Danny’s pen hovered over the pad. There were plenty of things he could say, things that people had mumbled awkwardly to him at the funeral and intermittently ever since (“Sorry.… I’m so sorry.… I’m sorry for your loss.… Heaven needed another angel”—Christ, how he hated that one); but as much as he knew that people meant well, he also knew that none of those words made the slightest bit of difference to how he was feeling.
I bet she was an awesome mum, he wrote.
“She was,” said Will. He pulled a thread from his sleeve and let it fall to the ground. “She was the best mum ever.”
They sat in silence for a moment, staring in different directions but both focused on the same person.
“It’s rubbish when people die, isn’t it?” said Will.
Totally rubbish.
Danny watched the man with the drinks cart trying to fix his broken parasol. Every time he straightened the ribs on one side, the other side would collapse, and just when he’d managed to get them all open, a mild gust of wind knocked them all down again. A passing couple laughed, but Danny knew how hard it was to hold things up when everything felt like it was falling down.
“You want to hear something stupid?” said Will. Danny gestured for him to continue. “I want to talk to her about what happened. I just want to talk to my mum about my mum not being here anymore. She was always the person who could make this kind of stuff better.”
Danny nodded. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, forgetting he still had the mask on.
Can’t you talk to your dad? he wrote.
Will shook his head. “It’s not the same. Mum was my mum, but she was also my friend, you know? But Dad, well, he’s just my dad. He was always working a lot, going out really early and coming home really late, so it was often just me and Mum who did stuff together.”
What sort of stuff? wrote Danny.
Will shrugged. “Just hanging out. We went to Brighton once. That was cool. And Stonehenge. And she used to make these amazing pancakes. She had this secret recipe that her gran gave her. She keeps it hidden in a cookbook. Sometimes I look at it, I don’t know why. Just to check it’s still there I guess. When she died it was just me and my dad, and it felt, I don’t know, different.”
Like you were living with a stranger?
“Yeah. Like strangers. He doesn’t really know anything about me. He still thinks I like Thomas the Tank Engine, even though I’m in secondary school. He thinks I like peanut butter, even though I hate it. And we never do anything together, not like I used to do with Mum. He hardly even talks about her.”
Maybe he finds it too painful, wrote Danny, wishing he could cross out the maybe.
“Maybe,” said Will. “Or maybe he just wants to forget about her.”
Danny’s pen scratched loudly against the pad as he frantically scribbled something down.
That’s not true! read the message. Danny had underlined it twice.
Will frowned. “How do you know?” he said.
Danny wanted to grab Will by the shoulders and explain to him that he hadn’t forgotten Liz, that he couldn’t forget her, ever, and that even if he lived for a million more years, even if he lived until the world started to fracture and break apart piece by piece until everything that remained had been scattered to the farthest reaches of space, even then she’d still be with him, keeping him company as he wallowed in the great unknown, happy to face the infinite darkness just as long as she was by his side. But he knew he couldn’t say any of that, so instead he wrote the first thing that came to mind.
Because I’m a panda.
Will smiled. “Whatever,” he said, standing and hooking his schoolbag over his shoulders. “I should probably get moving.”
Good talking to you.
“You didn’t say anything.”
Danny scribbled out the word talking and replaced it with the word listening.
“Better,” said Will. “See you.”
He made his way across the park, his blond hair dancing in the breeze. Danny watched him go, his small frame growing smaller and smaller until he disappeared from view. Only then did he take off his mask and bury his face in his hands.
CHAPTER 20
Later that evening, once Will had gone to sleep, or pretended to have gone to sleep while secretly playing on his iPad, Danny flicked through the notebook that he’d used to scribble down his panda messages. In between his own words he’d hurriedly written as much of Will’s half of the conversation as he could remember so that he was left with a document that, although far from perfect, nevertheless served as some kind of record of what could be the last conversation he might ever have with his son. Certain words and sentences were underlined roughly. “He doesn’t know anything about me.” “Strangers.” “Maybe he wants to forget about her.” “He never talks about her anymore.” Each one hurt him in different ways, but the one that inflicted the most pain was the single word he’d encircled several times. “Mum was like my friend, but my dad is just my dad,” read the full sentence, but it was that one word—“just”—that Danny kept returning to. He didn’t find it hurtful because it was cruel or unfair. What hurt him was that he knew it was true. He was just his dad. He wasn’t a friend. He didn’t know him like his mother did. Liz was like an encyclopedia of Will. She knew everything from his shoe size to his opinions on who would win in a fight between a stegosaurus and a triceratops. She knew the way he liked his hair cut. She knew where he was most ticklish. She knew the names of every single one of his stuffed toys from when he was younger, even when Will himself had forgotten them (or pretended he’d forgotten them). She knew his favorite foods, she knew his favorite color, she knew what he was afraid of, and she knew what she was most likely to find in his pockets on any given day. She knew which chocolate he would choose if presented with a tin of Cadbury Roses and she knew what he’d do with the wrapper afterwards. If Will disappeared in a time machine, Liz knew which period in history she’d most likely find him in, as well as which castle. She knew what dessert he’d choose in a restaurant, she knew what sort of surgery he’d perform on a Burger King Whopper, and she knew what piece he would choose in Monopoly as well as what streets he would buy. But having spent so much of Will’s life working all the hours he could get, not because of his love for the job but because he wanted his son to have a better life than his own, Danny knew none of these things. It had never occurred to him that by working all the time he was in some ways denying Will a father. Not that there was much he could have done about it. Overtime wasn’t a choice for Danny. He couldn’t pick it up when he needed it and pass it up when he didn’t. Danny always needed it, so he always took it. Liz sometimes joked that he was a workaholic, and he was, but they both knew that his motivation had nothing to do with greed and everything to do with necessity. Even with Liz’s income, their combined salaries left little in the way of savings once their rent and their bills and their groceries had been taken care of, and things had become even tighter since Liz had passed away, which was why he’d been working more than ever.
