by Jo Gatford
“She’s Alex’s mummy. And Angie’s.”
“She’s yours too. She loves you.”
“I want mine.”
He wasn’t even angry. That came later. At five, he was lost. Just like her.
“I know,” I said quietly. “I know.”
“I miss her.”
“Okay.”
“Does she miss me?”
“I bet she does.”
He knew I wasn’t any good at this. His face crumpled into a sneer of pain. “You’re lying.”
#
The birthday guests were gone when I returned from the pub. Alex was asleep, Matthew was sitting on the kitchen counter, crying, and Lydia was on the phone. I drop into my younger self again as the front door closes behind me, though just a footstep ago I had been in the garden with Graham. Doorways inside doorways. I lean against the kitchen worktop, ale in my belly, burnt paper and Golden Virginia on my tongue.
“What’s going on?” I ask her, even though I know what happens now.
“ - I’m so, so sorry. I’ll be round in a minute,” Lydia says down the phone. She hangs up, pats the receiver a few times, sighs.
“Who was that?”
Lydia puts her arms around Matthew and pulls his face into her chest, speaking in a quiet voice over his head to me. “The kids were in the garden. Matthew says they found the shed key in a flowerbed and went to play ‘club house’ in it.” She adjusts her arms around Matthew’s head to cover his ears, and continues. “They found Suki in there.”
I made my face blank. Lydia took it for incomprehension, when really it was cold, sick remorse.
“Suki,” she says, “Graham’s cat? She must have got locked in. She was dead. Frozen solid.”
“Oh.”
“I just called next door. I said I’d bring the body over to him. Can you do it? Please?” She jerks her chin at the party paraphernalia still spread across the living room. “I need a drink.”
I nod slowly, rub the back of my son’s neck and kiss Lydia’s temple. There’s a pattern in these recollections and there’s an uneasiness in my lower intestine that is more than ageing decrepitude. I’m being punished by a ghost of Christmases past that has no intention of allowing me to redeem myself - it wants me to see what I’ve done before I forget it forever.
#
I stand stooped in the shed with the cat in my arms, its little body stiff and wrapped in a towel. I wonder whether it was the cold or hunger that killed it. I take a spade, too, let myself out of the back gate and in through Graham’s. He is waiting for me at the back door, red-eyed.
“I’m sorry. Here,” my voice rumbles as I pass over the cold little bundle. Graham doesn’t reply, seems to be struggling to withhold whatever he thinks of me. I turn my back on him and look for the patch of soil at the end of the garden where I know there should be a cat-sized grave.
My palms blister as I chip away at the frozen ground. Turning the soil raises the deep scent of peat and chalk - a last embrace for Suki the cat. The winter wind burns my face but the work makes me sweat, and though it takes longer than I remember, I wish I could dig on and on. Room enough for all of us.
Graham goes back inside, reappearing a little while later with two cups of tea. We stand and admire my pathetic handiwork. I wonder if he spat in my mug.“She liked to sleep on the compost bags in there,” I say. “In the shed.”
“It was an easy mistake to make,” Graham replies woodenly, putting his tea down and taking a turn with the spade. He makes quick progress with the warmer dirt beneath the topsoil I broke open. I was irritated, first time around. Now I only watch, straining against the trappings of this younger, stupider, angrier version of myself. I take charge and stumble into a flower bed, scrabbling for a few lengths of tomato stakes which I tie together with bindweed to make a makeshift cross. I lay my tribute next to the towelled corpse and watch my neighbour’s wheezing breath dissolve into the air above our heads.
Satisfied with his grave, Graham ceremoniously pours the dregs of his tea into the hole before lowering the cat gently into place. I stand silently, hands clasped behind me in practised funereal manner, waiting to cringe at the feline eulogy I expect to hear. Instead, Graham simply scoops up a spadeful of soil and begins filling in the hole. I help with my hands, eager to warm my blood again after standing in the cold for so long. I wish for the overzealous heat of The Farm House, for heat packs and blankets and biscuits. When the grave is filled in, Graham positions the wooden cross at its head, collects up our mugs and leaves me standing there.
