by Jo Gatford
“Shirley down the road gave it to us. Her boys have grown out of it now, so it’s yours,” he said. Nana Alice tapped on the window and hooked her thumb backwards to get us to come in.
“Well, well, well!” she laughed. “A big boy bike, all for you! Wouldn’t your mama be impressed?”
Dad looked at her as if he was going to say something, then cast his eyes down at his dinner.
“Well? Do you like it?” he asked me.
I nodded, but it took the rest of the evening for the warmth to return to my hands and my chest.
#
Angela calls me twice a week now. At first I thought she was just worried about me but really she’s hoping for a breakthrough - either that Dad will have suddenly opened up to me, or that Clare will set teenage angst aside and speak to her again. Neither is going to happen. First she uses her nurse tone on me; sympathetic pragmatism to incite me into a self-obsessed rant where I’ll admit how shit I’m feeling. “I’m fine,” I tell her.
Then comes maternal guilt – she needs someone to help her sort through Dad’s stuff at the storage place – she can’t do everything for everyone, couldn’t I just help her out? I wouldn’t even need to see Dad to do it.
I don’t bite.
Finally she resorts to shouting and swearing, two things which are usually beneath her - “bullshit excuses” and “selfish bastard” and “total fucker”. I accept them all, happy to stay in distanced denial. Angie’s voice is different when she asks about Clare; it shrinks away, her okays getting smaller every time Clare refuses to take the phone. But even pity doesn’t sway me these days.
Then she hits below the belt:
“Well, don’t do it then. I’ll call Jamie, see if he’ll help me.”
“Jamie?” My voice hikes up an octave and Clare’s eyes snap to the side to stare at me.
“I can’t lift all those boxes, so if you’re not going to help me, what other choice do I have?” The “my other brother is dead” subtext is left unsaid, but very much there. Still, Jamie?
I try a laugh. “I don’t want him sniffing around Dad’s stuff, he’ll probably sell half of it,” I say.
“Who cares if he does? Look, your Dad’s paying something stupid for that storage rental each month and it’s not like he needs most of it. He said to get rid of it all. He just wants some books and personal stuff.”
A sudden flood of saliva causes me to swallow repeatedly before I can ask: “What personal stuff?” Personal stuff like letters from his missing wife? Personal stuff like all the things he’d never tell me in person? Proof that he knows what happened to my mum? Maybe Angie knows. Maybe she’s too respectful to look through his stuff herself, but maybe she knows what’s in that storage compartment, maybe that’s why she’s doing such an obvious job of blackmailing me into going. My lack of sleep feeds the paranoia into a hungry beast. “What stuff?”
Angela’s sigh rushes down the phone and into my ear. “I don’t know, stuff that belonged to his parents I think. Photos. I don’t have the time to go down there. If you don’t want to do it, just say. I’ll pay Jamie to go… ”
“You are not paying that fucker anything. I’ll do it.”
I can hear the self-satisfied manipulative smile in her voice. “Thank you. I’ll text you the list of stuff in a minute. Just drop it off when you visit him next week, okay? We can rent a van and clear the whole thing out another time.”
The vision of an empty storage compartment makes me nauseous. “He’s not dead yet, Angie.”
She tuts. “He asked me to do this for him, Matt. I’m just trying to do what he wants.”
I mutter an “okay” and Clare pokes me viciously in the left kidney when I put the phone down.
“What have you got against Jamie?” she says.
“He’s a dick.”
She shrugs, “He’s always nice to me. He and Alex bought me my first beer.”
“I bet they did.”
She narrows her eyes and pokes me harder, bulbous knuckles on skinny fingers like Alex’s. “He’s a nice guy, I spoke to him at the funeral. He’s really fucked up about Alex you know.”
“That’s because he was Alex’s little lapdog. Now he doesn’t have anyone to tell him what to do.”
“Wow. Bitter much?”
“Yep.”
She makes no attempt at hiding the rolling of her eyes. “Anyway… Can I come?”
“Where?”
“To see Grandad’s stuff.”