Money wasn’t the only reason, though. Danny had once worked with a joiner whose daughter had drowned on holiday. One minute she was playing near the shore and the next minute she was gone, dragged out to sea by a vicious current that only let her go when it was far too late. The man returned to his job just two days afterwards, something that Danny struggled to comprehend. He thought that work would be the very last thing on anybody’s mind in the wake of such an unspeakable tragedy, but when he lost Liz, he finally understood why the joiner had done what he did. In a time when nothing made sense anymore, a time when your mind stopped being your friend and became your worst enemy, sometimes work was the only thing that stood between you and insanity. Being on-site let him switch off his brain. He could hide his mental remote in his locker and leave it there for the better part of the day. Working allowed him to forget, if only for a little while and only until the night arrived and brought with it a darkness that he struggl
ed to shake off even after the sun had risen. Just as Will had chosen silence, Danny had chosen work. They’d been coping, separately, in their own ways and in their own time, for the last fourteen months. That’s what Danny had assumed they’d been doing, at least, although whether that was because he genuinely believed it or because it simply allowed him to wallow in his own self-pity he really couldn’t say, but after talking to Will, he realized that his son hadn’t been coping at all. Silence wasn’t his way of dealing with things. If anything, his silence was something he chose in the absence of a coping strategy.
It was then that Danny understood how Liz’s death had left not one void in their lives but two. There was the gaping hole she’d left inside their family, but there was also the hole she’d left between them, a hole that Will had filled with silence and Danny had filled with work when they should have been filling it with each other. Liz had in many ways been the bridge that connected the two of them, and they’d been living on different sides of the same ravine since the day that bridge had collapsed, watching each other from a distance while the space between them grew ever wider. Soon it would be so wide that they’d lose each other forever if Danny didn’t find a way to close that gap, and quickly.
Gripped by a belated sense of urgency, Danny trawled through his notes and reread everything that Will had told him in the park. He’d already lost so much time that he didn’t want to wait another second to implement some type of positive change in their relationship, but while everything that Will talked about was doable, nothing was doable now, at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening. He couldn’t exactly drag Will out of bed and take him on a surprise visit to Stonehenge. Nor was it an ideal time to take an impromptu trip to the seaside.
Suddenly he had an idea. He went into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, took out the jar of peanut butter, and threw it in the bin.
“A journey of a thousand miles,” he said to himself. He couldn’t remember the rest of the saying but he was pretty sure it was relevant here.
Noticing that a bag of flour had also expired by a considerable margin, he threw that in the bin as well. As he did so, he remembered Will talking about the pancakes that Liz used to make. She’d always maintained that the recipe was a secret passed down by her grandma, which had been passed down by her grandma and so on and so forth, back to the very dawn of creation, but the recipe wasn’t really a secret and it hadn’t been given to her by her grandma. She’d soaked a piece of paper in a tray of tea overnight and dried it to look like parchment. On it she’d written a Jamie Oliver recipe she’d copied verbatim from his website and written Gran’s Top Secret Pancake Recipe across the top, along with several faux warnings akin to those on treasure maps informing the reader of all the curses and plagues they’d incur if they dared sneak a peek at the information within.
Danny studied the shelf above the microwave, where several cookbooks were gathering dust. He slowly leafed through them, pausing occasionally to read the funny little notes-to-self that Liz had left at the top of several pages (bean casserole: Hearty but farty; Bolognese: Save some wine for the dish next time; homemade pasta: Only for sadists; homemade ketchup: Why did I even bother?), until he found the recipe he was looking for.
Making a note of the ingredients—mostly just standard pancake ingredients, but Danny knew nothing about cooking so he copied them all word for word—he closed the book and returned it to the shelf. Then, sneaking out to the corner shop, he returned with as many eggs and as much flour and milk as he could carry.
Standing on a chair and immobilizing the smoke alarm in anticipation of the disaster he was sure was about to unfold, he pulled on Liz’s apron, tied it at the back, floured his hands, wiped off the flour when he realized he didn’t need to flour his hands, and started to cook.
