by Anya Peters
‘Qualified’ was Brendan’s magic word, as if my becoming qualified at something would some day make everything okay.
Only with Brendan was I nearly myself. I opened up to him in a way I didn’t with others. Some of the time he seemed to understand me but I still wasn’t used to the intensity of the attention he aimed at me for those few days, a few times a year. I could never allow myself to open up fully, or get too close, because at the end of those few days he would be gone, back to his own family in Ireland.
It was the same with Kathy. Just as I was starting to feel close to them they would leave, off on a plane over to their own lives. They were always leaving. So I never risked showing them I needed or liked them.
Apart from Peter, who I didn’t see that much of, Brendan was the only male role model in my life, the only one to show me that not all men were as bad as my uncle had been, that not all of them had to be feared, the way I still feared him. As his business did well over in Ireland, he tried to make up for what had happened and the family life I was missing out on by throwing money at me. I always had the best-quality things at school and more pocket money than most of my friends and they were all impressed at how much my uncle Brendan‘spoilt’ me. But expensive possessions could never replace the things I really needed.
I was often at the outer edges of truth when talking to other people about my family. I didn’t flesh out the lies, but I implied them:‘My Mum chose it,’ I’d say about some article of clothing or present I’d bought myself with the money Brendan or Kathy gave me.‘My Mum gave it to me.’ ‘It used to be my Mum’s…’
‘My Mum’, the best sound in the world, wrapping it around myself, like a big circle of love.
Chapter 29
It was almost a year before I saw Mummy again. But when she came through the revolving doors of the hotel to meet us that first time, and her face lit up in a smile when she saw us, it was as if nothing had changed. I was trying to be grown-up in my first pair of court shoes, but ran across the lobby to give her a big hug, crying into her hair when she told me how much they’d all missed me.
Once every school holiday after that she’d meet us somewhere for tea. Seeing her for just those couple of hours would rip me open afresh each time, but there was no way I could put those feelings into words to anyone.
Once, when she came to have tea with Kathy and me, I remember being struck by how strangely out of place and ill at ease she looked in the hotel dining room, pretending too hard that she wasn’t. She sat there chain-smoking, smelling the milk to see if it was off, fidgeting while we finished eating. She checked her watch against one of ours, saying,‘Is that the time already? That can’t be right,’ shaking her wrist and pressing her watch to her ear before gulping back the last of her tea and leaving us all with a smile as she complained, as usual, at the‘daylight robbery’ of the sandwiches. Reapplying orangey-pink lipstick and tying a quick, loose knot back into her neckscarf, she tutted loudly as Kathy piled money onto the silver dish and handed it up to the waiter.
Kathy and I had smiled, half-embarrassed, as Mummy pulled one of the sandwiches apart, not caring who saw or overheard her, shaking her head at the scrape of butter, the soggy slivers of cucumber clinging to the top slice, the‘mean little strips of pink ham’.
‘That wouldn’t have cost a fraction of the price to make. Don’t leave a tip, they’ve made enough money out of you already,’ she said, pressing the triangles of bread back together again and tossing it back onto the plate.‘They saw you coming.’
I laughed nervously, delighted at her outspokenness, but the loudness of my laughter made up for how suddenly embarrassed I was in case the waiter overheard her, and then for how ashamed I was of myself for seeing her differently in this setting. I hoped the waiter hadn’t noticed the chipped nail varnish or the yellow nicotine stains on her fingers, or the dull frizz of her outgrown perm, rusty at the ends, or the quality of her clothes—all of which I was seeing for the first time. I felt a blush splash across my face and lowered my eyes, feeling disloyal, hoping she hadn’t guessed what I was thinking.
Whenever Kathy and Brendan came over they were impressed with all the changes in me, but Mummy seemed uncomfortable with them. Although I couldn’t have put words to it then, I was beginning to see that what all this time away at school was teaching me most was the difference between Mummy and Kathy, and to be ashamed of the way I used to live. I was sitting between worlds, my elocution lessons and privileged schooling turning me into someone different.
