by Jo Gatford
“So… ” Jamie smiles at me. There’s nothing in that smile that should be in a normal smile. His breath stinks of burnt Rizla and ash the same as my dad’s always does.
“Just give me a minute.”
We sit and listen to the Cubans and their guitars. The waitress picks up a phone call and through the empty bar we can hear every word, “I mean, she’s skinny, but she’s healthy, she just exercises a lot… Yeah, well, I feel sorry for her and everything, but she is a total bitch.”
Eventually she rings off. Jamie stares at me for a full song. I take a too-large swig of my beer in an attempt at a manful gesture then try not to choke as some of it slips down my windpipe.
“Excuse me?” I watch the waitress, who can’t have failed to hear me, but is still leaning, flicking, phone call finished, tap-tapping again. “Excuse me?”
Jamie sighs, finishes his beer and places it in an unmistakeably final manner on the bar. She looks up, “You guys alright?”
“Excuse me,” I say, pointlessly, a third time. “Does Lee work here? Lee Burnett?”
“He’s the manager. He’s in the office.” She points up through the ceiling.
“Can I, we, speak to him?”
She nods, after an uneasy pause, and dials a landline phone that sits by the till. Maybe she thinks we’re health and safety inspectors, or mystery diners, or undercover police. She speaks quietly and replaces the handset. “He’s coming down now.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Jamie spins his bottle on its bottom rim, lacking any skill whatsoever, and it clanks onto its side on the bar-top several times, making both the waitress and me wince.
We wait. Two more songs and the CD finishes. The silence is worse. My brain unhelpfully suggests and rejects a number of different ways in which I can break the news to Lee. Then it starts an imaginary conversation with Sarah in which I’m explaining where I’ve been today, tweaking things a little to make it sound like it was all my idea, to alleviate some guilt over Alex’s death, and how it seemed like the ‘right thing to do’. I’m such a twat.
A door marked STAFF ONLY swings outwards and a man steps through into the bar. He has a shaved head, receding hairline clear against the stubble; two small hooped silver earrings in one ear; black-rimmed glasses; plain, unadorned black and grey clothing. He too has an expensive phone cradled in one hand, while he balances a tray with an empty mug and a teapot on the other. The waitress takes the tray from him and nods her head towards us. He takes the bar stool two down from me and smiles, twirling his phone between his fingers and looking a lot like Alex might have looked in thirty years. I’m staring, he’s waiting, Jamie is grinning. Shit, it’s true, painfully obvious. It’s the eyes: dark lower eyelashes, irises rimmed with a thick black line and unnaturally pale grey within. Same lips, same small, neat, square teeth in the same mouth.
“Can I help you?” Alex’s older-mouth says.
Jamie elbows me in the gut. “Go on then, Matty.”
“Lee Burnett?” I manage.
“Uh huh.”
“Lydia Evans.” I seem to be speaking in names.
He pauses. Doubt and a heart-flutter pass over his face. “Lydia? I knew her - but thirty-odd years ago.”
“She’s dead,” I say. Well, at least it wasn’t another name.
He lets slip a tiny flinch, blows out his cheeks. “Oh. How did it happen?”
“Cancer. She, uh, left her son a letter.”
He calculates our ages silently and swallows, waving his hands at us, setting off the music player on his phone, blasting out a Fleetwood Mac chorus. He switches it off, flushing from his ears to the bridge of his nose.
“Hang on, hang on. What are you saying here?”
“Neither of us is your kid,” Jamie says tonelessly.
Lee sighs and deflates, making himself half a foot shorter. “Oh. Good.”
“But she did say you were the father of her son, Alex.” I feel like I’m giving the closing statements to a detective show.
Lee’s eyes close and he leans back stiffly, hands tight around the leather-topped seat. He springs off the bar stool, paces behind us and then back again.
