by Sarah Butler
The spaghetti’s stuck to itself. I get a clump of it into a bowl and spoon on some sauce. Tilly comes down. She shovels Dad’s food into the bin and glances at my bare feet.
‘You look exhausted,’ I say.
‘He wouldn’t eat anything.’
‘I’m not sure he can. Tilly, I didn’t heat the sauce.’
She shrugs, serves herself and sits opposite me.
‘What did he say?’ I ask.
‘He’s not hungry, he’d rather have a cigarette, will I stop fussing.’ Tilly tips her head from side to side as she speaks.
‘I mean before that. He had something to tell you and Cee.’
I watch her trying to arrange her face into a neutral expression.
‘What’s he got to say to you that he can’t say to me?’
Tilly twists her fork into her pasta. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Don’t bullshit me. Not you, Tilly.’
Her eyes widen and she rubs at her nose.
‘Why are you lot always so fucking secretive?’ I can hear the whine in my voice, like a kid.
‘I don’t think that’s fair, Alice.’
‘It’s his will? I don’t even care about his will. Is that what it is?’ I pull at a hangnail on my thumb.
‘It’s nothing that matters.’ Tilly looks at me with the same pity I’d seen in Dad’s eyes. I want to scream. ‘He’s an old man, Alice, he’s—’ She presses her fingertips together. ‘He’s dying, Alice. The doctor came while you were out. He said it won’t be long. It could be any—’
‘This is driving me insane.’
‘Alice, Alice.’ Tilly strokes at my arm. I brush her away. ‘He loves you, Alice,’ she says.
I want Kal. I want him to massage the soles of my feet and paint my nails. I want him to bring me a beer from the fridge and tell me about his day. I want to put my arms around his neck and hold on.
Ten reasons to hate my father
1) Lying.
2) Gambling.
3) Giving up.
4) Breaking my mother’s heart.
5) Having me.
6) I get my nose from him.
7) He was a bully and a coward.
8) I wake up some mornings and think the whole thing was my fault.
9) All that talk about making an impression, being a man.
10) It’s confusing: loving and hating someone at the same time.
I don’t sleep in shelters every night. If you go too often they try and fix things – which is fair enough, but I’ve made the choices I’ve made, and it’s not always as simple as you might imagine.
This shelter’s in the crypt of the church on Duncan Terrace. A young man with a ponytail and orange shoes told me about it back in April. There’s food, he said; sometimes they have toothbrushes, socks.
By the time I arrive it’s raining hard. Along Essex Road, people lower their heads to their chests, hunch their shoulders and quicken their pace. As a kid, I loved the rain. I used to sit at my window and watch it move in the spaces beneath the street lights. I’d watch the drops chase each other down the glass. It always made my mother nervous. She would fret about us getting wet, as if we might somehow be ruined by water. I remember her hovering around my father when he got in from work, trying to brush the water from his shoulders. He would shoo her away, shrug off his coat, and leave his shoes, like two empty beetle cases, soaking dirty water into the hall carpet. Now I share her anxiety. I worry about rotting material, about the rain seeping into my bones, which already feel older than they should. I worry about the picture in the inside pocket of my coat, even though it is wrapped in plastic, even though it has lasted this long already.
I would rather sleep in the church itself, with the street lights bleeding through the stained glass, and the statues watching from the corners, but the heavy front doors, with their hinges like giant flowers, are locked. You have to know to walk through the side door, into the hallway, where a stone Mary frowns at you from an alcove, then through a second door and down the stairs.
The crypt, with its whitewashed walls and beige lino floor, is divided up by low brick arches. Rows of foldaway metal beds occupy the main space. They look stranded, high and leggy, the edges of sheets and blankets escaping from their thin tubular frames. A kitchen has been squeezed into one corner; it’s the only space with windows – two narrow strips of grimy glass peering onto the street. The place smells of tea bags, just-turned milk, and body odour.
