by Helen Slavin
I kept playing. Heart on a spade. Club on a diamond. Diamond on a club. Whittling down the pack. And suddenly he’s there at my shoulder as if he’s sprung out of the wipe-clean carpeting.
He’s tall and underfed. He looks like a refugee. The dirt is ingrained deep into his clothing and his skin so you can’t tell where the fabric ends and he begins. He has, in fact, a patina. He is worn and weathered. His hand offers a white piece of paper. It’s Bridget’s flyer about the volunteer work.
‘Am I too late?’ he asks me. His voice is quiet, hopeless. He sounds as if he believes he is too late. For everything.
I don’t know it yet, but this is Evan Bees.
Cold calls
ONCE AGAIN I was stymied by my lack of personal relics. I didn’t have a neat, beribboned parcel of love letters from Dad to My Mother. I had the various fairy stories she had told me. I began there trawling the directories and lists of universities looking for Professor Dad.
I had no hint at his name. On a personal level I could remember Mr Bentley and vile Mr Dauntsey and our lovely Giant, Brian. All could be struck from my list straight away. I quickly realised not just how much of my own life had been hidden from me but how much of My Mother’s life was missing. Spaces. Gaps. Blanks. I began to feel like a character in a time-travel film who discovers they are fading the more they become entangled in the past. The past is where we should not be.
I had a taxing time that month. My mind was so occupied with the hunt for Dad that the Dead got a foothold. I folded into bed each night and yet I couldn’t unfold in the morning.
The night was missing to me. I couldn’t quite remember what had been said, who had visited, exhausted me, worn me out. I didn’t care then. I let them come and let them have their say. I can recall odd faces in dreams.
I have dreams now. Instead of customer service sessions full of people shouting at me, making complaints about things that I have no power over.
I made a list of all My Mother’s lame ducks and cold-called them to try and prise clues from them.
I find the telephone a strange instrument. I know you will laugh considering that my chief source of conversation is with dead strangers. No, a telephone brings the person close enough to whisper in your ear. A telephone call invades your space. The voice is in your head.
It felt strange to hear Chris Baker’s voice after so long. And of course, now that I’m grown up I could hear the wary tone in her voice. Her unwillingness to remember me, the Freakshow Kid. For just a second I could hear her deciding whether or not to remember My Mother. She is not remarried but she is ‘settled’. I think her use of the word ‘settled’ was a subtle hint to me to keep quiet and not pass on any messages I might have received. Do not unsettle me, Freakshow Kid.
She gave me two names, Paul Whelan and Alan Hartley. Chris had known My Mother before I was born. These two seemed likely candidates; and also a mystery man in a Rover 2000 who she thought might have been called Howard. I noted it down even though she couldn’t make her mind up if that had been his first or surname. Then Chris Baker was very anxious to be gone and may possibly have moved house so that I can’t ever call her again.
I took longer to find Janey Kirkpatrick. In the end I saw a photo in the paper of a teacher at Sir Charles Whitworth High with his prize-winning science class. Mr Kirkpatrick with his students and their National Award. They were all standing there like ill-at-ease prats in one of those idiotic stances that local newspaper photographers are specially trained to obtain. Hold your certificate up higher. Grin. Move closer together because there isn’t much room in the paper for this sort of thing between the adverts for double glazing and garden fencing.
Mr Kirkpatrick and his prize-winning class were blowing up a chemistry lab when I arrived. It was odd to think back and remember him as a red-haired chess team teenager. His brother lives in Germany now and his sister lives in a commune in Devon. Obviously a hangover from their time in the spare rooms of My Mother’s house.
Mr Kirkpatrick was helpful. He was helpful because he had a lady friend who was doing some sort of brain research at the university. He wanted me to be an experiment, let her measure my brainwaves when the Dead were speaking. I agreed. He telephoned her first and arranged our meeting before he gave me his mother’s telephone number.
Janey Kirkpatrick lives at the coast now and throws pots.
