Twin Truths

by Shelan Rodger

  I spend every free moment that I have in the tiny internet café that sits, incongruously, in a small side street off the town square. Like a teenager swotting too late, but eagerly, for an exam, I have surfed through a rainbow of different vocations, hunting out job vacancies and defining the skill sets they need. I jot down the bare bones of my life in preparation for the CV I will compose:

  Oxford graduate

  Bookshop manager (self-taught)

  English language teacher (self-taught)

  Waitress (self-taught)

  Sister (self-taught)

  Daughter (self-taught)

  And this is where I hit the problem. I have one tiny qualification and masses of irrelevant experience. Every ad I see sounds perfect until I get to the part which says, ‘The successful candidate will have a track record in . . .’ No matter, I bite my lip and think of Nick. We live in the age of transferable skills, he says, so I draw up a menu of skills that I think I can wing:

  Adaptability (I am still here!)

  Ability to multi-task (I have been two different people at once!)

  Ability to work to deadlines (there is only so long a customer will wait for his beer!)

  Ability to use initiative (I found my father!)

  Creativity (ask Ignacio!)

  Patience (I am Jenny’s sister!)

  Decisiveness (Argentina, Greece)

  Determination (I am still alive)

  Reliability (mmm . . .)

  I try another tack. I draw up a list of questions:

  What do I enjoy/hate doing?

  What am I good/bad at?

  What do people appreciate/dislike about me?

  Where can I visualise/not visualise myself working? (office/school/home etc)

  How important is money/free time?

  What/who do I care about?

  What have I found challenging/dull in my life so far?

  How do I see myself in ten years’ time?

  The answers are not forthcoming. No matter, I bite my lip again and I work at it. When I get really fed up, I email Nick and send him a tick-box questionnaire about me.

  What do you think I am most suited to?

  Primary school teacher

  Editor

  Novelist

  Conference organiser

  Fundraiser

  Branding consultant

  Or rank the following as if they were my innermost desires:

  To influence people

  To change the world

  To work with animals

  To use my imagination

  To be rich and famous

  He plays the game, and we tap back into something we had in Argentina. (One day I will tell him about the game I wanted to play with Henry and Sally after his departure.) Usually, now, when I arrive at the internet café, there is an email waiting for me. Sometimes it is disconcerting. Sometimes it is as if he is writing to Jenny. Sometimes it is as if I am teaching him about who I am, testing to see how he responds. Sometimes it is as if I am learning who I am. Maybe, if I am lucky, he will give me a logo!

  Then I receive an email that slows something inside me. I do a mental double take as I realise who it is from. The pebble I threw in the sea.

  My dear Pippa,

  Your card was forwarded to my address in Thame, near Oxford. I moved here when Frank and I split up.

  It was so good to hear from you after all this time. I have never stopped wondering how you are. I know we have had our differences in the past, sweetheart, but there is a lot of water under the bridge. I have changed, too.

  You speak of your father and I don’t know what to say. You are right, he was not a bad man and I wish things had turned out differently. I believe we could have been happy as a family, and I have never understood what actually made him leave.

  But this is too much, my sweetheart, to write about. If you want us to meet up that would make me very happy, but I will wait until you are ready. I created enough pressure for you as a child. I know it can’t have been easy living with an alcoholic for a mother and I won’t put any pressure on you now. It is enough that I have my daughter back in my life.

  Love, Mother

  Her words are an uncanny echo of my own thoughts about my father. I do not recognise the mother of my childhood in these lines. Has she really left the alcohol behind? Has she really changed? What made her and Frank finally split up? Did the truth dawn through the drink in the end? Does she really not know why Father left?

  I feel the same lame tide again, wanting to reach out and wash away the scars, but then another pebble slips into the sea. Does she really care that much? What about Jenny? If she really cares, how can she say nothing?

  I struggle with ghosts in my heart and delay my reply. This deadline can wait.

  Chapter 64

  But another deadline is approaching. Andreas and Carla sat me down yesterday and told me tenderly that there would be no more work for me beyond mid-October. Carla asked me whether I would go home to England, or to Athens to be with my sweetheart. Bless her, where had she learnt the word sweetheart? In a reckless moment, I told them that it is my father that I go to see; my father, who is a Greek lawyer in Athens. Andreas smiled with a sort of misplaced pride, but his wife’s eyes clouded. I felt a sudden urge, with my confession in the open, to bring my father here. As if I needed someone to witness us together, as if I was afraid of waking up one day to find I had imagined him. I don’t ask to step into his world or change his life, but I wanted to bring him into mine, just once before I leave. I tried to explain to the homely couple before me that my father and I have been reunited after a long separation and that we are still getting to know each other. I told them it would mean a lot to me to invite him here and for him to meet the couple who have been so good to me. Carla looked worried, but Andreas leant forward, touching her elbow to reassure her. But of course he must come, he said. And so I have emailed my father and am awaiting his reply.

