by Jo Gatford
Angela’s attention shifted from her stepfather to her daughter, who was chewing ice cubes noisily and kicking the central leg of the table.
“You’ve hardly eaten anything.”
Clare shrugged jerkily, “I’m not hungry.”
Angela lowered her voice while the waitress jutted out a hip and fixed her smile, hand hovering above Clare’s barely touched plate. “What was the point of ordering if you’re not going to eat it?”
“I’ve eaten breadsticks.”
Angela sighed in exasperation. The waitress moved round to Dad’s side of the table and loitered uncertainly, waiting for him to notice her and put down his utensils.
“Take it home then,” Angela said, “we can ask for a doggy bag.”
“Jesus, Mum. Stop trying to force-feed me. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. I didn’t even want to come.” She flicked her eyes momentarily up to mine in apology. I smiled my first genuine smile of the evening back at her.
I could feel the ache of my niece’s embarrassment as she shrank in her seat under the scrutiny of the entire table. Angela had adopted Dad’s hardness rather than her mum’s laissez-faire approach to parenting. Clare’s bland ‘kill-me-now’ expression felt so familiar, as if there weren’t sixteen years between us. The reverberating noises of the other diners seemed to close in even more tightly as Angela watched her face for submission and tried to ignore Dad’s incessant fork-turning. A meatball rolled off his plate, across the table and into her handbag. The waitress stifled a squeak and fished it out with seamless professionalism.
“Let me just take that, shall I?” she said to Dad, sweeping his plate onto the carefully balanced arrangement on her arm and leaving him with a redundant fork, dangling with cold noodles.
“What’s wrong with you?” Angela hissed at Clare.
“How about some ice cream?” the waitress suggested enthusiastically, as though Clare was a decade younger.
“No. Thank you,” Clare said politely. Then, to her mother, a vicious whisper: “I feel sick, okay?”
“Leave her alone, Angie!” Dad boomed, and the conversation in the restaurant fell into a sudden curious lull. “She’s not bloody hungry.” As the noise gradually and uncertainly returned to half its previous level, he reached for the wine bottle and filled his empty water glass.
“Peter, you shouldn’t, not with your medication - ” Angela said, and the waitress’ smile fell a few millimetres, her eyes fixed on the fork still in Dad’s fist.
Dad knocked back the wine like it was a shot and ceremoniously tossed his fork into the empty glass. The waitress swiped it away and quickly retreated to the kitchen. Peter raised a finger, as if we were all still mid-conversation: “And I’m not the only one who had the decency to keep quiet about things that don’t need to be discussed in the middle of a bloody restaurant.” He jabbed the finger into the table in front of Angela, “Your mother could keep a secret, I’ll tell you that now.”
“Fucking hell,” I said.
“She might not have been honest, but she kept her mouth shut.”
“Okay, we’re going home,” Angela said, face flushed and downturned, aware that the people at the tables around us had stopped talking.
“You mean, you’re going home. I’m going back to that nuthouse.”
“Peter!”
Clare lurched forward in her seat, the skin of her face almost translucent with a sudden draining of blood, “I’m going to be sick,” she said, and bolted for the bathroom.
“I’ll go with her,” Sabine offered, but the screeching of Angela’s chair on the tile floor stopped her.
“No,” Angela snapped, “I’ll go. You two get him outside.”
“Cart the old man off, that’s right,” Dad said, shoving his chair backwards and steadying himself on the table. “Where’s Alex?” he asked – the first of what was to be innumerable times – not that we knew it then. “I thought Alex was coming.”
“Dad, shut up,” I said, as I scooped up coats and bags and tried to head him off before he toppled into the diners next to them.
“Don’t tell your dad to shut up,” Sabine said. And that was the moment, I reflected later, that it was probably all over for us.
