When it started to get cold we set off for our respective parts of the city. I had plans to go to a party with some friends. I gave my mother a tight hug.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I told her. It was still warm and I walked for a while instead of getting on the tube. The BT tower boomed the words ‘It’s a Boy!’ across the sky in sapphire. I felt hopeful for all of us.
55
One morning we go swimming. It is drizzly and we wrap up in scarves and jumpers. He groans as we step onto the sand.
‘Do we have to?’ he pleads. ‘Can we not just go for breakfast instead?’ I pull a face and begin to take off my clothes.
‘I’ll race you.’ The wind stings my skin as I race towards the water. I don’t allow myself to stop and think or I might not be able to do it. I throw myself into the waves. It hurts as they smack against my body, but I keep running. It is so cold that my cells are screaming. I am prickling all over and my head is searing.
‘Christ!’ the man shouts then dives in head-first. My heart flinches in my chest. The blood vessels in my arms and legs are purple.
When we can’t bear the cold any longer we run up the beach together. I am crackling with static. Our toes are blue. I fumble in my bag for a flask and offer it to him.
‘Tea?’ he asks, raising his eyebrows.
‘Hot whiskey,’ I reply. He winks and takes a long drink. His Adam’s apple moves as he swallows. It seems so exposed, pale against dark stubble. I look away.
56
We all met for lunch the next day. My father was distracted. He tapped his fingers on the table and sucked from a beer bottle. It was noisy in the café and difficult for Josh to hear. My mother took him outside. When they didn’t come back, I dodged the crowds on Camden High Street until I found them perched on a windowsill. Josh was throwing a tantrum and my mother looked pale.
‘Are you okay, Mam?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to get out of there. I just can’t bear him when he’s drunk. Things are hard in there for Josh and no one is helping, you know? I always have to deal with it. I always have to hold everything together while everyone else just falls apart.’
I felt hurt. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She wasn’t listening. ‘I would have loved to spend this weekend in the pub,’ she fumed. ‘But I can’t, can I? I’ve got you. I’ve got Josh. I’ve got responsibilities.’
‘Come back to the café,’ I pleaded.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You go and meet your dad. I’ll take Josh somewhere else. We’ll do our own thing.’
57
There is a boiling. A burning. Acid-sharp. I know that I am bold enough now to be on my own but I no longer know if that is what I want. Not now. It seems not-right. I don’t want to be here with him who is missing, who has always been missing, who does not know how to hold. Who never held me. A dark shape with strange edges that I do not have a place to keep. And yet I must. Bury it. Seal it up. Trap it inside.
58
They were all due to get the same train back up north. I travelled to King’s Cross to wave them off. We hung around outside Pret checking the clock, half-expecting my dad to turn up.
‘I’m really not surprised,’ said my mother, when he didn’t appear. ‘He’s so selfish sometimes.’
My chest grew tight. The orange lights on the boards burned above our heads, listing all the cities soon to be stacked between us.
‘Let me know when he gets in touch,’ my mam said. ‘He will be okay, Lucy. He always turns up, eventually.’
The air around us began to shimmer. I felt an overwhelming sense that she could not go. There were always men between us, pawing at us and tugging the ends of our hair. All I wanted was to be close to her, without anything strange or unspoken around us, but that didn’t seem like the way things could be.
‘Mam.’ I struggled to breathe. A voice in the station announced her train.
Josh couldn’t find his ticket. He flung his suitcase onto the floor and unzipped it roughly, scattering socks and wires across the station.
‘Josh!’ My mother’s face folded. ‘We haven’t got time for this. We have to go.’ She got to her knees and began collecting his clothes. I stood very still and watched them. I didn’t feel real.
Josh began to scream. My mother swiftly twisted her hair into an elastic and pulled him up by his arm. She looked angry.
‘Mam.’ My voice was too quiet. I couldn’t make it loud. I had spent so long swallowing things down that I had forgotten how to speak at all. ‘Mam.’ I tried again.
Josh’s cheeks were wet and red. People streamed towards the ticket barriers.
‘What is it, Lucy?’ She found Josh’s ticket in her coat pocket and passed it to him. He stopped screaming.
‘Please don’t go.’ The air was static.
‘Lucy.’ Her tone was sharp. ‘Not now. There’s no time. I’ve spent too much of my life looking for your father.’
I dug my nails into the palms of my hands. ‘But I can’t do it on my own.’
My mother picked up her bag. ‘I have to go. This isn’t for me to deal with. It isn’t my job any more.’
Josh stormed towards the train and my mother went after him.
The noise of the station rushed over me. She called something to me but I couldn’t hear her. They disappeared through the barrier together.
59
The station rippled over my body in bursts of colour. Clothes shops grimaced whitely, expensive and pure. Voices echoed around the ceiling and lights flashed and bristled. Wheelie cases smashed into my ankles. Coffee grinders whirred and people frantically jangled coins and plastic wrappers, chewing and swallowing violently, passing the time before their passage out of the city.
