by Jo Gatford
Three will do it. I carry the box to the bathroom and drink from the tap until my stomach swells. I drop the eyeballs down the toilet but they refuse to flush. The pills in my hand are gone too, though I don’t remember taking them. Never mind, there are plenty more.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Message one. Angela: “Matt, why didn’t you wait for me at work this morning? I really need to talk to you about your dad. Did you find anything in his room? Call me back.”
Message four. Clare: “You’re absolutely right you’re all bastards, you stupid bastard.”
Message nine. Sabine: “I’m at your flat but I don’t have a key anymore. Are you here? Are you ignoring me? Fucking hell, Matt.”
Message sixteen. The Farm House: “Mr Landrow, we’re calling about your father. Angela says she’s been trying to get hold of you too but if you get this message please call the main number on - ”
Message twenty-one. Clare crying.
Message twenty-five. Angela crying.
Message thirty-two. Jamie: “Matty. Please.”
Message thirty-four. Angela: “Matthew. Sabine just called me about Clare, what the hell is going on? Matt, please, please, answer your phone.”
Clare’s number goes straight to answerphone, no matter how many times I yell at it.
My mobile slides up and down my lap on speakerphone as I drive into the rain and through the university campus, back to Angela’s flat and Jamie’s place, to Clare’s friend Becca’s. No-one’s in. Angie isn’t picking up her phone either. I can’t go back to my flat. If Jamie’s still there I’ll put his head through the wall on purpose.
I get stuck in the one-way system on my second circle of the high street when Clare finally calls. I throw the steering wheel over to the left and almost get hit by a taxi as I pull into a bus stop.
“Clare? Where are you?”
I can’t understand a fucking word she’s saying through the choking and the screeching of her hysterics.
I’ve got used to the tiredness, the flashes of homicidal rage and insatiable hunger pretty easily – she wasn’t much different before she’d got pregnant – but I’ve not seen her cry so much since she was two. Now she’ll cry at adverts, at the prospect of an essay deadline, at the ending of a particularly emotional episode of EastEnders.
From the moment she showed me the secret little thing wrapped up in tissue, the positive pregnancy test, I was at her mercy. She begged me not to tell her mum. She wasn’t even twelve weeks gone.
I tell her to breathe and the snorting and the sniffing eventually dies down.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. I just - ” I catch, before she’s off again. Then she hangs up.
I sit and wait, rubbing the lump on the back of my neck, pressing it until it hurts, knuckling my thighs until they bruise. Two minutes later she calls back.
“Where are you?” I shout at her. “We’ve been worrying out of our fucking minds.”
I can actually hear her ‘fuck you’ expression down the line. “I started bleeding. I’ve been calling you all day, Matt.”
“Oh my God, Clare - ” and now I’m choking up, “I’m so sorry. Is the baby…? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“At the hospital. They just discharged me.” Her voice falls back into squeaks and sniffs and she can’t make sense anymore.
And? Did my niece just miscarry while I was getting arrested and feeling sorry for my stupid fucking self?
“Clare, please, is everything okay?”
A huge shuddering breath and the longest moment of my life, then: “Yes, yeah, it’s fine. They gave me a scan. Baby’s there. Fuck, Matt, there was loads of blood. Where were you?”
Her last three words echo against my eardrum and drown out the irate beeping of the bus trying to pull in behind me. Clare’s voice swamps every single stupid thing that I have packed inside my stupid head and grateful tears pour down my face. “I’m coming to get you. Wait there.”
#
When Clare gets in the car we sit in the A&E drop-off bay staring at the dashboard when we should be hugging.
“You’re really okay?” I ask her.
She nods, just once. Her face is red, blotched and drawn downwards as if she has gained a decade in an afternoon.
“What do you want to do?”
“Just go home.”
“To your mum’s?”
“No!”
“Clare, she’s not going to be angry. She’ll want to look after you.”