“It’s a mess in there. Just boxes and furniture piled up.”
“Yeah but… ” And just like that she transforms herself into a six-year-old with an embarrassed squint, “I bet it smells like his flat. I miss his place.”
“Do you remember the house before that? You’d just started school when he moved.”
She nods. “The carpet in mum’s bedroom looked like it was on fire.”
The thought makes me grimace. Hellish sixties swirling orange carpet. Artex on the ceiling that Angie tried to paint with clouds and blue sky. It turned out like a choppy sea. Even after she found her own place the room still felt like it was hers. At Christmas, Dad would squeeze a camp bed in there for Clare, and I would end up on the sofa. Alex took over our little room when I moved out, the twin beds replaced with a double and a desk, so tight up against one another that you could barely open the door. No sign that I had ever lived there but Dad still kept Lydia’s glasses on her bedside table. The tortoiseshell case had turned a soft grey with dust.
The year before Dad moved into the flat, Alex and I stayed up to watch Die Hard 2 on Christmas Eve and he got drunk and told me how he still bought his mum a Christmas present. How he’d hide them in his room until Boxing Day, as if hoping Father Christmas might magic them away to her in the night. I asked him what he did with them afterwards. “Walk into town until I find a skip,” he said. Pictures of both our mothers stared down at us from the mantelpiece. A tanned and laughing Lydia, leaning towards the camera with a glass of wine in her hand. And Heather, wishing she could be sucked into the sofa and never be seen again.
“So, can I come?” Clare asks me. “I’ll help you.”
She doesn’t poke me this time, just nudges her shoulder against my ribs. I nod. And I’m sort of glad. I don’t want to go in there alone. It might swallow me up.
#
The self-storage place is the kind of yellow that makes you want to pull your eyes out of your skull. Clare and I collect Dad’s key code from the front desk and follow brightly-striped industrial floors to his compartment, just like the hospital: green for radiology, blue for paediatrics, grey for whatever floor it was they laid out Alex’s dead body.
I haven’t been here for a year, not since we dumped Dad’s stuff off and dumped him at The Farm House. There are no windows, just echoes; forgotten things and dying people’s things and divorced things and unwanted memories that threaten to kill you with guilt if you actually chuck them away. It’s the perfect setting for a serial killer movie but I am armed only with a mobile phone and insomniac rage. Fifty metres down from Dad’s compartment a guy packs boxes, listening to a comedy podcast on his phone. His laugh resounds around the steel walls.
Clare types in the code and mutters “bam bam baaam” dramatically as the door clicks open. She’s right. It smells like him, and rubber floors, and slightly damp cardboard. Automatic lights flutter into life and illuminate Dad’s sad stack of possessions. I don’t know what Clare was expecting but she looks disappointed.
“I told you, just boxes,” I say.
She flips open the nearest one. We’re meant to be looking for photo albums, sci-fi novels and a load of sentimental shit Angela tacked onto the list that Dad won’t care about. Clare pulls out a crucifix and grimaces - one of Alice’s more grotesquely realistic ones. I wonder what the hell it’s doing in Dad’s stuff.
None of the boxes are labelled, it’s all junk we stuffed into cardboard coffins in the hope that we wouldn’t need to look at it again. Sabine and I w
ere the ones to clear Dad’s house while Angie “settled him in”, as if she were putting a toddler to bed. Alex turned up when it was all done, when the father king has been usurped by his meddling children and deposited in his living grave, lined with knitted blankets and pamphlets about coping with dementia. Alex took him out to the pub for the afternoon and Angela and the nurses spoke bright-eyed about how Dad was more like his old self afterwards. Then the prodigal son fucked off back to London and we were left to stack Dad’s life into this little metal cell.
Clare comes across a box of photo albums and, just like Sabine did, quickly discovers that there are pretty much no photos of me before the age of four. Dad always said that Nana Alice kept them all, but when she died we found only a handful, sealed inside an envelope with Dad’s address on it. I explain this to my niece when she asks and she frowns as if failing to quite comprehend. “Grandad didn’t take any?”
