Missing You

by Douglas, Louise

  He stands still, quite motionless for a moment or two beneath the shower water, and then he pushes himself upright with the braced hand. He stands up straight and tall, and pushes the hair and water out of his face with his two hands.

  Fen holds her breath.

  Then he turns, he turns towards the door, and she knows he cannot see her – there is a streaming, steamy shower curtain between them and she is just a shadow in the gap between the door and its frame; and he does not know she is there, she should be at work – yet she feels he looks right into her.

  She sees the shape of his chest and the slightness of his hips and the dark, dark hair that trickles from his navel to his groin and the paler shape between his thighs, and she wants to groan like he has groaned, but she suppresses it.

  He leans down, picks up a bottle of shampoo, her shampoo Fen notices with pleasure, and it is only then that she remembers she should not be here. She turns away and puts her back to the door frame, then slides down it until she is resting on her heels. She leans her head back and exhales, and it is as if she has been holding her breath forever. In a way, she supposes, she has.

  ‘God,’ she whispers. ‘My God.’

  ten

  Amy falls asleep in her car seat on the way back to Bath after Sean stops at the off-licence and buys beer and whisky. Back at Lilyvale, he sees Fen has left the downstairs lights on for him and her bedroom light is on. Sean carries Amy upstairs and puts her to sleep in his bed. Then he takes his guitar and goes down into the living room. He shuts the door, turns on a small lamp and opens a can of beer. He fingers the strings of the guitar and makes up a song, which he knows he will have forgotten by the morning. The song is called ‘Membury Blues’.

  When he goes back upstairs, some hours, some beer and some whisky later, he finds Amy awake in the bed, watching Poltergeist on the television. The duvet is pulled up to her eyes, which are wide and round, terrified. Sean can’t remember the exact plot of the film but he knows it has something to do with a child of about Amy’s age being sucked into the mouth of hell, or something equally disturbing.

  ‘There are ghosts in the television, Daddy,’ she whispers, too scared almost to breathe. He switches off the set and scoops his daughter up in his arms. She is shivering and doesn’t seem to realize, thankfully, that she has wet herself and the bed. She would be mortified if she knew. Soon, the lap of Sean’s jeans is also damp. He holds Amy very close, wraps her into his big body and kisses her head. He strokes her hair over and over, smoothing it against her warm little skull with the flat of his hand, feeling the delicate shell-shape of her ear, and he tells her that there are no ghosts, that it was just a scary story.

  ‘I saw the ghosts,’ she insists, whispering, trembling in his arms.

  ‘Those were just pretend ghosts.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I know the man who made the film and he told me.’

  Amy shifts her position and looks up at her father, wanting to believe him, but still suspicious. Her eyelashes are sticky with tears that catch the light from the landing and reflect in her dark pupils.

  ‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘Shall I phone him up now and you can ask him yourself?’

  ‘Your words don’t smell very nice,’ says Amy, pulling her face away from his. ‘I think you should brush your teeth, Daddy.’

  The next day, they sleep in late, and Sean wakes to find his little daughter clinging to him like ivy to a tree. He unwinds her and wakes her, and she is hot and strange, an alien Amy. She behaves nothing like the quiet, eager-to-please daughter he knows and loves. She won’t let him comb her hair and refuses to brush her teeth or eat any breakfast. She says she does not want to go to Royal Victoria Park, she hates the park, she hates Bath, she wants her mummy, she wants to be at home. She works herself up into a desperate crying fit, sobbing as if her heart is breaking. Sean cannot touch her. She can’t hear what he says so he sits on the bed and waits for her to work the excess emotion out of her system. He has never seen Amy like this. It’s as if she has been broken.

  He thinks: Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Is this my life?

  Over his daughter’s wails, he hears Fen tactfully clatter Connor’s pushchair up the steps in the front garden. He hears her collecting the boy, hurrying him along, pretending she has somewhere to be so that Sean and Amy have the house to themselves. He is grateful.

