Our Fathers

by Rebecca Wait

  For a while he tried to read, and when he couldn’t sit still any longer, he went up to his room and listened to the wind sweeping around the sides of the cottage and the rain beating against the windows. He hoped Malcolm wasn’t up on the cliffs today.

  If he went outside, Tom knew exactly how the moorland would look under the onslaught of rain, knew how the grasses would be blown flat, how the sea would be turbulent and grey, half hidden by the dense mist. He knew too how the landscape would transform once the weather cleared, the dark clouds swept away with disconcerting suddenness and the sun coming through, everywhere the colour changing, the grassland turning green again and the sea and sky a bright blue. When the weather changed here, it changed fast. But while it was like this, you couldn’t imagine it ever being another way. The storm was as much a fact of the landscape as the sea was.

  Tom began to feel the weather closing in on him. There were gusts of anxiety moving through his body, but he was only tired, he told himself. His sleep had been fitful. He tried lying down on his bed to rest, but couldn’t relax as the wind howled and rumbled outside. It was making the windows rattle in their frames. Even the cottage walls seemed to shake with it, though Tom knew this must be in his head.

  Abruptly, he pushed himself up off the bed and went downstairs again. Keep moving, he thought. But there was nowhere to go. In front of the living-room window, he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He wished Malcolm would come back. His thoughts were moving beyond his control. The laundry, the dislocated shoulder, his mother’s red hair—he’d lost her face again.

  The whole cottage creaked and groaned as the wind surged around its walls. Tom could almost picture the wind itself, bank after bank of taut, violent air rushing against the walls. He had forgotten it could be like this, how you could feel that all the elements were raging against you. He imagined the cottage collapsing on him, Malcolm coming home to a pile of rubble, finding Tom bloodied and broken beneath it.

  The danger of this kind of storm: it took you out of time. Tom leaned his forehead against the window to feel the shock of the cold glass. He tried to take careful, deep breaths. Closer and closer the weather came, until he felt the storm around his face, in his ears, in his body and his brain.

  And he saw it all again; it was always with him, but sometimes it came over him all at once like a sudden faintness. He had known last night that it was almost on him again. The room through the slats in the wardrobe door looked unusually bright. The memory was in broken pieces, but the fragments were strung together by the feeling of cold that accompanied them, the icy shiver going through him, through him and through him, and the world seeming to slant and go into slow motion as in a nightmare. There was no noise except the throb of blood in his ears and a sound like the rushing of wings.

  He saw the bedroom door opening, and he saw Nicky coming in. Then there was a short gap before the next picture, which was Nicky standing in the middle of the room, looking around him. Tommy felt through the cold that his brother was searching for somewhere to hide, and he knew that Nicky had frozen, just like Tommy himself had, and could not make a decision.

  Then the next moment Tommy was whispering, “Nicky, Nicky,” and pushing the wardrobe door open a crack. And Nicky came in quickly to join him. They huddled together in the dark and waited. Nicky’s hand was in Tommy’s. In this version, Nicky was allowed to grow up, and eventually he got married and had children of his own.

  Then there was the other version in which Tommy felt nothing but the cold going through him, and he did not speak.

  In this version, the next fragment was his father walking into the room, very slow and calm, sliced into neat layers by the slats in the door. And the picture after that was the shotgun. Nothing seemed to move, and so there seemed no interval at all between that moment and the picture that came next of the blood on the wall, in streaks through the slats in the wardrobe. Tommy stayed where he was throughout it all, not even breathing now, trying to control his shivering, and he watched his father turn and seem to stare straight at him, as though he could see through the wardrobe door. And there was nothing else after that, nothing except the icy cold inside him and the knowledge that whatever he did now he would never get warm.

  PART 2

  1

  Katrina’s mother said, “We don’t have any secrets. People who love each other don’t have secrets.”

