by Claire Allan
‘Lots of jelly,’ Joe said with a wink, and I smiled at him and then at my mother.
The smile on my face was mirrored on her own. Then I noticed how she looked at him. How her smile was different when she was smiling in his direction. It was how those men and women smiled at each other on the front covers of her romance novels. She was falling in love. I knew it at once.
It was only when he came back from ordering and reached out to hand me the giant ice cream he was carrying that I noticed the glint of a gold ring on his finger.
I may have been only seven, but I knew what that meant. And I also knew he wasn’t married to my mother. He was grinning at me. Telling me he asked for extra sprinkles. I could sense Mum beaming at him from beside me. I knew she wanted me to smile, so I did. I remembered my manners just like I’d always been taught, and I thanked him and ate the ice cream. I pretended it didn’t suddenly taste a little sour.
Chapter Three
Heidi
Now
I wonder what the official protocol is when it comes to saying no to a dying man. Is it an out and out no-go area, or is it okay in some circumstances?
I chew the nail of my left thumb while I try to build up the nerve to call Ciara.
Alex, my husband, tells me getting her involved might be a good thing. She may be able to lessen any burden on me. Which sounds great, but still I’m not so sure. I’m not sure I have enough emotional energy to deal with a second toxic relationship just now.
I sigh as I realise that despite my misgivings, I have to do this. I just have to suck it up.
Alex is at least sitting close to me as I call Ciara’s number. I draw a little strength from him. My hands are shaking, my tummy tight. Even the sound of her voice makes me nervous.
I take a deep breath. Remind myself that she is an adult now. As am I. I’m a wife and mother, for goodness sake. I should be able to speak to another grown woman without losing my nerve.
But the truth is Ciara has always intimidated me. At times she has utterly terrified me, if I’m being honest. She was the loud to my quiet. The tall to my short. The confident to my terrified. The angry to my sad. She was always bigger and badder and more able to dominate a room than I ever had been or ever could be. She’s the kind of person who can shred your self-confidence to ribbons with just one look.
I hear a soft voice say hello in a calming Scottish lilt. ‘Hello, Ciara’s phone.’
I’m momentarily thrown. ‘Hello,’ I stutter, ‘I’m … I’m Heidi Lewis. It’s about Ciara’s father, Joe …’
I hear an intake of breath. An awkward ‘uhm’, which tells me what I suspected. This phone call will not be welcomed.
‘Is she there? I need to speak to her about him.’
‘One moment please, I’ll check,’ the voice answers, efficiently as if she is speaking to a business associate.
Perhaps Ciara is still at work. Maybe this isn’t the best time to call. I think about hanging up. It would be easier and I’d have a good excuse to do so.
I’m just about to take my phone away from my ear and end the call, when I hear the calming Scottish lilt replaced by a brusque Derry hello.
‘Ciara?’ I say, to be sure.
‘Yes. It’s me. Heidi, what can I do for you?’
She sounds as pissed off now as she did as a truculent teenager. I revert to type and feel inadequate. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. I feel unable to form coherent sentences.
‘Erm, are you still at work? Because maybe, you know, this would be a call better taken later, a conversation … you know … to have when you’re free to talk.’
I sound like an imbecile.
It annoys her.
‘I’m at home,’ she says, her voice terse. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s your father,’ I begin. I wait for an interruption that doesn’t come. ‘He asked me to call you. Look, Ciara, maybe this really is a conversation better had face to face.’ I realise I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to have to be the one to say those words to her.
‘I’d rather you just spat it out,’ Ciara says. ‘What is it? Does he need money? Has he met someone else?’
I take a deep breath.
The easiest way to do something you really don’t want to is to do it quickly, like tearing off a plaster. That’s what my mother would say, so I say the next sentence quickly. Probably too quickly. The words rattle off my tongue.
‘It’s nothing like that. Ciara, he’s not well. He’s just been in hospital for surgery and well, the news isn’t good. It isn’t good at all, I’m afraid. And he has asked me to call you to let you know he’d like to see you if you’d be willing.’
There’s a pause. ‘Are you telling me he’s dying?’ Ciara asks, as forthright as she always was.
I nod before saying, ‘Yes, Ciara. It’s cancer. He’s been given maybe three to six months, at best.’
The phone line goes quiet. I wonder if she has hung up, take the phone from my ear to see if the call is still connected.
‘Good,’ she says eventually, although I hear a trace of emotion in her voice that wasn’t there before. ‘Good. He’s dying. Good enough for him.’
‘Ciara …’
I start to talk but the line goes dead. She has hung up. I sit staring at my phone, my face blazing, wondering how I tell Joe what has just happened.
Chapter Four
Ciara
Now
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Stella calls from the kitchen.
