by Lia Louis
Roman cradles the back of my head. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he whispers against my hair. ‘So glad.’
‘I’m so glad you’re here, too.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.
I shake my head. ‘No more sorrys,’ I tell him, eyes fixed on the bluest sky, my cheek against his chest. Warm. His heart beating, strong. Still here.
We listen then, as Roman lightly draws circles on the top of my arm, to the distant mumble of a hospital TV, to the birds outside through a small crack in an open window, to a nurse speaking quietly to another, to the pouring of water from a jug on the other side of the curtain. Calm slowly shrouds us both, like mist.
‘How was the dress fitting?’ he whispers after a while.
‘Awful,’ I croak. ‘Shall wants the bridesmaids to change into red sequin dresses for a performance at the reception.’
Roman makes a noise in the back of his throat. ‘Performance. Is she having a laugh?’
‘I know,’ I whisper. ‘And she wants us to sing backing. Me and the other bridesmaids, in a line. Like it used to be when she worked on the cruises.’
Roman stretches. ‘So, you’ll all be like the von Trapps?’
‘Yep,’ I sniff. ‘And I’m finding it so hard to remember the lines. My brain just won’t. I don’t sing, I don’t perform. I never have, for god’s sake. Walking down the aisle is scary enough.’
Roman nods slowly. ‘Have you told her?’ he whispers. ‘That you’re struggling to—’
‘I did, so did Hubble. She just said that my behaviour was giving her stress-eczema and made me feel bad.’
Roman shakes his head. ‘God,’ he breathes. ‘What a balls-up, eh, J? What a bloody balls-up.’
I look up at him with misty eyes, inches from his face, and I say, ‘It’s always balls with you, isn’t it?’ and Roman smiles and says, ‘always.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘Did it ring at all?’
‘No, just straight to voicemail.’
‘So, it’s off. Dead?’
I nod, hand in the biscuit barrel. ‘Must be. I’ve called a few times and it’s never on. I did send a text.’
Katie stops drying the plate in her hands, a checked tea towel scrunched in her fist. ‘Did you?’
‘I just said hi, that it was me, and if he could – if he wanted to – he could text or call me. Told him I just wanted to know how he was, that I got the letter, that there was no pressure …’
‘And I take it you got no reply?’
‘Nothing. It’s not been delivered and last time I called, the phone was still going straight to voicemail so,’ I laugh, chomping a bourbon cream in half, ‘perhaps it’s time I accept he doesn’t want to be found.’
Katie starts drying again, shaking her head as vigorously as the tea towel circling the plate. ‘I don’t think that at all.’
‘I’m starting to,’ I shrug. ‘Anyway, is there any more of that cheesecake left? The mood I’m in, I just want to eat until I have to be cut out of the house by firemen.’
It’s Thursday at half-past seven, and of course, I’m here at Dad’s with Nathan and Katie for dinner. It’s the only thing that feels safe at the moment – the only thing I can trust to be exactly what it is. Tonight has been a little different, though, but still, being here, leaning across the kitchen counter, elbow-deep in biscuits, the kitchen windows steamed up from home-cooking and chatter, is as close to content as I can get right now. Dad’s girlfriend, Linda, is here too because she and Dad are off to Menorca at midnight, and where Dad is usually marvelling at his latest crumble combination as if it’s a newly discovered antidote to a deadly childhood disease, he has spent most of this evening pacing the house, mumbling to himself, about boarding passes and hotel transfers, sweating with stress.
‘So, are you going to go to the hospital?’ Katie pats my arm. ‘Scuse us, Liz.’ I duck my head as she reaches up and puts clean, dry plates away in the cupboard above.
‘There’re two. They’re both in Reading. We just don’t know which one he works at.’
‘You could call them.’
‘I’m going to.’ I hear Linda and Nathan burst into laughter in the next room. ‘I’m going to call both, and just ask for Roman Meyers. Well, Roman Matias as he is now.’
‘What’s that?’
It’s Dad. In the doorway, reading glasses on the end of his nose, plane ticket print-outs inches from his face. Dad needed glasses for years before he got them. I remember the way Mum would nag him about it, insistent on booking him an optician’s appointment, and he’d grumble, bat her suggestions away with his hand. It was two weeks after Mum left him that he came home in glasses. He did that when she left; did so many of the things she had wished he would for years, as if that would convince her to come back. As if it would mend everything and make up for everything he dwindled.