  Katrina, although she was only eleven at this point, was starting to wish that they did have some secrets. Her mother had told her recently, for instance, that she found it difficult to orgasm during penetrative sex. Katrina didn’t fully understand every element of this information, but she knew she was being told something adult and horrifying, and it brought a twisty feeling to her stomach and a hotness to her face.

  Sometimes she was flattered that her mother confided in her. She knew she was her mother’s best friend because her mother often said so, and Katrina was moved by the sense of her own importance; she was starting to be aware that her friends’ mothers did not rely on their daughters in the way that Katrina’s mother relied on her. Katrina’s sister Jill was seven years older than she was and had already left home to live with a boyfriend in Edinburgh. Katrina’s mother said Jill was “a person it was difficult to be close to’. Katrina felt a guilty swell of pride at this. She knew she herself was not like that.

  But it was tiring sometimes. Her mother was often sad, often had low moods, and then Katrina would have to make her feel better. And Katrina was allowed to keep nothing safe or secret in her own head. Everything must be shared. If her mother suspected Katrina was holding something back, she would go on and on at her until Katrina was worn down and would either say something true or manufacture something to please her mother, like, “I had a headache today,” upon which her mother would say, “I have the most terrible headache now,” and they would have to go and get in bed together and lie in the dark for hours until it passed.

  Katrina’s mother needed her more after Katrina’s father left, but Katrina wasn’t really sorry to see him go. She loved him sometimes, when he would sing his special song for her or hold her on his lap as they watched films together. But that stopped when Katrina was seven because her mother said it was “inappropriate”, a word she used often, though Katrina remained vague on its meaning given that her mother used it to encompass so many things. She missed her father’s warmth though, the cuddles he’d given her, however occasional they’d been, and the song he’d sung her: My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea.

  After Katrina’s mother used the word “inappropriate”, that bumpy, cumbersome word that seemed to carry so much power, Katrina’s father mostly acted as if Katrina wasn’t there, though he would still chat and laugh with Jill sometimes, if he was in the right mood. Occasionally, late at night, he would stumble into furniture. Katrina also knew the word “alcoholic” from a young age because she often heard her mother say it. “Disgusting alcoholic,” she would say. “I didn’t know when I married him.” Then she would lean in close to Katrina, so the scent of her perfume, a sweetness Katrina usually loved, became overpowering and sickly, and her breath smelled sour. And she would say, “Never trust a man. They’re liars. Marrying him was the worst mistake of my life.”

  Katrina was a bright child and was able to follow this statement to its logical conclusion: her own birth, too, was a mistake. She felt guilty for the difficulties they’d all caused her mother.

  Katrina’s father finally left when she was ten years old, not long after Jill had packed up and gone to Edinburgh. Katrina simply came down to breakfast one day to find him gone. The household had halved in a matter of months. Katrina had been more upset when Jill left, though she would not miss the rows Jill had had with their mother towards the end.

  Katrina was surprised at how distraught her mother was at her father’s departure, given that Katrina had come to think of him by then as their enemy. She
thought the house would be more peaceful without him. Maybe now she would be able to sit quietly and do her homework without being frightened by the sudden sound of yelling or doors slamming downstairs. Still, Katrina would sometimes lie awake at night in the aftermath (in fact, this would go on for years) and think about the fact that her own father hadn’t liked her enough to stick around. He had stayed for Jill, it seemed, but not for her.

  Her mother took to her bed for three days and refused to get up. “He was my whole life,” she said over and over again. Katrina hadn’t been to school that week, because her mother said she couldn’t bear to be left alone. Katrina sat for hours on end in the dark, stuffy bedroom while her mother cried and talked about betrayal. They were running low on food by the third day, and Katrina had resorted to feeding herself and her mother peanut butter on toast for every meal. She wasn’t sure what they would do when the bread from the freezer ran out, and she was starting to feel very anxious about it.

  She slept late on the fourth day, exhausted by it all, and when she got up and shuffled into her mother’s bedroom in her nightdress, she found her mother gone. Katrina momentarily panicked, believing in that moment that her mother had left as well, but then she heard her mother’s voice from downstairs, calling, “Katrina, come and have your breakfast.”

