by J. L. Merrow
Shame we weren’t actually speaking to each other at the mo.
I felt . . . I dunno. Lost, I suppose, which, given my well-known talent for finding things, should have been bloody hilarious.
I wasn’t really appreciating the joke right now.
I called off the afternoon’s job, then wished I hadn’t. It left me wandering around the house feeling like I ought to have stuff to do, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I mean, the cats had been fed probably a bit more than the vet would approve of and even Arthur was starting to get seriously hacked off with me stroking him all the time. Plus, I’d run out of laundry (don’t think about Phil’s stuff at the bottom of the basket, just don’t) and cleaned out the fridge.
Yeah, there was plenty of paperwork to catch up on, but . . . I just couldn’t. I switched on the telly, hoping to find some sport to pass the time, but all the BBC were showing was women’s gymnastics, and I didn’t think I was really their target audience.
The house felt empty. Too big and too small at the same time, somehow. I couldn’t stay there.
It was like I didn’t know who anyone was anymore. Including me. If Phil wasn’t who I thought he was, if Harry wasn’t . . .
I just wanted something I could be certain about.
Failing that, I went round to Mum and Dad’s.
They still lived in the house I’d grown up in—well, since I was seven or eight, when we’d moved from London. Much to my then-teenage sister’s disgust, as she’d had to leave behind all her mates and her boyfriend, who’d promptly sought consolation with her former best friend. Not that she was still bitter about it, or anything. Well, that was what she said, but then, why make a point of telling me a few months ago about how she’d blamed me at the time?
I mean, seriously, if she wanted to blame someone, why not blame the bastard who murdered a little girl and then hid her body in the park for yours truly to come wandering across? Or blame Mum for deciding the city wasn’t a safe place to live anymore.
So anyway, we’d moved to St. Albans, which was far enough out of London to feel totally separate, but still near enough for Dad to get in to work on the trains for the last few years he had to go before retirement. I’d settled in all right, as far as I could remember—primary school age kids usually do, I suppose. It was Cherry and Richard who found it hard moving away from all their mates. If Mum and Dad had the same problem, I was too young to notice—and in any case, Mum chummed up pretty quick with Auntie Lol next door.
Funny that. If they’d never met—if we’d never moved, even—would I ever have found out the truth about myself? Or would I have died thinking Dad was, well, my dad?
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It was hard not to be mad at Mum for keeping something so bloody important from me—but then again, if I’d never found out, would I be feeling so . . . Shit. I wasn’t sure how I felt.
Lost, I supposed.
Bugger it. I got out my key and opened the door.
After wandering into the living room and calling out “Anyone home?” umpteen times and getting no answer, I had a look round the house. Just in case Dad’s hearing had finally gone completely and Mum was, I dunno, upstairs in the bedroom with the door shut. And The Archers on full blast.
There was no one around. It was like a dry-land version of the Marie Celeste. Only the dust bunnies in my old bedroom gave me a cheerful wave when I opened the door. It was always weird, seeing the room without all my stuff in it, even after all this time. Like it was a hotel room I’d stayed in once. Mum wasn’t one for keeping shrines to departed children—every time one of us moved out, it was all hands on deck for a scurry of redecoration and pointed threats that if we didn’t take our junk with us it was going in the skip.
Which I’d never fully understood, with them having all this space here they never actually used. They spent more time in the conservatory than they did upstairs, during the day at least . . . It finally dawned on me. A hot summer’s day like today? They wouldn’t be in the house.
I ran downstairs again and headed into the garden, and there they were, installed comfortably on lawn chairs with faded flowery cushions, sunhats firmly wedged on heads. The glare from Dad’s pale summer trousers nearly blinded me. Mum was shelling broad beans into a colander. It was like I’d walked into a time warp, or a museum exhibit of the 1950s suburban family. I half expected someone to start talking about the coronation, or how those new-fangled televisions would never catch on.
“Oh, hello, Tom,” Mum said, looking up from her vegetables. Dad didn’t react, and a closer look confirmed my suspicion he’d nodded off under his Panama. “We weren’t expecting you today.”