I don’t ever want you to come to a place like this. I try to comfort myself that you were brought up with money, but I have met men who used to live like lords sleeping on the streets, so it’s no guarantee of anything. I sign my name in the book, and scan up the list, looking for you. When I’m feeling like this – a little worried, a little unsettled – I see the colours before I see the words. Only one frosted blue name sits amongst the magnolias and dirty yellows, purples and chestnut browns; it isn’t yours.
A cluster of people sit on and around a low black sofa facing a flickering television screen. I recognise Lady Grace, her pram at her side, and lift a hand to greet her. Usually she sleeps in the park opposite Smithfields. She complains about the noise, but says the butchers are kind to her and she feels safe with them around. In the pram is a tiny camping stove, a burnt saucepan, and a plastic knife and fork begged from a cafe. I camp, my dear, she said to me, the first time we met, I’m a camper at heart. Her dream, she said, was to live in the countryside. I want to sleep under the trees, she told me, and listen to the birds.
I’m not in the mood for talking to anyone, so I take a seat on a second sofa, at the far end of the room. There are four newspapers. I work my way through each one, but I don’t find what I’m looking for.
I don’t feel good. I can’t pretend I do. It’s like there’s something slowing me down, making me ache all over. If I died, no one would know to tell you.
Dinner is pasta with broccoli and lumps of chicken. I queue up, smile at the woman who’s serving, dipping a huge metal spoon into an oversized saucepan. I sit at the end of the table with my head down. My plate has a thin blue line around its edge. It makes me think of my mother’s plates – each with a drawing of a blue boy and a blue girl standing on a blue island holding hands. There were eight of them, displayed in a dark wood cabinet in the dining room. She cleaned them every Sunday with a feather duster. As a kid, I begged to be allowed to help. But by the time I was old enough to do so, I had changed my mind. How stupid to have plates and never use them, I said, even though I could see how my words made her flinch.
I wonder, sometimes, how she lived with all my father’s lies. I suppose it was easy enough when she didn’t know, and maybe once she saw them for lies they were so tightly knotted into the pattern of her life, it was simpler to keep on going than try to unravel them.
* * *
‘I may join you?’
I look up. He has broad shoulders, muddy brown hair beginning to recede, a round, pale face, hazel eyes. His nose is broad and stained red by drink. I don’t say anything, but he sits on the chair directly to my right all the same.
‘We eat together. It is better.’ He’s from Russia, or Poland, somewhere east. ‘I am Anton.’ He holds out his hand. His is the ice-blue name from the register.
‘Daniel.’ His hands feel rough with work. It’s been a long time since I shook hands with someone.
He takes a mouthful of pasta and eats it noisily, his mouth open, his head nodding.
‘What do you do today?’ he asks. When he speaks I can see bits of food lodged between his teeth.
‘What did you learn today?’ My father would ask it every dinnertime, whether I had been to school or not. He would lean on the word learn, so it splashed gold across the tablecloth. If I failed to provide an answer that satisfied him I’d be sent upstairs without any afters. The nights he went out, my mother would call me back down and I would eat cold apple crumble, or ginger sponge and congealed custard, or Bakewell tart. I suppose she was trying
to apologise.
‘I walked,’ I say.
Anton nods, still chewing. ‘Where to?’
I shrug. ‘Just around. And you?’
His face clouds. ‘I wait for work this morning, but they no pick me.’ He slams a fist into the table. My glass of water trembles. ‘They take young ones,’ he says. ‘I strong as ox. I tell them, but they no hear.’ He stabs a piece of chicken with his fork and waves it at me. ‘No work, no money.’
‘That’s why you’re here?’ I ask.
‘I here because my bastard friend say I no stay in his house. He say I drunk, I no good.’
I lift my eyebrows in sympathy, and bite into a piece of broccoli. It’s been cooked to a dark, soft green, and oozes water between my teeth.
‘I only drunk because of daughter,’ he says.
I chew slowly. I don’t trust myself to speak.
