Ethelbert's Sunday Morning

by Marcus Freestone

lonely, which he was (but then he was always lonely, even in company) but rather that he couldn't stand the silence of an empty house. That was why he always had Radio Two on (he even left his bedside radio on quietly all night, so he would wake up with some company), because silence reminded him. It reminded him that he'd lost his wife ten years previously - now it also reminded him that he'd lost his daughter; she wasn't dead, of course, but she might as well be, he often told himself.

  Three years and not one visit, not even Christmas. She told him it was the cost of the train fair, but he knew: although Norman Braithwaite was not a great thinker, and as socially inept as they come, he could read his daughter well enough to know, deep down, that she just didn't want to spend any time at all in his company. What he was intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding were the reasons why. He just thought she was like "the younger generation", "no respect for elders", and all the other vapid, archaic cliches that had long ago lodged themselves un-movingly into his skull.

  His ideas hadn't developed since childhood, and thus he had the attitudes and prejudices of a long gone, post-war generation. There are very few people for whom forty years of monumental social progress and upheaval can simply pass them by. The suffocation that Clare had felt, growing up without brothers or sisters - after eleven years of age, without a mother - the mind numbing, hair tearing, catatonia inducing boredom of having to survive with only her father for company; the arse-clenching frustration of sharing a house with such a dull reactionary bigot, someone completely useless as a figure of either guidance or authority; it choked her soul almost out of existence.

  His life had been over even before his wife died and his daughter escaped - he had never had a life to begin with. Hobbies and fun were anathema to him - he did nothing except avoid life. With all the gifted and potentially gifted people who die young, Norman's continued existence was a fly in the face and a kick in the bollocks of Natural Selection; he had done his life's work by propagating his genes (and that certainly wouldn't be happening again!), he should just curl up and die. Despite his imaginary arthritis, and all his other self-induced ailments, the bent up, brown slippered, psychosomatically defeated figure of Norman Braithwaite would continue to be a drain on the world's resources, and on the mental health of his daughter, for several years to come - he was fifty three years old.

  The train chugged on, dragging Clare inexorably closer to hell. Home is where the hell is. She'd tried to sleep but was troubled by images of a three headed dog and an underground river. She therefore started a conversation with the nearest available person, and was currently venting her spleen in no uncertain terms, as the recipient of her tirade shifted uncomfortably.

  "He goes to the doctor so often he's got his own chair in the waiting room."

  "Really?" asked the man rhetorically, but with little hope.

  "Oh yes! In huge letters on the back like he's Steven Speilberg! It's a very unsubtle hint that they want him to piss off, but he's just so... no stupid, he just doesn't get it. He doesn't get a lot of things. It's so annoying - he doesn't mean to be such a pig head, and he doesn't realise the effect he has on people. He just can't see anyone else's point of view, they're all in some parallel dimension; he never understood, and still doesn't understand why I wanted to go to London. 'What's wrong with the Bolton Institute of Technology? Why do you have to go to London, everyone smoking ecstasy and drinking acid'. It's impossible to have a conversation with him, he just never listens. I still haven't worked out how I'm going to tell him by big news - that I've got a job in London and I'm leaving for good in six weeks time. I just had to go back and tell him in person, he'd have probably feigned a heart attack if I'd told him over the phone; he'd do anything to get me back up there. And he acts so old all the time, you'd swear he was ninety not fifty three! He's just given up on life. Well, I'm buggered if I'm giving up!"

  The man cleared his throat to interrupt her diatribe: "Anyway, can I see your ticket, please?"

  "Yes, here you are."

  "Thank you." he clipped the ticket hastily, almost shoving it back in her hand. "Change at Preston."

  "And he always blames anyone but himself; even on the rare occasions that it gets through his thick skin that he is wrong!"

  "Really," said the guard, advancing rapidly down the carriage and ignoring other passengers waving their tickets at thin air, "that's terrible. Jesus!!!"

  He locked himself in the toilet until the train was the other side of Preston.

  Norman hummed tunelessly along with the last few bars of the song, before giving way politely to an announcer's voice. Outside his house, where he only ventured for food, medical advice or lottery tickets, the rain pebble dashed his windows like a vindictive D.I.Y. enthusiast.