Cheers, Mum. Way to make me feel welcome. “Yeah, I just thought I’d pop round.”
“Well, it’s always nice to see you. Gerald,” she said in a louder voice, “Tom’s here. Gerald.”
As if in answer, Dad gave an exceptionally loud snore, and then he woke up with a start. “What? Speak up, dear. Oh, Tom. We weren’t expecting you today.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that. Thought I’d pop round. You all right?”
“Fine, fine. Did you hear about that business in Brock’s Hollow? They found a body in the pub. Terrible. Still, I hear he wasn’t a local.”
I s’pose it was the same sort of thing as newsreaders making a point of telling us how many casualties in some far-flung disaster were British, like nobody gave a monkey’s about the rest, but it still sounded a bit harsh.
“Yeah.” I grabbed a spare folding chair from the conservatory, wrestled it open, and sat down. “Bad news for Harry—she’s the landlady. Mate of mine. Not good for business, this.”
And no, I wasn’t planning on mentioning I’d found the body, and luckily it hadn’t made the news reports either. Mum moved out here to get away from thoughts of me finding dead bodies. I didn’t want to remind her about all that sort of stuff.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mum said with a sniff. “She’ll probably get all sorts up there now. Gothic punks and whatnot. People are terribly ghoulish these days.”
Dad perked up. “There’s a pub in St. Albans that does ghost tours. She could try that.”
Cheers, Dad. It was bad enough having the memory of Grant Carey’s mortal remains stuck in my head. The last thing I needed when I went up the Dyke for a relaxing pint was his unquiet bloody spirit haunting the pumps. “Aren’t the ghosts in the White Hart centuries old? I don’t reckon it’s quite the same if they’ve only just died. Bit too close for comfort and all that.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mum offered, probably so she could get away from all this morbid stuff.
“I’ll make it,” I said, jumping up from my chair and almost knocking it over. “Dad? You on for a cup of tea?”
“Oh, yes. Lovely.” He closed his eyes.
I legged it back to the kitchen and put the kettle on. They’d had new kitchen cupboards put in since I’d left home, but since they were identical to the old ones except for the door fronts, I had no problem finding stuff. Even managed to dig out a tin with a nice fresh batch of tea loaf. Whistling, I buttered a few slices and bunged them on a plate, then got a tray and loaded it up with mugs and plates.
Mum had finished shelling the beans by the time I got back out there with the provisions. Dad was asleep—at least, until Mum nudged him. “Gerald? Tea.”
“What? Oh yes. Lovely.” He took his mug, raised it as if he was about to make a toast, then bent down to put it carefully on the grass without tasting it. And closed his eyes again.
“Hope you weren’t saving the cake for anything,” I said, offering Mum a slice.
“Oh, I can always make another one,” she said, leaving me not sure if I should be feeling guilty or not.
Still, I knew what would make me feel better. A nice slice of cake. I took the biggest piece and tucked in. It was pretty good. “You been busy?” I asked.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. No, not really. Well, there’s always so much to do i
n the garden. It’s been getting into a terrible state.”
I gazed around me at the pristine flowerbeds and the roses in their regimented rows. “Looks all right to me.”
“Everything’s been growing like wildfire, the weather we’ve been having. The buddleia’s getting completely out of hand.”
“That’s the one with the butterflies? Looks fine to me.”
“It needs cutting back. And we’ve got honeysuckle down the back that’s getting all over everything.”
“Well, if you need a hand . . .”
Mum gave me a look. “You always seem so busy lately.”
I sighed, thinking of just who I’d been busy with. Lately.
Should have remembered Mum was sharp as a pair of secateurs when it came to stuff like that. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Course,” I said automatically, with a big smile to show I meant it.
Mum didn’t look convinced. “You don’t usually just come round for an afternoon visit.” She frowned slightly. “I suppose your, er, Phil is working?”
“Er, yeah. Busy lad, he is.” Not that I actually had a bloody clue what Phil was doing right now, but it seemed like a fair bet.