“But… ” I can’t say it. I can’t say it out loud. I look at Jamie, he looks hungry in a way that beer won’t satisfy. I can’t let Jamie tell him. He would be cruel. Suck it up, Matt. “He died too, a few weeks ago. Just after he found out about you. He wanted to meet you, he wanted to - ”
Lee stops mid-stride, facing away from us. His shoulders rise and fall, skinny shoulder blades poking triangles through the back of his jumper. He’s relieved, I think. I can’t really blame him, though it repulses me.
Jamie stands up, buttons his coat, rests a comforting hand on Lee’s forearm and turns him around. “He wanted me to give you something.”
Lee’s miserable eyes lift a miniscule amount. It occurs to me that Alex would have turned out to be pretty good-looking in his old age, and I am struck by just how little he ever looked like my dad. Jamie smiles. “He wanted me to give you this,” he says, and his right hand balls into a fist, raises to shoulder height and thuds forward into the left side of Lee’s jaw.
“Shit!” The waitress rushes forward a few steps then backtracks and stays safe behind the bar.
Lee sprawls back against the barstools and drops to the floor. I try to help him up but Jamie shoves me away and sticks a boot in his ribs before spinning a theatrical one-eighty and marching out into the street.
I mutter a few sorrys and follow him at a run.
Jamie stands outside a sushi bar, rubbing his knuckles and staring at his reflection in the window. “What the fuck did you just do?” I say.
His voice is jerky with adrenaline, “Retribution from the grave.”
“This was your plan, all along? You couldn’t stretch to the train fare and do this alone? You had to be chauffeur-driven? We came all this way just so you could deck him? What did he ever do to Alex? He didn’t even know he existed!”
The chef in the middle of the revolving sushi conveyor glares at me. A woman pushing a buggy crosses the road with a frown so she doesn’t have to walk past us. Jamie digs furiously in his coat pocket and withdraws a screwed up piece of paper. “Oh it’s fucking obvious. He knew about Alex. He must have known, and he didn’t give a shit.” He shoves the ball of paper into my chest so hard it knocks me off balance.
“So Alex’s dying wish was for you to punch his real father? Have you got one for my dad too? You always were a pair of fucking idiots.”
“I was more of a brother to him than you ever were,” Jamie says. A verbal boot in my ribs to match Lee’s. “Just as well you weren’t his brother. You didn’t deserve to be.”
We are alone on the pavement; everyone who isn’t shouting at the top of their voice is walking quickly along the other side of the road. The sushi chef has stopped slicing up California rolls and holds a phone to his ear, eyeing us with disapproval.
“You deserved each other. Both of you, fucking sociopaths,” I say, but it doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would.
Jamie shoves me again and I react instinctively even though I’ve never hit anyone before in my life. I don’t punch him, but my fist pulls back and hangs next to my ear while he flinches backwards. I lower my arm. How can anyone consider hitting another person when there are such things as aneurysms in the world? When you can’t tell whether even a single strike could be manslaughter. Manslaughter, what a fucking word.
“Make your own way home,” I tell him, at normal pitch.
“As if I want to be anywhere near you,” he spits back, and is marching again, halfway down the road before I unclasp the paper in my fist and am able to breathe. I look down at the letter as I cross the road - Lydia’s handwriting, Lee’s name on about the fifth line. The dead ink of my stepmum hurts more than the fresh wound of my brother’s bleeding brain. When I look up again Jamie is gone, and the waitress from Lee’s bar has her hands pressed up against the glass frontage, eyes wide and
head nodding at me, behind me.
What now? Oh. A bus.
Chapter Sixteen
Across the dining table from me a nurse attempts to shake awake a woman who is so fast asleep, or dead, that her chin clacks against her collarbone with every jostle. I stretch as far as I can out of my chair to look for the sun out the window, wondering if I can work out the time of day by its position. It’s wintertime. And the slop in front of me is either lunch or dinner. Rice that begins with an R. A European soupy, cheesy thing, and though I really don’t care what the meal should be called it galls me not to be able to recall the word. It doesn’t matter what the hell the day is, they’re all the same in here.
Paul sits next to me, spooning up his gloop, talking through every single mouthful. He is nothing more than a blur of a jaw and browned teeth moving up and down, making noises I can’t translate. I’m not entirely sure how long he’s been talking but I have begun to nod in rhythm with his monotonous tone.
