When Did You Last See Your Father?

by Jodi Taylor

  When Did You Last See Your Father? copyright © 2019 Jodi Taylor

  Desiccated Water copyright © 2017 Jodi Taylorr

  Markham and the Anal Probing copyright © 2017 Jodi Taylor

  The right of Jodi Taylor to be identified as the Author of

  the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as part of Long Story Short, a short-story collection

  by Jodi Taylor, in Great Britain in 2019 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  This collection first published in Great Britain in Ebook in 2019 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  1

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be

  reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior

  permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in

  accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical figures – are

  fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4722 6675 0

  Cover design and illustration by zoedrawsthings.co.uk

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

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  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.headline.co.uk

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  When Did You See Your Father?

  ‘Max, your father is here. He’s come to take Matthew away’

  Have you ever wondered what would happen if Max’s husband met Max’s father? What would Leon do?

  They’re normally a fairly amiable bunch, but this is the story of what to expect if St Mary’s doesn’t like someone. As in, really doesn’t like someone. Warning: contains a unit-wide criminal enterprise, a great deal of illegal activity and a sad misuse of public resources. All the things a father will do to protect his family.

  It is also a story of revenge. Because this is payback – St Mary’s style.

  Desiccated Water

  Professor Rapson breaks astonishing new ground with his latest feat of scientific invention.

  Markham and the Anal Probing

  When Markham disappears in the middle of nowhere, Max jumps to the logical conclusion – alien abduction.

  Jodi Taylor is the author of the bestselling Chronicles of St Mary’s series, the story of a bunch of disaster-prone historians who investigate major historical events in contemporary time. Do NOT call it time travel!

  Born in Bristol and educated in Gloucester (facts both cities vigorously deny), she spent many years with her head somewhere else, much to the dismay of family, teachers and employers, before finally deciding to put all that daydreaming to good use and pick up a pen. She still has no idea what she wants to do when she grows up.

  The Chronicles of St Mary’s series

  Just One Damned Thing After Another

  A Symphony of Echoes

  A Second Chance

  A Trail Through Time

  No Time Like the Past

  What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

  Lies, Damned Lies, and History

  And the Rest is History

  An Argumentation of Historians

  Hope for the Best

  The Long and Short of It (short-story collection)

  Long Story Short (short-story collection)

  The Chronicles of St Mary’s digital shorts

  When a Child is Born

  Roman Holiday

  Christmas Present

  Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings

  The Very First Damned Thing

  The Great St Mary’s Day Out

  My Name is Markham

  A Perfect Storm

  Christmas Past

  Battersea Barricades

  The Steam-Pump Jump

  And Now For Something Completely Different

  When Did You Last See Your Father?

  Elizabeth Cage novels

  White Silence

  Dark Light

  Frogmorton Farm Series

  The Nothing Girl

  The Something Girl

  Little Donkey (digital short)

  A Bachelor Establishment

  Contents

  Copyright

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also By

  When did You Last See Your Father?

  Dramatis Thingummy

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  Dessicated Water

  Author’s Note

  Markham and the Anal Probing

  Author’s Note

  DISCOVER MORE BOOKS BY JODI TAYLOR . . .

  Dramatis Thingummy

  Leon Farrell

  Chief Technical Officer. Not just husband and hero but now criminal mastermind as well.

  Dr Bairstow

  Director of St Mary’s. Chief conspirator.

  Mrs Partridge

  PA to Dr Bairstow. The Muse of History. Whoever asked her to hold his coat made a big mistake. A big, big mistake.

  Mr Markham

  Head of the Security Section. ­Concerns he is losing his criminal touch are mercifully unfounded. In the happy position of legitimately being able to let his baser side run wild and free. Like turning a gnarled old warhorse out to pasture, according to Dr Peterson, adding that this might be the moment at which to hum the signature tune to Black Beauty.

  Mr Dieter

  Not really involved but couldn’t resist shoving his oar in. Naughty boy.

  Dr Peterson

  Resident urine expert and expecting full credit.

  Polly Perkins

  No, we still don’t get to meet her in person but she proves to be an all-round good egg just the same. Maybe next time.

  John Maxwell

  ‘Eminent surgeon and utter bastard,’ Leon Farrell.

  Dr Maxwell

  Standing her ground. Confused and bemused, yes, but most importantly – avenged.