“She fucking hates me right now.” Clare’s usual fury has dissipated into resignation. She really believes Angela wouldn’t care. Did she get that from me? Clare winds a tissue around her index finger and stares at the smokers huddled around the hospital entrance. “She’ll say I’m just making the same mistakes she did, like her mum did.”
“Shit,” I say.
She looks sideways at me. “On your birthday, I told her I was going to drop out of uni. She went mental - well, you probably heard. Said how she’d had to work twice as hard after I was born. Like, basically, she shouldn’t have had me. She was too young.”
A whining sob compresses Clare’s voice into her throat. “How could I fucking tell her after all of that?”
And then she’s crying again and the only thing I can think to do is lay my hand on her belly. It takes a moment for the warmth of my palms to travel through her t-shirt and she stops mid-sob. There’s no little bump yet but her stomach is rigid and hot under my hand. Her breathing slows, but not because she’s winding up her energy to knock me out – I’ve never dared to touch her in any other way than awkward patting or playful headlocks for several years now – because I look up and she’s smiling crookedly.
“But this little thing is okay? That’s what matters. Not your mum.”
Clare gives an involuntary, shaky inhalation as her tears leave her body. She taps my hands away and starts brushing tissue flecks off her jeans. She’ll be a wonderful, harsh, hilarious, terrifying, loving mother.
And we are not going to become our parents.
I start the car, swing it out of the car park and start speeding out of town.
“Where are we going?” Clare asks.
“To see my dad. To tell your mum. To tell them everything.” Angela will be shocked, then she’ll sort everything out, and Clare will be okay. And Dad can die knowing about Lydia, about Alex, Lee, all of it. I don’t care if it breaks him. And then he’s going to tell me about my mother. He has to. It’s all I’ve got. My last bargaining chip.
She’s quiet. It’s dark, raining; a silent kidnapping. Clare doesn’t try to dissuade me. I tell her about the letters. I tell her that I won’t be able to read them when Dad’s gone. I tell her how I need to hear it from him. I need to know what he did to make her leave me. I need to know that he thinks I’m worth knowing whatever it is he’s stored up my whole life. I tell her some cliché like life’s too short and things can be gone in an instant and I tune in and out to the sound of my own voice not even sure what I’m telling her but craving her reassurance, ending each sentence with, “You know? You understand?”
She nods, but she’s not listening.
The car aquaplanes on the tighter corners. Clare clutches at the door handle every time it happens and I hope she can’t smell the beer on my breath. I wind down my window to stop my tired vision from sliding into the middle distance. The rain is touching upon hail and every drop that strikes my face feels thick and almost solidified. It helps me concentrate - it is taking all my effort not to focus on each singular little bead of water streaming defiantly up the windscreen. I wonder where they came from; which ocean, which river, which puddle of piss outside a kebab shop. The downpour melts the snow piled at the side of the road revealing the green beneath. This winter has lasted for years. So much grey that I had forgotten colour exists.
There is water on my face - both warm and cold. Clare looks over at me in quiet curiosity and I swipe the tears and rain away.
She touches her stomach and
says, “You should be its dad.”
I swear at her because I am trying to watch the road and I misunderstand her with a flush of panic.
“I don’t mean like that,” she says quickly. “Not that we’re blood-related or anything. But I didn’t mean it like that, you twat.”
“What do you mean then?” I snap. “I thought you were with Jamie.”
She is finding it hard to speak in articulate sentences because of the speed we are travelling. Her eyes clack from side to side, trying to keep up with the flashing foliage as it passes by.
“I am. I mean, I want to be. I know you think he’s - ”
“A fucking arsehole?”
“Yeah. But he’s not. And I don’t even know if it’s going to work, so why not you? You’re responsible, you’re nice, you like kids. I’m already living with you.”
“Clare, you can’t just decide that I should be a father figure to your kid, that’s just… What about Sabine? What about your mum? Jamie? What the fuck are you thinking?”