I have to wait for my vocal chords to remember their existence. Until then I am stuck reciting inane haiku to the inside of my skull:
Dearest moron Paul
No-one cares about your life
Or what’s left of it.
Paul has turned a curious colour. I think he might be choking but then the sound of his outraged shouting slides into focus. Cutlery all along the table stutters into silence like a tiny orchestra faltering to a stop. Little missiles of saliva spurt from his lips like shards of glass.
“Hmm?” I say.
“It’s your fault,” he says.
I nod. It’s always true.
The nurses are watching him but no-one else bothers to look up. “You said to tell her what I really thought. She was hysterical. Crying! She’ll never visit again!”
It sounds as if I should agree, and since I can feel my voice hunkering behind my tonsils, I take advantage of it. “No, I expect not.”
“You… You callous old bastard!” Paul upends his plate over the tablecloth, his fork and plastic cup of juice dropping into my lap. He turns and stamps as quickly as his furious elderly body will allow from the room while the other diners watch me with a spectrum of incomprehension and amusement and fear. The scrutiny turns my internal thermostat up by ten degrees until my skin begins to bubble under my jumper. I need a doorway. I need an exit. I lurch in the opposite direction to Paul, the utensils in my lap bundled to my chest, wrapped in a cloth napkin. It doesn’t matter what I cling to, so long as I hold onto something.
#
When I leave the dining room I fall through a burning doorway that singes the hair on my arms as I pass. It smells like hot iron, like blood. Angela’s voice tells me about a dream she had. A dream of her unborn baby. She dreamt it was a boy, a girl, a newborn who could talk, told her its name was Suzie, Kieran, that it wanted a ham sandwich. She dreamt she was chasing her mother through a garden, through gates and over fences and fighting her way into privet bushes that scraped her thighs and whipped her face. Lydia had taken the baby, was meant to look after it just for the day, but she wouldn’t give him back no matter how much Angela pleaded.
Four days overdue, she woke me at five-something in the morning, circling her hips by the side of my bed and blowing out her breath like a punctured tyre. Half an hour later I tried to find a way to lift her into the backseat of the car without touching her because every tiny movement made her yelp.
I have no memory of the route we took to the hospital, only the stream of questions that spewed out of me in icy panic. “Do you want the radio on? Off? The fan? Heater? Window open? Am I going too fast? We’re about five minutes away. Should I stop and ring the hospital? Angela? Angela?”
I knew she’d be laughing if she weren’t in so much pain.
I tried to lag behind when we reached the labour ward and the nurses and the midwife took my place in holding Angela upright while she limped and wailed her way to a little pink room, but Angela’s clawed hand held on to my shirtsleeve and dragged me along after, to a place where I was utterly superfluous.
#
“Grandad?”
I can’t move. If I try to take a step forward, the rug swirls into a whirlpool and the skirting boards detach from the walls and float down the rapids of the corridor. Two nurses in matching purple approach, bruised uniforms bleeding into the sea, as inescapable as Scylla and Charybdis.
“Grandad? Peter?”
Behind me: a voice, and the water is calmer there. I flounder towards the light - a bay window, the familiar stink of potpourri on a pointless decorative table, and I’ve never been so glad to see an armchair in my life. The chair consumes me and I tuck my feet up out of the flowing water, a napkin-wrapped parcel pressing into my stomach. Something inside it clinks.
Someone’s crying – or trying to cry silently, at least – and I recognise the sniffing. A girl, my girl, little Clare, grown up Clare, still a child really Clare, different Clare. Something wrong. She crouches next to my chair and rests her head on the back of my casted arm.
“Hello,” I whisper. I can’t be sure she’s really there, after all, and the last thing I need is to look like I’m talking to myself.
Her head whips up, hair sticking to her wet face like whiskers. “Grandad.”
“Hello, Pickle.”
She smiles, a slowly creaking door left on the latch, unsure whether to let this stranger in. “What’s my name?” she asks me.