I watched Kathy dab her lips with her napkin and the waiter smile flirtatiously with her as he passed. Mummy patted her double chins saying, ‘Well, when you get to my age…’ and Kathy and I smiled and exchanged a look which I wasn’t certain I understood, or meant.
‘I haven’t got time for all the lotions and potions like my sister,’ Mummy said, winking at me, and half-memories of the times she used to say that to me after all the arguments came up like slow air bubbles through mud. I forced a smile and told Mummy she looked great. I couldn’t look in Kathy’s direction, and suddenly her voice annoyed me. I looked down at their cigarette butts in the ashtray, reminding myself that I preferred Mummy’s, smeared with her orangey-pink lipstick. The pain, like a lump of ice, stuck in my chest.
Chapter 30
Then I eventually found out who my father was I was fourteen years old. I was sitting cross-legged on a bed opposite Kathy in the Savoy hotel, and had been guessing. Until then I’d been told me that my father was dead, but as I got older I wanted more information than that, wanted to piece my identity together. And for some reason she finally decided to tell me the truth.
She told me he wasn’t dead, but that she had been waiting until I was old enough to understand.
‘He wants to meet you,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘He’ll be joining us on Monday,’ she said.
Thoughts were going through my mind so quickly I could hardly process them. I suppressed a nervous laugh and stared at her, trying to guess her feelings. But when it came to emotions, Kathy had always been as unfathomable as I was; I had no idea what she was thinking. I watched her place her cup back on its saucer, and dab her lips with the corner of the linen napkin spread across her lap. Everything she did seemed to be for an audience, a bit unnatural—‘all show’, I heard my uncle’s voice say loudly in my head. I blinked it away, but his words brought back memories my mind had been trying to bury for years, and particularly of all those times he had wanted to know who my father was.
She wasn’t pushing me for a response and I still didn’t have one. I just felt flat. Dozens of questions came into my mind, but none would settle. I couldn’t believe that my father was alive and I was finally going to find out who he was.
‘He’ll join us on Monday,’ she’d said, saying it in a way that made us sound like a family: a mother and daughter waiting for Daddy to arrive home for supper.
She wouldn’t tell me who he was, though, or anything else about him. She said they had decided to wait until Monday, to tell me together. It felt like they were almost treating it as a game; him letting her break the news first, expecting me to wait a whole weekend until we went to Heathrow to meet him, saying she’d promised him she wouldn’t tell.
‘We agreed,’ she said, leaning back on the bed on her elbows and smiling warmly. I couldn’t bear the suspense or understand the reason for it. One bombshell was enough. I wanted to know who my father was before he arrived so I could prepare a reaction. Kathy was evidently enjoying the game of happy families she was playing. She seemed to relax and her face lit up in a way I hadn’t seen before. We were suddenly a family unit and she looked like the cat who had finally got the cream.
I soon fell into the new role, becoming intrigued and more and more excited at the prospect of being part of someone’s family again—replacing Kathy in my mind with Mummy, of course. All evening I plied her with questions about him. It was fun for both of us for a while. I sat guessing alo
ud who he could be, becoming more and more outrageous with my suggestions and the questions I asked to narrow him down. When she told me that he was looking forward to meeting me at last I giggled nervously, feeling everything at once.
‘Is he?’ I asked, smearing Vaseline on my lips, and trying to show I wasn’t that concerned.
‘Of course. He loves you.’
It was hard to imagine being the focus of someone’s love all those years and not knowing about it.
I’d already wrestled some information from her: I knew he was Irish, and her strained expression when I asked told me that I had already met him on one of my visits. I tried to recall all the Irishmen I’d ever met, calling out half-remembered names or descriptions randomly, groaning into the pillow as I considered the awfulness of some of the possibilities. Kathy’s usual reserve around me fell away too, and her laughter seemed easy and genuine; the way she laughed with everyone else.
