by Mike Gayle
According to Fran, I’m officially getting more post than ‘Ask Adam’ ever had. I grab a handful of letters from the pile I’ve been sorting through and begin to read:
Dear Love Doctor Dave,
Why is it that, given a choice between a big-chested but stupid girl with the personality of a wet envelope and a flat-chested but really funny girl, boys always without fail pick the stupid girl with the big boobs? I only ask because there’s this guy at school who I really like and who I know likes me but rather than going out with me he’s decided he only wants to be friends and has started dating a girl with a big chest who laughs like a hyena.
A confused Janet Jackson fan (14), Aberdeen
Dear Love Doctor Dave,
My dad caught me and my boyfriend lying on my bed kissing and he went ballistic. The thing is my dad didn’t even know this boy was my boyfriend because I’d told him that we were just friends. Now he says that I’m grounded for ‘the foreseeable future’, he’s banned me from using the phone and on top of all that he says I’m not allowed to have anything to do with my boyfriend any more. I’m so upset and this situation is driving me crazy. What can I do to make him see that I’m not in the wrong?
A desperate Dawson’s Creek fan (16), Cheltenham
Dear Love Doctor Dave,
My boyfriend keeps treating me like I’m the Invisible Girl all the time. Whenever we’re on our own he’s as sweet as anything but the moment we’re out in public he barely talks to me and refuses even to hold my hand. All my friends say I should dump him but they don’t know how lovely he is when we’re on our own. Why is he acting like this and what can I do to make him stop?
Anonymous (15), Liverpool
I flick through another pile of letters. Some are written in felt-tip pen, others thick black marker pen, glitter pen on black paper and in some the ink has been smudged by the tears of the author. Their topics cover everything from unrequited love and dumping techniques to love bites and hand holding. I decide to read one final letter before getting down to work again. It’s in a bright yellow envelope and inside are three pages of light blue paper accompanied by two photographs. The handwriting is neat but unmistakably that of a teenage girl.
Dear Love Doctor Dave,
It’s been a couple of weeks since your first column in Teen Scene and I’ve been meaning to write to you for ever (in more ways than one). I know you may think this is a bit strange but I’ve got a really strong feeling that you might know my mum. Her name is Caitlin O’Connell. You met her in Corfu in a nightclub, in a place called Benitses on 11 August 1986 and spent the night with her. Mum said that if things had been different (that she didn’t live in Dublin and you didn’t live in London) the two of you might have tried to make a go of it and seen each other after the holiday. All this should be old news to you.
What you don’t know is that Mum got pregnant with me. My name is Nicola O’Connell, and I’m thirteen (I turn fourteen in four months’ time). Anyway, if you’re slow on the uptake this all means you’re my dad and I’m your daughter.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw your photo in Teen Scene I thought I was going mad but then I compared it to the only photo I’ve got of you and I just know it is you. Even though the picture was taken before I was born I can tell you’re my dad because when you’ve spent the majority of your life looking in the mirror trying to imagine one of the two most important people in your life you know exactly what you’re looking for.
I haven’t told anyone about you (not even Mum). And I don’t think I will as it will cause too much upset. But I’d like to meet you just once, if you don’t mind. Mum and I live in London (Wood Green) so it should be pretty easy to arrange.
I’ve enclosed the only photograph I’ve got of you and one of me taken at Christmas. I’ve written my mobile phone number on the back of it. So please call me if you can. Please.
Yours faithfully
Nicola O’Connell
PS Don’t ring during school hours, though, because you’re not allowed to have them on.
shake
I read the letter several times but nothing’s going in. I look round the office to check I’m not dreaming: Lisa, the production manager, is putting a new CD into the office hi-fi; Daisy, the senior writer, is talking loudly to a friend on the phone; Jessica, the junior designer, is standing by the colour printer in the far corner of the art department. Everyone’s going about their business. No one’s looking at me waiting to go ‘Ha! ha! Had you fooled there!’ I’m alone on this one.
I check the postmark on the envelope several times – it has been posted in London. I study the enclosed photos and one definitely features an eighteen-year-old me. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t believe the content of the letter for a second. But the thing is, I’ve never seen this photo in my life.
I look at the letter again, the letter that is trying to tell me that, for the past thirteen years, I’ve been a dad and haven’t known it. Is this the answer to my unspoken prayers? How can it be that while I’m still feeling the pain of loss for a child that never was, I should discover that there’s a child in the world who is mine all along?
I just can’t take it in.
I can’t think straight.
None of this is happening to me. It’s happening to the person who is responsible for it – the eighteen-year-old Dave Harding – a person I haven’t been for over fourteen years.
sun
Corfu. August 1986. It was the summer before I went to university to study English. I’d been working part-time in the warehouse of a frozen-food supermarket to earn enough money to pay for the holiday. Four of us went: me, Jamie Earls, Nick Smith and Ed Ellis. All friends from school. We’d been looking forward to the holiday all year. Everything was planned down to the last detail and we had even bought a tourist guide to the island that listed where all the bars and clubs were so that we could work out where we wanted to go on our first night out. None of us had girlfriends; Jamie had been seeing someone for a few weeks but he dumped her because he didn’t want to be the only one of us who was attached.