We weaved Dad through the maze of tables to the front door, no time for embarrassment as we focused solely on avoiding knocking over any glasses or bumping into passing waiters, while my dad grumbled and protested at our treatment. As we passed the door to the toilets we could hear Clare’s voice, high and strained, calling her mum a bitch, asking why couldn’t she just let her make her own fucking decisions. And Angela losing it, slamming a palm against a cubicle door, saying for God’s sake, Clare, you’re acting like a child.
The waitress, waiting at the front desk, didn’t even attempt a smile as we pushed Dad through the door, yanking his arms into his coat like an overtired toddler.
The cold air struck us into silence. We gathered ourselves for a moment on the pavement outside, eyes adjusting to the streetlight glare and the flashing of headlamps on the wet road, wrapping scarves around our throats and shoving hands into pockets.
“Where did Angie park?” I said, but Sabine ignored me and Dad shrugged. A laugh curled up and died in my throat.
I shook Angela’s handbag until I was able to follow the sound of jingling keys to an exterior pocket. I aimed the remote at the dark lines of parked cars on the street, eventually saw the blink of her car’s indicators down to the right, and herded my unwilling companions towards it.
By the time we reached the car, Dad seemed to have deflated to half his previous size inside his coat, eyes no longer full of the righteous anger that so effectively destroyed my right to reply. He let me help him into the back seat of Angela’s Fiesta and folded his hands into his lap.
I slammed the door harder than I needed to and leaned against the side of the car. Sabine was looking at her phone, and I had no chance to say anything apologetic before Angela came jogging up.
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
I nodded to the car. “Where’s Clare?”
“Still in the toilets. How much do I owe you?”
“What? Oh. Shit.”
“You didn’t pay? Oh my God, Matthew.”
Angela snatched her bag out of my hands and ran back round the corner to the restaurant, returning a few minutes later, still alone, with a voice that said there was a lump high up in her throat.
“Well, we’re not going there again. Clare’s not inside. Did you see her come out?”
We shook our heads.
“She’s driving me mad. She hates me at the moment. She - ” Angela sighed, decided against explaining. Asking for help seemed to almost cause her physical pain. “She’s probably gone to Becca’s. And I need to get Peter home. Back, I mean.”
I wanted to hug her but I waited too long to carry out the thought and she began scrambling in her bag, trying to hide her reddening face. I hated Sabine, then, for her lack of womanly solidarity. She should have been the one to be patting Angela’s arm and telling her it would all be okay, but she stood there, scrolling with one finger on her phone’s screen, as though she couldn’t hear us at all.
“I’ll take him,” I said, but Angela emerged from her handbag and thrust a gift-wrapped rectangle at me.
“Happy birthday. Sorry, Matt. I’ll talk to you later. If you hear from Clare, let me know, okay?”
When her car had disappeared over the hill, Sabine and I found ourselves still standing apart from each other, looking in different directions - too much distance for us to be a couple.
My phone rang and I answered it without seeing who it was, regretting it the moment I heard the response to my hello.
“Matty,” Alex said. “Are you home? I’m coming over.”
Chapter Four
The doorway calls. The belt of my dressing gown slithers along the carpet as I step through and leave my bedroom behind, a breadcrumb trail back to the present. For a moment, in the space within the portal, there is
unadulterated silence, full of the promises of death. Onward. Onward to go backward, following the scent of a time long gone but never forgotten. How could I forget this night? I emerge the other side, wavering with the shift of gravity. It takes time to adjust to the change in the spinning of the earth, but then I solidify, feet rooting into the ground like bindweed.
Home. Standing in the perfect trapezium of light cast by the streetlamp outside the living room, a week-old baby in my arms.
And alone.
I thought it wouldn’t be for long. I thought she’d come back. I thought then that this terror would last no longer than a few days.
The night I took Matthew home from the hospital was longer than a night had any right to be. The house was all at once unfamiliar, as though Heather had taken with her the essence of what had made it mine.
I drop into this young, uncertain body and begin to sway without realising it - a pendulous movement that doesn’t need to be learned. I avoid looking at the baby as I walk slow circles around the living room, trying to find something that truly belongs to me, trying to find an anchor.