‘My daughter,’ he says, and I see his eyes brighten. ‘She is pretty girl.’ He nods vigorously. ‘When she is two years, she say my name.’ He lays his fork down and folds his arms, leans back in his chair. ‘“Tato, tato,” she say. Tato. It is father.’ He points his index finger towards his heart. ‘She clever, no? I say word, she say word.’
* * *
I don’t even know what you look like. I don’t even know where you are. I tried to find you, you must believe that. I went to her house and rang the bell, but no one answered, and when I looked through the window I saw the marks on the carpet where the furniture used to be. I waited. And then, eventually, I went home and sat in my flat, staring at the phone. The only people who rang wanted to sell me something – double glazing, electricity, God. I listened to the salespeople stumble their way through their scripts. Once they stopped, once there was a space on their piece of paper for my input, I asked if they knew where she was. They never did.
* * *
‘Is she OK?’ I ask. Anton frowns. ‘Your daughter? You said you were drunk because of your daughter.’
His face closes down like your mother’s used to. He picks up his fork and eats.
I eat too. When I’m done I see the pasta has left smears of starch across my plate. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘Pry?’ When he frowns, a deep line digs into the space between his eyebrows.
‘To interfere, to be nosy,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ I don’t think he understands.
‘Her mother, she is bitch. You say bitch, no?’
I shrug.
‘I love her, the mother, she is my wife, but she is not answering phone. Now I call and there is nothing but the ringing. She has a man, I know this. She is slut bitch, same as all women.’ He lets out a long sigh. ‘But my daughter, my Sylwia.’ He rubs at his left eye with a knuckle. He has dirty fingernails, the same as the rest of us. A thin gold band cuts into the flesh of his wedding finger. ‘There is the one time I phone and I have beers and she no let me talk to Sylwia. I have to talk to her, I say, but she no let me.’ He rubs his eye again. ‘Then she ask for money. I send you money, I say. It is no enough, she say, you are keeping the money. I get angry. I say she no understand.’
The woman in the kitchen calls us over for seconds. I’m full but I take more anyway. Anton lets her pile his plate as high as the first time. We sit back at the table and neither of us talks until the food has gone.
‘I think it is just one fight,’ he says, clattering his fork onto his empty plate. ‘Man and wife they fight, no? But then the next time she ask if I have beers. I say no, but she say Sylwia is at friend’s house. And the next time Sylwia is sleeping. And the next time, Sylwia no want to talk to me.’ His fist batters at the tabletop. ‘She no want to talk to me,’ he exclaims. ‘She my daughter. She my beautiful daughter. She no want to talk to me?’
* * *
I know that once we meet, it won’t matter it’s taken me so long to find you. Once we meet we will have all the time in the world to say everything we need to say.
* * *
‘See?’ Anton is holding a photograph towards me. Its edges are slightly curled. ‘Only touch side,’ he says as I take it. I balance it between my fingertips like the people at King’s Cross station who lift their repeated image, still wet, from the passport photo machine.
She is maybe three years old, I always find it difficult to tell. She has her father’s round face, dark-blonde hair tied up in pigtails. She stands with her back to a white-painted wall. To her left is a closed door. At the far right of the photograph is the corner of a windowsill. She wears a blue cotton dress, the skirt flaring out from a white belt and ending just above dimpled knees. Her eyes look above and beyond whoever is holding the camera. She isn’t smiling, but she looks content.
‘How long?’ I ask.
‘Since I see her, four years, two months, sixteen days. Since I speak with her, one year, twenty-five days.’
I look at the photo, try to add the years onto her image. He holds out his hand, and I find I am reluctant to give it back.
