So many questions still burn, but silence seems more appropriate and neither of us utters a word as we stare at the block of granite. The old man has doubtless stood here a thousand times and offered a thousand prayers. He clearly remembers the first time though, and places a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll never be able to replace her but I hope you’ll let me be part of your life. All we’ve got is each other and I’d like to be the father you deserved.”
I can’t speak for fear of breaking down. It’s all I can do to give him a slight nod, once I’ve wiped the tears from my cheeks. I say a silent prayer for my mum, more an apology really, and walk away.
Once I reach the main path I stand for a moment to let the old man catch up. My mind conjures up a picture of Mum, sat in her wing-backed chair in their living room. She’s old, and not in great health, but she’s alive. Her eyes still sparkle and her smile still lights up the room. She can still make a Battenburg and she can still tell me off when I swear. The old man never got the chance to grow old with that woman. He’ll have questions, I’m sure, but I need to tread carefully with what I tell him. I’ve had time to come to terms with our lost future and I know how destructive it is to dissect what might have been. Far from sharing my pain, I need to protect my old man from it.
“You alright, son,” he puffs when he finally reaches the path.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I assure him.
“So where do we go from here? Do you want to come back to my place and we can talk?”
I honestly don’t know where we go from here. This is not an eventuality I could have ever predicted and I’m still struggling to get my head around it. I guess all I can do is accept the old man’s invitation and see where it leads us.
“Sure. That would be good.”
“Great. The car is parked over the way. Shall we?”
We walk silently back through the cemetery, past the church, and out through a gate into a small car park. Beyond my surprise that the old man is still driving in this life, it’s with some relief I find he’s traded in his Vauxhall Cavalier, and its puke-inducing suspension. He uses a remote control to beep open the central locking of a small, modern hatchback, and opens the door for me. We both clamber in, and after the old man flashes me a reassuring smile, we drive out of the church car park.
I don’t know our destination, in any sense.
14
Within the first minute of our journey, two of my questions are answered. The old man informs me he now lives in a village called Hale, just a mile beyond the northern border of Farndale. That would explain why his name never appeared on the electoral role, as Hale sits in a different borough from Farndale.
“I couldn’t live in that house after your mum went,” the old man says mournfully. “It was too quiet, too many ghosts.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t a happy home after, you know, I…left?”
“Honestly? That one weekend we had together in 1986 after our chat, best two days I ever had in that house. I was ashamed of what went before and distraught by what came after. For me, it was never a happy home.”
He doesn’t expand on his damning statement and concentrates a little more intently on the road ahead.
“You mind if I ask you a question?” I say.
“Sure.”
“My notes. Why didn’t you show them to Mum?”
“Believe me, son, I thought about it dozens of times.”
“But you didn’t actually show them to her?”
“You have to understand how fragile she was, son. Yes, your notes might have given her a sliver of hope, but they could just have easily pushed her over the edge. She spent a long time grieving and I couldn’t risk sending her back to square one.”
“Suppose not.”
“If I’d had the faintest inkling your mother was willing to take her own life then I would have shown her your notes in a heartbeat. I’d have done anything to stop her. I didn’t have a clue though, son, so I did what I thought was best. I tried to protect her.”
I can’t judge him. I wasn’t there. In such a fragile state, would she have really believed there was anything behind the scrawled notes? If she’d read my rambling thoughts, would it have given her comfort or torn at her already raw wounds? I doubt I’d have taken that risk either.
With the silence in the car starting to feel a little uncomfortable, I’m relieved when we pass a road sign advising us we’ve reached the village of Hale. A few more narrow streets are navigated before we pull into a horseshoe cul-de-sac with five squat bungalows sat in a semi-circle. Number three is directly ahead, and the old man slows the car to a stop on the tarmac driveway. He removes the key from the ignition and we sit silently for a few seconds, just the ticking of the cooling engine to focus on.
“Well, here we are, this is home now,” the old man eventually chirps.
“Right,” I reply, still wondering if this is all some fucked up dream and my body is still lying on a bench in a graveyard.
We get out of the car and I survey the cul-de-sac. It’s quiet, peaceful even. The five homes all look impeccably kept with manicured lawns and moss-free driveways. I can only guess the other residents are also retired. It’s a stark contrast to the noisy neighbourhood in which our former family home was situated.
I follow the old man across the driveway and he unlocks the front door. He leads me into a hallway and through to a spacious lounge with patio doors overlooking a small, but impeccably kept rear garden. The room is sparsely furnished, lacking any semblance of homeliness. The only personal effects are two framed pictures sat on a window sill; one of Mum and one of me, taken around my fourteenth birthday, I think. One sound from my past is present though — the carriage clock, still ticking away on a small table in the corner.
“It’s nice,” I say with little conviction.
“It’s four walls and a roof, nothing more” he replies ruefully.
The old man offers to make tea and disappears into the kitchen. I take a seat in one of the two armchairs which are angled to face an archaic television. The lack of seating suggests the old man doesn’t receive too many visitors.
