Lessons for a Sunday Father

by Claire Calman

  “Might as well stay in really.” I nuzzle at her neck.

  “I could carry on with the mural in Rosie’s room.” It’s a castle and hills she’s painted on the wall. She’s a bit of an artist, is Ella. She likes to do some every week so there’s something new each time Rosie comes to stay. “I was thinking of adding a lake and some swans.” She tips her head back and half leans against me.

  “Swans, yes. Could do that …” I very gently start licking her earlobe.

  “Or I could go back home and bake some cakes for the van next week.”

  “Cakes, yes. You could …” Tucking her hair back so I can kiss the skin behind her ear.

  “Or we could do a jigsaw puzzle?” Her breathing’s faster, more ragged now.

  “Jigsaw. Hmm-mm …” My hand slips down, sliding between her jeaned thighs and she half crumples against me.

  “Or you could take me to bed …” Her mouth open to mine, her hands roaming up under my T-shirt, stroking my skin.

  “Um, jigsaw puzzle’s probably the best bet.” My words slur out between hot kisses. I try to sneak my hand down the front of her jeans but they’re a good, snug fit. Struggling with the button now, the zip, leading her to the bedroom. She opens her eyes.

  “Let’s take it slowly,” she says.

  “OK, we’ll start with the edges.”

  * * *

  Take it slowly! Take it slowly? Is she kidding? I’ve waited months for this. Well, all right, three weeks then, but I’ve fancied her for ages so it counts as longer.

  But slowly it is.

  First, she draws my T-shirt up and over my head. Starts kissing me all over my chest, spacing the kisses out like a row of seeds. Her fingers lightly skim my skin, driving me crazy. Actually, if this is taking it slowly, I reckon I could stand a little more of it. I’ve never had anyone pay me so much attention.

  She helps me off with my trousers. Yeah, I know, I’m forty-one, I’ve been managing to undress on my own for years, but she offered so what can you do? It’d be rude to say no, right? My pants virtually have to be peeled off me by this point, though if she leaves them on a minute longer they’d probably burst right off me or spontaneously combust.

  Oh, hello, this looks promising. Ay-ay-ay … my eyes are rolling into the back of my head. God, I’ve missed this. Gail was never all that keen, to be honest, so it became a bit of a twice-a-year, birthday and Christmas treat, and it’s one thing you can’t do for yourself. Ella’s mouth is strutting some majorly funky stuff here and her hands aren’t just loafing either. I have died and gone to Heaven, there’s no other explanation. You can put “At least he died happy” on my headstone.

  She leans me back on the bed, then quickly strips down to her bra and pants and climbs astride me. Bends to kiss me, her tongue flicking over my lips, gently drawing my bottom lip between her teeth. God, that’s good.

  “I want to be inside you.” It’s what I mean, but it sounds feeble. It doesn’t sound like enough. “I want to be inside you, around you, through you, over you, under you, filling every inch of you …”

  “You’ll have to be pretty supple.”

  “I’ll be down that gym first thing in the morning.” I reach round her to unhook her bra. Circle her left nipple with the tip of my tongue then open my mouth wider to suck. She shivers above me.

  “Cold?”

  “No,” she smiles, drowsy-eyed. “Just shivery.”

  “Here. Come under the covers.”

  She snuggles up close to me.

  “Any chance of removing these knickers in the next—oh—two seconds or so?”

  “I was planning to keep them on. Good old-fashioned form of contraception—the barrier method.”

  “You think I can’t sneak my way round these? Dream on.” I start stroking her thighs, teasing her, tracing a path over and around with my finger, hearing her breath catch in her throat as I stray from the path. I press harder, feeling her through the damp lace.

  “Funny. Seems to be some kind of moisture down here. Perhaps I should investigate?”

  “Must be environmental humidity—but you’d better check.” “Ah, yes, that’ll be it.” I start to burrow down under the quilt. “Seems to be at pretty high levels in this part of the country.”

  Her legs shudder and widen for me. “Oh, it is,” she says, “It is.”

  I’d tell you the rest but Ella says it’s private and also too rude for general consumption. Sorry.

  Nat

  There’s this knocking at my bedroom door. I carry on with the game. Then Mum’s voice, sounding all concerned.

  “Nat?”