I pushed through them and out into the daylight. The cold light pierced my skull. My thoughts fizzed. I looked at the McDonald’s and the Costa and the pizza shops and the pubs and I hated all of it. I hated her for leaving me. I hated him, drunk somewhere in the dark. I hated myself, for needing them.
60
I went to my shift at the pub with glazed eyes. I didn’t speak to anyone. I served men with unbuttoned shirts who banged on the bar and demanded more booze. I kept sneaking off to the toilet to call my dad’s phone but it went straight to voicemail every time.
I fought back tears for days. I rang my mother. She sounded distracted.
‘What are we going to do?’ I choked. ‘What if he just never shows up?’
‘He’ll come back,’ said my mother. ‘He always does.’
I called the Holiday Inn where he was staying.
‘He checked out a few days ago,’ the receptionist told me. ‘But he did leave his bags.’
‘His bags?’ I repeated, emptily.
‘Yes, they are with our concierge. I must let you know that if any bags remain uncollected after two weeks then they are destroyed. It is our policy.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I assured her. ‘He’ll be back before then.’
It seemed serious. His drinking binges tended to get out of control, but someone always intervened before he did something reckless.
‘What happens if no one stops him?’ I asked my mother.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s never happened before. I always step in. But this time I can’t.’
61
I dreamed of clean, white rooms filled with soft blankets. I dreamed of crisp, pressed uniforms and hands in surgical gloves. I dreamed of my dad. His eyes were black. His hair was wild and dirty. The room became soaked in his blood. I mopped it all up. I was not scared. I washed the dark away.
62
I want to carry the weight of it, the way that you did. I want to know the hurt of it in my bones so I can feel how it is to walk through the world as you. I want to bathe him in warm water and soap the hurt gently from his skin. I can grow solid so he doesn’t have to. I know how hard it is to let people get close but I could show him how. It starts with the skin. Stop rubbing and scratching. Th
e raw will heal over. We could all become softer and easier to handle.
63
My grandfather was very ill in Ireland and I had booked to go and visit him, just after my graduation.
‘You’ve just got to go,’ my mother said. ‘Tom will have surfaced by the time you get back. There’s nothing you can do, just by being in London.’ Our conversations were sour and stilted. I was angry and sore. I could tell that she was holding back, that there were things she would not say to me.
‘Are you okay, Mam?’ I asked her, over and over again.
‘I’m fine,’ she snapped. ‘Go to Ireland, Lucy. Try not to worry about him.’
I made the long journey to Burtonport, on an aeroplane and two buses and a taxi until the fields blurred into bogs and bracken and it seemed as though I was standing on the edge of the world. I slept in a sleeping bag in my grandfather’s damp house, zipping it up over my head so that the spiders and beetles that climbed the walls couldn’t crawl over my skin in the dark.
I was shocked when I saw him at the hospital. His flesh was greying and his skull seemed too big for his withered body. The muscles in his throat had weakened, so he wasn’t allowed to drink any liquids, for fear that he would choke. He was given everything he needed intravenously.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ he said to me with panic in his eyes. ‘I just need a drink. Get me a drink, will you Lucy? Just a little sip.’
I lowered my eyes. ‘I can’t, Granddad. The nurses said no.’
‘What kind of life is this?’ he pleaded. ‘I can’t even have a sip of tea.’
I pressed my hand over his.
‘How was your graduation?’ he whispered. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I was saving up to come, you know. I would have done anything to be there.’
I swallowed my tears.
‘You’ve always been our hope, you know, Lucy. Our London girl.’
64
I built all of this. Carefully. Painfully. Hands needled; blistered and raw. He breathes out smoke and it all falls down.
65
‘I wanted to protect you from all this,’ my mother says to me as we walk along the beach towards Donegal airport. ‘All I ever wanted was to protect you.’
66
Everyone is obsessed with Snapchat. I sit in the pub with a group of the man’s friends and someone takes a video of a boy asleep at the bar. The video gets sent to a Snapchat group and then everyone sits and watches the moment played over on their phones, as someone else videos their reaction and sends it to the group and then everyone watches that.
The past and the present become intermingled until it is difficult to tell what is real. Patrick is sitting at the bar and his face is captured in the video for a second. I watch it over and over as the moment slips further and further into the past. He is a forgotten piece of my story who becomes more real and less real as the moment becomes a part of my memory.
I walk home half-drunk up the port road and my laughter is visible in the night. I think about all of the times my grandfather stumbled drunk up this road and now here I am, doing the same.
The man and I collapse into bed and I reach for him, half-asleep. My hand grazes the same exposed skin that I snagged playing tag, all those years ago. Somewhere, we do not exist yet and Auntie Kitty is asleep in this room with her husband, the IRA major. Somewhere in the future, maybe my daughter is asleep in this bed. I can hardly bear to imagine how much she will have inside of her.
67
In the airport on my way back to London, my bag was searched by security.
