We ran off, then. I remember how blue the day was: the sky was blue, the slides were blue and the water was the bluest blue I’d ever seen. It was still only morning – about eleven o’clock, perhaps, or half past ten – but the sun was beating down in waves, you could almost see it, and the rough ground was warm underfoot. There was a queue to get to the water slides, but it moved fast enough. The attendants, bored under their baseball caps, limbs burnished by the sun, were practised at dispatching yelping children. There were four slides, all joined together, and Alfie and I went in the two middle ones. I can see us there, now, clutching on to the thin metal pole, tugged forwards by the sluice of water, waiting for the go-ahead. I can almost feel it: the lurch of the first, plummeting drop, then skidding and bumping sideways and down to land in a plume of foam. We come up shouting and spluttering, hair sleeked to our heads, with slow swimmy echoes in our ears where the water has run in. The attendant is calling out for us to clear the way, and we doggy-paddle to the edge and clamber out, shaking our heads and gulping to clear our ears, and I wring the water from my long thin rope of a ponytail, then we seize hands and run back up, again, again.
The hour passes, and more, before we’ve realised. The aqua park is busier now, the queues longer, the music turned up louder. We race back down to our parents. You almost have to race, now, taking your feet off the ground as soon as they touch it: it’s baking under the midday sun. Our parents are sitting up, watching for us, making hand-visors and peering up into the sun. Dad has his other hand on Mum’s neck and he’s clasping it, squeezing it. He has beautiful fingers – long, tapered, delicate – which look incongruous, as if they’ve been grafted onto the bulk of him. They are the sort of fingers pianists have, or artists. I know: I’ve got them too. I got my father’s bulk, as well – his ‘big bones’, as people consolingly said once I became a teenager – though with our mother’s height, the worst possible combination. But there’ll be time for that later. For now, we’re running about, gabbling about the water slides, the splashes . . . And we’re suddenly starving – the smells of hot dogs and frying onions, the buttery smell of popcorn, are coming from the snack area, and we want hot dogs and rustling, salty chips in paper cups – but our mother says we won’t be able to swim for an hour after we’ve eaten, so we decide to go on one ring-ride first. We each take one of Dad’s hands as we lead him towards the one we’ve chosen – ‘Black Hole’ – and I feel a momentary pang for Mum, following behind us, but she must understand that it’s just we always see her, every day. At the entrance to the queue, the attendant is making all children stand beside a metal stick to see if they’re tall enough. Alfie ruffs up his hair, like in his Tintin books, and hovers on the balls of his feet, but he’s still too small. So he has to stay at the bottom with Mum, who says she’s not that keen anyway, and it’s Dad and I who go through, and I have him all to myself.
We climb the steps, right to the top, holding our clumsy, chlorine-beaded rubber tyres – mine almost as big as me – and join the shuffling queue.
‘All right, wee Squrl?’ Dad says. ‘Monkey-boy’ is Dad’s nickname for Alfie and I’m ‘Squirrel’, or ‘Squrl’, as he pronounces it, the relic of some long-forgotten babyhood joke.
I beam at him. ‘I knew you’d come in time for my birthday,’ I blurt out. ‘I knew it.’
He looks at me, then nods. ‘Come you here, Squrl.’ He grips me to him, and I nestle in against his solid, warm side.
The coiled tubes of the ‘Black Hole’ reach much higher than the water slides. From the top, through the railings, we can see the scrublands to the north, littered with palm trees and the concrete bones of new developments; and past the glinting heat of the car park, the glittering sea to the south. There is a breeze up here, and the sound of crickets is louder than the Europop coming from the speakers down below. We’ve left it all behind. We are kings of the world, up here.
‘Africa’s that way,’ Dad says. ‘If you kept going long enough in that direction, you’d hit Morocco.’
‘And Ireland?’
‘Ah, Ireland. Ireland’s a long way behind us, now. Almost the opposite direction.’
A group of giggling teenage girls is immediately ahead of us. I am shy of them – shy of their filled-out bikini tops and rounded bottoms. They are talking in loud, fast Spanish and one of them says something and they look at my dad and me and laugh. I slip my hand out of his and I think I’ve done it casually but he glances down at me and then at the teenagers.
‘This is going to be your last year,’ he says. ‘Before you’re a terrible teenager, I mean.’ He sounds sad, suddenly: very far away.
I want to say something but I don’t know what. Neither of us says anything more for a while.
The girls are dispatched, shrieking, and now it is our turn.
‘Do you want to go first, or do you want me to go first?’
‘You go first, Dad.’
So he does, clambering with all the awkwardness of his bulk into the bright yellow tyre and letting the gum-chewing attendant shove him spinning into the mouth of the tube. The yell he gives out resounds and hangs in the air for seconds after he’s gone and I am suddenly scared and I don’t want to follow him down there. But there’s no time to change my mind: suddenly it is me climbing into the holding pool and the thigh-deep attendant steadying my ring as I haul myself onto it, and gripping the handles for dear life I am sent hurling into the dank rushing darkness. In those few, suspended seconds it takes to hurtle round and round the tube, bumping sideways and turning backwards, the only thought in my mind is that my father’s done it too and he’s at the bottom waiting for me.