Her jaw clenches and creates a hollow at the base of her cheek - it is all I can see when I glance over, losing my accuracy between the white lines and whirring over cat’s eyes for a few seconds.
“I just thought… ” she murmurs, not wistfully, not wounded, but vicious. “I didn’t mean like a father. Just a guy that my kid can look up to.”
I grip the steering wheel so tight I can’t feel my fingers. “I’m not nice, or responsible, I’m a moron.” Just like my father before me. “You think you’re following in your mum’s footsteps? Lydia’s? Try wearing my dad’s shoes.” Have I got that to look forward to? “You don’t want me, Clare, think about it. No-one wants me.”
She doesn’t disagree. Too busy swallowing tears that I will no doubt pay for later.
I didn’t mean to make her cry again. I didn’t even mean what I said.
“Clare, I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you, Matt.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We make a crooked family tree. Twisted and diseased, marked with an X for destruction. I can feel the roots in my forehead -gnarled old veins sticking out like embodiments of bitterness. I take two pills for the pain.
I could have moved house. Part of me worried that if I left, Heather wouldn’t be able to find me when, or if she returned, as if telephones and electoral rolls and in-laws didn’t exist.
I didn’t move. I wanted to show that bastard next door that I was not ashamed, even though I was. I wanted to prove that Matthew was my son, no matter where he came from. It wasn’t some mindless alpha male competition. I hated Graham. I wanted to rip his lungs from his chest, but I loved my son, his boy, my son. Even if I found it hard to even look at Matthew’s little face for a long time.
I take two pills for the pain.
His little face and his little ears. The result of two recessive genes - earlobes attached to the side of his head and not ‘free’, detached, hanging low like a regimental soldier. Heather said it was the last piece of proof. She remembered it from the first year of her biology degree, before she dropped out, knew the moment she saw him. She went to see a woman called Gloria who could read palms and tell the future and talk to the dead and she told my wife that I couldn’t have children and Heather believed her. It’s all in the letter, the one in my belly, how she knew he wasn’t mine.
My ears hang low. Freckled, hairy and detached. Heather’s didn’t. And neither did Graham’s. This piece of ridiculous sleuth work was her logic, what sent her packing. She wasn’t well. She was depressed, I know that, and possibly somewhere beyond that, into a place where earlobes and a psychic were enough to send her off the edge. Right off the edge, into the ocean.
I take a handful of pills for the pain.
She wrote to me, a week after she disappeared, saying Matthew was Graham’s son. Ten years of trying and that bastard next door succeeded where I couldn’t. Graham must have known – perhaps he got his own batch of letters – and so I made sure he had to watch that boy grow up from the other side of a garden fence. My boy. Because she left him with me. I had that, at the very least.
My head is splitting open. I know I have painkillers here somewhere. A handy boxful sits in my lap, in fact - sweet shells like M&Ms, chalky within. I crunch them between crumbling molars, two at a time. The animals went in two by two before the rains came and the whole world got washed away. Washed clean. Noah even took the cockroaches with him and it is the cockroaches, not the meek, who shall inherit the earth.
The rain pours unrepentantly, gathering in the top edge of the open window, streaming quietly into the potpourri on the sill. I choke, silently, on an oblong tablet I shove into my gullet without waiting for the others to go down. This could be how it ends. I look for the nurse call button but something shifts. Tired old tissue slackens and allows the pill to slither a little way down, settling on the inside ledge of my sternum.
I briefly consider arranging the remaining tablets into a tableau of apology for whoever finds my body: I’m sorry I was useless; I didn’t mean to be so pathetic; I realise now that I was quite unpleasant to many people; please use my organs for research on self-destruction.
The box is empty. At least that’s something I’ve followed through. No more proof, no more secrets. And the ones I’d forgotten are clear. Alex is dead. My baby is dead. My son and not my son, just like his brother who was not his brother. I loved Lydia enough to let her think that I didn’t know her well-intended deception, but now my littlest boy – the one I managed to love so easily – he’s gone, and I missed it. A blink that lasted weeks.