At the back door he pauses and looks back, eyes squinting against the wind. “Tell Matthew happy birthday,” he says.
“I will.”
“Thank you.” He nods, just once, at the grave. “I appreciate your help.”
I pick up my spade and swallow the bile that has risen into my gullet. “Okay.”
This time it is Graham’s smile that lays an ill-at-ease blanket over the garden, and I am not able to return it.
Walking through the garden gate brings me to my knees, into a different pair of knees, inside a different skin, but the guilt remains.
#
The changes come quicker.
The transitions jar my bones and leave me in a perpetual state of jet lag.
I return to the nursing home. I’m on my knees in my bathroom in trousers soaked with urine, clutching at the shag pile shower mat while waves of gripping aches build and die away in my stomach. The throbbing in my broken arm is the only thing that is new. The past is filling me up and threatening to burst, oozing out of my ears. A nurse appears behind me, tells me to stay put, not to worry, but my bedroom doorway has become frantic again, urging me through and turning the room around me into an unbearable desert that I am forced to flee if I am to breathe, if I am to live. I obey. And I am somewhere worse.
I am staying at my aunt’s house while my mother has a nervous breakdown and my father is embalmed at Morleigh the undertaker’s, three doors down.
My mother is a war widow even though the war is over. I am partially orphaned. I am six, and embarrassed that my dad did not die in combat. He wanted to be a pilot, but a perforated eardrum made him an engineer instead. A collapsed hangar during an air raid left him half deafened, which is why he did not hear the fire engine that ran him over.
My aunt lives alone, but I have never counted fewer than four people in her house at any time. I’m not sure her door even locks. No-one knocks, and my aunt never shows any surprise when visitors let themselves in. I can hear her in the kitchen below, noisily rolling out dough, telling my not-real-aunties Joyce and Mary about my poor devastated mother who is currently drunk and unconscious in the bedroom next to mine. I sit inside my aunt’s wardrobe and stroke her rabbit fur coat, blowing tracks through the black and white hair to reveal the pale dead rabbit skin beneath. My uncle’s clothes still hang next to hers, just as my father’s still hang next to my mother’s at home; dead men’s clothes. The stink of mothballs makes me sneeze.
I have toothache and gut ache and brain ache because my breakfast consisted of jam straight from the jar. My aunt believes that letting me do stupid things will encourage me to make the decision not to do them again. My mother believes that shouting and a crack round the head will help. But my mother hasn’t spoken to me since they came to tell us about my father. She clings to the bed as though adrift on a rough sea and wipes away her tears with his coat.
The fireman who ran him down brought my father’s black coat to our door late Friday night. It’s stiff and brittle with dried blood but she won’t let my aunt wash it. She rubs it against her face, even when she’s not crying, and the salted tears and rough wool leave her skin raw and flaking.
My aunt shouts up the stairs for me to come and help her cut out scones. I wipe my nose on one of my uncle’s hanging shirtsleeves. My mother retches in the spare bedroom. Through the half-open door I watch her stumble to the bathroom and lock herself in. I press my teeth with my tongue. They twinge.
Maybe I’ll just have butter on my scones. Maybe I should go and see my dentist, Alma.
Chapter Eleven
Dad is having a bad day. The nurse put it fondly – “off with the fairies” – when she let me into his room. I’m not sure which fairies he’s with, but he is standing at the window pulling long orange threads out of the curtains, somewhere between anxious and content.
Today there is no reaction to Alex’s death, even when I turn it into a terrible form of poetry: “Dad. Alex is dead. Alex is dead, Dad. Dad, he died. Alex died, Dad. Alex. Dead. Dad?” And after that I continue on with my list. A reverse confession of sorts. A catalogue of every time Alex was a little shit when we were kids.
“The swimming competition.” I say. “I was fifteen.”
Dad ignores me, tapping on the glass like he’s saying hello to a squirrel or a bird or something. My father: Doctor Dolittle. The man who once threw next door’s cat over the fence for pissing on his irises. He fucking hated that cat.