I took the train to the coast. It is about an hour with the train halting at every stop just so you can stare at the benches and marvel at the wonders in other people’s back gardens. I have not travelled much, but I like the train for its sneaky back view.
She sobbed when I introduced myself, ‘I’m Annie Colville. Madeleine’s daughter.’
Janey had a studio on the ground floor of a three-storey fisherman’s cottage. It was in the harbour in Old Town. It was like a fairytale cottage, as if at any given minute a talking fish would be begging a boon of thee. She made tea, poured from a pot she made herself into mugs she made herself.
Apparently it was all due to My Mother that Janey was happy here, now, doing this. My Mother’s encouragement and support. Here I was being shown two things I didn’t ever know about My Mother.
Janey Kirkpatrick upset me further when she got out an album of photos and picked through them. There were photos of My Mother with Janey’s kids. One or two at Goatmill before it was officially a country park. Others showed her at events, a car boot sale manning a stall, a jubilee of some sort with flags and children in costumes. I looked for myself amidst the fairies and the monkeys. Am I standing behind Batman? At the side of the boy dressed as a snooker table?
I remembered the festival. We were all in a steamy beer tent hiding from the rain. Outside mud slathered. What did I wear that day? Where am I in the photo? I am not there. I am missing.
She had one of the two of us. My Mother crouching in the garden weeding out one of her barrels. She looks happy and relaxed. It captured her so perfectly, the way her hand is raised, the half smile, that I gasped. I wanted to cry. I am standing a short way behind her looking serious. What I saw is that I looked like a ghost. A little haunting girl, hanging around in the background spaces.
Janey went to night school to learn the art of ceramics and pottery. She took it up as a hobby on the advice of My Mother and found she had talent. I remembered the evenings we spent playing cards or Monopoly with Janey’s kids. They must have been Janey’s pottery nights. And in return Janey babysat when My Mother dated a handsome ‘old friend of the family’. Oliver Howard and his Rover 2000.
So, we have a name that has cropped up twice and been lent history. Janey told me he had known My Mother since she was a girl. My brain mistranslated ‘girl’ into that stage of girlhood when you are in fact a young woman. When you are sixteen and your body has all the shape and function, but your brain doesn’t emotionally match up to it. Your brain can still get a kick out of riding the playground roundabout until you are dizzy, as men are dizzied by your hips.
Again I was at the edges of territory that I had never seen before, My Mother as a Girl. I began to feel that I was looking through the wrong end of a telescope and that my life was further away.
It was pushed still further by Miss Chatham, now Head Librarian and County Archivist. Her ‘paramour’ as she called him, the man who broke her heart like an egg, became an information technology specialist in Borneo. He set up library systems in jungle portakabins. He married a Brazilian woman who used to be a go-go dancer. I didn’t want this information, but Miss Chatham was keen to tell me anyway.
We were sitting in the library tea room. Through the window I could see the Memorial Garden and the chocolate-brown-clad soldier who sits on the memorial to the Unknown Warrior. He has been there as long as I can remember. His uniform looks Great War. He was smoking a cigarette that he had spent five minutes rolling. Miss Chatham confessed that she didn’t ‘intrude’ on My Mother’s private affairs and couldn’t help me. As far as she could remember there were no ‘male compani
ons’ at that time.
As I passed through the library I went through the reading room. There was a chocolate-brown-clad tramp in there eating what was left of a vanilla slice from a semi-crushed bakery box. He was also licking the remnants of a chocolate éclair that were crushed on the box lid. He has been there since the afternoon in 1978 when he choked on a Danish pastry he wasn’t supposed to be eating.
Ellen Danby lives in America now and Mrs McCann is dead.
That evening I pushed myself back to the Waiting Room. My astral self, still in Technicolor. Mrs Berry was crocheting. It never gets any larger, some tablecloth she’s never going to complete. There was another man there now, just coming through the door. He was stopped by the angel on the other side and a few words were exchanged, then he was let through.