  In the kitchen, her mother had set out two plates, and next to each one was a glass of orange juice. Katrina could immediately see it was the expensive kind with bits, which she was never usually allowed. Her mother was cooking eggs and bacon in a frying pan and heating up baked beans in a saucepan. There was already toast in the toast rack and a new pat of butter on the table. Katrina, still half asleep, wondered where all this food had come from, and then, with even more confusion, where her mother’s good mood had come from.

  “We’re going to have such a lovely time, now it’s just the two of us,” her mother said. “Aren’t we? It’s us girls against the world.”

  Katrina nodded. She thought of Jill, living her new life in Edinburgh, and wondered when she would come back to visit, already half knowing the answer was never. Still, Katrina was relieved to see her mother up, and she was also absolutely starving, so she squashed down the prickly anxious feeling in her chest and sat at the table to receive her food.

  There followed several months of “girls’ trips”, which involved Katrina being swooped upon suddenly, made to put on a series of new dresses her mother had bought for her (each, Katrina noted with dismay, frillier than the last), and then taken on a day out. Sometimes these were wonderful: they would go into Glasgow and Katrina’s mother would visit the shops and then buy Katrina a huge milkshake and take her to the cinema (“the pictures”, Katrina’s mother said, although Katrina knew only old people called it this, and she thought her mother must know this too). Or they would drive for an hour to get to the beach and then eat fish and chips and ice cream sitting on the sand, however cold the wind was.

  “Aren’t we having a lovely time?” her mother would say to her, and usually Katrina would agree.

  Other times, however, these outings were more bizarre, like when her mother took her to the hairdresser’s, had them seated in chairs side by side and said with her high, tinkling laugh, “Make us look like sisters.” Perhaps the hairdresser had taken pity on Katrina, because she gave both of them fairly nondescript shoulder-length cuts that weren’t striking enough in themselves to make the similarity emphatic. Katrina didn’t mind her new cut, but she had preferred having her hair long so she could wear it in two plaits.

  Some of these outings would take place on school days, which Katrina didn’t like. She enjoyed school and worried about getting behind with her work. The worst occasion was when she was supposed to be presenting her project on the Victorians to the rest of the class. Katrina had been working on it for two weeks and had created a model of a Victorian schoolroom out of two shoeboxes she’d cut and sellotaped to make into one, with desks made of matchboxes, and the dolls from her dollhouse stitched into tiny uniforms she’d sewn herself out of dark blue cloth. A teacher at the front brandished a matchstick cane. When Katrina’s mother said on the Wednesday morning Katrina was supposed to present, “I’ve got a lovely surprise for you today,” Katrina’s heart sank.

  It was unusual for her not to acquiesce immediately with her mother’s plans, but in this case, she said, “I’ve got to present my history project at school today, Mum. I can’t miss it. It’s my turn.”

  “Don’t be so silly,” her mother said. She was smiling, but it was one of those hard-around-the-edges smiles that Katrina had learned to distrust. “It’s just a boring school project.”

  “It’s on the Victorians,” Katrina said, aware that this comment wasn’t really conveying everything she wanted to say.

  “Don’t be tedious, love,” her mother said, and the matter was settled.

  They went into Glasgow and had lunch in a restaurant that Katrina could tell was very fancy and that she worried they couldn’t afford. Afterwards her mother took her to a bookshop and picked out a book for her on Victorian religion, saying to Katrina as she paid, “There you go. Now you can’t claim you’re missing out on your education.” Smiling at the shop assistant, she added, “My daughter is extremely conscientious about her schoolwork.” She was doing that accent she sometimes put on—it was posh, almost English.

  Katrina could see the book was for adults; it was very thick and the print was tiny. Besides, it was a hardback and the anxious feeling in her chest got even stronger when she saw how much it cost. She did not say any of this to her mother, because she knew if she did her mother’s smile would vanish and she would say Katrina was ungrateful.