I straighten. ‘Nothing, Dad. You OK?’
‘Nothing?’ Dad smiles, tight at the corners. ‘Didn’t sound like nothing.’
‘Girl talk,’ Katie jumps in with a smile. ‘Coffee, Charlie?’
Dad looks at me for a moment, and then shakes his head. ‘I won’t, darlin’, thank you. Already got the jitters about this flight, I don’t wanna add fuel to the fire.’
‘You’ll be fine, Dad.’
‘I can’t find the bloody return flight number.’
‘It’ll be on there.’
‘Oh, Christ, he isn’t boring you all about that bloody Trip Advisor review, is he?’ Linda wraps her chubby, freckly arms around Dad’s round tummy from behind him. Her pink, smiling face appears over his shoulder. ‘I told you, relax, or we’re going to have a horrible time.’
When Mum and Dad announced they were getting divorced, my mind shot forward like it’s supposed to before you die, but the reverse. I saw my future. As a bridesmaid at their second weddings, two bedrooms, two Christmases that never ever felt the same so each heavily overcompensated with gifts nobody really wanted, Sunday night drop offs, the parent at the door, and the parent in the car nothing but markers to run between. And then there was the vision of an evil step-mother with long flowing blonde hair and a constant smirk on her face. I was right about most of it. All except Linda. Linda isn’t an evil step-mother. She is gentle, kind and sixty-seven per cent Hattie Jacques. She has the biggest boobs I have ever seen and is so short and wide, that hugging her is extremely satisfying. Like cuddling a pillow. She looks like a 1950s housewife all of the time with her neck scarves and high-waisted A-line skirts, and she fucking loves ballroom dancing. And Dad. She loves Dad, every inch of him. I said that once with Mum in ear shot.
‘Every inch? Well he sure has a shit-tonne of those, doesn’t he?’ she’d said.
But then, she was never going to say anything else. She’s never forgiven Dad for what he did. He’s never forgiven her for leaving him.
‘Seven cossies, I’ve packed. Seven,’ grins Linda, squeezing through the kitchen and picking up a tea towel. ‘He can’t quite believe it.’
‘But that’s one for every other day,’ I say. ‘That’s wise.’
‘Thank you!’ she says, her chubby arm shooting up to point across the room at Dad. ‘Tell that to bleedin’ Mr Baggage Allowance.’ Dad doesn’t hear her, though. He’s too busy muttering under his breath, as he scrolls through his phone.
‘I still can’t find it,’ Dad grumbles, and Linda rolls her round eyes.
‘It’ll be on the ticket,’ shouts Nathan from the other room. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just get your stuff together and get ready to go.’
‘Is Nathan taking us, love?’ Linda asks Katie, who slides a pile of washed and dried side plates into the cupboard.
‘No, I am. He’s going to do the pick-up.’
‘Good plan,’ winks Linda. ‘Get him to do the dead-of-the-night drive.’
‘Exactly,’ grins Katie.
‘For Christ’s sake, where is this damn bloody flight number? You’d think they’d make it simple, wouldn’t you?�
�� Dad is so flustered, he’s tomato-red. Beads of misty water sit on his forehead, which is so furrowed, the deep, dark grooves look like troughs.
‘Dad, I told you, it’s—’
‘Dizzy, I am telling you—’
‘Give.’ Linda tuts and holds her arm out. It jingles, as clusters of gold bangles and chains sway, glittering together at her wrist. Dad gives up with a sigh and hands over the pile of papers.
‘It’s all so bloody complicated,’ mumbles Dad, his dark greying hair unruly, but still shiny from this morning’s gel. It dangles in front of his eyes. Dad has always had a lot of hair. Thick and dark. I’ve never really liked it long, though. It just reminds me of all the times he’d bumble around the house, depressed, reeking of last night’s drink and sweat and old sheets, barking things at Nathan and me, screaming at Mum down the phone. I remember almost looking forward to the meetings we’d have with my social worker, or with Ramesh about my progress at The Grove, because he’d make an effort then. He’d brush his hair, flatten it with gel, and put on aftershave like all the other dads you’d see at parents’ evening or school plays. I looked for safety everywhere back then, in the tiniest things, anywhere I could. It was either that or give up. So, I held on. I stared out into the pitch-black darkness and looked – hoped – for just glints; tiny specks of light to show me all was not lost. That there was light to come.
