Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  She wasn’t having it. ‘You’re sixteen, Hannah. You’re still a child.’

  ‘I told you I was staying out.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to know where.’

  My father stood behind her, holding his tea. ‘Your mother’s right,’ he said. ‘You should tell her where you’re going.’

  ‘Oh, do me a favour,’ I said, annoyed at his interference, stomping upstairs to lie wide awake on my bed.

  ♦

  Since starting college, I had more free time in the day and was often home alone with my father. Since the incident at Coral’s, he was home more too, and the phone rang for him less and less, as though his cronies had finally realised how old he was, how frail his health. He’d lost something that night.

  At home, we were like tenants of the same building, occupying different rooms, rarely crossing paths. He still woke late, appearing in the kitchen at midday, barefoot in his dressing gown, making tea or rolling his first cigarette before his trip to Patel’s, the newsagent, for the newspaper. He spent his days in the sofa with Chloe on his lap, reading or watching snooker. He’d nap away the late afternoons, waking just before my mother came home to make himself look busy in the kitchen. Some days Charlie White came round to drink tea and do the crossword. Unlike most of the men my father knew, Charlie was a proper friend.

  On Tuesdays, my father could draw his meagre pension at the post office. He’d get up early on those days, returning via Patel’s with the paper and a pouch of tobacco, and he always played cards on a Tuesday night. A club in Gants Hill ran a kalooki game that cost £10 to enter. It might be his only night out in the week – a tenner of the pension was always reserved for the game.

  I had a job as a waitress at a pizza restaurant in Ilford, serving customers, refreshing the buffet’s dehydrated pizzas with a water spray and, when it was quiet, going out into the street wearing a bright shell suit, leafleting shoppers with discount vouchers. Despite such humiliation, I liked my job – the feeling of independence, going off to work, collecting my pay packet at the end of the week. My father would often pick me up from a night shift and we’d drive through Ilford, the roads quiet of traffic, past pubs at kicking-out time, people crowding the fluorescent-lit kebab shop. ‘Lend us a tenner, Han?’ he would say on the way home, his face looking hopeful.

  ‘I haven’t got a tenner, Dad.’

  ‘Oh come on, Han. I thought you were rich now you were working?’

  I’d be annoyed. ‘No, I’m not rich. Anyway, that’s not the point – it’s my money!’

  But often I’d dig out a note from my purse. I hated him asking, and the fact that I pitied him enough to give it.

  One day I came home early from college to a quiet house. I assumed he’d gone out. But from the hall, I heard him in the downstairs bathroom.

  ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ he was shouting. Then there was silence. Then he started again. ‘What am going to do? Oh God, oh God.’ Over and over again until his voice broke. I thought I could hear sobs.

  Quietly as I could, I tiptoed up the stairs to my room and shut the door.

  ♠

  Despite his weakened heart, my father continued to take Chloe for a daily walk up the road to the newsagent’s, where he would tie her up outside the shop, make his purchases, pass the time of the day with Mr Patel, retrieve the dog and walk home. Five minutes left alone and Chloe would be whining with anxiety, convinced she’d been abandoned.

  One day he forgot her. I was at home, engrossed in my essay on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying while he watched Wimbledon downstairs. My father loved any sport he could bet on – horses, snooker, boxing – but he also loved Wimbledon for its Englishness. Before Nan died, Wimbledon fortnight brought a temporary truce to Ashgrove Road, Nan’s prejudices put aside so she could watch the only television in the house, upstairs in our flat. She and my father forgot they hated each other, sat side by side, commenting on the players’ form, the quality of rallies, drinking endless cups of tea. Maybe it was because he was so engrossed in the tennis that he didn’t notice Chloe’s absence.

  ‘Where’s the dog?’ my mother asked, the moment she came in from work. ‘Hannah!’ she shouted upstairs. ‘Have you got Chloe up there?’

  ‘No!’ I called down.

  I watched my parents through my bedroom window, walking the length of the garden, calling for her, checking the hole in the fence which Chloe liked to wiggle her way through. My father stood on the lawn scratching his head. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Suddenly my mother turned and stalked into the house and he hurried in behind her. I came down the stairs as he was putting his shoes on.