  When Amy’s crying has subsided into huge, swallowing, gulping sobs, he takes her downstairs and gives her little sips of sugared tea from a spoon, like a baby. He turns on the television out of habit, and Amy screams that the ghosts will come. She kicks the guitar that he left propped beside the settee. Amy knows that kicking his guitar is about the worst crime she can commit in her father’s presence. She is never naughty. She is, by nature, the least controversial child. Once she has kicked the guitar, her hand flies to her mouth and she looks up at her father with wide, startled eyes, as if she cannot believe what she has just done. Sean doesn’t care. He is tired and hung-over. He rubs his stubbly chin, rubs his eyes. He hitches up his jeans; he needs to buy a belt.

  ‘Come on,’ he says to his daughter. ‘We’re going into Bath.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into Bath.’

  ‘There’s a fairy shop,’ says Sean, ‘and it’s full of nice things. Really, Ames, I think you’ll like it.’

  He noticed the shop some weeks back and has been saving it for an emergency.

  They catch the bus down into the city centre and make their way through the Saturday crowds to the fairy shop, which is down one of the narrow little side streets that remind Sean of film sets; they are too authentic, too quaint to be real, he thinks. Amy holds his hand very tightly. She has gone quiet now. Occasionally she sniffs. The shop is tiny, a shrine to pink and glitter, fairy dust, wands, sequins, tinsel and fairy lights, all sparkly corners and mirrors and pink plastic.

  Amy’s mouth falls open.

  ‘Oh!’ she says, a little bubble-gasp of pleasure between her lips, and she is off.

  Sean looks at his watch. He leans up against a shelf of tiaras and wishes he had brought something to read. He plugs his iPod into his ears, crosses his arms, closes his eyes and fills his head with the Pixies, only moving when Amy shakes his sleeve to show him some new wonder. After an inordinately long time, bored almost to tears, he persuades her out of the shop by buying her a fairy outfit, wings, wand, glitter dust, the whole shooting match. It’s the sort of stuff he and Belle have always tried to steer Amy away from, hoping to nurture less stereotypical interests. Today he doesn’t care. He’ll do whatever it takes to make Amy happy.

  They eat lunch in a cafe upstairs at the Podium. Amy, her hair messy beneath the tiara, picks at a bowl of chips, delicately dipping each one in mayonnaise and nibbling off its end, before discarding it at the side of her plate. From time to time she spoons marshmallow balls from a mug of hot chocolate, making a sticky mess on the table which she makes worse by painting patterns with her finger. She is talking to herself, her lips moving constantly, maintaining a private running commentary. She does not realize she is making a mess. Sean can’t be bothered to stop her. He wolfs down a bacon burger and drinks a pint of Stella as the hair of the dog. The waitress, a pretty girl with a nice wide mouth and an Alice band, makes a fuss of Amy and flirts with Sean. He has no inclination to join in. He wipes the froth from his upper lip with the back of his hand and tries to keep his mind on his daughter. There is still a whole afternoon to fill in. There are five hundred or more weekends to be endured before Amy will be old enough to go to concerts with Sean, by which time she’ll be too old for him to impose his musical tastes on her. He prays that the child will grow to like rugby because otherwise God knows how they’ll manage. What interests Sean bores Amy and vice versa. One or other of them will die of boredom. They’ll grow to dislike and resent one another. The future looks grim.

  After lunch, he shows Amy how the steam from the hot springs, which feed the famous Roman b
aths, comes up through the drain covers in the old roads around the historic building. She is captivated, putting her hand in the steam which, her father tells her, has come all the way up from the centre of the earth. She is almost back to her old self. She asks lots of questions about hot springs and the Romans who built the baths and what they wore when they were bathing. They walk through streets almost unchanged since Georgian times and lined with grand, tall, sash-windowed houses all in the palest, most elegant stone, houses with straight, high walls that catch the sunlight in geometric slabs and cast beautiful shadows. They go to the balcony that overlooks the Recreation Ground and Sean manages to watch a bit of rugby. Amy, in her fairy tiara, soon attracts several other little girls who want to play with her. Amy is flattered by the attention, but does not know how to take advantage of it. She hangs on to her father’s hand and lets the other girls play with her wand.