“I think this is probably only the second cup of tea I’ve ever made you” he says as he enters the lounge, holding two mugs.
“Probably,” I reply with a smile.
The old man settles into the other armchair and we swap small talk while sipping tea. We both try to ignore the time-travelling elephant in the room but the need to know is too great for the old man.
“What was she like, your mum, when she was older?”
“Do you really want to go there, Dad?”
“I’ll grab any crumb of comfort I can. To know she lived a happy life in some parallel universe would be something.”
Do I tell him she was never really happy? Do I tell him his counterpart made her life a misery?
“She had a few health problems, but she was…content.”
He takes a sip of his tea and slowly shakes his head.
“I appreciate you trying to save my feelings, but I’d rather know the truth.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“Right,” he sighs. “I can probably guess. Without your intervention that afternoon, would it be safe to say I didn’t make her happy?”
I don’t answer him, which is an answer in itself.
“Thought as much,” he says.
“Look, Dad, I’ve spent the last eleven months torturing myself with all of this. God only knows how I clung to my sanity through it all. And all I can say for sure is there are no answers, there is no closure. I’ve had to accept the life we had, for better and for worse, is gone. There is nothing to be gained by looking back. We are where we are, better to accept it and forget the past, every version of it.”
The silence returns. Maybe I could have handled that better, been a little more sympathetic. The trouble is, I’m still talking to the old man from my past, the cantankerous old git who provoked conflict, and always spoi
lt for an argument. This old man is not the same old man.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have been so blunt. Sometimes it all gets too much.”
“No, son,” he whispers. “You have every right to tell it as it is. I deserve nothing less.”
Now I really feel guilty.
“It’s just, well, so fucked up, so ridiculous, all of it.”
“You can say that again,” he snorts. “Maybe you should write a book about it, it’d probably be a best seller.”
“As a work of fiction, maybe.”
He shoots me a half-hearted smile and changes the subject.
“Anyway, how long have you been…um, back? When 2016 came and went, and there was no sign of you, I assumed my theories were as wrong as they were ridiculous.”
For the next hour I try to explain as much as I can about my new life as Craig Wilson, including my stay at Broadhall. Many questions are asked. Some I can answer, most I can’t. I conclude by telling him about my job in the charity shop and my humble accommodation in Farndale.
“This flat they put you in, how long are you able to stay there for?”
“A few months. Why?”
“I don’t want to put you on the spot, and you can say no, but why don’t you move in here? I’ve got the space and to be honest, I could do with the company.”
In my previous life I’d rather have stapled my scrotum to the floor in preference to living with the old man. But the prospect of sharing a house with this old man isn’t quite so daunting.
“You’ve got a spare bedroom?”
“I have, and it’s yours if you want it. I don’t want any money, any commitment, and there are no catches. You can come and go as you please.”
“Right.”
“Actually, saying that, there is just one small catch,” he adds.
“And that is?”
“Come with me and I’ll show you.”
We get up and I follow him back into the hallway. He opens a door and we step inside a double bedroom. There’s no bed, no furniture.
“This is the catch,” he says, pointing to a mountain of packing boxes, stacked six-feet high against the back wall.
He answers my question before I even ask it.
“Stuff from the old house. The removal men packed it up for me, and dropped it in here.”
“Bloody hell, Dad, there’s a ton of it. Why did you keep it all?”
“Couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it but I’ve never had the stomach to sort through it either.”
“Okay, we can deal with that. But there’s no bed, no nothing.”
“Tell you what, if you’re not doing anything tomorrow, why don’t I pick you up and we can pay a visit to a furniture shop, get you kitted out. Then we can come back here and go through this lot, together.”
He looks at me, his face expectant like a kid asking if he can stay up late on a school night.
“I’m skint, Dad. I can’t afford a pillow, let alone a bed to put it on.”
“Money is about the only thing I haven’t had to worry about in recent years,” he sighs. “Your grandparents left everything they owned to your mum. When she left, all of that passed to me, along with the payout from her life insurance policy. I’ve got my pension to live on, which is more than enough for a man on his own, so the rest of the cash has sat in the bank doing bugger all. It’s your money as much as it is mine, son.”
“How much are we talking about, roughly?”
“About three hundred,” he replies nonchalantly.
“Three hundred quid?”
“Grand.”
“Shit. Right. In that case, you have yourself a new lodger.”
The old man rigorously shakes my hand, his smile as broad as it’s probably been in a long while.
We return to the lounge and chat about the mundane for another hour. Football, cars, and politics — the usual fare for two men who don’t know each other that well. The conversation eventually dries up and we move onto our plans for tomorrow. Then, with some reluctance, the old man drives me back to the flat and we say our goodbyes on the street, accompanied by an excruciatingly awkward man hug.
I stand and watch him drive away. Once his car has turned out of my road and out of sight, I exhale a deep breath and amble up the stairs to the flat.