The man who asked me to write down my name shoos us away from the table. We take two cups of tea from the counter – doused with milk and sugar – and sit on the sofa by the newspapers. Anton tells me about the day his daughter was born, how she held onto his finger and looked into his eyes. He tells me how he met his wife, at the wedding of his cousin. She let him kiss her, but when he tried to touch her breasts she slapped his cheek, and he knew then that he wanted to marry her. He tells me about a trip to Middle Pomerania on the Polish coast when Sylwia was a year old. They took a picnic to the beach every day. He carried his daughter into the sea, sat her high on his shoulders, and listened to her laugh at the spray of water on her toes. He combed the beach for amber, found a lump of it with an ant inside, perfectly preserved. He doesn’t ask about me, and I am happy to sit and listen. The television blares – tinny sounds and primary colours. A man slumps in a chair to our left; he’s about my age I reckon. His leg is bandaged all the way to the knee. His beard has yellowed around the circumference of his mouth. He mumbles to himself, a soft string of words, before falling asleep. We are all dying too quickly.
‘It is better she forget me, no?’ Anton says. He turns to me and I look at his pale watery eyes and his battered skin. ‘It is better to have no father, than to have a father like me, no?’
I shake my head, but I know what he means, and it makes my insides hurt.
* * *
Anton would have talked until the morning, I think, and I’d have been happy to let him, but these places have rules, and timetables. Just before ten thirty we choose beds next to each other, and try to settle down. Even while the lights still glare white, the snoring starts. It’s a problem with shelters. I’m a light sleeper anyway – I’ve learnt to be – and even when I’m somewhere safe, like here, my sleep is always fractured. I lie and look at the hump of Anton’s back beneath his blanket until someone clicks out the light.
* * *
I stop breathing. I must have done, because I wake up gasping into the dark, like a man almost drowned. I was dreaming: walking across Waterloo Bridge, towards the advert curved around the cinema. There were white letters, the size of men, on a lemon-coloured background, but I couldn’t make out the words. I kept walking and walking but I never got to the end of the bridge.
I pick out five layers of snores, from thin and rasping to rich and sonorous. Beneath the noise is the faint touch of rain against the narrow windows. The air is fetid with sleep, and farts, and unwashed skin. One of the volunteers shifts in his chair. Sometimes they read with a torch, or put the television on with the sound turned down, but this one sits in the dark. I wonder what he thinks about. I wonder why he does it. I wonder if he has spent nights sheltering from the rain, if he has stuffed sheets of newspaper underneath his clothes to keep out the cold, if that is why. I wonder if he’s lost someone.
* * *
When my mother called to tell me, I couldn’t make sense of what she said. I could hear her. I could hear the words, and the tears,
but I couldn’t get any of it in order.
People call it different things. I’ve experimented over the last twenty years, most often inside my head. Sometimes, when I had the cab, I chose to talk to passengers, if they had the right kind of face, or if the night was particularly long and dark and lonely.
My father committed suicide.
My father took his own life.
My father died.
My father killed himself.
My father took a mix of diazepam and diamorphine. We never found out where he got it from.
He didn’t know what else to do.
He was in too deep.
He was a miserable lying bastard and I don’t care that he’s dead.
My mother found him. I’ll never forgive him for that.
* * *
There was a heatwave the summer I finished university. My parents came to my graduation, my father sweating in a new suit and tie, my mother self-conscious and excited in a wide-brimmed hat. I had avoided every lecture and tutorial I could, had spent my time and energy marching against the war, against racism, for women’s rights; seducing women and persuading them to pose nude, eking out expensive tubes of oil paint, drinking beer, smoking pot. It was a miracle I even passed. My father accepted my Third with pursed lips. You’ll just have to work twice as hard from now on, he said, though he knew as well as I did that I’d fucked up and no practice would accept me.
Maybe we are more alike than I’d care to admit. He hid his gambling for as long as he was able, and then when it got out, he got out too. Maybe I’d have done the same.
I remember sitting with my mother in the dining room, with the rows of untouched plates behind the cabinet’s glass doors. The table was covered with pieces of paper. Letters, invoices, bills. Well, I’m sure there must be some kind of explanation, she kept saying, over and over. There’s bound to be some kind of explanation.