“I suppose that’s something.”
I stood up. “Mum, what are those flowers down the end of the garden? Those blue ones.”
“Those? Nigella. Love-in-a-mist.”
“Want to show them to me?” I sent a significant glance at Dad, who had his mouth open and certainly seemed to be asleep, but I wasn’t willing to chance it.
Mum looked unhappy about it, but she stood up, and we wandered down past the roses towards the flowerbed at the bottom of the garden.
I took a deep breath. “Mum, I need to talk to you. About my real dad.”
Mum frowned at the flowerbeds. “I’m going to have to talk to Gerald about these slugs. We’ll need to put more pellets down.”
“Mum. Please? I need to know.”
She sighed. “It was all so long ago.”
I tried to smile at her. “Yeah, I know. Thirty years this week. Well, plus nine months, I s’pose.”
“Have you made any plans for your birthday? We’d be very happy to have you round here—”
“Mum.”
She sighed. “I didn’t set out to have an affair, you know.”
“Course not,” I said loyally. “Hey, you want to sit down?”
There was a wooden bench at the end of the lawn that rarely got used, since it was in the shade of the apple tree in the afternoons. I brushed off a few old leaves and bits of moss, and we sat, Mum smoothing her skirt primly over her knees.
“So how did it happen?” I encouraged her after a short silence.
Mum stared back up the garden. I wasn’t sure if she was seeing Dad, the house, or something else entirely. “I know it doesn’t excuse it, but I was so lonely in those days. Richard and Cherry weren’t little children—Richard was practically a teenager. They had their own friends, they took themselves to school . . . They didn’t seem to need me anymore. And your father—” Mum stumbled a bit on the word “—Gerald, I mean, just seemed to live for his work.”
It was a bit hard to imagine. He’d never seemed that focussed on his career when I’d been old enough to remember. More like just marking time until retirement.
“How did you meet him? Mike, I mean.” God, it’d better not be some cheesy porno setup—something goes wrong in the house, bloke comes round to see to it, ends up seeing to the missus.
“He came round with some letters that had been wrongly delivered. You see, he lived at number forty-four Stoneyhill Road, which I suppose looks a little like number forty-four Stonecroft Gardens.” That’d been the house we’d lived in, in Edgware, back when I was born. “But really, there was no excuse for the post office to get it so wrong.”
“Yeah? Nice of him to bring ’em round in person.” I’d occasionally had the wrong mail delivered to mine, but I’d usually just bunged it back in a post box with the words Delivered to wrong house scrawled across.
Mum sort of smiled, in a not-very-happy, faraway sort of way. “It was the name, I think. Paretski. There weren’t nearly so many Polish people in the country back then, because it was still behind the Iron Curtain in those days, so he thought it was a funny coincidence he’d got our post. And I suppose he’d have been glad to get to know some fellow expatriates.”
“Hang about,” I said slowly as the little wheels in my head turned and the tumblers clicked into place so bloody loud I was surprised Mum didn’t hiss at me to pipe down, I’d wake Dad. “You mean to tell me . . . all those bloody times I’ve told people I’m not Polish—”
“But you’re not. You’re British.” Mum took a deep breath and glanced up the lawn at Dad, snoring with his mouth open like a geriatric Venus flytrap. “But yes, he . . . Your father was from Poland. Mike Novak was his name. Mike was short for Mikolaj.”
It was like the continental divide had just opened up under my size nines. I was Polish. Well, half Polish. And all I knew about Poland was they were keen on solidarity and had a consonant fetish. “Wait a minute . . . Was? Is he, well . . .” Pushing up daisies? Did they even have them in Poland?
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. We didn’t keep in touch, not after . . .” She sighed. “You were just a baby. You didn’t know any different, but I couldn’t take Richard and Cherry away from their father. And I couldn’t leave them.”
Bloody hell. This Mike had asked Mum to run off with him? And me? I gazed out at the neatly pruned rose bushes and closely mown lawn, and tried to imagine what my life might have been like—no big brother and sister too busy with exams and teenage lives to be anything but annoyed by a much younger kid; no amiably distant Dad who’d always seemed twice as old as my mates’ dads. Had Mike been younger? Much younger? Another thought struck. “He wasn’t a plumber, was he?”
