The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  “I think she wants a feed,” Sheila says.

  I get up and relieve her. You quieten enough for me to hear Bob sniffing. Sheila is watching him, concern in her eyes, as he stands up to his full five foot nine, (I think old age has stolen that extra half inch from him) but he is looking at me and I hear him say the words I’ve always wanted to hear. Words I’ve always wanted to believe. The impossible is true. It has been true all along.

  “You’re my daughter,” he says.

  Later we stand together out in the yard, you and I, while I snip, one-handedly, two roses from Andy’s bush.

  “Come on, Miss. Let’s go for a walk.”

  I put you in the pram – also donated by Grandma Sheila – and push you up the road past Wink’s old house, past the chippy, to the Bone Yard where I buried the silver jubilee coin and shared a bottle of Pomagne with Christopher Bennett.

  Nothing much has changed. The same yews, cedar and pretty stone church. The granite crosses, the carved angels. They have stopped burying the dead here. Lucas was one of the last to have this peaceful spot as his final resting place. Peaceful when there aren’t kids playing hide and seek. Though he’d like that. He and Albert Morris. They’d like the sound of children’s voices bouncing round the graves like a game of pinball.

  We find the spot – a little overgrown but not as bad as I feared – and I lay one of the roses down by the headstone. No, nothing has changed. Lucas is still dead. Still seven-years-old. But I’ve come back, bringing you with me.

  “Here she is,” I announce. “Lucy.”

  Then I tell him that Doctor Who has been resurrected. I tell him that there are stickers and cards and all sorts of TV tie-ins. I tell him about Blue Peter – that there is a myriad of young trendy presenters and it is as good as ever. That there are all sorts of channels these days, even ones devoted solely to children’s programmes. Then I tell him about you. That I am determined you will lead a happy life. I will make sure of that. I tell him about Helena. I tell him that the young pretty woman who was such good friends with his mummy, wasn’t who we thought she was. She wasn’t a bad mother, after all. She was my sister. And she loved me. Finally, I tell him about Bob. That he was a waiter in a former life. That he was in actual fact my father. He was never in the jungle. He was here, in a sweet shop in Torquay, all along.

  A shadow falls over the grave. I’ve never been scared here, not since that first day when we thought Albert Morris was chasing us through the giant rabbit hole but I spin round quickly – just in case.

  It is Bob.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “For giving up on you. I should never have done that. I could blame the pills – they make you do strange things. But I won’t. I blame myself. I should’ve told you the whole truth. If I’d done that then maybe you wouldn’t have made such a mess with Adrian.”

  “Aren’t I allowed to make a mess?”

  He can’t find an answer to that. There is no answer.

  “I’ve got Lucy,” I say, after a bit. “She’s what matters in all this.”

  “Never forget it,” he says.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I’m her mother. I love her.”

  We visit Wink’s small memorial stone over in a quiet corner by the wall. Her final resting place is flying with the gulls over the harbour but I lay a rose for her too and remember her sitting with her gammy leg on my lap, coming home from London in the back of Linda’s Maxi, regaling Larry Facts about his childhood… born out of wedlock… put in a foster home… and then it comes back to me, the other crucial fact that Wink was telling me, the one I’d blocked from my mind or simply forgotten: He’d been brought up by his foster sister. A sister who he’d thought of and referred to as ‘Mum’.

  My Wink.

  I show her you, the jackpot, the one that runs rings around Tiger and Captain. The one that will shine above all others.

  “Look what I’ve got,” I say. “Didn’t I do well?”

  Two weeks later, Someone Else turns up on my doorstep. Terry Siney. For now, as his letter to me suggests, he is plain old Terry again.

  “You never escape your roots,” he says, in his best Brummie accent. “However hard you try.”

  “I know,” I say. “Look at me. Back behind the counter serving sweets.”

  “You’re my roots, Phil,” he says. “In the words of Barry White,” he sniffs, embarrassed, “You are my everything. You and Lucy, that is.”

  2007

  To celebrate your first birthday, the fact that your little heart is mending all by itself, we are going on holiday. There is no need for anyone to pop down to the travel agents in Castle Circus because your daddy gets given free flights all the time as a travel writer, especially one as in demand as him. He has managed to wangle four tickets and – with Sheila safeguarding the shop, Coco, and Captain – Bob is coming with us. We are going to Canada!

  You are not keen on the take-off, grabbing your little ears and squealing. But once we are up there, flying, you are happy on your daddy’s lap, yabbering away to Tiger in your arms. I even manage to sleep for a bit but dreams of our lost baby tell me this is not a good idea. I need to keep those old useful wits about me for in a few hours we will be in Toronto where I will see my sister, your Auntie Helena.

  It is Bob’s turn to hold you on his lap. He sings you a lullaby, if you can call Goldfinger a lullaby. I look at Bob’s fingers and imagine them entwined in Elizabeth’s hands. Their brief, snatched moments together. My parents.

  Like Dick Whittington, Bob went to London in search of gold. And he found it, though he never knew it. Perhaps now, flying over Iceland, he will realise the gold is in his fingers. His granddaughter.

  Oh dear. Tears are waiting just around the corner but now I have Terry who reaches into his pocket for a packet of Kleenex. I will marry this man.

  As the sun rises over the Great White North, we suck on lollipops and try to distract you from your ears in the moments of our descent. We are the last to get off the plane; there is no hurry. We have waited long enough.

  Not least Helena, a widow now since Orville passed on a few months ago who, when we finally make it through to Arrivals, is waiting in a wheelchair, a tank of oxygen on one side, Wes on the other. They brighten as they spot our strange little grouping. Wes pushes Helena towards us and we meet halfway. I bend down to kiss her on the cheek, and I whisper: “Nice to see you.” “To see you, nice,” she whispers back. And we get a glimpse of how we would have lived together as sisters if that is the way Life had taken us. But instead we are here and there is no point questioning it. It is what it is.

  Wes clears his throat and announces: “Welcome to Canada!” Then he gives me a hug and says, “Good to see you, Aunt Philippa,” which makes me feel all sorts of things like old, happy and excited to be here.

  He is a tall man now and, when he bends down to pick up one of our suitcases to put on the trolley, there is the start of a shiny bald patch on top of his head… so, just for a moment, I wonder… that night of passion in the shop before Helena met Orville Tupper… is there another secret waiting to be told?

  Nothing would surprise me. Nothing in this funny old game called Life.

  But the one certainty in all of this is that I want to play the game with these people here, making a riotous noise in the deserted Arrivals hall. As I watch them making a fuss of you, kissing you and cuddling you, I know that I want to play the game as best I can.

  And I want to play the game with you.

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