean… I mean, no, I wasn’t stuck with you, I wanted to be with you—”
“You never wanted me! No seventeen-year-old boy wants a baby—”
“I did want you!” I insist, but even as I say it, I’m tormented by the memory of standing in that hospital, secretly hoping that his first breath would never come. “You weren’t planned, but I did want you!” I repeat vehemently, as if saying it with enough conviction might erase the shame of what I once felt.
Josh shakes his head as if he doesn’t believe me and I feel sick to the core. Is that what he’s always felt deep down? That I’m the one who got stuck with him through default because his other parent left?
“Look, I never told her to leave. You don’t understand how it was—”
“You had no right to keep those emails from me!” he fumes.
“But the emails weren’t to you, they were to me! We – me and her – we have to sort some things out before we take anything forward—”
“You should have told me!” he yells, fury blazing in his eyes.
“Okay, yes okay, you might be right—”
“It involves me! Me! Were you even going to ask me how I feel about this?”
“Of course I was! I just wanted to clarify where she was coming from first. I was pretty shocked by this, Josh. I might not have handled it correctly, but I wasn’t expecting this email from her out of the blue and I was trying to negotiate things—”
“You didn’t need to negotiate anything, Dad! This isn’t Brexit! All you needed to do was talk to me about it!”
“Okay! Okay. I’m sorry. I screwed up. I should have just told you about it and asked what you wanted to do.”
“But you didn’t. Because you always think you know what’s best for me. What GCSEs I should do, when I should study, what I should do with my future, whether I should even be allowed contact with my own mother… I mean, were you this much of a control freak with her? ’Cause I’m not surprised she left!”
I blink at him in disbelief. He really thinks the fact Hellie left was my fault?
“Forget it,” Josh spits, turning away and heading back to his room, “I’m going out.”
I follow him as he grabs his phone and hoodie from his mess of a room.
“You’re not going out,” I tell him, blocking his doorway, “we’re going to talk—”
“I don’t wanna talk!” he shouts, shoving me so hard in the chest that I stumble out of his way. I’m taken aback by his strength and his anger. He’s never laid hands on me before.
“Wait!” I snap, grabbing him, but he breaks free with a quick twist of his arm.
“Get off me!”
“We need to talk about this! Josh!”
But it’s no use. He’s already out the door, slamming it behind him.
I’m left alone in the hallway, shocked and dazed.
“Shit!” I spit, banging my fist against the wall. “Shit, shit, shit!”
That evening, I drive around in the dark searching for my son. It’s well past closing time on a Friday evening and only a few people walk the streets – the odd couple who’ve been out for a quiet drink with friends, the odd group of mates who’ve had a few – or way too many. I drive with the window down, the intermittent noise of their shouting and laughter making me nervous. I don’t want Josh out there alone.
I’ve been reassuring myself that despite my fears he’s probably big enough to take care of himself. Six years of karate, judo, kickboxing… I remember the way he twisted his arm free of my grasp earlier today, not randomly but with applied technique. But I’m starting to slip into panic. I’ve called everyone I can think of and no one’s heard from him. I’ve driven around town twice, walked through the park, explored the grounds of the closed-up leisure centre, the skate park, the underpasses…
I pull into the deserted car park of the Canal House to phone my sister. An hour ago, I promised to call her with an update, and it’s more than my life is worth to break a promise to Laura. But I’m distracted by a figure lurking in the darkness.
I get out of the van. “Libby?”
“I thought that was you,” she says, stepping forward into my headlights, wrapping her arms around herself.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for Crumble. He’s normally back in by now. Stu
and Irena told me not to bother, but you just don’t know, do you? People can be so mean after a few drinks.”
My stomach flips. I don’t need a reminder of this.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for Josh. We had an argument and he ran off and I can’t find him anywhere and I’m going out of my mind because this isn’t the kind of thing he does. I just don’t know where else to look, no one’s heard from him…”
“Oh, God. Okay. Umm…” she searches for a suggestion.