After lunch, despite ourselves, we are glad to rest for a while, warm and lazy on our loungers in the sun. Mum pushes her and Dad’s loungers together and lowers the arms, so they’re almost one, and they lie there, she in the crook of his arm, pulled in to his chest. In almost all my memories of them together, I realise, they are this close. Touching, kissing, leaning on each other. Even as they ate, he’d have a hand on her knee; as they walked along, they’d be holding hands, or his palm would be in the small of her back. She was forever stroking his face, twisting her hands in his hair, he bending to kiss her forehead or shoulders, wherever she had skin exposed. You’d think, if you watched them, that nothing could ever come between them. They looked, and I’m sure it’s not just in my mind’s eye, like the very picture of a couple deeply in love.
Later on, we swim in the pool with the wave machine, which is turned on every hour on the hour, and Alfie and I have a few more goes on the water slides. The sun, though still fiercely bright, is lower in the sky now. People are starting to pack up and go and we know our parents are going to say it’s home-time soon. I suddenly want one more go on one of the bigger rides – the ‘Kamikaze’ this time – and I decide I want to do it on my own, and see my father’s face when I tell him. So I make Alfie wait by the fence and I go up again, by myself. Near the top, I turn to wave at Alfie, and he waves back, and I wonder if I can see my parents from here. I find the snack area, and the loungers, and count my way along until I can see their shapes, and our towels. My mother’s body, despite her four-days tan, looks pale and very small beside my father’s: and something strikes me that hasn’t occurred to me before. How tanned he is. All over his body, back and front, his skin is the red-brown of someone who’s been in the sun. It’s been raining in Belfast, I know, I’ve seen the photos in the Daily Mail and followed the weather forecasts, desperate for any news from there. All week, a thick, dreary rain and low, dull skies. Why would my father be tanned, and why haven’t I noticed it until now?
The skin pimples on my arms and legs, although there is no breeze, and a boy behind me nudges me to move forward and close the gap that’s opened up in the queue. I bump the rubber tyre along with my foot but I don’t want to do this any more. Something isn’t quite right: the feelings I’ve had, since the afternoon my mother was so inexplicably angry and upset about Ireland, since the gin-and-ton
ics and sunglasses on the plane and the horrible wait in the terminal building, her crying this morning, the glimpse of golf clubs I had in the boot of Dad’s car, it all surges back and I have a bitter, dry taste at the back of my mouth and throat, as if I might vomit.
The ride is no fun this time. I judder and swoosh to the bottom then wriggle out of the tyre and drag it from the deep end to the shallow, and out. Alfie is cheering me and I snap at him to shut up and he looks at me, big-eyed and startled.
‘Come on, stupid.’
We make our way back to the loungers, this churning feeling inside of me. Our parents are sitting waiting for us, their towels rolled up, ready to go. Mum holds out my towel for me and when I’m close enough for her to see my face she puts it down and reaches out her arm instead.
‘What’s wrong?’
My father steps forward, tilts up my chin so he can see my face. ‘C’mere, pet. What’s happened?’
‘She came off the ride and yelled at me,’ Alfie starts.
‘Shut up, Alfie.’
‘Don’t talk to your brother like that. What’s happened, Lara? Did you hurt yourself?’
I look at my mother, and from her to my father. All the things I want to say are swilling in my stomach. Does he have cancer? That’s one of them. I know that you have to have radiation when you have cancer, and maybe that gives you a tan. Another is: are they getting divorced? Another is: does he want us to move to Ireland, or does he want to go to America, or somewhere, and we’re going to have to leave London, and our flat, and our friends? None of these things are right and I know it. I stare at my father and can’t find the words for any of it.
‘It was the ride,’ I say. ‘I think I swallowed too much water.’
‘My poor wee Squrl,’ Dad says, and goes to hug me. I take a step away from him and he looks hurt. Part of me feels mean for hurting him, but part of me is glad in a way that I don’t understand.
We’re walking back from the changing rooms to the car park when Alfie says, ‘Can we come back here tomorrow? Please can we? For Lara’s birthday?’ and there is a silence. My mother actually stops walking.
‘Come on, love,’ Dad murmurs. ‘Not here.’
‘No, Alfie,’ she says, and her voice is tight and high. ‘No, we can’t come back tomorrow.’
‘Why not? Oh please . . .’
‘Come on, Monkey-boy. Don’t spoil a perfect day. It’s been a perfect day, hasn’t it, Lara? Apart from you swallowing half the pool, eh? Here, why don’t you spit it back before we leave, I don’t want them charging me extra,’ our father says in his easy, joking way. He catches Alfie round the waist and swings him up onto his shoulders, with a grunt – Alfie is just about small enough for him to do this.
Our father is an expert at changing the subject.