  "That was the Everley brother's bringing us to the end of another edition of Mindless Rocking Chair Classics on Radio Two - it's five o'clock."

  Norman turned off the transistor radio, as if he thought that his daughter would want to talk to him when she arrived, and began an uncharacteristically brisk pacing of the room. He often paced the floor of his living room ("Only exercise I can manage these days"), but this was different.

  "Five o'clock, she'll be here soon. What she's doing taking up with a bloke at 'er age I can't imagine, I've told her I don't know how many times she's better off staying at home with me. Kids today think they're an adult at twenty one - they should never have lowered the voting age, I blame Harold Wilson! Still, at least she's back for good now... it has been a bit lonely without her, going t' doctors is only conversation I get these days. I don't know how much longer I'd have been able to live on my own, I might have a bad fall or something - be lying dead on floor for weeks. Wouldn't like anyone to find me like that, I'd be so embarrassed. Ay, I wonder what her this lad'll do up 'ere with their fancy degrees - he should ave done an apprenticeship, and, well, I don't know why they bother educating girls, there's plenty of shop work about. I don't suppose her bloody English degree taught her how to work a cash register - still, I've cut a few job adverts from paper for 'er. When I were a lad we didn't ponce about being students, you left school at fourteen and went down 'pit - when there were pits, before bloody communists closed em all; I blame Scargill. Ay, in them days we never..."

  The doorbell rang.

  Not in itself a monumental event, but its consequences for Norman... well, who knew?

  He shuffled faster than usual to the front door. The chain was pulled back, rusty, statesman-like bolts moved, and the door was finally opened.

  There was complete silence for four seconds.

  "Hello, dad, have you lost your voice?

  "Bloody 'el."

  "...what?" Of all the contingency plans she's spent months formulating, this wasn't in any of them.

  "Bloody 'el, is that you Clare?"

  "Of course it's me, who do you think I am, one of the Spice Girls?"

  "The who girls? Clare, I hardly recognise you. What have you done to yourself?"

  "Well, three years is a long time at my age." She cursed herself instantly, that was one of his expressions. Heredity was a four letter word for Clare.

  "Your hair's a different colour! What happened to it, is it the pollution?"

  "No, dad, it's called Henna."

  "What's that?"

  "It's something you put in your hair."

  "Oh... you did it deliberately!?"

  Clare heaved a sigh as you would heave a corpse into the boot of a Volvo. "Are you going to invite me in, I'm getting soaked out here?

  "Ay, I suppose you'd better come in."

  She muttered under her breath: "Thanks a bunch - well, that's really made me feel good. Welcome fucking home!"

  Twenty minutes later, Clare had dumped her bags in her old room. While her father flapped around in the kitchen, she was, despite her pathological loathing of his ways and mannerisms, pacing furiously up and down the living room and conducting an interior monologue.

  "God, he hasn't changed - not one
iota of progress in three years. I'm a different person now, and he hasn't even so much as moved any furniture round. Or the photographs."

  She paused by the nauseatingly old-fashioned fireplace.

  "A signed, framed photo of Lonnie Donnegan. Pride of place above the fire. Has he changed the family photos - no, what a surprise; still the horrible ten year old one of me. All pigtails and braces, dad's ideal image of me, before I grew up and started having a mind of my own. Yet another example of being stuck in the bloody past - being eleven seems, I don't know, unreal. I can't believe I ever was that person." She paused pregnantly. "Hello, mum. He hasn't changed your photo of course -we should have buried that one with you and cremated the negatives. It was four months before you died I think, the last time you could go out - he even took away your last chance to really enjoy yourself. Fancy taking your dying wife to a stupid fifties nostalgia I've got no life' evening - remember what he said to you: 'You can wear one of those wigs'; I've never forgiven him for that. 'Well, Clare, they might think she's one of those AIDS people, I don't want folk thinking we're that sort.' I'm glad I was mature enough not to run and tell you what he said, and you never found out. That's his favourite image of you, you know, so I had to see it every day for eight years. It's partly the reason I went to Uni, it was sort of symbolic of everything I'd lost... and a