The bravado of four eighteen-year-old boys together on a foreign holiday was intoxicating. We soon established a regular daily pattern – get up at midday, slope to one of the many roadside cafés for an ‘English breakfast’, then go to the beach, lie down and stare at girls. About four o’clock in the afternoon we’d wander back to the apartment to sleep and at about eight o’clock we’d go out to get something to eat, usually burgers, then head for the various bars and clubs Benitses had to offer. We never arrived back at our apartment before five a.m. if we could help it.
Our success rate with the opposite sex wasn’t high. Despite this, though, we’d stand each night in a group in the corner of whichever bar or club we were in, watching girls. Eventually one of us would declare that someone was ‘giving us the eye’ and walk over to try to chat her up, only to return shame-faced minutes – or seconds – later. Rejection, however, is part and parcel of what being an eighteen-year-old male is all about.
On the final night of our holiday, however, something strange happened. We pulled.
It happened exactly as the letter said. I’d been in a beach bar with my friends when a group of girls about our age walked in and ordered drinks. We thought they were English from the way they were dressed but when we sent Jamie on a reconnaissance mission to the bar we discovered they were from Ireland and they’d just arrived in Corfu. So there we were, four lads from south London on the last night of our holiday in one corner and four girls from Ireland, determined to kick off their holiday with a real party, in the other. It was the perfect match. We started talking to them immediately. Jamie and Ed were chatting up a girl called Caitlin. Nick was chatting up Brenda, and I was trying to entertain Colleen, whom I fancied, and her bored friend Sarah-Jane, whom I didn’t.
It was a scattergun approach to seduction: we indicated which girl we were attracted to and, after a decent interval, they indicated whether we were
in with a chance. As it stood we’d got nearly everything wrong. It turned out that Sarah-Jane liked Nick, Brenda liked Ed, Colleen liked Jamie and Caitlin didn’t really like any of us, which left me as the odd one out. Within half an hour of the who-likes-whom information going public Brenda and Ed had left to go to another bar, Colleen’s tongue was lodged down Jamie’s throat, while Nick and Sarah-Jane had tucked themselves away in a corner of the bar, laughing and giggling.
The bar was filling up now, a DJ had begun to play a variety of chart hits and people were congregating on the dance floor. The entire world seemed to be having fun, apart from me and this fantastic-looking girl. Caitlin and I spent half an hour or so alternately staring emptily into our drinks and at each other. Then she shrugged, as if she’d come to a major conclusion. ‘I’ll dance with you,’ she said, in a lilting Irish accent I could’ve listened to all night, ‘but that’s all.’ Although her voice was soft it carried a hint of menace that unnerved me, but I followed her on to the dance floor.
The DJ was playing any old stuff to get people to dance – Madonna, Michael Jackson, Abba and some cheesy Italian house music – and Caitlin kept going all the way through it. I thought, as she seemed exceptionally cool, that she’d sit down when they played Abba but she carried on. A few times – even though it must have been clear to everyone in the bar that I was dancing with her – guys tried to edge their way in right in front of me and each time she manoeuvred herself deftly back to me.
At about eleven, I’d realised nothing was going to happen between us and was contemplating going back to the apartment to pack my bags in preparation for the flight home. ‘Listen, Caitlin, I’m off,’ I said. ‘It was nice to meet you.’
She smiled at me for the first time that evening, and said, ‘Don’t go.’
No explanation.
No additional information.
Just ‘don’t go.’
So I didn’t.
Soon after that we left the bar, headed down to the beach, sat on the sand and watched the tide come in. It was like she was a completely different person. She apologised for being offhand with me, and explained she’d only come on the holiday under pressure from her friends because she knew they’d spend the whole two weeks ‘chasing lads’ and she wasn’t ‘into all that’. I asked her what she was into and, without pausing for thought, she said, ‘Music.’ She named some bands she liked. I nodded and named some bands I liked. We passed each other’s first round of tests. I named some more bands I liked, more obscure ones, and she did likewise. We passed each other’s second round of tests. Finally I named some obscure tracks by the obscure bands I liked and she did likewise. We passed each other’s final round of tests. And everything changed.
When we got cold, we walked back to the apartment she and her friends were renting. None of the others was there, even though it was three o’clock in the morning. We talked more about highlights in our record collections and a little later we began to talk about ourselves. She told me she was seventeen and had lived her whole life in a place called Sutton on the outskirts of Dublin. Because of the way the education system worked in Ireland, even though she was a year younger than me she was going to university in Dublin that October. I told her about life in London and attempted to make Streatham sound marginally more interesting than it was. She was impressed that I was from London. She had relatives there, she told me, and she planned one day to spend a summer with them.
She made coffee and we sat on the balcony, which overlooked the swimming-pool. On a whim she picked up a camera and said she was going to take a photograph of me. I hated having my photograph taken so I suggested we take one of the two of us. We sat on her bed and I put one arm around her waist and held the camera as far away from us as I could. And with the lens pointing at our faces and laughing like idiots, I took the picture.
