by Claire Allan
my hand gripped in hers, my cheek pressed against the soft
fabric of her coat.
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‘Heidi, this is Joe,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’
The man smiled, extended his hand towards mine. Dark hairs
crawled from the cuff of his jacket. They looked like spiders. I
cuddled in closer to my mother.
‘Heidi, say hello,’ she said, an urgency in her voice.
He withdrew his hand and sat down. ‘She doesn’t have to if
she doesn’t want to, don’t you not, Heidi? I’m a little nervous,
too.’ His smile was kind.
The tightness in my chest eased as he lifted his teacup and
sipped from it. I dared to take a step away from the safety of
my mother’s long, green woollen coat.
‘I know it’s cold and rainy outside, but maybe you’d like an
ice cream anyway? Since we’re here?’ he asked.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Heidi?’ My mother’s voice was
more relaxed again, too.
I nodded.
‘How about we get them to make you the biggest ice cream
they’ve got?’ he asked and my eyes widened at the thought.
There was little that seven-year-old me loved more than ice
cream.
‘With jelly?’ I asked, because jelly came a close second.
‘Lots of jelly,’ Joe said with a wink, and I smiled at him and
then at my mother.
The smile on my face was mirrored on her own. Then I
noticed how she looked at him. How her smile was different
when she was smiling in his direction. It was how those men
and women smiled at each other on the front covers of her
romance novels. She was falling in love. I knew it at once.
It was only when he came back from ordering and reached
out to hand me the giant ice cream he was carrying that I
noticed the glint of a gold ring on his finger.
I may have been only seven, but I knew what that meant.
And I also knew he wasn’t married to my mother. He was
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grinning at me. Telling me he asked for extra sprinkles. I could sense Mum beaming at him from beside me. I knew she wanted
me to smile, so I did. I remembered my manners just like I’d
always been taught, and I thanked him and ate the ice cream.
I pretended it didn’t suddenly taste a little sour.
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Chapter Three
Heidi
Now
I wonder what the official protocol is when it comes to saying
no to a dying man. Is it an out and out no-go area, or is it
okay in some circumstances?
I chew the nail of my left thumb while I try to build up the
nerve to call Ciara.
Alex, my husband, tells me getting her involved might be a
good thing. She may be able to lessen any burden on me. Which
sounds great, but still I’m not so sure. I’m not sure I have
enough emotional energy to deal with a second toxic relation-
ship just now.
I sigh as I realise that despite my misgivings, I have to do
this. I just have to suck it up.
Alex is at least sitting close to me as I call Ciara’s number. I
draw a little strength from him. My hands are shaking, my
tummy tight. Even the sound of her voice makes me nervous.
I take a deep breath. Remind myself that she is an adult now.
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As am I. I’m a wife and mother, for goodness sake. I should be able to speak to another grown woman without losing my
nerve.
But the truth is Ciara has always intimidated me. At times
she has utterly terrified me, if I’m being honest. She was the
loud to my quiet. The tall to my short. The confident to my
terrified. The angry to my sad. She was always bigger and badder
and more able to dominate a room than I ever had been or
ever could be. She’s the kind of person who can shred your
self-confidence to ribbons with just one look.
I hear a soft voice say hello in a calming Scottish lilt. ‘Hello,
Ciara’s phone.’
I’m momentarily thrown. ‘Hello,’ I stutter, ‘I’m . . . I’m Heidi
Lewis. It’s about Ciara’s father, Joe . . .’
I hear an intake of breath. An awkward ‘uhm’, which tells
me what I suspected. This phone call will not be welcomed.
‘Is she there? I need to speak to her about her him.’
‘One moment please, I’ll check,’ the voice answers, efficiently
as if she is speaking to a business associate.
Perhaps Ciara is still at work. Maybe this isn’t the best time
to call. I think about hanging up. It would be easier and I’d
have a good excuse to do so.
I’m just about to take my phone away from my ear and end
the call, when I hear the calming Scottish lilt replaced by a
brusque Derry hello.