Matthew tried to tell me. He was just here, sitting beside me on the bed, trying to find the words to make me remember. Just a minute ago, I’m sure. He could still be nearby. I could catch him. Not on foot, not following behind, but I could cut him off in the car park. I could catch him and keep him and stroke spots of rain off his shoulders and send him loose to find his real father. This needn’t be the end for him. I can give him that truth. He deserves it.
The window slides fully open with the aid of my shoulder. I climb out stiffly, slippers sliding in the mulch of the flower beds. My one hand grabs clumsily at the ledge and a rusty hinge slices a jagged lifeline across my palm.
The wet car park steams in the night, all but empty. Matthew’s car has gone. How can the sun have dropped so suddenly? The failing motor in my head ticks off-beat. It forces me forward through an asphalt plain, peppered with fat little water crowns, appearing and disappearing on impact, as if the raindrops are an inch wide. No more doorways, no more portals, just a road.
He can’t have got far. I can catch him if I hurry.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I might die tonight, a mangled mess indistinguishable from the twisted frame of my car. The rain sprints down, throwing itself like arrows at the windscreen, so heavy the wipers can only sweep brief lines through the deluge. The headlights barely cut through a square metre in front of the car, and beyond lies the darkness of nine-nine-nine calls and the afterlife. But I am unable to ease off the accelerator, the conclusion to this endless day careering forward like a stampeding animal driven into blind panic.
The raindrops on the windscreen, like blinking stars, distract me from what is behind them.
It’s only when Clare goes quiet that I take notice of her. She swallows, like she’s forgotten how, and stares out through the darkness ahead with squinted, pained eyes. Her hands rise from the sides of her seat, fixed in a clawed grasp, levitating up to chest height as if she is trying to point but can’t seem to straighten her index fingers.
I’m entranced by her slow motion, drained of the heat that has driven me this far. I could fall asleep without any effort right this second. And then I realise I have been watching her instead of the road, and I should already be braking. I see what she sees too late: a man in the road. He wears a dressing gown and slippers, weighed down with the rain. And though we’re moving too fast to see his face, I could swear blind that I catch the
pale streak of a smile under hooded eyes.
#
Angela says she heard splashing from the hallway outside dad’s door. She saw the open window first, the sodden carpet, then blood on the sill - finger smears left there for balance. Finally: the shoebox. And one overlooked tablet on the floor.
She climbed out the same way he had gone, slid in the flowerbed and fell into the dirt on her side. She says she began crying then, long before she heard the harsh attack of brakes and bumper plastic crunching.
Her fall dislodged the crocus bulbs attempting their way through into the spring air and they lay in disarray around her legs. She carefully returned them to their homes, tucked the slippery soil around them, clambered to her feet and started screaming for Dad. Not Peter, she said. Dad. And just the word on her tongue makes her cry even harder.
#
The car finishes its pirouette and snuggles beneath the awning of overhanging trees, facing the opposite way to which it had been travelling. The rain sieves through the leaves and each dink on the bonnet sounds like an atom bomb.
A hundred metre sprint away is a pile of clothing which barely contains a man. But the dawn of the aftermath has not yet broken and so no-one is sprinting yet. The consistency of time is still Newtonian - solidifying against pressure, melting away when left alone.
The ringing and the white noise begins to fade, too. And then the birds call out for morning.
Chapter Thirty
A part of me rips free from the cluster of my soul. The furious possessiveness that created spite for one son and desperate adoration for the other does not reverse itself, but splits in two and distributes itself evenly between them. Hatred and sorrow never dissipate, but divided, they can weigh less.
The road is black and half-covered with water. I realise that I am days and weeks and years too late to catch Matthew, and a bubble of self-pity belches from my throat, along with a handful of pathetic fallacy tears, for once supporting the rain instead of the other way around.