  I don’t know how I came to write this. I know when I came to write it. That’s easy. I was climbing into bed one night, accompanied by all the usual paraphernalia – laptop, Kindle, box of tissues for my early morning nose – my nose will kill me one day – notebook and a couple of pens – because they all run out together – and a Terry Pratchett novel. The great man is probably most alarmed to find that death has not released him from the burden of having me take him to bed every night.

  Anyway, it was a night just like any other. I arranged everything nicely, wandered off for the usual bathroom pit stop and threw my dressing gown on the floor just where I’ll trip over it when I lurch, crusty-eyed and wild-haired, on my way back to the bathroom the next morning.

  I’m going to digress. I know bed hair is fashionable these days, but I have real
bed hair. REAL bed hair, not the namby-pamby, girlie stuff you get from a jar. I’ve learned to perform my early morning ablutions with my eyes closed. Getting a brush through it is a waste of time – I just have to wait for gravity to kick in, which is normally around three in the ­afternoon.

  I’ve lost the thread again. Bed. Yes. I was just at that stage where I was drifting off nicely and that’s when the idea hit me. And it wouldn’t go away. There was a really weird compulsion to write this one. I sat up and switched on the light, because there was no chance of sleep, and got stuck in. I only meant to make a few notes – just so I didn’t forget anything – but I had half the story down that night. I finished the whole thing in about a week and then made myself put it away for a while because it was a story I needed to read again from a distance.

  And the idea?

  What would happen if Max’s husband ever met Max’s father?

  I knew what he’d want to do but what would he actually do? What could he do? Without making things even worse for Max or littering the place with corpses, I mean. Protecting Max would be his first instinct. And then I thought – would it? Because suppose it wasn’t Max her father wanted? Suppose it was Matthew. And after everything that’s happened to him, the last thing he needs is to meet his grandad.

  So, there’s Leon – he lost his first family under tragic circumstances and now it looks as if it’s going to happen all over again. Leon’s family means everything to him.

  What would he do?

  I never knew my father. As far as I know he’s never seen me and I’m almost certain I’ve never seen him. I don’t know who he was, what he was, or what he’d done. I do remember a group of men – if there were women present I don’t remember them – sitting behind a long table, asking, ‘When did you last see your father?’ I was about three or four years old, I think, and they’d had to stand me on a box so I could see over the table.

  I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. They asked the same question in a number of different ways. I said nothing in exactly the same way to all of them.

  Eventually they went away. There were no threats or violence. No one ransacked the house. My mother was more angry than frightened. I never asked what it had been about and she never volunteered the information. They never came back and slowly the memory faded.

  In fact, Maman never spoke of my father at all. I don’t know if it was because he died and she loved him so much that talking about him was too painful, or whether he was someone she was glad to be rid of and wasn’t going to pollute the rest of her life by thinking about him.

  Maman was English and so am I. Her name was Grace and it suited her. Her height gave her an elegance even among the elegant Frenchwomen. We weren’t well off, but she always looked smart. In fact, I thought she always looked beautiful. It was only later I realised just how poor we had been. It didn’t take me long to realise that everything I asked for – new toys, new books and so on – must have entailed considerable sacrifice on her part. I made sure I didn’t ask for much.

  My life these days is good. If I have any regrets at all, it’s that she didn’t live long enough for my happy ending. I have no idea what she would have made of Max – or Max of her. I like to think there’s a place somewhere, where she knows everything turned out well and that I’m grateful for what she did for me.

  One day, every year, I go away somewhere quiet – so nowhere near St Mary’s, then – to a place I found some time ago. It was a mis-jump. They happen occasionally. All you can do is return to St Mary’s, re-check the coordinates and have another go.

  On this occasion, I opened the door on to a landscape without colour. Blue-grey clouds bulged with rain, hanging so low they seemed to suck all sound and movement from the landscape. Blue-grey mountains rose up around me, jagged and steep, encircling an expanse of sullen, motionless water, which, in its turn, reflected the blue-grey sky.

  I stared around.

  Utter silence. Perfect peace. Nothing moved. No birds sang. There were no ripples in the water. A soundless, timeless landscape that had remained unchanged over the centuries. Moisture hung heavily in the still, warm air.

  After everything that had happened to me, it was hard to believe this was part of the same world. That a place like this could exist in the world that had taken my family from me. A world in which Stevie’s pain-wracked sobs still echoed inside my head.

  I hardly dared move, not wanting to disturb the peace of this strange place. Because there was something special about it. It wasn’t just a wet landscape – this was grief made tangible. The jagged pain of the mountains, the bottomless pool of misery, the heavy clouds of anguish.