“Grandad was in shock for about five years after I was born,” I say. “I don’t know, maybe Alice had more but we never found them.” Maybe she sent them to my mum. Maybe everyone was writing to her and nobody thinks that this information is something I might want to fucking know. The box I’m searching through contains only clothes and random kitchen utensils and I shove it off the stack and kick it into the corner. A stove-top kettle falls out and lands on my foot and even though it didn’t hurt, I yell and swipe it up and throw it as hard as I can into the metal wall. Clare smirks for a moment before flipping forward a few pages in the album.
“Grandma took lots though,” she says, nodding at the group pictures of Angie and me and baby Alex, my father lurking in the background of some, making it obvious who was behind the camera.
“Lydia? Yeah, she did. She practically papered the dining room in photos.”
Clare’s eyes lift in a smile, “I remember that. I loved looking at those. Mum says I looked like Alex when I was a kid. Only with blonde hair.”
I’d never really thought about it but she did. Sometimes I forget that I’m related to any of them at all. Except I’m not really, am I? Not Angie, not Clare, not Lydia, and not even Alex. Just Dad. “Yeah,” I say. “Just the same.”
Clare’s smile drops and she tosses the photo album at my feet. I never quite know what I’ve done or said wrong but I know the signs. I’m supposed to say something, I think. “So… ”
“What?”
“Are you going to ever talk to your mum again?”
“No.”
“Right. That’s realistic.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.”
She pulls out the rest of the photo albums, frisbeeing them carelessly at my shins. “If you want to get rid of me… ”
“That’s not what I meant.” I try to give her a hard, meaningful stare but I don’t think it works. She stops throwing things at me, at least. One box and she’s already had enough. She sags against the wall and picks at a sticker that says: One man’s storage is another man’s treasure.
“Of course I’m going to talk to her,” she says. “Just not yet. It’ll never end, you know? She never stops pushing you. I just want a break before it all hits the fan.”
“I know,” I tell her. She nods, lets the corners of her mouth flick upwards for a second. She doesn’t look nineteen in the same way Alex never looked like a child. Too little fat in the cheeks, too much of Angela’s weariness. I don’t want her to end up like either of them.
We keep digging in silence. I find a neat little box that Sabine must have packed – stuff from the war, from Dad’s father – browned paperwork and army pocketbooks, patches from his uniform, telegrams. And underneath, a soft-focus picture from his parents’ wedding day. My dad looks a little bit like both of them; taller than his father but the same hairline; a wider face than his mother but the same nose, same forehead, same tightness of a smile held too long. I throw everything into a carrier bag and open the next box, and the next, but there’s nothing secret or dramatic or conspiratorial, nothing that even suggests my mother ever existed. No letters at all, from anyone. Dad was as useless as communicating on paper as he is with his vocal chords.
Clare gets bored, hungry, irritable, and needs to wee. She wanders off to find a toilet and I tell her I’ll meet her at the car. There’s one more box to look through. I recognise it with the kind of lurch that hits you in the guts when you’re about to fall. It’s the same faded box that lived at the top of Angie’s wardrobe for years - a horrible, pointless, gloating box that I didn’t even know existed until Alex told me about it when I was twelve. He’d had a good sift through, not really understanding what the piles of paperwork meant, but knowing that it was something that could hurt me. He showed me where it was and then went and told Dad that I was snooping. I got a fat ear and no pudding and I never saw the box again.
I open it up but I don’t bother to read the reports, there are too many and they all say the same thing and nothing at all. Police reports about my mum - red tape and the procedural humouring of a sad little man and his oblivious little baby. If I had a lighter I’d turn the box into kindling - let the whole room go up, scorching the yellow walls black and reducing all this pathetic shit to soot. Paperwork doesn’t matter, photos don’t matter, letters don’t matter. What matters is what my father knows. What he never told the police, or me, or anyone.