  “Mn.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “What? Can’t you reach the handle or something?”

  Excellent. This teacher at school, Mr Perkins, does this thing, right. When someone says, “Sir, sir—can I go toilet?” Perky goes, “I don’t know. Does Granny have to take you?” First time he says it, none of us got what he meant. Whoosh, straight over our heads. Then he tells us it’s like can isn’t the same as may. Can’s what you say when you mean something’s possible, like you can manage to do it and may’s when you’re asking if you’re allowed, wanting permission or whatever. Anyway, I remember it ‘cause Andrew nearly wet himself while Perky was telling us. He won’t let you go unless you say, “Please, sir, may I go to the lavatory?” He says it’s common to say toilet, but everyone else on the entire planet says it ‘cept for him, so what does he know? And even when you remember to ask how he wants he says you should have gone at breaktime and can’t you wait till lunch.

  It’s wasted on Mum. She opens the door.

  “Nat? What are you on about? Can’t you—” She stops then and crosses her arms. “Good game?” Ah, the trying-to-be-nice strategy. She’s been doing a lot of that lately. Actually, she’s not so bad. Just don’t tell her I said that, OK?

  “S’all right.”

  “Natty?” She only calls me that when she’s trying to get round me or treat me like a baby. “I thought you might be doing your homework?”

  “Mn.”

  “Could you switch off the game please.”

  I turn away from the screen for a nanosecond. Fatal error. Terminated by an android. Thanks, Mum.

  “Now look what you made me do.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Nathan, is that how you plan to spend the rest of your life? How’s that going to help you get your GCSEs? You could be anything you wanted to be—a doctor, a lawyer, a—”

  “Yeah, right. Don’t you watch the news? There’s no jobs anyway.”

  “So we might as well all give up now, is that right?”

  “I’m just saying, what’s the point?”

  She plonks herself down on the bed. There’s a bit of a rustle ‘cause I still had a mag under my duvet from last night, but she doesn’t seem to twig. She starts looking round at the floor, like she’s about to tell me to tidy it up, but she gives it a miss for some reason.

  “But Nathan, look at your dad, for example …”

  I give her a look. Oh, puh-leese. Since when has he ever been an example of anything?

  “I know you’re still angry at him, and—well, I hope you’ll come to see he’s not as bad as you think. But my point is—your dad never got the chance to do much with his life, you know? He’s bright, but he left school as soon as he could at sixteen, with no qualifications to speak of, and that was it. He had to take the first job that came along. And he’s gone on that way. He works hard, but he could have done so much more.”

  “Yeah, like Dad could have been a doctor or a judge?”

  “Well, maybe not a doctor.” She does this spooky kind of smile. Jeez, I bet she’s thinking of Weirdy Beardy, then she goes, “He’s not much of a one for studying. And definitely not a judge, no. But he could have done something. Something that really interested him, I mean, something that made him look forward to each day. He could do his job in his sleep. It’s a waste, Nat. Don’t make the same mistake.”

  A
nother rustle as she stands up. I hold my breath. She comes over and rests her chin on my head, the way she does with Dad sometimes. Used to do. Actually, it was kind of OK.

  “But you’re not a doctor either and I bet you did all your homework. I bet you were a right goody-goody—like Rosie.”

  She gives me a shove.

  “Was not.” She rests her chin back on my head again and puts her arms round me. “There’s nothing wrong about being like Rosie and you know it. But no, you’re right, Nat, who am I to talk? I’ve wasted a lot of time, too, because I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know either.”

  “That’s OK. The thing is, you don’t need to know exactly what you want in your whole life when you’re only thirteen. But don’t leave it as late as me, hmm? Learn from my mistakes. Start noticing what you really enjoy so you know what you’re aiming for in life. But you also have to be prepared to work hard to get it.”

  “There you go then.” I reached for the mouse and selected “New Game” from the menu.

  “There I go what?”

  “I want to work in computers, so this counts as work, right?”

  She laughs and kisses me on the top of my head, then she ruffles my hair like I’m a little kid or something. I shake her off but she keeps laughing.

  “You’re beyond help. Tell you what, Nat?”

  “Mn?”

  “You work a bit harder at school and I’ll start thinking about getting myself some kind of training too. That’s a promise.”

