Our Fathers

by Rebecca Wait

  The days out stopped as soon as the boyfriends began, or rather they continued, but usually without Katrina. Instead her mother went to the beach or to the cinema or to restaurants with her boyfriends. Sometimes Katrina would be brought grudgingly along, but more often she was left with a neighbour, or at home by herself.

  Not that her mother would allow Katrina to feel left out. Katrina was always kept up to date with the intimate details of her mother’s latest relationship. She knew, for instance, that her mother felt “safer” with Joe than she had done with a man for many years, but also that Joe was a feeble lover (“You know, between the sheets,” Katrina’s mother added for extra clarification. “Sexually.”), whereas Callum knew how to please a woman (“sexually”) but couldn’t, Katrina’s mother said, be trusted.

  “And because I don’t orgasm easily from penetrative sex,” Katrina’s mother said, “I need a man to do a bit of extra work. Not all of them are willing.” She looked at Katrina with a small smile. “You’ll understand one day. Men can be very selfish.” Then, after a short pause, “I’m talking about the stimulation of the clitoris.”

  Katrina fled at this point, saying she had to do her homework. Her mother always saw through this excuse.

  “How did I raise such a prude?” she called after Katrina. “You should be grateful I’m trying to educate you. Most mothers prefer to keep their daughters in the dark.”

  Katrina found it difficult to look at her mother’s partners after that. Sometimes, too, she heard the noises coming from her mother’s room, even in the middle of the afternoon. She stayed out of the house as much as possible, visiting friends (she had few) or going on long, solitary walks around town, or reading in her bedroom. She was so awkward and tongue-tied around her mother’s boyfriends that her mother accused her of being sullen and ungrateful.

  “I gave up a lot to have you,” she would remind Katrina. “I had my own life in Glasgow, dates every night, hundreds of friends and a lovely wee flat I lived in all by myself. I threw a lot of parties in those days, before you came along.” (Katrina could see that her mother had got her confused with Jill, that first unexpected pregnancy before she had “got the hang of the sponge”. Katrina herself had been the second blip. In any case, she had heard her mother complain in other moods about how she’d had to slum it in a filthy, rat-infested bedsit when she lived in Glasgow because her parents never gave her any help.) “I don’t hold it against you, of course,” Katrina’s mother would add. “But it hurts me when you’re so moody and spoilt, after all the sacrifices I’ve made for you. Do you know how difficult it’s been, bringing up two daughters all on my own? Your father never helped. And now I’m left alone with you. It’s been desperately lonely.” Here, she would often start crying, and Katrina would have to comfort her.

  One of the positives of her mother’s boyfriends was that it gave Katrina the opportunity to do her schoolwork in peace without her mother calling her a bluestocking, or complaining that Katrina was neglecting her. Katrina was fourteen now, and had begun to see, with some gentle encouragement from her teachers, that she was passably clever and had a chance of doing well in her Highers when the time came. Though she struggled with maths, she was good at English and history, could express herself neatly and concisely, and had an intuitive understanding of grammar. Her English teacher suggested she might consider teaching or journalism, and since the idea of standing up in front of a class terrified her, Katrina settled on journalism.

  She knew better than to voice this idea to her mother, who would tell her, Katrina knew, not to be so silly, that she wasn’t cut out for journalism, that you had to be much tougher and quicker than Katrina to make it as a journalist. She would say it in a kindly, smiling way, of course, as though all she wanted was to help Katrina. But Katrina was starting to distrust her mother’s help. For so many years she had felt as though she could hardly breathe, that there was no space left over for her; her mother took it all. She wasn’t yet able to view her mother with any level of detachment, but nevertheless she began to feel a fierce impulse to get away.

  After Callum finally left, following many months of shouting and door slamming (Katrina had come to regard these things wearily as a fact of life), Katrina’s mother retired to her bed, just as she had done after Katrina’s father walked out. Katrina—sixteen, by now—took it in her stride. She worked on Saturdays and Sundays at the local newsagent’s, so at least they would have enough money for vegetables to make soup if her mother lost her job. They would not starve. Over the next week, she brought her mother cups of tea and slices of toast with jam, and encouraged her to wash from time to time. This storm, she knew, would pass, just as all the others had.

  And naturally it did. Katrina’s mother rose up from her bed like Lazarus, washed and set her hair, applied her bright lipstick and declared that all she needed in life was her daughter, and that as long as they had each other, no man could hurt them. She did not know, of course, that Katrina was already starting to harden her heart against her.

  The following year, Katrina sat her Highers and did well. She left school not long before she turned eighteen and, much to her own and her mother’s surprise, secured her first job at the Stirling Reporter without too much effort, writing the death notices.

  “They just want someone to make the tea,” her mother said. “You watch out, hen. You’re only there so they can take advantage of you. They hired you for your looks.”