  This amenable state of affairs does not last long. Soon Amy is quietly unhappy again. Sean buys a paper and takes his daughter to the Royal Victoria Park. Amy runs off towards the sand pit. The grass is cold and damp, spattered darkly with fallen leaves, so Sean finds a discarded orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag to sit on, and reads the Guardian from cover to cover, and all its supplements, even the Money section. He feels more at home, because he and Amy have already been to the park so many times, and because a lot of men on their own come here with their kids at weekends. Sean has even spoken to a few of them. He’s thrown footballs and cricket balls back to boys. He’s ridden the rope slide with Amy. He has not exactly made friends, but here he feels less of a social pariah.

  With one arm tucked behind his head, Sean is half-sitting, half-lying against a grassy slope, chewing a piece of grass and watching Amy, who is being bossed about by an older girl. Amy is listening intently to instructions. She is slightly knock-kneed and her fairy wings are already bent out of shape. She looks up at the other child, nods and then crawls off through the sand, in search of something or other.

  Sean smiles. He checks his watch and as he does so he is aware of somebody beside him. He looks up and it is his landlady, Fen.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, squinting into a metallic, wintery sun. He makes a visor with his hand. ‘Do you come here often?’

  She smiles, looks down. ‘It was such a nice afternoon. I thought I’d come for a walk.’

  The boy is in his buggy, wrapped up in a coat, boots and gloves, and a felt hat with ear-flaps is tucked around his head. He grins widely when he sees Sean and climbs out of the buggy.

  ‘Hey, Connor,’ says Sean.

  Connor salutes Sean as he has been taught and says: ‘How’s it hanging?’

  Fen laughs. ‘Go and play, Con,’ she says, pushing his shoulder gently. ‘Where’s Amy?’

  Sean nods towards the sandpit. ‘I’m sorry about the noise this morning.’

  Fen shrugs.

  ‘I was going to get a cup of tea,’ she says, looking towards the icecream van in the corner. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘I’ll go,’ says Sean. He jumps to his feet and indicates the carrier bag. ‘Have a seat,’ he says, ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  She doesn’t talk much. She sits quietly beside him, looking out over the park and watching the children, one hand shading her eyes. It’s OK; he doesn’t feel as if he has to make conversation. They have shared the same house long enough now to be comfortable with one another’s silences. And she always seems half lost in thought.

  ‘It’s as if all the children in Bath come here on Saturdays,’ she says.

  ‘We always do. I tried to persuade Amy that rugby was more fun, but she wasn’t having it.’

  Fen laughs. ‘Bath’s nice in the summer,’ she says. ‘She’ll like it better then. There are more things to do. Loads of things for children.’

  They are silent again for a moment. Sean is thinking that he won’t be here in the summer. He’ll be back home by then.

  ‘You know,’ she says, ‘you don’t have to be out of the house all weekend. I don’t mind if you want to take over the living room or the kitchen. It’s your home too.’

  Sean winces. He didn’t mean to and he hopes she didn’t notice, but she’s wrong. Lilyvale is not his home.

  ‘OK,’ he says, ‘thanks.’

  A little later he says: ‘You’re not local, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told me you grew up in Taffy-land.’

  She laughs. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What brought you to Bath, then?’

  She gazes over towards the giant gas tanks across the road. They are catching the falling sunlight, magnificent in their enormous ugliness.

  ‘I was sort of passing through and I bumped into Lina. I needed somewhere to live and she had a house to rent.’

  Sean glances at her. Her eyes are pale brown, almost yellow, glassy in the sun’s rays.

  ‘That’s not much of an answer,’ he says.

  She smiles, but not at him; she smiles at Connor, who is methodically piling sand around the base of the climbing frame.

  ‘Is that where Connor’s father is?’ Sean persists. ‘In Wales?’