‘Wait,’ I shouted and lurched forward hoping to jam my foot in the door before the angel yanked it shut. I was of course too late. All my energies were focussed on projecting myself there. The angel had endless energy, focussed on the Universe. Shutting an MDF door is a reflex. The man stood there waiting his turn. As the door shut he spoke.
‘I was just coming to talk to you,’ he said. I was shaking. Is this him? My Dad?
‘It’s about my wife, April. I need you to find her, give her a message…’ I looked at him. Glad that this pot-bellied, sweating man was not mine. I moved past him and knocked on the door.
‘Tell her I’m dead.’ He looked disturbed as I hammered on the door. ‘I left her. Two years ago. Went out for a paper, only I decided I’d go and live in Spain.’
I did not get to speak with Mrs McCann. This time the angel did not even open the door and in the end April’s husband got edgy that having talked his way out he wouldn’t be able to talk his way back in. Finally he told me to go because clearly they weren’t opening the door until I had. April’s husband got very shirty with me, his voice getting higher pitched. Stranded.
I put April out of her misery. April cried a lot, but they were tears of relief. Of letting go. She would be heading off to the airport soon and was going to be met at the other end by his Spanish widow. It depressed me utterly.
I opened the Bourbon biscuits and then I cold-called Alan Hartley, who put the phone down on me three times. Then I tried Paul Whelan, who did not remember My Mother. Genuinely so. He was friendly enough, even asking his newest wife if she remembered him ever having mentioned a Madeleine Colville.
There were seven O. Howards in the phone book and I called them all. Only three were men. Of the men, the third one was my Oliver Howard.
‘Do you remember a woman called Madeleine Colville?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid Madeleine is dead.’
‘I know. I’m her daughter. Annie.’
This was met with several moments of silence. I sat at my end thinking that perhaps he was imagining the moment of my conception, some lush and sexy moment of his life that he had always cherished. I thought that he was probably sifting through a catalogue of memories of My Mother at her most beautiful, her most sexy, her most womanly. Madeleine Colville, the love of his life.
‘Is that all?’ he said very coldly. A man who keeps his voice in the deep freeze.
‘Are you my father?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘You’ve thought about it then?’
‘No.’
‘Are you my father?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you have to use the word “doubt”? Now you’ve got me thinking. If you doubt it, Mr Howard, that means you must have thought about it. Doesn’t it?’
There was another acre of silence then.
‘I am not your father. I don’t know who your father was. If I am brutally honest Hannah…’
‘Annie.’
‘Annie…I doubt that your mother knew who your father was. Do you understand what I am saying? Your mother enjoyed herself…on a grand scale.’
Now it was my turn to be silent.
‘Can I have a list?’
Which is when he put the phone down. He pulled the plug on it too. I tried the next day and got no response.
So I headed over to his house to see if I could get a personal response. I knocked on the door. I rang the bell. I waited in the front garden, sitting on the neatly trimmed grass. Grass that was neatly trimmed by a gardener.
Mrs Howard was first home. She’d been out at a charity lunch. Clearly this had exhausted all her charity, as she frogmarched me down to the gates and made me wait outside. Oliver Howard’s detached Georgian home had large, ornately wrought iron gates. If you looked at them long enough they could become even more ornate. At first glance there were branches and leaves. Then as your eyes traced along the branches you’d find birds, finches with stubby beaks, here a wren and suddenly a squirrel, an owl at the very topmost left-hand corner. Finally there were the bees and the ladybirds and the dragonfly.
Mrs Howard had not done much forward thinking when she locked the gates behind me. As Oliver Howard arrived home in his glossy new Rover he had to leave the safety of the vehicle to talk with her over the intercom. He didn’t see me at first beside the row of hydrangeas on the grass banking.
‘What’s going on? You’ve locked me out.’
There was a tinny, clattering response and he looked round. Looking for me.
‘Where?…For Pete’s sake Syb I can’t see her.’