  “Sure.”

  She stops outside on the landing and I hear her voice from the other side of the door.

  “Supper’s in twenty minutes. Macaroni cheese. And Nat?”

  Another android exploded to bits on the screen. 140 points. 160. 200. “What?”

  “Do your homework.”

  Rosie

  My dad’s got a girlfriend. She’s called Ella and she’s got freckles on her nose and she’s got a little boy whose name’s Jamie and he’s two and a half. On Sundays, when I go out with my dad, sometimes they come with us or they meet us in the afternoon so I still get Dad all on my own in the morning. If we have lunch with all of us, I try to get Jamie to eat up his vegetables because he says he doesn’t like them except for peas and he drops a lot of them. I told him that his carrots were really sweeties just made to look like carrots, so he ate some of them. One time, Dad said we should all go for a picnic on the beach and take a pack lunch. He turned to Ella and he said,

  “How about whipping up a few rounds of sandwiches then? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He was laughing. And she put her hands round his neck as if she was going to strangle him, but she was only playing.

  Dad likes her, you can tell, because he holds her hand when we’re walking along. I told Nat Dad’s got a girlfriend, but he said, “So? Tell me something I don’t know. I knew that. I told you in the first place.”

  I tried to tell him that I don’t think it’s the same one but he wouldn’t listen.

  Ella is painting a picture right on the wall in my bedroom at Dad’s. She said she is very rusty at painting but she is miles better than me. Dad is good at walls but he can’t do pictures. What she’s painting is a castle on a hill and there’s birds and clouds in the sky and it’ll be the only painting like it in the whole wide world. Dad said she went to art school and did painting when she was younger and then she made jewellery and used to sell it on a stall in a market but she had to give it up because she couldn’t make enough money. Ella doesn’t get any money in an envelope because Jamie hasn’t got a daddy, so she has to work really hard all by herself. I tried to tell Nat but he put his fingers in his ears and told me to shut up and stop talking about smelly Ella the whole time. But she is not smelly except for sometimes she has perfume on and she let me squirt it on my neck and my wrists like a lady and Dad said I smelt very nice and posh and now he’ll have to take us both out to a fancy restaurant and put on his best suit so as not to let the side down.

  Scott

  Hey—it’s not bad this talking lark, is it? I stay at Ella’s a couple of nights a week now and we do lots of it—talking, I mean. She can’t come to mine, ‘cept at the weekends of course, because she doesn’t want to unsettle Jamie plus she has to get things ready for the van. She’s up at the crack of dawn, buttering away against the clock, then she loads up, with all the spare fillings in plastic tubs, and the paper bags and everything. She’s a one-woman whirlwind. Sometimes I try to help her, but I can’t keep up so I just do the lifting things into the van bit. She gets Jamie up and breakfasted too, though he’s a self-reliant little fellow.

  I’m teaching him to dress himself, but it’s a tricky business when you come to think of it and, frankly, at that time in the morning, I’m not all that hot at it myself. Jamie reminds me of Nat at that age, wanting to do everything himself and going mad with frustration when something’s just a bit beyond him. The first few times I stayed there, Ella bundled me out the house as soon as she got up. Then one time, I just could not lever myself upright from the bed until it was seven so I bumped into Jamie and he pointed at me very accusingly and shouted: “You were in my mummy’s bed!”

  “She said I could because my bed’s broken.”

  “I’m not allowed any more!”

  He likes to shout does Jamie, but he’s a sweet kid. Anyway, when I’m there, me and him have a bit of a chat about manly matters over our cornflakes, then Ella’s sister Cora drops in, scoops up Jamie and whisks him off to nursery school which luckily is next to the junior school where her own twin girls go. In the afternoons, Ella sorts out the van and restocks, then she has the twins for an hour or two after school to give Cora a break. They’ve got it down to a fine art, so they tell me, and it mostly goes without a hitch, but they’re both completely knackered the whole time. Cora’s husband works a night shift in the mortuary at the hospital, and so far as I can see his sole contribution during the day seems to be nothing but a lot of snoring.