I can’t recall how we started kissing. One minute we were talking, the next kissing. Even that was different, though – it wasn’t frantic in the way I was used to, where my eagerness had less to do with passion and more to do with a suspicion that the girl might change her mind. We kissed as if we had all night – which we did.
The following morning when we woke up, we were awkward but comfortable at the same time. Neither of us talked about the night before. I think we both felt that we’d had a perfect night with a perfect person and that the time we’d spent together would lose its perfection if we tried to make any more of it. So we didn’t say anything about swapping addresses or telephone numbers or even that we were unlikely to see each other again. I remember feeling so grown-up as I got into the taxi that took me back to my hotel. Like I was a real man. Like I’d finally made it.
photo
There’s a part of me that isn’t even bothering to question whether the girl who has written the letter is my daughter: that night with Caitlin had been the first time I’d played reproductive roulette but it wasn’t the last. The occasions (all before Izzy) were few and far between: a one-night stand with a girl I’d met at a party in Liverpool, a reunion with an ex-girlfriend in Glasgow, a girl from Austria when I was on holiday in Ibiza.
I wasn’t proud of them.
I knew my actions were stupid at the time.
But this knowledge hadn’t stopped me for a second until now.
I pick up the photograph of the girl who has written to me. Her dark brown corkscrew curls are held away from her face by a blue hairband, and she is wearing small gold hoop earrings, a dark blue hooded top, unzipped, and underneath it a light grey T-shirt. It’s her face, however, that holds my attention. She’s got beautiful light brown skin, but even more fascinating are her features. Initially I’m convinced that I can’t see myself in her but slowly, like a photograph developing in a darkroom, I see flashes I think I recognise: certain aspects of the shape of her face have echoes of my mum when she was younger and I notice her grin – broad-toothed – and I think if only for a moment that perhaps it’s mine.
do
I decide to keep a tight rein on my thoughts. Worst-case scenarios can wait. First of all I have to deal with the problem at hand: this girl wants to meet me, but do I want to meet her? I weigh up the pros and cons but I know the answer will be the same at the end as it was at the beginning.
Yes. I am curious.
But, no, I do not want to see her because I can’t afford the risks involved.
My main fear is of losing Izzy. After all our time together I know how she will react in any one of a million different situations except this one. I go through all the rational arguments several times. It happened a lifetime ago. I hadn’t known the child existed. No one tried to contact me until now. It’s not like I can change history, is it?
No matter how I look at it, no matter how liberal, fair-minded or forgiving I think Izzy might be, there’s always the chance that she won’t accept this, that she’ll hate me, that somehow it will signal the end of us. Because after the miscarriage I can’t be sure how something like this might affect her. I tell myself that I’m doing the right thing. I tell myself that I’m protecting her from a truth that would hurt her more than anything in the world.
What I fail to consider is that I’m denying her the chance to make up her own mind. And if I can’t tell the person closest to me, who else can I talk to? I go through potential confidants one by one until the only person left on the list in my mind is the one who’s normally sitting right next to me.
Indeed
‘So,’ says Fran, as we sit down, beers in hand, in our favourite seats in Hampton’s for an after-work drink, ‘what’s up with you?’
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Yeah, right. You’ve been acting strange ever since I came back from the reader make-over shoot. What’s up, Doctor Love?’
I look at Fran carefully, weighing up whether or not to trust her – and whether I have what it takes to betray Izzy like this. Izzy and I never talk about our relationship with anyone else. Never. And it’s not one of those cases where I think Izzy doe
sn’t gossip with her mates about me when secretly she really does. I know because she told me that sometimes she feels a bit left out when Stella’s telling her stuff about Lee, and Jenny’s going on about Trevor. I told her she could if she was desperate, but she said she didn’t want to. She said our relationship wasn’t like that and I understood what she meant because our relationship isn’t like that. I’m the only person in the world she needs to confide in about me and she is the only person in the world I need to confide in about her. Until now. Although it feels wrong wanting to confide in someone I barely know, I need the opinion of someone who doesn’t know me inside out, who doesn’t know me well enough to judge me, who won’t get upset and who will see the situation for what it was and not what it would mean to her. It might sound harsh but it’s true.
‘Listen,’ I begin, ‘it’s serious.’
‘How serious?’
‘You have to promise me that you won’t breathe a single word of this to anyone. And I do mean anyone and not just anyone I don’t know because you know how things work in this industry – even if you don’t know them directly you always know someone who knows someone else.’
‘Okay, okay. Anyone would think I’m the world’s biggest gossip when I’m not even Teen Scene’s worst gossip. That has to be Linda Bell, the freelance sub-editor, you know the girl with the bright red hair, she’s got a gob on her like no one else. There’s no way I’m that bad—’
‘Fran . . .’
‘Sorry. Go ahead with your secret. It’s safe with me. And don’t worry about how I’m going to react either because I’m pretty unshockable.’
‘This morning I got a letter in my Love Doctor postbag only it wasn’t that kind of letter.’ I hand it to Fran and watch her face as she reads it.