#
All I know about my missing mother is that after the birth she needed a lot of stitches – as Nana Alice used to delight in telling me – due to my abnormally large head. And as soon as my mother could walk, albeit wincing, she was gone, leaving me in my little fish tank cot in the maternity ward. No-one thought to stop her while she dressed, packed and limped straight out of the hospital without her baby, and no-one has seen her since. A little boy with a bowling ball for a head was not, apparently, what she had ordered.
Alex took his mum’s slender, athletic genes. I was given stocky solidity with a tendency for spilling over my jeans, just like my fat mother. People always imagine that she was some young, thin, beautiful, glamorous thing, and that was why she ran - looking for something better than a grumpy old fucker of a husband and a misshapen kid. People assume that if she were just fat and plain she would have stayed, would have been grateful for what she had, no matter how unhappy it made her. Or people just assume that she was mental, and, by extension, that I might end up the same way too. All I can guess is that she believed disappearing was preferable to my squashed up newborn face, and ran as fast as her thunder thighs would take her.
Alex used to joke that it was a wonder no-one could find her, after all, it couldn’t be that hard to miss her. He loved telling people how she ran away, like it said something about me. He stopped after Lydia died, but by then he didn’t need to. We’d both lost our mothers, but where he had pathos, I was just unwanted.
I’ve given three pounds a month to a missing persons charity since I was sixteen, a little fuck-you secret from my dad. I once suggested the idea to him and he looked so lividly lost for words that I blushed and tried to leave the room whispering, “Never mind.”
He pulled me back by my sleeve, held me against the door frame, let his voice drop to a rustle, every word a threat. It’s the only time I can remember him saying something to my face about my mother’s disappearance, right in my face, bitter breath filling my nostrils: “What is the point in looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found?”
For my three quid I receive a newsletter every month, pages and pages of lost faces. The problem with taking an active interest in missing people is that you see them everywhere. At the bus stop: Sylvia, thirty-four, missing since December ’12. Serving me pints at The Hare and Hound: Ben, twenty-one, missing since July ’07. Asking me for spare change outside Starbucks: Gemma, fourteen, missing since October ’10. Ethan, twenty-nine, missing since August ’04, sold me a digital camera in the January sales. Kathryn, forty-nine, missing since spring ’98, gave me her condolences when I bought flowers from her for my brother’s funeral.
But never Heather, sixty-five, mousey blonde hair, brown eyes, five foot two inches tall, approximately fourteen stone, missing since November ’71, last seen wearing a long black skirt, purple top and blue denim jacket.
I don’t bother reading them anymore. Always the same statistics. Most missing people come home within seventy-two hours, but not Mum. Most cases are solved between the police and families and charities, but not Mum’s. The longer they’re gone, the more likely they are to turn up dead. Or not turn up at all. Like Mum. The ever-present disclaimer; terms and conditions for hopeful relatives.
I spent a lot of time imagining the different ways she might have died. Always tragic, always in the middle of a desperate struggle to get back to her baby. It had all been a terrible mistake. I planned expeditions to find her, to rescue her from kidnappings and torturers, aliens and villains. Even in my daydreams I never got there in time. It was easier if she were dead. I knew that. I just wanted to know how. And why.
I checked under bushes on my way to school, peeked through boarded-up windows, poked at stream beds with sticks. I learned the odds of finding her body in different states of decomposition and wondered if I’d recognise her corpse from the few photos I’d seen. I crept into corners at the library with books on embalming and unexplained murders, making notes on how fast a dead body can decompose. If she’d been buried six feet underground, it would take more than two years - if she’d been embalmed properly and in a coffin, it might take decades. A shallow grave could take just six months. Decomposition of her body would occur twice as fast in the air than under water, and four times as fast as underground. Heat would speed up decay and cold would delay it. I pictured her mummified in a desert, frozen and emulsified halfway up a mountain. Intrepid Heather, one fateful last adventure, destined for tragedy.
I told Sabine all of this, not long after we first met. She seemed the type of person who would not be overly disturbed. She sighed and kissed my cheek. “If you say so, Matt.”