“Swimming, Dad,” I say again. I was going to represent the school in front crawl. I had underarm hair and everything. I was starting to get pecs, lose some of the puppy fat. There was a girl. Harriet. She was coming to watch me compete. My dad doesn’t know this story. He didn’t come.
I sit in his armchair and talk at my knees. “It was summer. You know how hot my room used to get?” It was a south-facing oven, the sun kept at bay by thin polyester curtains. I used to sleep in just my boxers with no duvet. I should have known to watch my back.
Dad turns but doesn’t look at me, doesn’t seem to even know I’m there. He opens the wardrobe and sifts through his shirts, looking for something - his grasp on reality, the way through to Narnia.
“The night before,” I say, “Alex wrote TWAT across my back in black indelible marker while I was asleep.”
Dad snorts. My head whips up. Is he laughing at me? His eyes squint and he sneezes loudly into a shirt, wipes his nose with a sleeve and continues his search.
“Yeah, well, as you can imagine, I found it hilarious. Little fucking bastard. And that’s why I hit him with that tennis racquet.”
I was going to hit him with a chair but thought better of it at the last moment. Alex took advantage of my brief moralising pause to run into the hall. As I followed him, the nearest thing I could grab was Lydia’s tennis racquet. I hit him twice. Once on the ribs on his left side, and once on his back as he fell down. He had curved bruises and criss-cross welts for two weeks. When Dad found out, he smacked me round the head so hard I missed a good thirty seconds of his shouting tirade. I tuned back in to “ - despicable! He’s only eleven! I can’t even look at you, get out of my sight!”
I didn’t tell him about the skin graffiti. I knew he’d only laugh, and that would be worse than the smack. I shut myself in my room, hooked a chair stacked with heavy books under the door knob and smashed all my swimming awards into little shards of plastic men. Pointless self-destruction as a gut reaction - as if it would temper the punishment I was about to receive.
“I had my first cigarette that day, too,” I tell my father’s hunched back. “I stole a packet out of Lydia’s sock drawer when you took Alex to casualty.” Dad was convinced I’d broken the little shit’s ribs. I hadn’t, lucky for me. Unlucky for Alex, who could only stand two days of a cultivated limp before finding the poor cripple routine too tiring to maintain. “I went down the end of the garden and smoked three in a row. Graham from next door saw me and said he’d heard you shouting.” There was always a lot of shouting. Graham would appear on his patio feigning plant-watering or buddleia pruning so that he could peer over into our kitchen window with enlarged, concerned eyes.
Dad has gone stock still, one hand on the door of the wardrobe, the other wrapped around a hanging trouser leg. You could almost believe he was listening, but I know better.
Graham promised he wouldn’t tell Dad about the smoking. He seemed to feel sorry for me and didn’t laugh when I told him what happened. He stood there afterwards for longer than seemed normal, watched me pretend I knew how to smoke in a cool way, idly scraped dried mud off a trowel. He suggested nail varnish remover to get the ink off, which, incidentally, is a fucking bad idea when applied to scrubbed-raw skin.
“So did you win?” Graham asked.
“Win what?”
“The race. The swimming.”
“Oh. No. Third.”
“Third? Third is good.”
“Yeah, well… ”
“Did you get a medal? A trophy?”
“Medal. And a certificate.”
“Something to remember it by.”
I scoffed. “Good memories.”
“You’ll laugh one day.”
“I think not.”
“Well. Laugh now then. You’ve got your revenge, it’s not worth being bitter about.”
I thought he was wise. And I felt like an adult talking to him, something that wasn’t possible around my dad. I was a perpetual tug on his sleeve. Always an intrusion.
“He said I looked like Mum,” I say, louder than is necessary to cross the small room. I want to hurt him. I want a reaction.
My dad sneezes again and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Five years, and nothing,” he says, still facing the wardrobe. “That bastard next door.”
“What?”
“That wasn’t true. But she never sent him any letters.”
He’s talking about my mum, I know it. His voice changes when he speaks about her, as if he has to put on a different face to do so. My lungs sink into my stomach.
“Who? What letters?” I’m on my feet but I don’t remember standing up. He still won’t turn and look at me.