‘Routine check,’ said the guard, unzipping my bag. ‘Please stand over here.’ I watched him roughly shove my knickers and books onto the table, feeling for contraband. I started to cry. All of my personal, secret things were out under the strip lights for everyone to see.
‘Everything alright, miss?’ he asked, sternly. I sniffed and shoved my clothes back into my bag, catching my palm in the zip.
I looked out of the window as the plane circled over London. I imagined that I might be able to see my dad from up there, crumpled in a park corner with mildew settling in his hair. How do you look for someone who doesn’t want to be found?
When I turned on my phone I had so many messages. I called my mother.
‘Any news?’
‘No, Lucy.’ Her voice cracked. ‘I’m getting worried, now. Look. You’re going to have to go to the police and declare him a missing person. He could be dead or anything. I don’t know what else we can do.’
‘Okay,’ I promised. I felt so bruised by her for leaving but I was determined to get this right. I wanted to prove that I was strong like her. ‘I will.’
‘I think I’m going to have to tell Josh,’ she said.
I sat on the floor in London Bridge station and cried. People rushed by.
I went to the police station before work. It was hot and I didn’t have much time. The policewoman at reception did everything at a painstaking pace. She tapped a rhythm on her desk with her pen as she waited for her computer to load.
‘I’m sorry, but can we go a bit faster?’ I asked her. ‘I have to go to work.’
‘Take a seat, please.’ She glared at me. ‘You’ll have to bear with me. I’ve never filled out a Missing Person form before. It could take a couple of hours.’
I panicked. ‘But I haven’t got time,’ I said.
‘You’ll have to wait. Call in sick to work.’
‘I can’t call in sick. I’ll get sacked.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘I need the money.’
Another police officer came to the desk and I relayed the situation to her, hoping she would speed up the process. She took in my dark eyes, short dress, shaking hands.
‘Everything seems to be under control here.’ She gestured at the computer screen. ‘Cute eyeliner, by the way.’ She smiled on her way out.
68
Everything is out of control. Spiralling and splintering. The world I built is cracking. Torn open with his rough fingers. Our past is falling in sheets from the sky like rain, bouncing on pavements and shattering around my feet. I thought I had moulded myself into something different but the ones who shaped you will always linger.
69
The architect took the day off work and we searched the parks together. We started at King’s Cross and branched out, seeking him out in bushes and on park benches. Every man I passed seemed to have his face. We sat at the kitchen table and rang round hospitals with his name and description.
‘What department?’ asked the receptionist.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Date of birth?’
I kept getting it wrong.
It was too hot to sleep and we went for a walk in the middle of the night. We lay down in the park beneath the trees and tears pooled in my ears. The architect pulled a packet of sparklers from his pocket and we watched them dazzle and fizzle to nothing.
My nan rang me with the details of his credit cards.
‘I went through his bank statements,’ she said. ‘And these are all the numbers I can find. Maybe you can get the police to trace them, or something?’ I wrote them down dutifully.
I started noticing Missing Person posters everywhere. They were stuck in shop windows and pasted on lamp-posts. Forgotten faces staring back at me. I could have passed those people in the street countless times without knowing.
‘How often do people go missing?’ I asked the architect.
He took my hand. ‘All of the time.’
70
I started running. It was a good way to get rid of the black smoke in my chest. I pounded around London parks for hours, even as the world began to splinter. Sometimes I ran and cried at the same time. I was moving away from the sad pink shape of myself. Something sticky set in. I could not stop. It burned and itched inside of my bones where I could not reach to scratch it. I saw my old self often. She walked down the opposite side of the street. She had fireworks inside of her. I could see th
em smoking. I remembered how I fought to put them out.
71
Finally, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar voice.
‘Is that Lucy Bailey?’ I braced myself for the worst.
‘Yes.’
‘My name’s James and I work for the Metropolitan Police. We’ve got a man here that we think might be your father. Found him on a bit of grass behind an estate. King’s Cross. He’s in a bit of a mess.’
‘Oh my God,’ I breathed. ‘Okay. Okay. I’m coming.’ They gave me the address and I scribbled it down with shaking hands.
‘How long will you be?’ they asked.
‘Not long,’ I said. ‘Please wait.’
I jumped off the tube and raced down the street, following directions on my phone. I was using ribbons instead of shoelaces and I hadn’t had time to put on socks. My shoes cut into my feet and the ribbons kept coming undone. A police officer approached me and looked me up and down.
‘Lucy?’
I nodded.
He frowned, gently. ‘I just wanted to let you know, before you see your father, that he’s in a bit of a state.’ I nodded again. ‘He doesn’t want you to see him like this.’ We turned the corner and I saw him sitting under a tree. He looked so old. I ran over to him and sobbed, feeling embarrassed. My father cried, too. I buried my nose in his dirty hair. He stank. The police kept their distance.
‘What happened to you?’ I gasped.
Saltwater Page 20