  When Katrina went back to school the next day, she asked her teacher if she would still be able to present her project, but Mrs Christie said, “Sorry, but there’s no more time. We have to move on to the solar system.” Then, seeing Katrina’s dismay, she added, “But I’ll look at it very carefully, I promise.”

  Katrina handed her project over, but Mrs Christie never gave it back, nor even mentioned it again. Katrina didn’t get the merit mark she had hoped for. She heard from some of the others that they’d got merit marks the day before at the end of their presentations and she was sure that if she’d been there she would have got one too, and then she would have had ten in her merit book and would have got a bookmark and a badge from the headmaster. As it was, she never made it to ten that term so she never got her bookmark.

  For a while, Katrina’s father did come back to visit her occasionally. There were rare, strained Saturdays during which he’d take her out for a walk and then to eat a piece of cake in the café round the corner. But Katrina’s mother usually insisted on being present too, “to supervise”, and these outings would follow a predictable course from her mother’s sniping comments to her father’s increasingly infuriated replies, and then, if it was a good day, things would resolve into a sullen silence, or, on unluckier days, a row. Either way, Katrina often never received her piece of cake. The visits became rarer and rarer, and eventually stopped altogether. Mostly, Katrina didn’t mind.

  But as the months went on, she grew more and more concerned about money. Her mother worked part-time as a receptionist at an optician’s, and she often complained that Katrina’s father didn’t send her enough money each month to supplement her income.

  “If it wasn’t clear before,” she said to Katrina, “it’s certainly clear now how little he cares about his own daughter. I daresay he’s drinking it all away. Perhaps he wants us to starve.”

  Katrina had never in her life gone without food, but the idea took root and panicked her. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the money ran out. She began to overeat at mealtimes, only half aware of it, as though cramming down food for the famished months ahead.

  “Darling, you’ll get fat if you carry on like this,” her mother said one day, as Katrina reached for a second helping of mashed potat
o. She made it sound like getting fat was a worse fate than starvation, but Katrina couldn’t stop. She developed a terror of going to her bed hungry, and started to hoard Jacob’s cream crackers in her bedroom, which she bought with her pocket money and the birthday money her grandparents sent her. She didn’t get fat, but her mother said no one would ever marry her if she went around wearing that anxious expression the whole time. “Which in some ways,” her mother added, “might be a blessing. Better a spinster than married to a man like your father.”

  Katrina found out some years later that Jill had continued to see their father, right up until his death from a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, when Katrina was in her early twenties and newly engaged. It was Jill who delivered the news to her. Katrina felt a pang of sadness, but no more than that; it was difficult to feel much for someone who had essentially been a stranger.

  “He was a good man,” Jill had said through her tears. “He had his troubles, but he was kind.”

  Katrina had been ashamed at how little she felt herself. She missed her father, though, on her wedding day. Unexpectedly, the tears came as she walked down the aisle on her mother’s arm—tears everyone else interpreted as those of a happy bride, not of a young woman crying for the father who had left her, or had perhaps been driven away.

  It was almost a relief, given the increasing frequency of their “girls’ trips”, when Katrina’s mother turned her attention away from her daughter and back on to men. It had never even crossed Katrina’s mind, considering how often her mother expressed her relief at her husband’s absence and how much she seemed to hate him during his occasional visits, that her mother was interested in auditioning potential replacements. Nevertheless, six months after her separation, Katrina’s mother brought the first of her boyfriends home. He was called Michael, and Katrina’s mother claimed she had met him on the bus to work. “It was meant to be,” she said. Michael was kind to Katrina; when he came round in the evenings, he would sometimes bring her a packet of flying saucers and ask her what she was learning at school. But Katrina had scarcely begun to hope he would marry her mother and provide for them when he vanished and was replaced by Joe, who never spoke to Katrina or even looked at her, and then Alan, who had a beard and smelled of cigarettes and sweat, and then Callum, who did speak to Katrina but in a sly, jokey way she didn’t understand.