Windows filmed with condensation. A fat sponge on the sill, waiting for its morning work. Heather’s work. I would leave the glass unwiped until black blossoming mould began to creep across the panes. The curtains hang open, unlined, because Heather loathed her sewing machine and told it so whenever she hauled it onto the kitchen table. Above the mantelpiece the sunburst clock that I can’t stand glows bronze in the low light, an instrument of auditory torture. Heather’s choice, or was it a gift from her mother? A blanket embroidered with Matthew’s initials lies rumpled on the sofa in the shape of a mountain range. The house is full of baby things. They conspire against me and pile into corners – I do not recognise any of it, not the booties, the bottles, the bibs, the bassinette – Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice. I wonder if she had started to systematically remove me from the house long before Matthew arrived.
He stirs in my arms, heavy with awkwardness. I do not want to put him down in case he breaks. I do not want him to cry again because that was worse than any stroke, any heart attack - electricity running through his lungs into my nervous system. He had wailed without warning, an acute note of outrage at crossing the threshold from the front step to the hallway. There was no-one to consult, no-one to look to, no-one to take half of the knifing noise into their ears. The house rang with the sound and I felt nothing but pity for myself.
My aged self slips quietly into my younger body and forces my eyes downwards, to the little face turned away from the street light, turned in, to the valley between my chest and my arm. I am struck by how much the baby Matthew looks like the man, how I didn’t know then how he would look when he was grown. Now, it is just so obvious. There’s the eye, the lip, the hairline, the ear. The fluency of handling a child sweeps through me and I adjust him so that he lies across my arm, legs dangling, cheek squashing his mouth into a questioning O. He settles once more, a dead weight.
I walk through the house from front to back, something I didn’t do the first time I was here. I squint into the darkness of the kitchen windows, wondering if his mother is out there, if she came to see him this night, crouching behind the garden hedge, peering into the lighted rooms while we paced. Or whether she was already far from here.
Matthew slept for five hours, woke at three to nuzzle a bottle of milk and went back to sleep. Thirty-five years ago I managed, eventually, to put him down - clumsily swaddled in the Moses basket Heather had taken forty minutes to choose over the other almost identical option in the shop. I had only touched him to feed him, supporting his swollen head like I was told to, wiping the white tracks that flowed from the corners of his mouth and burping him until he threw most of it back up on my shoulder. This time my young hands are made strong with the gift of being possessed by my elderly self. Two hands, intact and steady. I nestle him into my chest, breathe a soft Edelweiss into his ear, humming when I don’t know the words, rhyming bright with light, white, night. New lyrics about hearts rising and falling, fall and rise forever. He doesn’t mind. Alice knew the right words and he’d learn them from her in time.
But I can feel the link fading, my ghost losing weight, drawn by the magnetism of the door to the hall. Another door. Another time left behind. I know what happens next and I must move onwards, ever on. The new father’s fear begins to take hold again, a nauseous twist, a collapsing tunnel. He will be alright. I promise him that as I close the door behind me.
#
Heather’s mother came by at six in the morning and I knew that she hadn’t slept either, watching the clock until it was an almost acceptable time to come over, until the milkman had been, at least, until commuters were leaving houses and trains running sleepily from their bunkers.
“Where’s the little soldier?” Alice shouted as she came through the door that first morning, flinging off gloves and layers, dumping bags of yet more baby things across the hallway. I pointed to the living room where he still slept and made a cup of tea. Matthew woke for Alice and squinted indifferently at her as she made all the appropriate noises and her skin shone, flushed, as though she had just run a mile.
“Wait ’til your mama gets home, little man,” I heard her whisper, over the boiling of the kettle, “It’ll be love at first sight.” I didn’t point out that Heather had already missed that opportunity.