“Scary Clare,” I tell her, because she never wanted to be a passive little princess. She knew the dragon got to have more fun.
She nods, twists a bracelet around and around her wrist. I can feel her foot jerking up and down in impatience through the carpet. She doesn’t want to be here. Why is she here? Something different in the way she stands. Something new working away behind her eyes.
“I’m scared,” she says quietly. “I can’t talk to my mum.” She looks up and down the corridor. “She’s not in today. I checked.”
And I see. I know. She has that look on her face – the same look her grandmother had when she was pregnant – a bizarre mix of serenity and unease.
Darling granddaughter,
find a sucker just like me
to help you raise it.
I shake my head. “Just like your mother. And hers. How long do you sirens go back?” She straightens up at my change of tone, disappearing into a distorted silhouette against the hard sunlight behind her and I can see three generations of Sutton women, round-bellied and tired with heaviness, lined up in front of the window, beauteously terrifying and full of power. The light overexposes them, makes me leer, blinking, but there they are, all the same. Lydia with her head to one side, mocking, adoring and ready to give me a slap for being so nostalgic; Angela standing solemn and unblinking, reproving of my self-indulgence; Clare, nervous and furious and wishing she was still small enough to cuddle up and watch Top Gear with me, chewing our way through a packet of Liquorice Allsorts.
She would be alright, I knew. Her mother would be shocked, then accepting, then give all the advice I wished I’d had on hand to give Angela nearly twenty years ago. Why do they come to me? What can I possibly offer them?
The three figures bloom into ink blots against the sheer curtains, melting and deforming until they are as twisted and broken as my Mother Whistler. It is their turn to leer. They have come for me, for the things I have hidden. I scramble to stand, treasure clamped to my chest, pushing away the hands that try to grab me as I slip on the wet carpet underfoot. The flood has passed but my feet will sink into the ground if I stay still for too long.
#
I stumble over a threshold into a body drenched in sweat, adrenaline usurping my blood. My hands are white, trembling beyond my control, beyond hiding. Angela didn’t have time to suck on the gas canister that they’d wheeled in. I am glad, because the mouthpiece is dimpled with the teeth-marks of other screaming women. She’d barely got inside the room when a flurry of peach-scrubbed staff descended upon her, hands on her head, her belly
, between her legs.
Each contraction begins with a fearful and dread-filled curling of her toes, a rolling forward of her shoulders, a bracing of her palms on the bed’s side-bars. A noise rises from her like an air raid warning, cyclical and mechanical. She sustains a perfect note for so long I cannot believe she has enough air in her lungs to hold it so steady. Her belly tightens and stands out rigid while she gulps in a breath and the note lifts a few tones, increases its volume, tails off with an upward flick as she tops the peak. What follows is a series of moans too sexual for me to bear to listen to, then a satisfied sigh. I blush every time, even though each one makes me want to cry with pride, with fear, with incomprehension at her strength. How does she know? How can she do this? How can any woman have done this before her?
In my ears her sounds become Heather’s terrified pleas, Lydia’s low, guttural lowing. Something agonising is yanked out of me with every cry. I force myself to listen to Angela’s interpretation, to watch sweat peel from her pores and mingle into a pool between her collarbones. The midwife has a grin on her face now, the nurse too. Angela manages a weak, breathy smile in between contractions, squeezes my hand, nods when the midwife says, “Soon, keep going, honey.”
The room descends into a sudden rush of action as Angela’s eyes bulge with shock and a stream of negatives spring from her mouth, while the midwife reassures her and everyone sets their eyes on her vagina, except me, who won’t even allow myself a prudent glance.
Everyone pulls together – a bloody and agonising Hokey Cokey – while Angela pushes with every vein in her face and holds her breath for longer than is humanly possible. I know this, because I try to hold mine with her, and fail.
“Again!” the midwife yells.
Angela pushes silently. I hear splattering on the floor, a deep exhalation.
“There’s the head. Wait. Waaaaait. One more!” My eyes flick automatically to the disembodied little red face protruding from her crotch.