I decided to be more systematic, to work out who he was by a process of elimination. I started by ruling out Brendan.
‘It isn’t him, is it?’ I said.
It wasn’t really a question. I said it dismissing him, as my mind raced on searching my memory for other men it might have been. Brendan had already told me it wasn’t him anyhow. Driving alongside the canal on the way back to school at the start of the summer term the year before, I’d asked him out of the blue if he was my father. I didn’t dare look at him, staring out at the long chain of barges roped to the sides of the canal as we passed.
When he said that he wasn’t I blushed, remembering all the times as a little girl that I had secretly wanted it to be him. Anyway, if it had been Brendan, Mummy would have known. Eventually she would have given in and told my uncle during all those years he was convinced it was Brendan, rather than go through all those arguments, all that drunken rage and violence. Much as she loved her younger sister, and would have wanted to keep her secrets and protect her, she wouldn’t have gone through all that if she could simply have told him who the father was. Also, she was my mother by then and no mother would have let her child endure all that name-calling and fighting. It would have broken her heart to watch her child suffering like that. She would have screamed it out as loudly as she could. Eventually.
I saw Kathy’s face flood with colour when I said that it wasn’t Brendan. Although there was hardly any change of expression and her eyes were downcast, she was clearly agitated, unconsciously twirling the ring on her finger. Waves of panic rolled through me as I watched the flush work its way up her neck and spread across her face, and she must have seen the colour drain from mine. I felt my whole past rearrange itself in a flash.
‘It’s not…is it?’ I asked, desperate for the answer to be no, but reading a yes from her face even before she finally nodded.
A stampede of memories came into my head: twelve years of fists and screaming and all-night arguments. A whole childhood of Mummy answering in a thousand ways that‘Honest to God…I swear on my father’s life,’ she didn’t know who Kathy’s‘fancy-man’ was,‘but I know for a fact that it’s not Brendan Walsh.’
As the years had gone by, and I came to like Brendan more and more, I felt disappointed that it wasn’t him. He was always so different from the other men in our lives: gentle and kind and sensitive. But he was always Mummy’s weapon of last resort too. She had threatened my uncle so many times that Brendan was involved in the IRA (though of course he wasn’t), and that one phone call from her‘was all it would take’.
‘All it would take for what?’ my uncle would scream. Then the insults and obscenities he kept exclusively for Brendan would begin, the special lexicon of hate he reserved for him unleashed like furies around our front room.
‘Why are you lying for them?’ he’d roar.‘Tell me who the father is, or their bastard is out,’ he’d say, leaping over to punch me for crying. And all the time it had been Brendan.
‘Did Mummy know?’ I finally asked, getting it out at last.
She looked almost surprised by the question. She still had no idea exactly how much trouble she had caused by flitting in and out of our house and our lives over the years.
‘Yes,’ she said, quietly, but with no real sense of apology.‘Mummy always knew.’
I couldn’t have said whether I felt angry or shocked or betrayed. Nothing made sense. Not anything. Why wouldn’t Mummy have told my uncle if she knew? Kathy couldn’t have realised how important it was for me to know whether Mummy had known. The thought that Kathy and Brendan had been having an affair all the time, betraying his wife and daughters, shocked and appalled me. I had truly but naively chosen to believe over the years that they were just good friends—him helping her out because she never had anyone else. I even felt guilty, that I was somehow implicated in the whole deception now. But the fact that Mummy knew who my father was all along, yet kept her sister’s secret for her all those years, stunned me.
I couldn’t speak, no words came out. I just broke down in floods of tears. Over and over I heard Kathy asking me what was wrong and why I was crying, and please could I tell her what I was thinking—but her voice came from somewhere far away and I couldn’t respond. I wanted to, and I wanted to stop crying. I was nauseous and exhausted from it; my head was pounding but inside it was numb. All I could think was what Mummy had been put through all those years because of me being there, just because they forced her to lie about Brendan in order to protect themselves. They could have helped her so much by telling my uncle the truth.