“Or maybe she did. Maybe he was laughing at me.” He goes very quiet and then starts sniffing. He better not be fucking crying. The fingers poking out of the end of his plaster cast form a gnarled fist.
“Dad?” Just fucking look at me. “Peter?” He controls himself with one extra-loud sniffle. “Peter,” I say again. “Did Mum - Did Heather write to you?”
Dad’s head jerks up and slightly to the side, as if hearing someone calling his name from another room. The only sound I can hear is the rhythmic suck and groan of the machine wired up to the old lady in the room opposite, and the off-key humming of his neighbour Ingrid. But Dad turns and heads towards the door, oblivious to my presence aside from having to manoeuvre past me, like I’m an inconvenient piece of furniture. I grab him by the shoulder – on his bad arm – and he hisses in pain but looks back at me blankly. There are tears on his face. I let him go.
“Dad?”
“Happy birthday, Matthew,” he says, and walks out into the corridor, wiping his eyes with his stump.
#
For a long time I didn’t even consider that it might have been hard for my dad. I truly believed, in some way, it was his fault that she’d disappeared. Something he’d done, some dark secret, some violent moment that had driven her away. I was terrified of him at times, not that I really knew why, other than not understanding how he could make his face into an expressionless mask whenever I asked him about my mum.
I lived at Nana Alice’s until I was three. He would visit daily after work to have dinner with us and sit in silence while Alice told him about our day. I sat muted, too. Unless she nudged me to add a detail of our thrilling activities: “And what did we pick from the garden for lunch?”
“Broad beans.”
“And Matthew podded them all, didn’t you little one?”
A nod from me. A nod of acknowledgement from Dad. Nana Alice would continue on, making up for the absent two-thirds of the conversation, talking until she had to stop and sigh in between sentences to catch her breath. Soon after that she’d declare that a cup of tea was needed and we would be gratefully disbanded; me to my room to play, Dad to the sofa to watch the news.
When I moved ‘home’ to Dad’s house I thought it was a punishment. It happened over a bank holiday and I was left to spend three whole days and nights alon
e with my father -awkward pauses paced between stuttered communication and a lot of TV. His cooking was comparable to Nana Alice’s like slurry is to fertiliser. When Nana Alice turned up on Tuesday morning to look after me while Dad went back to work, I hugged her leg so tightly I ripped a ladder in her tights. She set about making Dad’s house “a bit more liveable” - emptying the box of toys that had stayed packed away in the corner of my room, laying my mum’s favourite knitted blanket on my bed, making sure there was an obligatory crucifix in each room.
Nana Alice had a compulsion for crosses. One in every room, one everywhere you go, even if you had to improvise it out of crossed cutlery, or the sleeves of a shirt, or legs of a toy octopus. That Tuesday she made one out of ice lolly sticks and wool and hung it in the kitchen. She couldn’t listen to Jerusalem without joining in, but would always fade out with a lump in her throat by the second verse. A little brass Christ pegged up like bloody washing hung in my room, leering down at me as if asking: “What the fuck did you do this for?” I shut him in my bedside table drawer and used my prayers to beg that he wouldn’t free himself during the night and creep across my mattress to stick pins in me while I slept.
When Dad came home to find his house considerably more religious, he rolled his eyes at me and muttered, “Oh bloody… Christ.”
Nana Alice made dinner and Dad told me to go and look in the garden - a surprise, he said. The darkness of early evening autumn felt like an endless Halloween and I couldn’t bring myself to go out there, couldn’t guess what I was being initiated into now that I was the property of my father. I stood at the back door, building up the courage to open it when he appeared behind me with a torch, picked me up in his bony arms and carried me outside. Nana Alice’s round face floated like a moon at the kitchen window, sweating over a pot of slowly thickening white sauce. She didn’t look up. Perhaps my bedroom was being moved to the shed. The torchlight fell upon what looked like an enormous spider web, then another. “Ta da,” Dad said quietly. “What do you think?”
He put me down next to a small green bike and let the torch beam run slowly over it like a game show prize. I stroked the seat and wobbled it from side to side on its stand and fingered the brakes and stared, afraid to tell him I didn’t know how to ride a bike.