  ‘Your father’s left the dog outside the paper shop,’ my mother told me, incredulous, standing over him. ‘He’s only just remembered. He’d lose his bloody head if it wasn’t screwed on. The same way he’s lost the car, not once, but three times, in as many years.’

  It was true: more than once in the last few years my father had forgotten where he’d parked the car, following nights of gambling. Once he’d even phoned the police to report it stolen before finding it parked on the street where he’d left it.

  My mother was still ranting as he left the house, rushing down the path and up the road to see if, by some miracle, Chloe was still waiting patiently at Patel’s, seven hours after being left there. Of course she wasn’t, and that evening he walked the streets as the sun went down, calling and calling for the dog, bent to his knees looking under cars, searching front gardens. He scoured the local park and knocked on our neighbours’ front doors to ask if anyone had seen her. It was past ten when he came in, sitting forlornly on the sofa, his head hung low. My mother had been phoning local animal rescue centres, but most were already closed.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Bet,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to her. Where can she be? Where’s poor Chloe? Can you imagine how scared she’ll be? Where can she be?’

  My mother was kinder. ‘Well, there’s not much we can do now,’ she said. ‘It’s late. We’ll have to go to bed. Not that we’ll sleep.’ She dragged deeply on her cigarette. ‘The dog will be having a nervous breakdown somewhere.’

  ‘No, I can’t go to bed,’ he said. ‘How could I go to bed? I’ll go back out in a minute. I’ll just have a sandwich, Bet, and go back out.’

  Then the phone rang and she answered. It was our vet, telling us he had Chloe. He described the day’s protracted chain of events: Chloe had been rescued from the newsagent by an old lady, who had given Chloe some food and rung the local vet. The vet had come by after work, collected Chloe and taken her to an animal rescue centre near his home. He hadn’t recognised her, but by coincidence, a nurse at the centre who used to work for him remembered her. The vet took the now-identified Chloe back to Ilford to check the records for our number. They were just round the corner – we could go and pick her up. My mother was laughing as she relayed this to my father, but he went silently to stand at our back door, a cigarette in his mouth. I watched him from the kitchen. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was crying.

  ♥

  ‘Couldn’t you leave him?’ I blurted out to my mother one night. She was in bed and I was sitting on the edge. My father was out somewhere. We were both rubbing Nivea cream into our hands.

  ‘Leave your dad?’ She stopped rubbing. I could see she was surprised. Then she laughed. ‘Don’t think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind!’ she said.

  I knew this conversation was strange territory. I don’t think I had any idea what I was asking. In the world of my friends, boyfriends were picked up and dropped with relative ease. I had no idea about the allegiances and obligations that might come with thirty years of marriage. I had no idea what it would be like to not have my father around. But my mum was still so young, and my father was such a burden on her. I wanted her to have a different sort of life. Another chance.

  ‘I couldn’t leave your dad, Hannah,’ she said, turning serious. ‘Where
would he go? How would he get by?’

  Who knows where he’d go, I thought. He probably wouldn’t get by. Part of me didn’t care. I was angry at him – for being old, for being ill and depressed, for losing the dog.

  ‘Do you still love him, then?’ I asked. The question was out before I could stop it.

  She looked sorry for me, like she was letting me down, and I realised in that moment that she would never leave. She’d made her bed and she’d lie in it. She didn’t want to be set free.

  ‘I do love him,’ she told me. ‘He’s a silly git, but I do.’

  ♣

  There was no doubting my father’s health was getting worse, but he was also a dreadful hypochondriac, convinced that any physical discomfort was the onset of life-threatening disease. He worried constantly about his health and was a regular at the doctor’s surgery, so much so that the receptionist knew his name and birthdate off by heart.

  My mother thought his anxiety was linked to his lifestyle. It was the instability of everything, she said later. Money, health. He never knew what was round the corner. But even after the scare with his heart, she didn’t take his ailments seriously and neither did I.