  Anyhow, because of this hectic frenzy Ella calls a life, she has to be in bed by ten most nights, but if I’m there on a sleepover, as Rosie would say, we stay awake and talk for an hour. In the dark. Ella says she and Cora used to talk with the lights out when they were kids, they’d whisper to each other and make up stories. We never did that. We wouldn’t have had the nerve. The old man would have murdered us in our beds if he’d heard a peep out of us once we were supposed to be asleep.

  “He sounds like a barrel of laughs, your dad.”

  “Oh, he is. It’s like a non-stop pantomime, being in his company.” Her arm slides across me, her skin cool against my stomach.

  “You seem amazingly un-bitter about it though. I mean, I know you joke about it, but it must be painful surely? Aren’t you angry?”

  “What? Angry that he’s a foul, mean-minded, violent arsehole who wishes I’d never been born, you mean?”

  “I’m sure he’s not that bad, but—well, yes.”

  “Not really. I’ve given up thinking about it. I mean, yeah, it was crap at the time, but none of us knew any different, and—well—we all survived.”

  “Yes.” Her hand strokes my cheek. “But much more than that, you’ve made something of yourself and you’re a great father to boot. Still, you must have missed having a dad you could look up to?”

  “You don’t miss what you never had, do you? I’m OK.”

  “It’s good that you’ve got Harry in your life,” she says. “Thank God for being a grown-up—at least you get to adopt some new relatives if you like. No reason why you should stay stuck with the ones you’re born with. He means a lot to you, Harry, doesn’t he?”

  “Mmm, I guess so. He’s all right, is Harry.”

  It’s nice, this, talking in the dark. You can say things you couldn’t say in the daytime. Ella’s body curves close into mine, our legs bent at the same angle. Sometimes I barely know which parts are her and which are me.

  “My turn,” she says, as
we turn together, facing the other way. “Your go to spoon me.” And she wriggles back onto my lap, sighs and settles into sleep.

  While we’re on the subject of my wondrous family, did I ever mention that I was a mistake? I may have let it slip somewhere along the line. The Gruesome Twosome had decided to call it a day after they’d had Sheila and Russell. I guess they felt there was only so much happiness they could stand, you know? Yeah, right. More like they decided the carpet couldn’t take the extra wear and tear. Anyway, it wasn’t so much a decision, I think, as that they’d more or less stopped “having relations” as my mother puts it—which, to me, sounds like what you’d say if you asked your aunty and uncle over to tea. But my mother doesn’t like people speaking about the “S” word in front of her. It makes her wrinkle her nose up as though she’s just got wind of a nasty whiff.

  Anyway, a brief lapse occurred. Either that or a lone brave sperm made a slither for it across the vast desert of the marital bed and managed to struggle on under the flannel marquee my mother favours as a nightie, elbowing its way bravely like a commando in hostile territory. That’s a horrible thought, I wish I’d never got started on this. Yeuch. However it happened by some happy accident—ha!—I came into the world. It’s no wonder half the time I feel unsettled, like I’m not really supposed to be here at all and any minute now they’ll discover my visa’s expired and boot me off the planet altogether. Still, it’s not my fault, is it? I didn’t ask to be here either. But now that I am here, you’d think the parents could at least put a brave face on it and act like they’re happy. To be fair to them, I can’t accuse them of favouritism, ‘cause they didn’t exactly smother Sheil or Russ with love either. They like them better now, but only because they live so far away and communication’s been reduced to Christmas and birthday cards. My mum’s especially proud of the fact that Russell lives in Canada—bit like the way Harry and Maureen are about their son Chris in Australia, now I come to think of it. My mum’s always saying, “My son Russell, who lives in Canada,” as if it’s her achievement, like it reflects well on her. Which it doesn’t. I mean, why’s she think he moved over there in the first place? Wasn’t for the beaches and the non-stop sunshine, was it? And Sheil up in Scotland. OK, it’s only 400 miles, but she knows they’re too mean to stump up the train or air fare to be dropping in on her every other weekend, and that’s the way she likes it. So how come I’m the only daft sod who still lives within spitting distance of the old dears? No, not literally—they’re a half-hour drive away. It’s not like my mum or dad have ever begged me to stay in the neighbourhood; my mother doesn’t turn to me with a twinkle in her aged eye and say, “Scott, dear, it’s such a comfort having you live close by"; my father’s not on the phone every morning, asking me if I fancy going for a round of golf.