Mum gave me a weird look. “No. He worked in a restaurant. As a sous chef.” She blushed beetroot red. “He cooked a meal for me once. It was very nice. A bit, well, fussy. But nice.”
Huh. A chef. I supposed working the antisocial hours made it handy for carrying on with women whose husbands weren’t around during office hours. “What, um, what kind of restaurant was it?” Mum frowned, and I carried on hastily. “I mean, I didn’t reckon Polish cuisine had really caught on around here back then.” Or now, come to that. Funny, really. Every neighbourhood seemed to have its own Polski Sklep these days flogging imported groceries to the expats, but I could count the number of times I’d passed a Polish restaurant in Hertfordshire on the fingers of, well, one finger.
“They just called it Baltic.” Mum shrugged. “It wasn’t really my kind of thing.”
No, but the chef was, I didn’t say. God. All the what-ifs and might-have-beens were starting to give me a headache.
“Did I ever meet him?”
Mum looked even less happy. “Only once. It was an accident. I took you out in your pram, and we just bumped into each other.”
I wanted to ask where she’d taken me, and how much of an accident it’d been—on either of their parts. I mean, shit, if I’d had a kid, I’d want to at least see it once. Actually, that was bollocks. I couldn’t imagine having a kid and not wanting to be involved. It hurt that Mike hadn’t felt the same way.
It hurt even more, knowing he’d met me and still decided not to bother.
I mean, Christ, I could understand him rejecting me now. But kids are cute, for fuck’s sake. Even the ugly ones, and I’d seen pictures of me as a baby. I hadn’t been that hideous.
“Things were different in those days,” Mum said. I gave her a sharp look, wondering if the psychic abilities had come from her side of the family after all.
“What was he like?”
Mum went a bit pink. “He was nice. Very easy to talk to.”
Yeah, and apparently not that difficult to do other stuff with either. And ye gods, I did not want to be thinking about that sort of thing in connection with my
mum.
“He had a lovely smile,” Mum went on. “You look a lot like him.”
I knew. I’d seen the pictures and had a certain private investigator point out all the physical similarities. “How old was he?”
Mum went a lot pink. “In his thirties when I knew him.” Whereas she’d been in her midforties, having the classic midlife crisis fling. Maybe that was another reason she hadn’t been able to view him as a serious relationship prospect.
Still . . . thirties wasn’t so young you’d expect the bloke to have panicked on finding out he was going to be a dad. I mean, it’s not nice when any man runs out on a woman he’s got up the duff, but at least, if the bloke’s in his teens or early twenties, you can sort of understand it. When you’ve not really grown-up yet yourself, the prospect of having kids of your own must be bloody terrifying.
But thirties . . . He might have been thinking about that sort of stuff anyway. “He didn’t have a family already, did he?” I asked.
“No—well, you know. Relatives in Poland. But he wasn’t married. Or, well, with anyone. He said it was hard to meet people, working the hours he did.”
Apart, of course, from lonely housewives. “And he never got in touch again? You know, to see how I was doing and all that?”
“Mike agreed it would be best if he didn’t.”
I gave her a sharp look. “You didn’t want him hanging around? Even though he was my real dad?”
Mum wouldn’t meet my eye. “Children need stability.”
And I guessed she’d wanted Dad—Gerald—whatever the hell I was supposed to call him now—to forgive and forget about the affair, and it’d have been a bit hard with the other party popping up every weekend to take me to McDonald’s or whatever noncustodial fathers did with their kids in those days.
Well, maybe not McDonald’s, with him being a chef and all. Maybe he’d have shown me where he worked, got me helping him out in the kitchen . . . Nah, restaurant kitchens are manic places where tempers run hotter than the ovens. Mum wouldn’t have been chuffed if I’d come home talking like Gordon effing Ramsay. Or with third-degree burns from accidentally getting myself flambéed.