  This comment came as a surprise to Katrina; her mother had never before suggested that Katrina was pretty. It was true that in her last two years at school, boys had started paying her attention, but this had only disconcerted her, and she had ignored them until they lost heart. Katrina had always known, of course, that her mother was beautiful. She knew, too, that she herself looked nothing like her. It was dark-eyed Jill who took after their mother in appearance. In fact, there had been times in the past when Katrina’s mother had looked her up and down critically and said, “You got your looks from your father, unfortunately.” Her mother had suggested once or twice that it would be especially important for Katrina to show herself to be very sweet and biddable around men, because not everyone was lucky enough to be able to rely on their appearance.

  Katrina was aware that she had reached adulthood with no clear sense of her own personality, no real idea of her likes and dislikes, or even where her own edges were. It was difficult to feel where her mother stopped and she began, and almost impossible to patrol those borders.

  What she did have was a strong instinct for movement. It was the deepest, truest thing she knew. She had to get away, although she didn’t know how this could be achieved or whether her mother would let her go, or indeed if Katrina herself could even exist outside of her mother’s sphere (perhaps she would simply fade away as she moved clear of it, having no definition beyond those boundaries). Nevertheless, it had to be attempted. Katrina put her head down and focused on her work, even while her mother commented that she was wasting her time, that Katrina didn’t have the right temperament for reporting.

  Jill, mostly absent from their lives over the past few years, proved an unexpected ally in this. She invited Katrina to stay with her in Edinburgh for a weekend, and they climbed in the rain to the top of Arthur’s Seat and ate cake on Princes Street, and then Jill made curry for tea in the tiny flat she shared with her boyfriend (a different one, Katrina was surprised to note, from the one she’d originally left to live with, or “eloped with”, as their mother liked to put it). Katrina had never had curry before, nor spent the night away from home. She was nervous around the boyfriend Chris, though he was very polite to her. Jill had cut her hair short and bleached it, and she was wearing bright red lipstick like Debbie Harry. In the evening, Jill and Chris smoked cigarettes that Chris rolled for them (Katrina refused one), and the three of them sipped red wine out of beakers as Jill cooked. Katrina thought her sister was the most glamorous person she’d ever met.
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  “Of course you have to get away,” Jill said in that cool voice of hers, turning from the saucepan to look at Katrina. “You can’t stay at home with her any longer. You’ll lose your mind.”

  Katrina already knew this was true, but still something—perhaps some long-buried feeling of reproach towards Jill—made her say, “If I leave, she’ll have no one.”

  Then Jill said something surprising. “Our mother,” she began, and here she paused and gave the curry a vicious stir, “is incapable of love. It’s not her fault, but it’s true. She has no sense of other people’s feelings, no interest in them or even awareness. I suppose it’s a mental disorder of some kind, but I can’t feel sorry for her. She lives alone in her world—the people around her are just moving, coloured shapes. So Katrina, it doesn’t really matter whether you stay or go. You’re no one to her—or rather the role you play could be filled by anyone. Do you understand that? That’s why it’s so important that you leave.”

  Chris had his arm around Jill’s shoulders now, but Katrina could see her sister’s back stayed tense, and after a moment she shrugged Chris off. Katrina herself was quiet, absorbing this sudden rush of words. While she felt her sister was overstating the case, Jill’s outburst brought with it a sudden sense of freedom, almost vertiginous in its unfamiliarity. She said, as Jill continued to stir the curry as though nothing had happened, “I want to apply for a job at the Glasgow Herald. Then I’d be earning enough, just about, to move to Glasgow. Only I don’t think they’d take me.”

  Jill turned to face her. “You know, I bet they would.”

  Chris added, “At least there’s no harm in asking, is there?” and for some reason it was this more than anything that clinched it for Katrina. She did apply the following week, and was interviewed and taken on as a junior reporter, writing articles for the business section. She found a room to rent, and arranged it all without consulting her mother.

  “You’re moving out?” her mother said, when the subject was finally broached. “But you can’t!”

  “I have to, Mum,” Katrina said, almost shaking from the stress of it. “I need to be close to work.”

  “Nonsense. It’s only a forty-minute drive into Glasgow. I’ll get you a second-hand car.”

  Katrina held firm. She didn’t want to drive, she said.

  “Don’t be so selfish,” her mother said. “It’s always been just the two of us. You can’t leave me on my own.”

  This was the mode of attack Katrina had feared the most. She suspected that she was being selfish, perhaps monstrously so. But she knew, too, that she had to go forwards, that she had to get away as Jill said. She was glad she had had the foresight to find a room in advance, to pay the landlady a small deposit from her savings and arrange to move in the following week. Otherwise, faced with this, she didn’t think she’d ever have been able to go through with it.

  “You’ll be O.K., Mum,” she said, attempting to sound cheerful and bracing. “I’ll be back every weekend, and I can come round for tea some evenings in the week, too.”

  “You won’t be able to get here. You must be mad if you think I’ll pick you up, drive all that way.”

  “I’ll get the bus,” Katrina said.

  “I won’t pick you up from the stop.”