  ‘Help!’ he cried out from his bedroom one morning. It was late and I’d just woken up. My mother was at work. ‘Hannah?’ he said in a small voice, as though he could tell I was there on the landing.

  ‘What is it, Dad?’ I asked through the door.

  ‘Phone your mother. I’m very sick.’

  I opened the door of the dark room which smelt of sleep and sweat. He lay on the bed in his old dressing gown, sheets twisted around his bony legs, his head at an awkward angle on the pillow. His hands gripped his side of his mattress. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ he gasped. ‘Call me an ambulance.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Terrible pain. Terrible. Get your mother.’

  I phoned my mother at work. ‘He’s probably got indigestion,’ she said. ‘Make him a cup of tea and give him some Gaviscon. It’s in the bathroom cabinet.’

  I administered the Gaviscon to my father, two pink spoonfuls he sipped carefully, tears in his eyes. But an hour later he was still crying out, ‘Help me! Help me!’ writhing on the bed, kicking his feet. There was a slick of sweat across his brow.

  I phoned my mother again. ‘Oh bugger it!’ she declared. ‘Tell him I’ll be home in an hour.’

  I relayed this news to my father, who groaned. ‘I can’t bear the pain!’ he panted. I wondered if I should call an ambulance. His face was pale, his eyes were bulging. It was hot and fetid in his small room. I opened the window to get some air. ‘No light!’ he cried.

  Finally, my mother arrived home, took one look at him and dialled 999. The paramedics lifted him down the stairs on a stretcher, thrashing around and groaning. He was in hospital for a week, diagnosed with renal colic caused by kidney stones. The acute variety, which the doctor told us my father had, was considered to be more painful than a gunshot wound. Or surgery. Apparently it was more painful than childbirth.

  ♦

  Jason and I lasted nine months together, until one weekend I made up an excuse not to go to his house. Something had changed. I didn’t want to lie on his single bed drinking cider and stubbing my cigarettes out in empty pizza boxes. I wanted to get out into the world. Holly had tickets for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Barbican and she and Ella wanted to go to a club after. I told Jason I had to study.

  I surprised myself when I felt the same the next weekend, calling him from the payphone at college to say that I had to study again.

  ‘I’m not stupid!’ he told me.

  ‘Speak up,’ I said. I could hardly hear him in the busy hall.

  ‘I know what this is,’ he said loudly and slowly so I couldn’t miss a word. ‘Why can’t you just say it straight? We’re breaking up. Don’t bother to answer. I know. I’m going to come round and get my stuff.’ He hung up.

  I was shocked, but I didn’t phone back, suddenly realising he was right. I didn’t want him any more. I wondered if his ex-girlfriends had grown bored of the weekend routine, watching Jason wasting his wages on a bag of weed, a wrap of speed, still talking about his dreams, knowing they would come to nothing.

  When I came home that night, my mother was in the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel, looking concerned. After a shaky start, she had come to like Jason, preferring him to come to our house where she could keep an eye on us.

  ‘Jason’s been over, love,’ she said. ‘I think he’s taken his things.’

  My father hovered in the doorway, listening in. I had no idea what he thought of Jason – whenever he’d come over, my father would disappear into the back room. Upstairs, I looked around. Jason’s things had gone – his old guitar, a battered copy of Dark Side of the Moon, a pile of sci-fi novels I hadn’t read. There was a short note on my desk. I hadn’t seen his handwriting before. It was a mess. He’d misspelt beautiful. At the bottom, a PS: Are you sure you’re sure?

  I sat in the chair and cried. I was completely sure.

  ♠

  I spent that summer, my last before university, dancing in nightclubs all across London. Bagley’s was my favourite, an enormous brick warehouse behind King’s Cross – three dark, cavernous rooms that pumped melodic house music the clubbers gyrated to from midnight until dawn. A long concrete terrace overlooked the industrial estates of York Way, and as the sun came up, the drugged-up crowd paraded in their sparkly, theatrical clothes – girls in silver hot pants and headdresses, boys in denim shorts and braces, their tops off to show their slick torsos. I went with Maria and sometimes Holly or other friends from college. We didn’t take drugs and hardly drank on those nights – there was a high enough in the experience of dancing to the uplifting music, meeting new people. At home, I raided the music from my brother’s record collection – Frankie Knuckles, Inner City, Ce Ce Rogers. It wasn’t just house music playing in the clubs back then, but old and new soul music and R&B from America and the UK.