“I’m just gonna carry on driving around for a bit.”
“Do you want me to come with you? Two pairs of eyes are better than one.”
I check my watch. It’s gone midnight.
“I’ll come with you,” she says decisively, heading for the van.
We drive in silence through the dark streets, peering through our windows for any sign of a boy in black jeans and a grey hoodie. I’ve called Sam, and Sam’s texted their other friends, but there’s been no responses, perhaps because they’re all asleep, perhaps because their parents confiscate their phones at bedtime like I do with Josh. I don’t know what else to do.
Just then my phone rings.
“It’s okay, he’s here. He’s just turned up at our door,” Michael says.
My body slumps back against the seat.
“Okay, I’m coming—”
“No,” he says, quickly, “we made a deal that if I told you where he was then he could stay here the night.”
“A deal? He’s not a in a position to be calling any shots, Michael! I’ve been going out of my friggin’ mind!”
“I know, I know. Look, he’s really wound up and I think if you turn up here he’ll probably just make a run for it again.”
I pull into a side street and park up.
“Can you just put him on the phone?”
“He won’t talk to you. Look, it’s late, just let him stay here tonight. Let everything calm down a bit and I’ll drop him back in the morning.”
Feeling that I have no choice but to agree, I hang up and lean my head on the steering wheel.
I feel Libby place her hand gently on my shoulder, and the relief that Josh is safe is suddenly sabotaged by a whole host of other mixed-up feelings which shouldn’t even be featuring on my radar right now. I wish she wouldn’t touch me.
“Safe and sound?”
I sit back and nod.
“I’m not giving you a very good impression of life as a parent, am I?”
“Well,” she says, trying to be diplomatic, “I can see why you might not want another one.”
I laugh quietly, relief washing through me, although she’s way off the mark. Not wanting another one has nothing to do with the millions of daily stresses and strains that come with parenting, and everything to do with the nightmare of being told my five-year-old son might die of meningitis. I am never, ever risking an experience like that again.
“Take this as a reflection of my parenting skills more than anything. I’m sure you’ll fare much better.”
“I’m sure this wasn’t your fault.”
I tell her about the emails from Hellie. I even read her a few of the more outrageous lines – and by the glow of my phone I see her frown and shake her head, indignant at Hellie’s sense of entitlement after all these years.
“What did you ever see in her?”
I shake my head, sadly, and experience a strange sense of the past repeating itself. This is a question Libby asked me so many times when we were trying to work through what had happened, trying to get our relationship back on track.
“It wasn’t about what I saw in her. We were just two unhappy, drunk kids—”
“But why were you even friends with her in the first place?”
“Because she had another side to her. And because by the time I’d seen what she could be like—”
“So what was this other side to her?”
The way she says it sounds like a challenge. We look at each other, eyes shining in the darkness, and suddenly I feel like we’re teenagers again, back in that place where we were thrashing it out over and over; her pouring out her jealousy and hurt in an endless stream of questions about this girl from my school that she’d never even heard me mention, and me explaining, however many times it took, that it meant nothing, that I thought we were finished, that I was angry and hurt and just got swept along…
“It doesn’t matter,” Libby says, shaking her head as if she’s not sure why she even asked the question, “she just sounds so… I mean, I just wondered how you ever ended up—”
“It’s not something I meant to happen, you know that.”
“I know.”
“It just happened.”
“And if it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have Josh.”
“And that’s why I can’t regret it.”
“I never asked you to regret it.”
I search the shadows of her face. I have no idea what’s happening here. It’s like we’re going through it all again, sixteen years later: the bitterness, the upset, the need to understand where we went wrong.
She turns away and looks out the window at the row of red-brick houses lurking in the darkness. In the thick silence that lies between us, I feel my heart thumping. I don’t see it coming, I don’t even know why I do it. Blame it on the endorphins that have rushed in after an evening of stress and panic.
“The only thing I regret is losing you.”