  I stood for a long time, silent and still, taking in every detail of the scene before me, breathing in the smell of clouds and water. Listening to the sound of silence and, if truth be told, struggling just a little bit.

  And then, right in front of me, a small movement, vivid in this unchanging landscape, caught my attention. I looked down to the water at my feet. There must have been a sluggish current after all because a small, scarlet leaf floated serenely past me. And another. And another.

  And then, around the bend floated a whole carpet of leaves, scarlet and crimson and orange and gold. The contrast to the brooding, blue-grey world in which I was standing took my breath away. I like to think that upstream, a whole forest must have dumped this year’s leaves into this river, just for me to witness as I stood there, at that very moment. I couldn’t drag my eyes away from this explosion of colour. A river of fire. No – a river of hope. That moment when grief moves on, leaving everything fresh and clean; all the pain and hurt is gently washed away and the world waits for you to lift your head again.

  Sometimes I think I’ll take Max there. Something about the place calls to me and I think it would call to her, as well. She could paint it. The diagonal sky. The vertical mountains. The horizontal river. And in the foreground, a splash of brilliant colour as the leaves float by on their way to who knows where. She would be painting grief but she could make it wonderful, I know she could.

  I go back every year. Sometimes the river is scarlet with hope and sometimes it isn’t because I’ve missed it. But that doesn’t matter. I know it was there. And will be there again. I always sit in the same spot, looking out over the water, and I take out my memories. I turn them over and smile at each one. Maman. And Alex. And Stevie. I’m not a religious man – as Max says, religion’s not easy when you see some of the things it’s done – but I firmly believe they’re all together somewhere, perhaps in a sunny kitchen, making jam tarts and having fun. The jam tarts of eternity.

  Anyway – to continue. I did well at school. There were scholarships. And then I joined the army. I sent Maman as many pictures as I could manage. Every time I visited her there were more and more of them on the mantelpiece. I felt really sorry for anyone who dropped by for a coffee and a chat. She would start on the left-hand side and work her way down the line. Every single one was picked up, described, passed around and admired. I realise now how lonely she must have been while I was off around the world, building my career. I made a point of writing or calling her whenever I could and every time I returned from deployment there would be a whole raft of messages from her waiting for me.

  Eventually, I was posted to a carrier. I can’t mention the name but it was huge. Like a small city. And it took nearly as long to get from one end to the other. I enjoyed it and the job went well. We worked hard and played hard. Well, I was young – it’s obligatory.

  And then, I met a pilot. She was a recent posting and she’d bounced her aircraft on landing and made a bit of a mess of it.

  I was on my back, frowning up at the damage, when I saw a pair of legs. With flying boots. This must be the pilot. I wriggled out and there she was, hands on hips, glaring at me.

  We had one hell of an argument. I asked her what sort of useless pilot she was and she called m
e a bengo – which wasn’t very polite – and we spent twenty minutes yelling at each other while people and aircraft got around us as best they could. Eventually we took it into an equipment locker and the next minute our clothes were all over the floor and we were all over each other.

  I was really embarrassed to have to ask her name afterwards.

  ‘Monique,’ she said, laughing. ‘Monique de Maupassant.’

  It was an open secret, of course. We tried to keep it quiet but apparently, we were the only ones who didn’t know everyone else knew.

  Eventually, I asked her to marry me. I was quite surprised when she said yes. She was a top pilot, pretty and petite – she only just scraped through the minimum height and weight requirements – and she was friendly and popular, and for some reason, she picked me of all people.

  We were married as soon as possible, and it was wonderful. We spent a lot of time apart – we were both at the top of our careers – but our time together was spectacular and more than made up for that. For two years, everything was wonderful – glorious. When she laughed – and she often did – her eyes would sparkle and her entire face would light up. I thought it would all go on forever.

  And then, one day, right out of the blue, she said she wanted to have a child. In fact, she rather thought . . .

  I was overjoyed. I thought it would be the icing on the cake. Alex was born a little early so she’d got her dates wrong, but he seemed fine. Right from the start, he was a quiet boy who liked to build things with his hands. He was never happier than with building blocks or some kind of construction toy.

  And then along came Stevie. Another surprise. She laughed and said she really must read the instructions on the contraception packet more carefully.

  Stevie was the complete opposite to Alex. Noisy, cheerful, always happy.

  And then it happened. Nearly a year after Stevie’s birth, I came home and half the contents of the house had disappeared. I stood like an idiot, looking around the bare room thinking, ‘Where’s all the furniture gone?’