  There are five emails for me the following day in the internet café. Two sender addresses I recognise: my father’s and Nick’s. The others will no doubt be just more job rejections. I could wallpaper any bedroom I could afford to rent with them. My father’s is brief and empties my stomach. ‘Yes, I will come.’ I love the stark economy of the way he uses English, and I wish I knew Greek well enough to know whether he is the same in his own language. I am sure he is.

  High and immune to the prospect of rejection, I flit next to the three unknown senders, leaving Nick’s email till last, like the prize mouthful of food you save until you have finished all your vegetables. The first is a confirmation of my ticket purchase. The second and third are the predicted rejections. Oh well, something will show up . . . Nick’s email is a test.

  Dear Charles,

  (Every email he has sent has teased me with a different name.)

  This name suits you better than Pippa, which should be kept for dolls and pet parrots. Charles, on the other hand, stands for everything you could possibly want in a good mate and because I know you well enough to know that pride will stop you asking for help, and I’m guessing you have bugger-all to fall back on in your English bank account and probably haven’t quite amassed a fortune under your Greek mattress, I am going to make you a proposition I won’t let you refuse.

  I have a spare room, no strings attached, which you can use as a base for as long as you want. You haven’t seen my flat. It’s not a bad little place. It’s on the right side of the river (Highgate) and the Essex flats are close enough for a weekend away that will remind you (nearly) of Patagonia. So how about it, Pips?

  Oh, and in case you’re wondering about Mel and how she will take it, there’s no need. She went off in search of a nineties man with no hang-ups about commitment.

  I remain, truly yours,

  Nick

  What is it in me that resists his generosity? How does he know I will try and resist it? Why not, after all? This is not like moving into Ignacio’s apartment. Nick and I are mates. Why sh
ouldn’t I call on his friendship? What the hell am I going to do until I can get a job and some money together anyway? OK, Nick, I will take you up on your offer. I write just four words. ‘Yes, I will come.’ What will he make of that? I smile as I click ‘send’.

  Chapter 65

  The sun is low in an orange sky. Heather stretches, blurred, into distant hills, and below us now is the sea, a dark desert in the shadow of sunset. We have walked off our long lunch and the strain of well- meant small talk. My taverna owners were kind, and the whole family lunched together to celebrate my father’s presence. The atmosphere was cheerful, my father was bright and grateful, and yet there was something slippery under the surface of our conversation.

  A breeze seems to rise up from the sea and rushes to meet us as we move with quickening steps back to the town before the light fails. My father is to stay overnight in a hostel in the town centre and we have the whole evening ahead of us still. I battle with the rat at my feet, conscious that this may be our last meeting for a long time and yet, aware that this is a beginning not an end, I am torn between broaching the subject of Mother and letting it go.

  Later, we are sitting in a taverna, picking lazily at olives and a menu of fragmented conversation. There are moments when the worried look returns to my father’s face and I can feel a niggling tension at the back of my neck.

  ‘Will you come and visit me in England?’ I ask. I need to show that this is not a goodbye. There is no need for it to be a goodbye, is there?

  ‘It is a long time since I went to England,’ he answers – or doesn’t.

  This is not like him. This is too political.

  ‘Have you been back since you left Mother?’ A momentary flash of resentment is enough to release the words.

  ‘No,’ he pauses. ‘No, I have not.’ He is back to simplicity and directness again. Thank God for that.

  ‘You probably wouldn’t recognise it,’ I say, becoming the politician myself now. ‘Did you like living there?’

  ‘At first it was difficult,’ he laughs. ’You English are difficult at first! I didn’t know what anyone thought about me. Then people started making jokes about me to my face and I learnt that that was your English compliment – the way you say to a person that you like them and accept them!’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are a bit anal like that.’ I laugh to myself, thinking of Nick. Very anal – and yet that was exactly the kind of thing I missed when I lived in Argentina.

  ‘A bit anal?’

  ‘Forget it,’ I say, laughing and filling our glasses.

  ‘Ah, you see, you are English too!’

  ‘Why?’ I am mock-hurt.

  ‘When anything gets too difficult, even if it is emotional or just explanations, you say forget it and you bury your shovel in the sand.’

  ‘Head, not shovel!’

  ‘No matter, it all goes in the sand.’

  We are both laughing and the irony slips away unnoticed.

  ‘Next time you will meet my family. I promise you that. It was just this time, too quick for me. Do you understand that?’

  Your other family, I think, but yes, I do understand that. How could I not? It took me over a year to get to Iguazu Falls. It has taken me my lifetime so far to find him. But there will be a next time.

  ‘Yes, I do understand,’ I say, and suddenly that worried look is in his eyes again.

  ‘You are very honest, aren’t you?’

  I think about that. Am I? I can be. I can also be very dishonest. ‘I am, sometimes.’ That, at least, is true.

  ‘And do you hope people to be honest with you?’

  Hope, expect, want? I wonder what the word is in his own language. Do I?

  It didn’t happen. We will never speak about it again. It didn’t happen.