I kick my trainers off and collapse on the couch. Seven days since I began life outside of Broadhall and the craziness beyond the hospital walls is greater than anything I experienced within them. Today caps off a week-long rollercoaster ride. I just want to get off now, I really do. I want some stability, some normality. Christ, I just want the mundane life I left behind. What I wouldn’t give for another day at RolpheTech, or a pint with Dave, or even to hear Megan’s guttural breathing again.
None of it will ever be part of my life again.
I suppose I should try and grasp the positives. I’ve got Lucy, or a version of her. I’ve got a friend in Brenda, and as unlikely as it ever seemed, I’ve got the old man. So many people lost but my saving grace is that I’m not entirely alone here now. But if I want sanctuary from my past, I’ll have to build it. Thick walls to keep the harrowing memories at bay. A door I can choose to slam shut whenever I feel vulnerable. It will need to be impenetrable to the past, solid. It will need to serve as my bolt-hole for the rest of my days.
Tomorrow, I’ll lay the first bricks.
15
Bang-on ten o’clock, the old man pulls up to the kerb outside the flat. I climb into the car and we make our way to the same trading estate I worked on for all those years. Not an ideal start to my day but the old man’s enthusiastic chatter proves a welcome distraction. We enter the furniture store next door to RolpheTech and I can’t help but feel like a teenager again, kitting out his bedroom under the supervision of a father who has an opinion on every item I show an interest in.
“Buy cheap, buy twice,” he sagely advises as I test the springs on a hundred quid bed.
Compared to his tightwad tendencies in my former life, I guess I shouldn’t complain.
“Here, this divan looks like a good, solid bed,” he calls across the aisle, a little too loudly.
A few other customers turn and inspect us. It dawns on me we probably look like an odd gay couple, bed hunting together. I’m not concerned about people thinking I’m gay, more that they might think I’m shacking up with a geriatric partner bedecked in brown corduroy.
“Okay, Dad,” I reply, my voice loud enough so it’s clear to everyone in the store I’m not into necrophilia.
After an hour of bouncing on beds, inspecting dovetail joints, and swinging wardrobe doors to and fro, we leave the store. I am the new owner of a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a bedside table, all to be delivered to the old man’s bungalow on Wednesday. He is the owner of a two grand store receipt but seems happy enough with our shopping trip.
We clamber back into the car and set off towards Hale. Barely a mile into the journey and the old man suddenly suggests we go and look at cars so I’m not reliant on him for transport. I point out I don’t have a driving licence.
“It must be weird, having to start again,” he says.
“That’s one word for it.”
“Some people might see it as a blessing.”
“You think?” I snort.
“Would you change things back to how they were, if you could?”
“In a heartbeat.”
The old man ponders my answer for a few seconds.
“So why all that angst then, in your notes? They sure didn’t read like the words of a man who was happy with his lot in life.”
My turn to ponder.
“I was an idiot, Dad. I was so busy focusing on all the negativity that I didn’t see what I had, or what I could have had. I spent most of my life analysing where I’d gone wrong rather than where I was. You don’t realise how much you have until it’s all taken away from you.”
“Not so different then, were we?”
“Eh?”
; “You weren’t the only one who had his head stuck in the past. The way I behaved towards you and your mum, I was so angry that life hadn’t delivered what I expected that I never stopped to consider what it had given me. Maybe we were both idiots, son.”
They say the apple never falls far from the tree. Just like the old man, I had spent most of my life taking umbrage rather than taking stock. We may have reacted differently to our circumstances but we both wallowed in our self-inflicted, myopic misery. It probably wasn’t the mutual bond either of us wanted, but we had earned it.
We spend the rest of the journey in contemplative silence until we pull up on the driveway outside the old man’s bungalow.
“You ready for this, son?”
“As I’ll ever be. What’s the plan?”
“If we sort through everything and put all the stuff we don’t want in the garage, I can arrange for a charity to come and collect it later in the week.”
“Or we could take it to the tip?”
“Really? Seems a shame to throw away stuff that might be of value to somebody.”
“Trust me, Dad, they won’t want our crap.”
“Fair enough. You’re the expert,“ he says with a smile.
I follow the old man through the front door and into the bedroom. We stand next to one another in front of the wall of boxes, and the task neither of us are relishing. He takes the initiative and pulls a box from the top.
“Two hours from now, it’ll be done. Finished. That’s the way to think about it,” he says cheerfully as he places the box on the floor.
I offer him a weak smile and peel the tape from the top of the box. It contains dozens of small items, all individually wrapped in packing paper.
“You might want to revise that estimate,” I reply.
By the time we reach the sixth box, it’s clear just how little of the contents from our old home never made it beyond this room.
“Did you actually unpack anything when you moved here?” I ask.
“Not really. Just the kitchen stuff and my clothes. I was planning to do a box a day, to lessen the load, but the first one was painful enough.”
I can’t say I blame him. Perhaps some people find comfort in surrounding themselves with mementos of loved ones who’ve passed, but not me, nor the old man it would seem. Safer to keep the memories hidden away in boxes; sometimes cardboard, sometimes psychological.
Beyond Broadhall (The '86 Fix Book 2) Page 12