I don’t answer. I’m staring at my phone, trying to process the conversation I’ve just had with Heidi bloody Lewis. The golden child. It had to be her to tell me, didn’t it? It couldn’t have been anyone else. He couldn’t have spoken to Mum and got her to break the news. No, he was always one to go for maximum impact. Maximum distress.
The bastard.
Anger wells in me and I throw my phone at the sofa, watch as it bounces off the cushion and hits the solid wooden floor with a crack. I’ll have broken the screen, in my anger.
‘Good enough for him,’ I’d said to Heidi. It had been my gut reaction, to feel angry and shocked and think fuck him for getting her to contact me only to tell me he was dying.
He is dying.
My father, for all that word really meant to me, is dying.
‘Ciara,’ I hear Stella, ‘are you still on the phone, only the pasta …’
She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again. The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.
‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for information that I’m still trying to process.
‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.
Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.
‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.
One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her thumb.
Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father. Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.
‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’
That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway for anything? He walked in and out of my life, leaving damage in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.
‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.
; Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back at her. She understands me in a world where it feels like no one else does.
I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’
‘Or maybe it would help you find your own peace and move on a bit?’ Stella asks. ‘But, you know there’s no right or wrong in this? You do what you want to do. If you want to see him, I’ll come with you. If you want to tell him to go to hell, I’ll hold your hand while you do it.’
I brush away a second pesky tear, take a deep breath. I’ll be damned if he can force me to make a decision like this quickly. Who does he think he is to get his mousey little minion to call me and ask me to come over?
‘Is there much wine left in that bottle?’ I sit back and ask Stella.
‘Not much,’ she says. ‘But there’s a second bottle in the fridge and I’m sure there’s another bottle of something in the rack.’
‘Okay,’ I say, sniffing and sitting up straight. ‘That dinner we spent all of fifteen minutes cooking is going to be absolutely ruined if we don’t eat it now. So, I say we eat. I don’t want to waste any more energy today thinking about that man.’
Chapter Five
Ciara
Then
I was an only child and I was deliriously happy in my only-child status. I was never lonely. I had lots of friends. We lived in a busy street in the Creggan Estate – a proudly working-class area on the west bank of the River Foyle.
There was always someone to play with. Come rain or shine we would be riding up and down the streets on our bikes, or on scooters or roller-skates. We would play ‘padsy’ or ‘tig’ and occasionally a gang of us would disappear en masse into one of our friends’ houses to watch a movie and eat crisps and biscuits.
I’d seen how friends with a houseful of siblings didn’t get the same treats that I did. Or the same attention from their parents, either. I was the apple of both of my parents’ eyes – but at heart I was always a daddy’s girl.
Right up until the day he left.
At thirteen years old, I experienced the worst, most painful, heartbreak of my life.
It didn’t make sense. I thought my daddy loved me. I was his special girl. I trusted him never to hurt me. But then he left – on a Thursday afternoon. I came back from school to find my mother perching on the edge of the sofa, a cigarette in her hand and a tautness to her posture that screamed that something was wrong. Being thirteen, my first thought was that I was in trouble. I braced myself for her to launch into some rant about my messy bedroom or the three pounds I’d nicked from her purse that morning. I expected her to use my full name and though my heart sank at the thought of the rollicking I was about to receive, I was already preparing my best eye-roll and ‘But, Mammy …’ response.
‘Sit down, pet,’ she said.
It was the ‘pet’ that threw me. She was hardly going to give out yards to me if she was using ‘pet’. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.
‘Look, there’s no easy way to tell you this, Ciara, so I’m going to come right out and say it. I want you to know that I love you very much. And your daddy loves you, too. You’re not to doubt that, ever. Okay?’
There was a strange buzzing sound in my ear. I could feel something build up inside of me, a burst of adrenaline that made me want to fight or run. I dug my fingernails as hard as I could into the palm of my hand to try to ground myself. I’d seen enough corny movies to guess where this was going.
‘Daddy has moved out,’ she said, the shake in her voice belying her true feelings. ‘It was a mutual decision and it’s just that we don’t make each other happy any more.’
‘Where has he gone?’ I asked. I needed to know where I could see him. When I could see him.
My mother’s face coloured. She sagged momentarily before straightening her back again. ‘He’s gone to live with a friend,’ she said.
Of course it wasn’t long before I found out that friend was another woman, and that woman had a daughter.
My father had left us to go and be with another family. A family he’d known for less than a year. A family with a daughter for him to love.
My teenage heart hurt so much that I cried until I threw up.
Chapter Six
Ciara
Now
It’s two days since Heidi called and I’m now standing, with Stella, outside the front door of my father’s house. It’s less than ten minutes’ walk away from our riverside apartment, but it might as well have been another country for all these years.