  Yes, I suppose I do. Why, what is he getting at? I feel for a second like a mouse with a cat, until I remember that my father is a lion who does not kill his prey. Whatever my mother had us believe, this man’s eyes cannot have changed that much with age. Can they? I nod but say nothing.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Know what?’ I feel like a nine-year-old child all of a sudden, playing for time. I look sideways for Jenny out of a habit that will never die.

  ‘Pippa.’ He pauses and I imagine an old set of balancing scales behind his frown. ‘I do not know what is the right thing to say or not to say in this situation. I never hoped to meet you.’

  Hoped, expected, wanted? My mind is going blank, I can feel it disappearing, becoming just a desert where words blow past without leaving any prints in the sand. But I do want to know. I have always wanted to know. More than Jenny. This is one secret that Pippa always wanted someone to tell.

  ‘Yes, Dad, I do want to know.’ It is the first time I have called him Dad. In my mind he is always ‘my father’, but it slips out of me, responding to the moment.

  He looks down then and up again with very still eyes. ‘Pippa, I am not your father.’

  What? It didn’t happen. We will never speak about it again. It didn’t happen. I am not your father. It didn’t happen. I am not your father. We will never speak about it again. See you Sunday. See you some day. It didn’t happen.

  ‘Pippa, my dear thing, don’t cry.’

  So I try to laugh. I laugh for all the times that Mother has cursed this man, for all the parts we have imagined for ourselves in the Greek myths we devoured as children, for all the lies I told Ignacio in my therapy.

  ‘Pippa, don’t laugh. I will tell you what happened.’

  Don’t laugh, don’t cry . . .

  ‘Go on then,’ I say, in a voice so distant it feels as if it comes from the sea. And so he tells me. He tells me that he did a law degree and went to London to improve his English. That he met my mother there and loved her with the force of youth. That they got married in a village in Crete where his parents lived and that theirs was a happy wedding, and my mother laughed a lot. He tells me that he gave up his country to live in England, and that he was ambitious and worked hard for his career and their lifestyle. Sometimes she no longer seemed happy and he fought harder for their happiness. They tried for children that didn’t come. He tells me that he is a man who cannot live in darkness, and that he wanted to protect her from disappointment. He decided to have himself tested to make sure there was nothing wrong with him.

  ‘I did not tell your mother about the test. I did not want to worry her, but when I discovered that I could not have children, I knew I would have to tell her. I delayed for days and then weeks. She seemed so easy to break, I was afraid to break her if I told her, and then one day I did not go to work and I told myself I am not a man to lie. I will tell her and we will move on. I came home determined to tell her that day, but when I opened my mouth, she rushed up to me and told me, “Darling, I am pregnant!” “Are you sure,” I asked her. “That cannot be. Are you sure?”’

  And it dawned on him that she might break him too. It dawned on him that she had slept with someone else. So he gave her the chance to tell him who the father really was. He gave her the chance to give them a chance by being honest. ‘Is there nothing you need to say? Are you sure?’

  He told me, ‘I could forgive her for being with another man. I could not forgive her for not telling me. I could not stay with a woman who was dishonest with me.’

  ‘And so you just got up and left?’

  ‘Yes, I “just” got up and left. That “just” took years to get over. I loved your mother, I only asked for truth.’

  What the fuck is ‘truth’, I think. ‘But what about your children? You have children now, don’t you?’ I fumble for flaws in his story.

  ‘They are not my children, Pippa. When I married again, ten years later, the woman I married was a widow with two sons.’

  ‘And Mother – why did you never tell her why you left? Does she know that you aren’t our father?’

  ‘Ah, Pippa, that I do not know. I told her that I could not trust her and that I needed to leave.�
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  I look at the man who was my father, the lion circling, and I think in Jenny’s language, oh well, he has his limits. We all have those and my mother broke them, simple as that, but it burns a hole in me to think this. What a waste. What appalling and unnecessary hurt my mother suffered for the sake of truth.

  The third conditional is biting again.

  If he had confronted her instead of walking away, maybe they could have got over the betrayal and stayed together, and if they had stayed together maybe Mother wouldn’t have become an alcoholic . . . and wouldn’t have met Frank . . . and . . . and maybe Jenny would still be alive . . .

  Then this man, this man of principle who is not my father, touches my elbow and brings me back into the now.

  ‘Pippa, I am sorry. I would like to be your father but I am not.’

  So, who is my father?

  ‘So, what now?’ And I feel like laughing, almost. That sounds like such a crass line. ‘Do we see each other again?’

  ‘I would like to, if you want to,’ he says. Simple. Black and white.

  She lied. He left. Do I want to?

  ‘Yes, I would like to.’ Grey, grey, grey, but yes, I would.

  Chapter 66

  Tomorrow I leave. Today I brace myself for a last swim. There are cold, dark currents, which tell of winter on its way. I walk in knee-deep and then dive straight in. The water is so cold it feels hot for the first few seconds. I swim and my body gets used to the temperature. I have the sea to myself and I savour it, the space of it, the depth of it, the sureness of its touch against my skin. A rat nibbles, helpless, at the water’s edge. Here, I am at peace. I wish there was a way to bottle this feeling to take away with me, like a perfume I can breathe in whenever I need it.