Danny made a lot of pancakes that night. The first batch kept burning, the second batch refused to cook, and the third batch kept sticking to the pan. When he figured out how to stop that from happening (more butter), the next pancake stuck to the ceiling. He made close to twenty before he managed to get one onto a plate, but his satisfaction lasted only as long as it took him to taste it and realize he’d added too much salt. He tried again (and burned them again), and then he tried again (and undercooked them again), and then he flipped a couple more onto the floor, until finally, at around 2 a.m., Danny crawled into bed, burned, bruised, and quite literally battered, but confident he knew how to make a decent pancake.
* * *
When Will woke up the following morning and shuffled past the kitchen, he paused, frowned, and sniffed the air a couple of times. Shuffling backwards like a moonwalking zombie, he came to a halt in the doorway.
“Morning, mate,” said Danny over his shoulder, his body blocking the hob so Will couldn’t see what he was doing. “Sleep okay?”
Will didn’t respond, too overwhelmed by the sounds and smells that were emanating from the kitchen.
Danny smiled. “Take a seat,” he said. “Le petit déjeuner est prêt.”
Will stared blankly at Danny.
“It means breakfast is ready. It’s French.”
A single nod, but still no movement.
“Look, just go and sit down, okay?”
Will’s confusion only increased when he saw the maple syrup. He knew what it was, and he knew what it was for, but he couldn’t figure out what it was doing on their table. He was still staring at the bottle when Danny emerged from the kitchen with a teetering platter of pancakes. Will looked at the mountain of food, as speechless as a boy who didn’t speak could be.
“What?” said Danny as he put the pancakes down with a thud.
Will looked at the table and turned his palms up.
“I thought it was time for a change,” said Danny. “What do you think?”
Will nodded as if Danny had asked if he wanted a raise in his pocket money.
“Great,” said Danny, disappearing into the kitchen. “One second, let me get the plates.”
He grabbed Will’s Thomas the Tank Engine plate and mug from the drying rack and looked at them in turn. Then, holding them at arm’s length and opening his hands, he dropped them both and watched them shatter against the kitchen floor.
“It was an accident,” he said when Will ran in to see what the commotion was about. “My hands were wet and… they just slipped. I’m so sorry, mate.”
Will picked up the mug and slowly turned it around in his hand. It was still intact except for the handle that had broken off and skidded beneath the cooker.
“I’ll buy you another, I promise,” said Danny, who couldn’t quite gauge Will’s expression and thought that perhaps he’d terribly misjudged everything and destroyed something that was in fact very dear to his son. Any concerns he might have had were quickly extinguished, however, when Will raised the mug above his head and slammed it down on the floor. This time James the Red Engine did not survive.
“Or… not,” said Danny as Will grinned at him. “Come on, help me get some plates before the pancakes get cold.”
* * *
Krystal was doing side splits in the middle of the floor when Danny arrived at the dance studio.
“Please tell me that’s not part of the lesson,” he said, wincing on her behalf.
“You said you wanted to learn everything,” said Krystal without looking up.
“I meant everything that wouldn’t require physiotherapy afterwards. Or psychotherapy, for that matter.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, bending forward until her body was flat against the floor. “We’re not doing the splits.” She waited for Danny to breathe a sigh of relief before adding: “Splits are for the next session.” Danny laughed. Krystal didn’t.
“You’re joking, right?”
“I guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”
“If I survive until tomorrow. I’ve barely recovered from last week’s lesson,” he said.
“That was nothing, mate. The last lesson was like a walk in the park with your grandmother.”<
br />
“I hated my grandmother.”
“Oh. Well, this lesson is going to be like a walk in the park with your grandmother, then.”
“Are you going to hit me with a stick and tell me what a hideous mistake I was?”
“It can definitely be arranged,” she said, pulling her legs in and springing to her feet. “Come on, you muppet, get stretching. We ain’t got all day.”
Danny peeled his coat off and chucked it into the corner.
“I’m never going to win this competition, am I?” he said, wobbling about on one foot while he stretched his hamstring.
“Nope.”
“Can’t you just lie to me for once?”
“I’m not a good liar.”
“Try.”
“Okay. Fine.” Krystal thought for a moment. “You’re very attractive.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What do you want me to say, Danny? You know as well as I do that this is a long shot. Longer than a long shot. The bloke from American Sniper would have a hard time pulling off this kind of long shot, and he was a fucking sniper. So if you’re asking me if I think you’re going to win this competition, then no, I don’t. But if you’re asking me if I think you have a chance of winning, then yes, I do. Not a big chance. Barely a hair on the arse of a chance. But a chance nonetheless. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t, Danny, because despite how funny it is to watch you stagger around this studio like a drunken donkey, I’d much rather be spending some quality time with my Netflix subscription than stuck here with you. And anyway, it’s not like you’re training for Swan Lake or anything. You don’t need to learn the entire fucking history of dance. You don’t need to be the next Michael fucking Flatley. You just need to know enough to get through one single performance, which will only last a few minutes max, and don’t get me wrong, that still equates to a shit-barrel of work between now and then, but you’ve got three whole weeks to nail a three-minute dance routine, which is one minute per week, which is, like, what? Ten seconds per day or something, so if you follow my lead and do as you’re told and stretch your sodding hamstrings properly”—Danny instantly improved his posture—“then who knows, we might just be able to give those fuckers a run for their money. There, how did that sound?”
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