‘Ciara?’ I say, to be sure.
‘Yes. It’s me. Heidi, what can I do for you?’
She sounds as pissed off now as she did as a truculent teen-
ager. I revert to type and feel inadequate. My tongue feels heavy
in my mouth. I feel unable to form coherent sentences.
‘Erm, are you still at work? Because maybe, you know, this
would be a call better taken later, a conversation . . . you know
. . . to have when you’re free to talk.’
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I sound like an imbecile.
It annoys her.
‘I’m at home,’ she says, her voice terse. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s your father,’ I begin. I wait for an interruption that doesn’t come. ‘He asked me to call you. Look, Ciara, maybe this really
is a conversation better had to face to face.’ I realise I don’t
want to tell her. I don’t want to have to be the one to say those
words to her.
‘I’d rather you just spat it out,’ Ciara says. ‘What is it? Does
he need money? Has he met someone else?’
I take a deep breath.
The easiest way to do something you really don’t want to is
to do it quickly, like tearing off a plaster. That’s what my mother would say, so I say the next sentence quickly. Probably too
quickly. The words rattle off my tongue.
‘It’s nothing like that. Ciara, he’s not well. He’s just been in
hospital for surgery and well, the news isn’t good. It isn’t good
at all, I’m afraid. And he has asked me to call you to let you
know he’d like to see you if you’d be willing.’
There’s a pause. ‘Are you telling me he’s dying?’ Ciara asks,
as forthright as she always was.
I nod before saying, ‘Yes, Ciara. It’s cancer. He’s been given
maybe three to six months, at best.’
The phone line goes quiet. I wonder if she has hung up, take
the phone from my ear to see if the call is still connected.
‘Good,’ she says, eventually, although I hear a trace
of emotion
in her voice that wasn’t there before. ‘Good. He’s dying. Good
enough for him.’
‘Ciara . . .’
I start to talk but the line goes dead. She has hung up. I stand
staring at my phone, my face blazing, wondering how I tell Joe
what has just happened.
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Chapter Four
Ciara
Now
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Stella calls from the kitchen.
I don’t answer. I’m staring at my phone, trying to process
the conversation I’ve just had with Heidi bloody Lewis. The
golden child. It had to be her to tell me, didn’t it? It couldn’t
have been anyone else. He couldn’t have spoken to Mum and
got her to break the news. No, he was always one to go for
maximum impact. Maximum distress.
The bastard.
Anger wells in me and I throw my phone at the sofa, watch
as it bounces off the cushion and hits the solid wooden floor
with a crack. I’ll have broken the screen, in my anger.
‘Good enough for him,’ I’d said to Heidi. It had been my
gut reaction, to feel angry and shocked and think fuck him for
getting her to contact me only to tell me he was dying.
He is dying.
My father, for all that word really meant to me, is dying.
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‘Ciara,’ I hear Stella, ‘are you still on the phone, only the pasta . . .’
She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and
looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again.
The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room
beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.
‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for infor-
mation that I’m still trying to process.
‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my
tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.
Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to
see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently
caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news
of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.
‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.
One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her
thumb.
Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father.
Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least
ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.
‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All
thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had
planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked
Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’
That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a
frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him
some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway
for anything? He walked in and out of my life leaving damage
in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.
‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.
Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back
at her. She understands me in a world where it felt like no one
else does.
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I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’
‘Or maybe it would help you find your own peace and move
on a bit?’ Stella asks. ‘But, you know there’s no right or wrong
in this? You do what you want to do. If you want to see him,
I’ll come with you. If you want to tell him to go to hell, I’ll
hold your hand while you do it.’
I brush away a second pesky tear, take a deep breath. I’ll be
damned if he can force me to make a decision like this quickly.
Who does he think he is to get his mousey little minion to
call me and ask me to come over?
‘Is there much wine left in that bottle?’ I sit back and ask
Stella.
‘Not much,’ she says. ‘But there’s a second bottle in the fridge
and I’m sure there’s another bottle of something in the rack.’