We get back to the complex and Dad comes and takes another shower, even though we showered at the aqua park. Then he puts on his clothes – and why is he wearing, I suddenly wonder, two-tone golfing shoes and ankle socks, shorts and a polo shirt and even a visor?
You don’t need to see our incomprehension, and anger, and our mother’s tears. She knew this was a bad idea, she says, they’re too old, you can’t lie to them. It doesn’t come out quite so neatly as this but I’ll spare you the tears, the scenes where our father peels us off him and pleads with us, with me, to forgive him for missing my birthday tomorrow. I’ll spare you the sight of our mother, silent as a statue, as if she’s disappeared and shrunken somewhere into the depths of herself. The sight of the car, a maroon saloon, pulling away and not stopping, and Alfie running after it, and me yanking him back, and then despite myself running after it myself. Both of us crying, sobbing our little hearts out – a dark-eyed man from one of the tourist shops coming over to offer us (you wouldn’t make this up) one of those damn donkeys our father had tried to fob us off with. I want to hurl it at him, to scream – but I’m too well-mannered for that. Instead, I take it, say a stiff thank-you, then grab Alfie’s hand and drag him back inside our compound, and back to our apartment, where our mother is standing exactly as we left her.
My father, you see, as I’m just beginning to guess, is living a lie. The lie is us. Our father has another wife – or rather, I should say, a wife, because it turns out that he and my mother aren’t, as I have always assumed, actually married at all. He lives with her in Belfast, the real wife, with her and their children – his other children, his real children. They are up the coast, in a hotel in Marbella, and they know nothing about us, at all. As far as they’re concerned, their husband, their father, is returning home after a long day’s golfing, ready to have a cocktail at the hotel bar, then dinner in a fancy restaurant. My father’s wife is called Catriona Connolly. Their daughter, who is a year and a half older than me, is Veronica Louise. Their son is Patrick Michael, known as Michael.
I realise I haven’t named my father yet, not properly. I’ll name him here with them, where he most belongs. That sentence, even after all these years, is difficult to write, but it’s true. His name was Patrick Michael Connolly. We don’t have his name, Alfie and I. He’s not named on either of our birth certificates. We, like our mother, are Moorhouses.
Of course it doesn’t come out as neatly as this. I’m starting to get into what I pieced together in the weeks and months afterwards, the tangled web of lies and logistics. What my mother tells us that evening is that it’s like our father is divorced, except he can’t leave his first family. But she’s a terrible liar, my mother. We can tell by her silent tears, rolling down a face as stricken as ours, that she’s not telling the whole story.
Sunday evening blues
The best thing about the Monday writing classes is the shape and purpose they give to Sunday evenings. The long, flabby hours; the washed-out, grey despair that sets in around three o’clock and stretches until nine, or half past nine, or ten, or whatever hour you can persuade yourself is a reasonable time to take a Zimovane and go to bed.
Sundays in my childhood were the day when our father would have left, and there’d be two weeks to go before he was back. In your teens and twenties you can go out and get trashed on a Sunday night with other people who feel the same. In a couple, you can sink the day into long lunches that stretch boozy into the evening, or pub quizzes, or even if you do nothing but takeaway and telly there’s both of you, there’s company. On your own, there is nothing. The world, at the weekend, is full of new couples, shagged-out and mooning at each other. It’s full of young parents with babies; families; groups of married friends. Alone in the day on a Saturday, you can be independent, full-of-purpose, getting things done. On a Sunday, there’s no way of disguising, even to yourself – especially to yourself – how utterly alone you are. These days, if I’m not on the rota and I don’t make plans in advance, the whole day can pass without my speaking to anyone, unless you count a visit to the Costcutter to buy something I don’t need for the relief of a human exchange. For a while I went to Alfie’s on a Sunday, but I could see they only had me over out of pity. Loneliness is infectious – you trail its miasma around with you – and people sense it unconsciously and want to be away from you. The girls would be fidgety and bored at having to sit in the living room and talk to me; once, I even heard Danielle promising them Bratz dolls if they stayed with their aunt until teatime. A few times we went on excursions. To the garden centre, to a family-friendly pub, to the London Butterfly House at Kew. That was my suggestion – the horror at being the aunt who forces you to trail around a garden centre; I don’t even have a window box – and it was the last. The Butterfly House was hugely, steamingly humid – tropical, of course – and the damp flapping butterflies, some the size of dinner plates, nosing their proboscises at blackened banana sludge made the girls run squealing. Afterwards in the café, when I was coming back from the loos, I heard them complaining about having to do boring things with their aunt on Sundays, and I decided not to trouble the family again. It isn’t their fault. They’re only little. Their Sundays should be sp
ent doing things they want to do: going skating or swimming, or adventure playgrounds. So Mr Rawalpindi’s writing classes were a lifeline, because now I reserve Sundays to do the exercises, even if I don’t hand them in, and to think over the issues the tutor has asked us to ponder for the following night, even if I don’t participate in class.
All the Beggars Riding Page 5