Kathy came and sat on the edge of the bed and put her arm across my shoulders. I tensed under her touch, feeling her rings through the thin wool of my sweater as she slowly rubbed my back. I had longed for somebody’s touch all those years but I shrugged her away and cradled my head in my hands. I had the kind of headache I’d had as a child, like all the bones of my skull were being crushed, my brain squeezed to the size and tightness of a fist.
She crossed to the bathroom. I heard the screech of the taps and water gushing into the hand basin and then the swish of her skirt coming back towards me.‘Here,’ she said, taking my hand and lifting it up to a cold, wet flannel. Her touch was so light.‘I wish you would tell me what you’re thinking…This is difficult for me…Is it good, or bad? Just nod.’
I wanted to tell her all the things we’d gone through with my uncle because they wouldn’t tell him who my father was, but I couldn’t. In my head I heard Mummy say,‘Don’t tell her, I don’t want them looking down on me.’ So I didn’t, because I didn’t want that either.
Kathy lit another cigarette and tried to phone Brendan.‘You’re frightening me,’ she said.‘I don’t know what you might do.’
I went and locked myself in the bathroom. When I came out several hours later I felt so light-headed and weak that I could hardly walk to the bed. Even the blankets touching my head hurt. Kathy was already curled in the other bed next to me with the lights off and her back turned. Once I was in bed she told me in a small, shaky voice that she had phoned Brendan and he would be coming over the following morning now instead. She was scared of being alone with me; but it was me who was most scared. Why couldn’t they see that?
Chapter 31
The next day we went to Heathrow to meet him. I hadn’t wanted to go but Kathy insisted. I trailed reluctantly through the airport behind her, feeling tense and nauseous and ashamed of them both.
Brendan hardly changed over the years. He came through Arrivals with his long, loose stride, wearing his winter coat open over his pinstriped suit and swinging his overnight bag. He looked the same as I remember him walking along the landing of our flats all those years ago, tall and athletic. But this time he was grinning sheepishly, making him look more boyish than ever. My eyes welled up again and I wanted to run in the opposite direction. I felt so deceived by them both.
I also felt a bit disappointed to find out that my father was‘just’ Brendan, having fantasised about who else it might have been most of my life. He walked over to say hello,
putting out his hand to touch mine, but I shoved both hands into the pockets of my duffle coat and looked away. There was a long, awkward silence, the three of us just standing there as around us‘normal’ families talked and laughed and flung their arms around each other. He gave Kathy a peck on the cheek for the first time ever in front of me and I turned away, embarrassed in case anyone knew they were having an affair. I felt like I was intruding on something now; I felt even more shut out.
Brendan started writing me long letters at school to win me around, one every fortnight. I pushed them down under the waistband of my skirt and read them upstairs in my room later, humiliated in case any of my friends saw them. The letters explained how they had met and everything that had happened, how much they had tried to stay apart and how much they both cared for me.
They stayed with me together more often after that, keen to explain things to me and to give me a bit of‘proper’ family life now I knew Brendan was my real father. It seemed a relief to both of them to talk about their affair with me. And knowing that I was one of the few people they could talk to about it made me feel valued in a strange way, and in some ways it brought us closer—although, as a teenager, I was still ashamed of them for it, especially since I knew Brendan’s wife and children.
They’d still arrive at hotels and leave a few days apart so they weren’t seen on the same flights. And Kathy would still hide in the bathroom when room service arrived so they weren’t seen in the room together in case the waiter or waitress was from Ireland and somehow knew them. But at least now I understood why.
‘It was true love. We tried to stay apart, but sometimes when a love like that comes along…’ Kathy said defensively, but almost dreamily, sitting prim and upright on the edge of the bed, picking at her room service meal as Brendan admired her every move. She was telling him more than me, both of them animated now that I knew who he was, unused to having anyone to tell their secret love to and enjoying having an audience for it.