‘Okay,’ I say, sniffing and sitting up straight. ‘That dinner we
spent all of fifteen minutes cooking is going to be absolutely
ruined if we don’t eat it now. So, I say we eat. I don’t want to
waste any more energy today thinking about that man.’
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Chapter Five
Ciara
Then
I was an only child and I was deliriously happy in my only-
child status. I was never lonely. I had lots of friends. We lived
in a busy street in the Creggan Estate – a proudly working-class
area on the west bank of the River Foyle.
There was always someone to play with. Come rain or shine
we would be running up and down the streets on our bikes, or
scooters or roller-skates. We would play ‘padsy’ or ‘tig’ and occasionally a gang of us would disappear en masse into one of our
friend’s houses to watch a movie and eat crisps and biscuits.
I’d seen how friends with a houseful of siblings didn’t get
the same treats that I did. Or the same attention from their
parents, either. I was the apple of both of my parents’ eyes – but at heart I was always a daddy’s girl.
Right up until the day he left.
At thirteen years old, I experienced the worst, most painful,
heartbreak of my life.
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It didn’t make sense. I thought my daddy loved me. I was his special girl. I trusted him never to hurt me. But then he
left – on a Thursday afternoon. I came back from school to
find my mother perching on the edge of the sofa, a cigarette
in her hand and a tautness to her posture that screamed that
something was wrong. Being thirteen, my first thought was that
I was in trouble. I braced myself for her to launch into some
rant about my messy bedroom or the three pounds I’d nicked
from her purse that morning. I expected her to use my full
name and though my heart sank at the thought of the rollicking
I was about to receive, I was already preparing my best eye-roll
and ‘But, Mammy . . .’ response.
‘Sit down, pet,’ she said.
It was the ‘pet’ that threw me. She was hardly going to give
out yards to me if she was using ‘pet’. I felt a knot in the pit
of my stomach.
‘Look, there’s no easy way to tell you this, Ciara, so I’m going
to come right out and say it. I want you to know that I love
you very much. And your daddy loves you, too. You’re not to
doubt that, ever. Okay?’
There was a strange buzzing sound in my ear. I could feel
something build up inside of me, a burst of
adrenaline that
made me want to fight or run. I dug my fingernails as hard as
I could into the palm of my hand to try to ground myself. I’d
seen enough corny movies to guess where this was going.
‘Daddy has moved out,’ she said, the shake in her voice belying
her true feelings. ‘It was a mutual decision and it’s just that we don’t make each other happy any more.’
‘Where has he gone?’ I asked. I needed to know where I
could see him. When I could see him.
My mother’s face coloured. She sagged momentarily before
straightening her back again. ‘He’s gone to live with a friend,’
she said.
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Of course it wasn’t long before I found out that friend was another woman, and that woman had a daughter.
My father had left us to go and be with another family. A
family he’d known for less than a year. A family with a daughter
for him to love.
My teenage heart hurt so much that I cried until I threw
up.
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Chapter Six
Ciara
Now
It’s two days since Heidi called and I’m now standing, with
Stella, outside the front door of my father’s house. It’s less
than ten minutes’ walk away from our riverside apartment,
but it might as well have been another country for all these
years.
I have avoided the shops I know he frequents. Stayed away
from the library where he used to work, and where he still
liked to spend his mornings drinking strong tea from polysty-
rene cups and reading over the day’s papers.
He holds court there, talks to everyone who comes in. Shares
his stories of old Derry and snippets of local history. It’s laughable for the man who barely looked at a book when he lived
at home with my mother and me. Once he left, he transformed
himself. Discarded his working-class persona entirely, lost
himself in books. Went back to college. The few old friends
he still deigned to spend time with gave him the nickname
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‘The Professor’ because he was considered so learned. He enjoyed feeling superior to them. He enjoyed revelling in their
new-found respect for him.
Learned and respected. It galls me to this day.
I feel Stella give my gloved hand a little reassuring squeeze.