She stays turned away from me and I wait. I don’t know what for. I bite the side of my tongue, perhaps to stop me saying more, perhaps to punish myself for having said too much.
The silence between us seems to stretch forever.
“It was your decision,” she says eventually, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I said we could have still tried to make it work.”
I stare at the back of her head, straggles of dark hair caught inside the neck of her T-shirt. “I didn’t have a choice,” I say, “once I knew about the baby—”
“It was still a choice.”
“But what was I meant to do?”
She takes her time to answer.
“You could have given us a chance.”
I think of our first meeting at the Canal House, the way she’d scoffed at the idea of us ever having stayed together, the way she dismissed the notion like it was some kind of childish fantasy.
“I wanted to,” I say with more feeling than I intend, as if I need her to know, after all these years, that letting her go was one of the hardest things I ever did. “But I just… I wanted you to be happy. And free.”
“Of you?”
“Of me, of the mess I was in—”
“But that should have been my decision.”
I think of Josh this evening telling me exactly the same thing.
We sit in silence and I barely dare to breathe.
“We should go,” she says.
I look out at the dark street ahead of me, and when she doesn’t say anything more, I go to turn the key in the ignition. But then I stop. There’s so much I want to tell her: that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her, that I’ve been flooded with memories of the past, that my dad isn’t who I thought he was, that I’m worried I’ve screwed things up with my son, that I feel like an empty vessel…
“Libby, are you happy?” I ask, because in the midst of everything else that’s going on, right now this is what I really want to know.
There’s a long pause.
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I want to know. And because I’m still allowed to care about you, aren’t I? I still want you to be happy.”
She opens her mouth to speak, but then turns away again.
“Can we just go?”
We drive through the dark streets in a silence so awkward and confusing that it’s almost painful. When we pull into the car park of the Canal House, she fumbles in the dark to open the van door. I reach over her and lift the latch, so close I can feel the warmth of he
r body, smell the scent of her hair.
“I hope you and Josh manage to sort things out,” she says, stepping onto the concrete, about to close the door behind her.
“Libby—”
We stare at each other.
“I need to go,” she tells me.
Once more I know something’s shifted between us, taken us into a place it feels forbidden to go, where sentences are left hanging and nothing seems to make sense. But I don’t understand it and I don’t know what to do with it.
I nod. “Okay. Well, thanks for coming with me.”
She offers me a weak smile, shuts the door and heads across the dark car park, leaving me wondering what the hell happened tonight.
I wait at home the next morning until Josh comes back from Michael’s, pushing past me at the front door and heading into his room without a word.
“I’m tired,” he mumbles, when I try to talk to him.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry,” he says, kicking off his shoes and flopping down on the bed. “I just want to sleep. Can you shut the door?”
I stand in the doorway, uncertainly.
“Please,” he grumbles.
I close the door sadly.
That evening, I insist Josh stays home. We need to talk. But my explanations are met with stony silence, as are my apologies. I get nothing back but contemptuous glances. He simply isn’t ready to engage.
In the end, I wonder if it’s best to let the dust settle, talk things through in a couple of days when he might have calmed down. My main concern at the moment is to build a bridge between us, so the next morning I try a different tack.
“Why don’t we go to kickboxing?” I suggest, when he slopes into the kitchen. “Burn off some steam?”
He lazily flicks the kettle on, peers inside a box of Shreddies as if they disgust him, and then opens the cupboard.
“We’ll stop at McDonald’s, get some pancakes on the way.”
Josh gazes at the almost-empty shelves as if he’s longing for an alternative breakfast option to suddenly materialise in front of him, but when it doesn’t, he shrugs.
“Whatever,” he mumbles.
Josh eats his pancakes in the van just as he always eat them – drowning in syrup, rolled up and devoured in a couple of gluttonous mouthfuls. This is a good sign, I think, seeing as he refused to eat any dinner last night. But he still won’t talk to me, and we make the twenty-minute drive to the gym in silence.