I put up with that kind of talk for three weeks. Constant reassurance starts to grate after a while. “When your mama sees how big you’ve got, little one,” and “Won’t your mama be proud of you, drinking up all your milk?” I put up with it until the police told me the negative correlation between the time a person is missing and the chance of finding them alive. They told Alice too but she snapped her head to the side like a toddler refusing a spoon. “You don’t know my daughter,” she’d said to them. For a second I thought she was talking to me.
By the time he was a month old we had become used to our awkward routine. Alice finished the decoration of his little bedroom - not much more than a glorified cupboard, strung up with a sheep mobile and an alphabet cross-stitch wall hanging. It smelled of Alice even when she wasn’t there, soft and clean and warm and motherly. He struggled in my arms, as though I was coarse all over. He threw himself away from me, coiling backwards like he was in pain. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and watched as she changed him, dressing him up for a walk to the shop, cooing: wouldn’t his mama love to see him looking so smart in his dungarees? Her hands moved with surety, anticipating each involuntary movement with practised ease in a way mine wouldn’t learn until I was able to try again with Alex.
Matthew had begun to watch everything with dark, unblinking, gullible eyes – finally acclimatised to this bright, loud world – as though he knew something was not quite right and had decided to start taking stock.
“You look like a little sailor boy,” Alice told him. “Oh… the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh… ” She thought he had started to smile but I read in one of Heather’s baby books that it was probably just wind. The boy stood with her assistance, legs a year away from supporting his own weight, chin doubling – tripling – into his chest as his head flopped forward. He threw himself backwards so he could look at me. Alice made him dance and laughed at her little puppet.
“Your mama used to love that one too. She’ll sing it to you when she gets back.”
I stumbled then, even though I had been standing still. There was the limit. Once I reached beyond it, I never found a way back to the silence of before. The quiet of denial. And if I couldn’t have that falsified peace then I could make sure no-one else could either. My yell made them both startle: “Stop telling him she’ll come home!”
Matthew wailed. Alice looked away.
“Don’t promise him things that you can’t make true,” I said, quieter. “Don’t do it to yourself, or me either. It’s not fair.”
She gathered him up and held his head against her bosom, covering hi
s ears. When she turned back to me, her face and her tone were gentler than I’d expected. “I’ll tell you what’s not fair, Peter. Pretending she never existed.”
She took the baby downstairs, placed him in the pram and tucked a blanket around his chest like a corset. Alice was the type of woman who would chase the milkman down the street for leaving a silver top instead of a gold top, which is why the worst thing she could have done was not deafen me with self-righteousness. She finished packing up the pram and wheeled him out onto the street.
“Alice… ” I couldn’t mobilise myself to follow her. A lawnmower moaned outside. I managed to make it to the front door. She reached the end of the path. The lawnmower stopped.
“Morning!” Graham from next door raised a slow hand in a wave, stalling as he saw our expressions.
Alice ignored him along with me. The lawnmower started up again, slightly more vehemently than before. Heather’s mother took a ninety-degree turn and marched the pram towards the sun. And under the cover of the lawnmower’s growl, I closed the front door and screamed at the radiator.
#
The next doorway leads through to the nursing home conservatory. The windows are blue-black, a timeless tiredness has muffled the other residents into rough-edged statues. I blink at the room, counting the hours I must have lost within that other place, my baby son’s milky breath still warm on my neck. A nurse takes my elbow and moves herself into my eyeline.
“Peter? Are you okay, love?”
I nod. They must know that yes means no when they ask that kind of question. She accepts my answer though, and brings tension to her grip, subtly pulling me forward until I follow like a pony.
“Here you are,” she says, guiding me down into a chair by a viewless window. “Tea’ll be round in a minute. Can I get you anything, Pete? One of your books?”
No-one has ever called me Pete. I want to go back to my room but I can’t find the words to tell her, and I know that once I got back there I would wish to be anywhere else. She takes my forward-facing stare to be a ‘no’ and moves on to the next abandoned mannequin. As soon as she has gone I laboriously get back to my feet and make an uneducated decision about which corridor to take. “Onwards,” I say out loud, though I didn’t mean to.