  “I’ll walk. Honestly, Mum, you’ll hardly notice I’m gone.”

  Her mother began to cry loudly, but when Katrina tried to comfort her, she batted her away, talking inarticulately about how selfish Katrina was, how Katrina wouldn’t be capable of living alone in the city, that she wouldn’t cope, that she would probably be raped and murdered within the first week.

  “You can’t even cook,” she said, and Katrina, who had been cooking for both of them since she was eleven, let this pass.

  “I’ll manage,” she said.

  “But what will happen to me?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “How can you do this to me?”

  “I’ll be back to visit all the time,” Katrina said again. She felt as though she were committing a terrible crime, and the excitement of her new job—it had felt like the first genuine achievement of her life—was spoiled utterly. But still she was determined to go through with it. Perhaps this was the first real indication she’d had of her own personality: that she was irredeemably selfish, deep down. She could hardly regret it, though; she had begun to see how she might survive.

  Her new room was a little back bedroom in the house of a middle-aged widow in west Glasgow, not too far from the offices of the Herald. Katrina only had to take a fifteen-minute bus ride each morning, and it felt like luxury to get ready in the quiet of her own room, putting on a new pink lipstick without her mother ridiculing it, and eating breakfast undisturbed. Her landlady was stern and imperious, but mostly left Katrina alone once she’d satisfied herself that Katrina wasn’t the kind to try to bring men back, or to break the rules about when she was allowed to use the kitchen or take a bath.

  At twenty years old, Katrina found herself really happy for the first time in her life. She liked her job, and she enjoyed being in the office, the general atmosphere of industriousness, the jokes she shared with the others. Her older male colleagues were mostly kind to her, if a little patronizing; one or two would ask her to make them tea, as though she was a secretary (Katrina usually did it, because it seemed too awkward to go and ask one of the real secretaries to do it on her behalf). Katrina also discovered during this time that she could make people laugh. She became more animated in the way she relayed anecdotes, dryer and more self-deprecating, often finding herself exaggerating her stories. Some of her colleagues became friends, and from time to time they would go to the pub together after work.

  She didn’t see her sister much after moving to Glasgow. Jill and Chris had had a baby, so Jill was occupied with her new son, and Katrina with her new life. Her visits to her mother went from every weekend to every other weekend, and though Katrina had thought her mother would make a huge fuss, instead she seemed quietly resigned, as though already aware the battle was lost.

  So at the age of twenty-two and finally having escaped her mother, Katrina walked into a pub in Glasgow’s West End and met John.

  2

  Perhaps it was true what John said later, that she was looking for marriage, although she was hardly aware of it. Though she loved the small, neat life she had made for herself, she still carried a sense of being in flight. She craved the kind of stability that was borne on deep foundations, the reassuring concrete of a husband and children lying thickly beneath the surface of her life.

  It was a Thursday night, leaving drinks for one of Katrina’s colleagues in a pub they’d never visited before. (“A special occasion calls for a different venue,” someone had said, and the plan was made.)

  John, at twenty-five, was not exactly handsome, but he had a nice face. He had dark brown eyes which Katrina liked, and though he wasn’t especially tall, though his mouth was wide and his front teeth a bit too large, Katrina found his appearance appealing. Several of her male colleagues had made passes at her since she’d started at the Herald, but Katrina had become adept at brushing these off, politely and shyly, careful never to offend. She’d scanned their ranks discreetly and decided none of them would do for a boyfriend. In any case, most of them were married.

  John would later tell her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in real life, and Katrina would be embarrassed, but grateful.

  There was no opportunity for John to approach her on her own in the pub that night, because Katrina wasn’t the kind of girl confident enough to go up to the bar to get a round in like the men, and tended to rely on others to fetch her drinks. John waited instead until she was on the edge of the group of her colleagues, only five of them left by that point, and then he simply walked up to her.

  “Do you mind me asking,” he began, “if that’s your natural hair colour?”
r />   Katrina did mind him asking, although the rudeness of the question was partly allayed by the warmth of his manner.

  “It is,” she said, not committing to a smile, but ready to be charmed, if he turned out to be charming.

  “I’ve never seen such lovely dark-red hair,” he said. “It’s very striking.”

  Mae, Katrina’s colleague, whom she had been chatting to up to this point, snorted and turned away to talk to the rest of the group, clearly deciding to leave them to it. Katrina wished she hadn’t, because she immediately felt awkward.

  John, however, seemed pleased. He asked her about herself, and, upon eliciting that she worked at the Herald, said, “So I’d better watch what I say, hadn’t I? Else I might make it into print.”

  “Hardly,” Katrina said. “I work for the business section.”

  “A real career girl,” John said, smiling.

  “Hardly,” Katrina said again, and then wondered if she’d forgotten all her other words.

  “But a girl as pretty as you won’t be doing that for long,” John said. “Someone will come along and marry you. Or are you one of those modern women who don’t believe in marriage?”