‘See, I think they get too cocky these days,’ Dad carries on now. ‘They put everything on there; internet addresses, Facebook bloody names, hashtag whatsits, but no flight—’
‘Got it. Right, Nathan, note this down, love,’ calls out Linda. ‘MH1723. You’ll need that for when you pick us up.’
‘Hang on, Lin,’ shouts Nathan. ‘OK, I’ve got a pen. Say it again.’
‘Where did you find that?’ gawps Dad, eyeing Linda as if he is quite sure that she’s lying and somehow etched the number there herself when he wasn’t looking.
At eight, we say goodbye as Katie leaves to take Dad and Linda to the airport, and for the first time in a really long time, Nathan and I find ourselves alone. Just us, two cups of tea and a box of old paperwork at the kitchen table; the table at which we sat through everything; through those seemingly endless childhood years, night after night, all of us gathering together. Before we fell so easily and quickly apart.
‘Jesus this is old. Look at this.’ Nathan holds up a Thames Water bill that looks as though it was printed on a screen printer and delivered by a small boy on a promise of a goose for his family. Nathan and Katie are going to start renting the house from Dad when he moves in with Linda in a couple of months, so have been spending every waking moment recently, gutting old cupboards, and emptying the loft.
‘And this,’ laughs Nathan. ‘This is from when Dad worked at Fry’s. I don’t even think you’d been born yet. And look,’ he says, holding up a small curling brown envelope. ‘This is Mum’s payslip from when she worked at the aerobics studio.’
‘Which is now an American restaurant.’
‘Says it all,’ Nathan grins, slumping back into his chair. He brings his mug to his lips. ‘I just don’t understand how there’s so much stuff. I even found Mum’s hairdryer and rollers in the back of one of the wardrobes, her hair still in some of them.’
I bring my shoulders up to my ears. The back of my neck prickles with goosebumps.
‘What?’ says Nathan. ‘It’s not like they’re a dead person’s.’
‘I dunno.’ I shudder. ‘It’s just weird, isn’t it? It feels like another lifetime. Like those people – that Mum with the rollers and that Dad working at Fry’s – it’s like … were they even real? Were they ever even together? They’re completely different people to the Mum and Dad we know now.’
Nathan stretches, leaning back on his chair. It creaks as he does. His arms are huge, and I find it amazing that those are the same arms that used to struggle helping me up and over Hubble’s garden wall when we were kids, the same skinny arms that would wrap reluctantly around me on bad days, struggle to pull me to standing from the bathroom floor when the panic would get so bad, I’d throw up the entire contents of my stomach until I was exhausted and bruised. They’re also the same bandy arms that would shoot out as he shook a fist in the ‘wanker’ sign behind Auntie Shall’s back after she’d tut and say to Dad, ‘She’s fifteen, Charlie, it’s called hormones. You don’t see me laying down and dying and I had a full hysterectomy last November.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s ’cause they are different people, Liz,’ says Nathan now, papers in hand. ‘Nobody stays the same, do they?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I suppose they don’t.’
Then there’s silence for a while, as together we continue to sift through the mound of musty, dusty papers, sipping tea in the dim light of the kitchen, nothing but the soft amber under-counter lights on. I like the dark nights that come with Autumn. They remind me of the bonfire nights we’d have as kids, Dad barbecuing sausages, face lit by the fire, Mum lighting sparklers, lamps glowing through the windows of the lounge where we’d bundle afterwards for warmth in front of the fire.
‘They were that gross couple, Mum and Dad, weren’t they?’ Nathan says, cutting through the silence. ‘The pet names, the PDAs …’
‘God, yeah.’ I toss an old handful of business cards into the recycling box on the floor beside us. ‘Made me want to spoon my eyes out. The snogging …’
‘And the arse-grabbing.’ Nathan laughs, and passes me another pile of letters. ‘Chuck anything that isn’t important or a photo.’