  Fen picks at the dying grass and narrows her eyes as if she’s trying to remember and then she says: ‘I don’t know where Connor’s father is.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Doesn’t he help you out at all?’ asks Sean.

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s not his fault,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t know about Connor. I’m sure he’d help if he could.’

  ‘Why can’t you contact him?’

  She looks into the distance. ‘We were only together for one night. He was very nice, but I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t expect to fall pregnant.’

  Sean can think of nothing to say to this.

  She looks at him sideways.

  ‘Do you think that’s awful?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head and smiles. ‘It’s kind of romantic.’

  She looks away again. ‘I was a bit fucked-up,’ she says, ‘at the time.’

  Amy comes over to the adults. She looks anxious, shy.

  ‘Fen,’ she says, ‘has Connor hurt his leg?’

  ‘Not exactly. He has a problem with his muscles, that’s why he looks a bit strange when he walks.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s just the way he was born.’

  Amy thinks about this for a moment.

  ‘Does it hurt him?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Can I ask him if he wants to play with me?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  Sean is touched by the way Amy plays with Connor. The two get on very well. If Amy can’t understand something Connor says, they work it out between them with signs. She enjoys mothering him; he is grateful for the attention and does everything he’s told to do.

  They are enjoying one another’s company so much that the normally impeccably placid Connor refuses to get back into his pushchair even though the sun is so low that it has disappeared behind the gas tanks and the air is turning cold and the grass is already wet.

  ‘Why does he have to go in the buggy?’ asks Amy.

  ‘Because his legs are tired and it’s a long walk home.’

  Amy hangs on Sean’s hand to pull his head down towards hers. She stands on tiptoe and whispers: ‘Can Connor come with us for a pizza?’ Her breath is hot and moist in her father’s ear. She smells of damp grass and sand, discarded lollipop sticks and fallen leaves.

  Sean glances at Fen.

  ‘Well, why not?’ he says. ‘Why don’t you come and eat with us?’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Fen, ‘but I don’t want to intrude on your time with Amy.’

  ‘You won’t be intruding.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Please come,’ says Sean, ‘you don’t know how lonely it gets.’

  It’s only as the words leave his lips that he realizes they are true.

  ‘My treat.�
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  She shakes her head.

  ‘Go on. I’ll put it on my expenses. I’ll pretend you were clients, you and Connor. I’ll pretend you had a restoration project you wanted me to look at.’

  Fen looks down at Connor, who is looking up at her, pleading with his eyes.

  ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘OK,’ says Fen, ‘thank you.’

  They eat in Amy’s favourite restaurant, pricey but classy with its high, ornate ceilings and rococo walls, big mirrors and tea-lights on the tables. Amy sits next to Fen and tells her about her life. Fen picks slivers of artichoke and olive from the surface of her pizza. Connor listens, but is too hungry to join in. Sean, temporarily relieved from having to worry about whether or not Amy is having a good time, slips back into his thoughts. He drinks his wine and watches Fen and how she smiles at Amy with her pale brown eyes.

  ‘And Lewis, who is Mummy’s partner, well, I’m supposed to call him Uncle Lewis, but he’s not my real uncle, but Lewis is his real name, which is not as funny as Daddy’s name, which is Sean,’ says Amy.

  ‘I know,’ says Fen.

  ‘Like Sean the Sheep!’

  ‘That is funny.’

  Amy leans forward conspiratorially. ‘Daddy and me call Lewis “Pooey Lewey”.’

  Fen raises her eyebrows.

  ‘But only when nobody else can hear. Anyway he’s moving into our house today. He’s going to share Mummy’s bedroom. Mummy says Daddy will get used to it but he shouted at her yesterday when he came to pick me up.’

  Amy stares at Fen with round, serious eyes. Sean holds his wine in his mouth.

  ‘I expect he did,’ says Fen in a matter-of-fact voice. Sean relaxes, swallows, tugs at his ear lobes.

  ‘But he shouldn’t shout at Mummy,’ says Amy quietly, shaking her head to emphasize the point. ‘I really don’t like it.’