  After these nights out, feet sore, we hobbled to whichever side street Maria had parked on, driving home through the East End and towards Ilford. My father came to mind on those journeys – the same journey he’d made most nights of my childhood – the sky lightening as he came down from the adrenaline of the night, sleep heavy on his eyelids, the tiredness hanging on his breath. My mother would greet us at the door, just out of bed.

  ‘Have a nice time then, girls?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Auntie Bet,’ Maria would say. ‘But I’m starving now. Is there any toast?’

  The sweat would still be drying on our clothes as we sat down to eat my mother’s bacon and eggs, a round of toast, a mug of sweet tea. The sun always shone that summer. When Maria left, I’d pull the curtains tight, curl up in my bed and sleep the day away.

  ♥

  We were all on the move by 1994. Sam had already left for university in Nottingham. My cousins moved too. Susanna went to Liverpool to train as a teacher, Maria moved into halls in London to study science, and suddenly little Alf was grown, with a clan of misfit friends who dyed their hair in rainbow shades and pierced their lips and noses. Alf coloured his hair bright blue and shaved his eyebrows off. He looked like an alien. The spring he turned seventeen, he moved up North, ostensibly to study music but in truth to busk the streets of Barnsley.

  That same autumn, I packed my bags and headed off to Sussex University. My parents didn’t drive me, unlike the other first-year students. I was an adult now, I thought. I didn’t want their chaperoning. Instead, Maria and her boyfriend Ben took me there – my clothes and tape cassettes and a duvet tucked tightly into the back of his car.

  On the doorstep, my father pulled a ten-pound note from his pocket. ‘There you go, Han,’ he said, handing it to me. I looked at the money. He must have missed his kalooki game to give me it.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, slipping it into my pocket. ‘Bye, then.’ I hoisted my last bag onto my shoulder. He stood behind my mothe
r outside Ashgrove Road and as we pulled away, I waved, and they waved back. He was shielding his eyes from the sun with his other hand, his purple cardigan buttoned up all wrong.

  Ben was a DJ and had friends in Brighton. There was a party the night we arrived. So rather than sharing a nervous drink with my fellow freshers at the halls of residence bar, I sat in a posh flat on the seafront, where people ten years older than me drank cocktails and a tall girl in a sparkly dress racked up wobbly lines of cocaine on a mirror.

  ‘Who’s got a note?’ she said loudly over the music, looking around. ‘Anyone?’ Her eyes locked with mine.

  I fumbled in my pocket, finding my father’s tenner. ‘Here you go,’ I said, half standing from the sofa where I was crushed between two men who couldn’t stop talking over me about graphic design.

  ‘Ta!’ she said, almost snatching it from me, rolling the note into a tube she then popped up her nose to snort with. ‘Who’s next?’ she said, lifting the mirror with my tenner rested on it.

  ‘Yes sirree!’ shouted the man next to me, reaching for it.

  Someone turned the music up and turned the main light off. Fairy lights sparkled around the high windows and people started dancing. And I lost track of that tenner as the mirror was passed from one pair of knees to another – all night long.

  ♣

  If my father was addicted to gambling, his compulsion was masked because it was his work – his job, he might have said. We never used the word addiction. He said that gambling was ‘in his blood’, and blamed his father, whose penchant for mahjong was seemingly much more destructive than my father’s compulsions. But my father – unlike his dad, unlike most gambling addicts who run up debts of huge amounts, who might purloin or commit fraud to fund their fix – rarely lost at cards or dice, because he cheated.

  Aside from a few years driving a cab, it was the only work I’d ever known him do. If Sam needed new shoes for school, he’d play cards for it. If I needed money for a school trip, he’d play cards for it. My mother’s income paid the mortgage and the bills, but for food shopping or clothes or treats, my father was dispatched to get the cash, and for many years, he did just that.