I have avoided the shops I know he frequents. Stayed away from the library where he used to work, and where he still liked to spend his mornings drinking strong tea from polystyrene cups and reading over the day’s papers.
He holds court there, talks to everyone who comes in. Shares his stories of old Derry and snippets of local history. It’s laughable for the man who barely looked at a book when he lived at home with my mother and me. Once he left, he transformed himself. Discarded his working-class persona entirely, lost himself in books. Went back to college. The few old friends he still deigned to spend time with gave him the nickname ‘The Professor’ because he was considered so learned. He enjoyed feeling superior to them. He enjoyed revelling in their new-found respect for him.
Learned and respected. It galls me to this day.
I feel Stella give my gloved hand a little reassuring squeeze.
I see lights on through the stained-glass panelling of the front door. It might be the middle of the day but it’s dull and dark, and January has us firmly in its grip. The darkness is as oppressive as this house looming over us. Semi-detached. With a big back garden. There was a wooden swing set there when I first visited all those years ago – a sure sign of wealth, along with a phone in the hall that didn’t have a lock on it to stop anyone from running up a big bill.
I’d felt intimidated then, but that was nothing compared to how I feel now.
‘I’m not sure I can go in,’ I say to Stella.
‘You know you don’t have to, but you’ve come this far. And look, if it feels all wrong, you never have to come back again. Focus on that.’
I squeeze her hand. There’s no way I could be here without her by my side. ‘Okay, then,’ I say. ‘Here goes nothing.’ I reach up and rattle the brass knocker, and it’s not long before I hear footsteps clacking along the tiled floor and see the shadow of a person approach.
I’ve not seen Heidi in as long as I’ve not seen my father. She was only a teenager the last time our paths had crossed, in her second year at university. She’d come home for the Christmas break – wherein my father had made a disastrous attempt to have us all round for drinks. I shudder at the memory.
Looking at Heidi now, she looks as if more than ten years have passed. Her face is pale. Tired-looking. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her hair, which clearly could benefit from a wash, is pulled back in a tight ponytail, which does her no favours. Her roots need touching up, I notice. There’s a lot of grey there for a woman still in her twenties.
She pulls an oversized grey cardigan around her small frame, wrapping her arms tightly around herself as she does. Her body language screams that she is deeply uncomfortable with this situation.
She blinks at me as if it is taking her some time to put a name to a face. I know I look different now – but not that different. And she had been aware that I was coming.
‘Heidi?’ It is Stella who breaks the silence – coming to my rescue as she always does. ‘We spoke on the phone. I’m Stella, Ciara’s partner.’
I watch for any sort of reaction on Heidi’s face at the realisation that I’m gay. It has never been something I’ve advertised. It’s no one’s business but my own, and Stella’s, of course.
Heidi barely blinks. She looks from Stella to me and then takes a step backwards to allow us in. ‘Please, come in, both of you,’ she says, her voice quiet. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Stella,’ she says. ‘And it�
�s good to see you again, Ciara.’
I smile at her because it is what is expected. We both know that what she has said is a lie. It’s not nice to see each other at all. I think we could have quite happily existed without ever seeing other again and been perfectly happy.
I hear the cry of a baby, look to Heidi.
‘That’s Lily,’ she says. ‘My baby. She’s due a feed. If you’ll excuse me. Joe’s sleeping just now, but I’m sure he would be okay with you waking him.’
‘Maybe we’ll just wait a bit,’ I say.
She nods, looks anxiously towards the living room door where the cry is becoming more persistent. ‘Well, you know where the tea and coffee are, why not make yourselves a cup?’ she says, and with that she scurries, mouse-like, into the living room, closing the door behind her.
I lead Stella to the kitchen.
‘So that’s Heidi,’ Stella says as she sits down and I switch the kettle on to boil.
‘It is indeed. Although she is much more mouse-like than before. And she was pretty mouse-like then.’
‘It must be hard for her, with a new baby to look after and Joe to be minding,’ Stella says as she looks around the room, taking in the slightly dated décor. I bristle. I do not want to be any part of a ‘poor Heidi’ narrative. I saw and heard enough of it over the years to be done with it for good. I’m not so much of a bitch that I don’t accept she had it rough to lose her mother at a young age, but she has led a life of privilege, and him – my father – he chose her over me. Not just once. But time and time again.
I don’t answer Stella. I just make the tea, rattle around the cupboards for sugar. This house is familiar and yet it isn’t. It’s quieter. Darker. Colder. I think briefly of the angry teenager I had once been. I can almost hear echoes of her stomping up the stairs or slamming the front door. My heart aches for her a little. I wish things had been different.
I turn to hand Stella a cup of tea. I see her shudder.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.