I moved to stand behind him as he berated her and received tinny responses. She was safe within the house. She had the power to keep him locked out. He was in the middle of ticking her off, telling her she was a paranoid bag when he stepped back. I was there. Almost under his feet. He hung up the phone as she was in mid-tirade.
‘You’re Hannah,’ he stated, looking tired.
‘I’m Annie. I’m just here for a few pointers. I am looking for my dad…’
‘No. Not him. Not me.’
‘No. I understand. But My Mother is dead and I haven’t anyone else I can ask.’
‘You can’t ask me. I don’t know.’
He folded his arms, defensive and yet making himself bigger, top-heavy with sleeves and elbows.
‘I thought you might remember someone.’
He looked down then at the gravel under his soft leather shoes. He took a deep breath. Then, speaking from above his elbow-forearm barricade, ‘I’m not him. Truly, so help me Godly. I swear on the Bible that I don’t have any idea who sired you. Your mother didn’t go into details. You were already there when I met her. I will say that I was her first for a long time. You were about eighteen months old I think. You’d stopped her in her tracks. She’d got her figure in shape and she’d picked me out.’
He folded his bottom lip in then, over his teeth as if that finished the matter.
‘You didn’t stay with her. Why?’
‘She didn’t stay, Annie. She left me. I’d’ve married her. Seriously. Even with you in tow. The only woman I’ve ever wanted to marry.’
His glance slithered to the intercom then, checking that he hadn’t accidentally left the frequency open. I could imagine the wife he hadn’t wanted to marry listening in to white noise.
‘Why did she leave you?’
He shrugged.
‘But you came back. Later.’
‘Yes. She offered.’
‘You didn’t marry her then either.’
Now he unfolded the bottom lip and instead folded the top lip behind his bottom teeth and let out an irritated wheezing sound.
‘I was already married by then.’
He spoke very quietly and finally and looked at me with a finished expression as if he had just about explained the universe to me and that was that. I looked back, trying to see through his eyes into his memory. To see the true story in all its details. For everything he said simply opened up more gateways, more dirt tracks. A maze. I felt he had so much to give me that he was being mean and stingy keeping all this knowledge to himself.
His wife was tapping down the drive now in her high-heeled beige shoes. E
xpensive shoes. Ugly shoes. She was triumphant behind the gate, brandishing keys to let him in.
‘I’ve called the police so if you know what’s best for you, you won’t be here when they arrive.’
Oliver Howard groaned.
‘Talk about taking things completely out of all proportion.’
He got back into the car, almost mowing her down as he moved into the drive, driving past her, up to the door. She gaped, angry that he was not going to give her a lift up the drive to the house. I watched her tappety all the way back to the front door. You could almost see the hairs on the back of her neck standing up, knowing that I waited.
I watched. She shut the door. A light went on in a conservatory at the back of the house. I could see one edge of the windows, a sofa, a giant tropical pot plant curling up into the roof. The blinds came down then, like a blink.
There was no use going to his office. The first day he was away in Nottingham. The second day he was out at a business breakfast on the industrial estate and his secretary/assistant/dogsbody called him on the mobile to warn him. He didn’t return. He didn’t go home. He holed up at the golf club where I was escorted to the gates in a bunker buggy.
On the third day the security guard at his offices wouldn’t let me in. He was very polite but very firm despite not being the tallest, bulkiest guard I had ever encountered. He had power because he was thoughtful. What he said and the tone he used were more forceful than if he had physically hoisted me up by my knicker elastic and hurled me into the street.
On the fourth day I sat outside the house finding woodpeckers and peregrine falcons in those gates. I stayed for hours sitting on a low wall. I noticed only that the blinds in the conservatory were drawn. When it grew dark I pulled on a jacket. I had a notion, I don’t know what I think about this now, that perhaps the seven-year spell was breaking, ending with madness; my notion was that if I stayed all night I might be able to tune into Oliver Howard’s dreams.