I hold up a crumpled page of A4. ‘Keep? A school trip letter for you from 1996. Way back when Emma Bunton was in power.’
We laugh and Nathan motions for me to sling it in the box on the floor. ‘Nah. Bin.’
I unpeel an old envelope, next. World cup football stickers. Years ago, Mum would buy three packets of them for Nathan every Wednesday evening after night-school, and I’d get an issue of Shout or Smash Hits magazine. It was like she felt guilty, for stepping out of her usual Mum-and-wife shoes, for focusing on something other than us, and she needed to bring home gifts to show us she still cared. ‘They were happy, once, weren’t they, Nate?’
‘Who, Mum and Dad?’
‘Yeah.’
Nathan nods. His eyes don’t shift from the papers which move as if on a production line through his hands. ‘I mean, I know they had their issues. When Dad had that … well, whatever it was with that woman at the scouts. I don’t ever think they – you know.’
‘Ninette,’ I say. ‘Ninette deGrassy. And I dunno, you know, I think something might have gone off.’
Nathan grimaces. ‘Maybe. That was a bit of a dodgy time, though, wasn’t it? Mum was studying, barely home, obsessed with that fucking weird plastic personal trainer guy.’
‘Jean,’ I smile, tearing a bunch of receipts into strips. ‘Face like Kryten off Red Dwarf and hands like sweaty turnips. Ugh.’
‘God, he was the worst,’ Nathan laughs. His cheeks have always gone taut, like apples, when he laughs properly. ‘Totally up his own arse.’
‘He was the pits.’ I ditch the next piece of paper. Junk mail, advertising a new local restaurant that no longer exists.
‘But yeah, I just think they had a slump, then,’ says Nathan, custard cream between his fingers. ‘And every couple has slumps, don’t they? Those times where you question what the hell you’re both doing it for because it’s more arguing than it is anything that even resembles joy. But I dunno. Dad and the money. That changed everything.’
I nod. ‘She forgave everything else. Like when she heard that he’d told Fiona in the Co-op that he wished she was more like her, more spontaneous, and someone thought they saw them snog in the car park. Do you remember when Mum emptied that massive tub of koi carp food into his suitcase?’
Nathan bursts out laughing after a mouthful of tea, and quickly covers his mouth.
‘Yes!’ he says, composing himself. ‘And she put it in the driveway, and put the lu
ggage tag on it, saying … what was it, again, Liz? What did she write on it?’
‘Slag. Simply “slag”. As if she was his destination.’
Nathan and I laugh, stomach-tightening, rosy-cheeked, real laughter; the sort that warms you through like hot soup after being caught in the rain; the sort of laughter that feels precious, because it’s shared, and understood by only the two of you. And I realise this is the first time I have laughed properly, for weeks. It has lifted a weight I had no idea was even there, and it’s not until I feel it lift, that I realise just how dragged down I have felt the last few weeks. It’s as if the digging I have done into memories, all the excavating, and delving, and all the energy I have put in to finding Roman, to the thinking and worrying, has bit by bit, utterly drained me.
‘She put up with a lot,’ says Nathan. ‘But the gambling … she couldn’t come back from that. And I don’t think I could ever blame her.’
‘I can’t imagine how that was,’ I say. ‘It was everything she’d worked for, every penny she’d saved our whole lives. To check your bank balance, and see nothing.’
‘He was addicted, though, Liz. Completely.’
I fray the edges of an old council tax bill in my fingers. Gambling. Gambling. It still feels like we’re talking about someone else. Not Dad. Not my dad. A gambler. An addict. So far gone, he didn’t care who he hurt to get the money. He just knew he had to, and when he did, his moment would come: he’d make it all better, he’d give us the life he wanted to, full of bigger, better things. We’d have it all. He just didn’t realise we already did. He didn’t see it until it was too late. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘And Mum. She was no saint, I know that. She had the affair and that was all really fast.’
Nathan’s sausage fingers hold his mug of tea at his lips. ‘And then they broke up … and broke the fuck down.’ Nathan laughs lightly, his eyes downturned just a tad, at the corners. He meets my eye. ‘They lost it didn’t they, Liz? Both of them. Properly lost it.’
