by Mike Gayle
‘There you go,’ he says, setting down a jar on the counter. ‘Will that satisfy you and your fancy London ways?’
Just the sight of the jar of supermarket own brand instant coffee causes me to reminisce fondly about the seven hundred quid titanium silver gaggia bean-to-cup coffee machine sitting on the granite counter in my kitchen back in London. ‘That’ll do nicely, Pop.’
I sit down at the kitchen table and flick through a local free newspaper next to the fruit bowl. ‘So how have you been, Pop?’
‘Oh, you know me,’ he says. ‘I’m fine in myself.’
I raise a sceptical eyebrow which is about as much as I’ll ever raise to my dad. Four years ago Dad had a heart attack. Things had been dodgy for a while and every time my phone rang I was convinced it would be one of my family calling to let me know the worst, but he pulled through in the end. The drugs seemed to sort out the problem for the interim and eventually he was lined up for a bypass operation, which seemed to have done the trick. To look at him now you’d never guess he’d been through this but to this day I still can’t take an unexpected late night call from a member of my family without a split-second replay of that whole nightmare.
‘Anyway,’ continues Dad, ‘it’s your mother who’s the one to worry about. I’m always telling her to slow down but she won’t listen. Now that your sister’s moved closer she’s always volunteering us for babysitting duties even though it’s a good forty minutes in the car.’
My kid sister, Yvonne, and her family moved to Worcester from Plymouth the previous summer for her paediatrician husband Oliver’s job. Since then nearly every conversation with Mum begins with an update on how big my newest niece, Evie, is getting and how, despite being only seven months old, Mum’s convinced that she’ll be walking soon because ‘all Beckfords walk before their first birthday’, or an update on Evie’s brothers, two-year-old Peter and three-and-a half year-old Jake.
Dad pulls out an envelope of photos from behind the radio on the kitchen counter and gives me a running commentary as he shuffles through them. As befits my father’s skills with a digital camera at least half of them appear to have been taken within a split second of each other, with only the slightest variation between them, but there are a few, like the one in my hands of a just-woken-up Evie smiling at Yvonne, which even I can’t help getting lost in. In the end Dad and I end up so engrossed in the photos that we don’t hear Mum’s keys in the front door. So when I look up and see her laden down with shopping bags and she says, ‘Matthew! What are you doing home?’ I’m taken so much by surprise that without getting my brain into gear I say the first words that spring to my lips which happen to be the unexpurgated truth. ‘It’s me and Lauren, Mum, we’re getting a divorce.’