If This Is Home Read online

  NINETEEN

  The taxi dropped me near what had once been my primary school. More houses, the same poky boxes, spread out over the playground and playing field. Somewhere they must have built new schools more technologically advanced than the shabby places Bethany and I had attended. More houses, more kids, bigger schools; buses to ferry the children there, assemblies of hundreds in their brightly painted school halls.

  ‘When did this stop being the school?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, must be ten year or so, I think,’ the cab driver said. ‘Long time. Place were falling apart anyway.’

  I handed him the fare and watched him pull away. The streets where I’d grown up looked windswept and ill-kempt. I walked past the house with the bushes, as my father used to call it, and saw that they had become as tall as trees and now guarded the small bungalow like a prison wall. It was where I went when my parents went out. A comfortable house that smelled of tea and baking, owned by an older woman called Josie, who made Radio Four a permanent soundtrack until 8 pm when I was permitted to watch television. Josie’s husband had died sometime in the seventies and she had made herself a cosy, protected life halfway up a hill in a small suburb of a small suburb.

  The bicycle tied to the back gate and the two cars suggested she was no longer there, perhaps retired now to Southwold as she’d always intended. Bracketed to the garage roof was an enormous satellite dish, a baby Jodrell. Every light in the house was burning, tennis balls and other kids’ ephemera littered the greasy lawns. Through the window of the kitchen extension, I saw a woman washing dishes. I thought of Ferne and what she’d said about people’s lives going on without you. It was the first time I had seriously considered the possibility of my father no longer being at the same address.

  The evening was slowly darkening, the clouds bunched and sprayed. On summer nights my father and I would watch the sun go down sitting in deckchairs, neither of us speaking, the rugged fields out the back sticky with cow dung and fronded with nettles. We would read, and occasionally one of us would say that it was beautiful, wasn’t it? and the other would agree and then we’d go back to our books, sitting there until it was too dark to make out the text on the page.

  As I walked down the hill, the fields were still visible, still just resistant to the march of the housing. The cows had been herded up to the top. To their right was a wooded area that we kids had called Bluebell Forest, a boggy clearing where a rope swing swung on warm evenings. It was the kind of image that people cling to: that summery abandon, the freedom of childhood; but like adolescence, I couldn’t imagine wanting to go back. Even as a child it seemed that it was tinged with nostalgia. My father used to say, ‘Get your time now, lad, those fields won’t be here for ever.’ And he believed it with grim inevitability. Seeing them still there was an argument he could not claim to have won.

  There was a car in the driveway, a newish model, rust-free and clean. Dad had never had much luck with his cars; he spent more time underneath them than driving them. There had been an oil patch on the paving slabs for years, a remnant of a particularly truculent Vauxhall Cavalier, but the slabs had been replaced by tarmac, smooth and comfortingly grey. The curtains were open in the front room of the bungalow, a television light visible, the outside barge boards now painted red. It was only the garden that made it clear that Dad was still around. If he’d had bad luck with cars, it went double with plants. Dad had never managed to get anything to flourish, or even grow. The beds of the small lawn were lined with withered stumps, dying buds, falling flowers: the grass patchy and erratically mowed.

  Are you going to do it, then? Really? Bethany said, sitting on the boot of the car. Are you man enough? She laughed. What would Ferne say you should do, eh? You seem to listen to her little pearls of wisdom.

  The garage was joined to next door’s: Dad’s painted the new red, theirs green. I stood at the front door, the whorls in the glass distorting the hallway. I rang the doorbell and took a step backwards. I did not want to hear, ‘I’ll get it,’ nor the sound of children or a woman’s voice. It needed to be as though I had never taken the taxi, had never put my bag in the boot and headed to the airport without even saying goodbye.

  The door opened. Dad had got fat, his face full, his torso three plump tubes inside a too-tight shirt. He was wearing his glasses and his hair had almost all gone.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, tell me you recognize me. Please.’

  He took off his glasses and closed his eyes. He opened them and replaced the spectacles.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

  *

  The L-shaped lounge had been redecorated. There was still wallpaper – Dad was fastidious about wallpaper – but it was muted; the old sofa with the fleur-de-lis pattern replaced by something in dark fawn with thick cushions. The carpet was deep and there was a glass coffee table and a massive television alongside two floor-standing speakers. He pointed for me to sit, but he remained standing. He was wearing slippers that had seen better days.

  My father put his hands on the chimney breast and then leant his head against it. He’d done the same thing when my mother had left. Then he had been crying, but he didn’t look like he was crying now. More like he was steeling himself.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said, calmly. ‘I knew this would happen. You spend all that time thinking about it, but then the time comes …’

  He turned to face me. He looked blank.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to say something?’

  I looked at him and half got up. He took a pace backwards. I sat back down and he shook his head.

  ‘No. Thought not.’

  He went through the dining area into the small kitchen and came back with two cans of beer. He put one in front of me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘So it does speak! After thirteen years I was beginning to bloody wonder.’

  He opened his can and took a long pull on it. McEwan’s Export, same as always.

  ‘You’ve done the place up nicely—’

  ‘Don’t you speak. Don’t you dare speak to me. “Done the place up nicely”? What the bloody hell are you talking about, boy? Couldn’t you have written? Couldn’t you have called?’

  I made to answer, but he cut me off.

  ‘I told you, don’t you speak. Don’t you say a bloody word.’

  He put his can down on the coffee table. On the mantelpiece was a framed photograph of the two of us, him in a party hat and a seventeen-year-old Mark wearing a sulky smile. He picked it up and passed it to me.

  ‘You know that’s the only photograph of us?’ he said. ‘I know. I’ve been all over this house trying to find one. I even wrote to your mother. Called her too. She couldn’t find any either. Just that one photograph to prove that you were ever here. Of all the things to do, of it all, to burn everything you couldn’t carry? That was the thing that cut me. That was the thing I kept thinking about. To burn it all in the garden, every last thing. You heartless bastard. You unfeeling, uncaring bastard.’

  I hadn’t thought about the burning for a long time. I had been meticulous about it, filled up Dad’s barbecue with everything not in my suitcase and covered it in lighter fuel. I’d thrown on a box of matches and lit the corner, the matches inside suddenly catching. It was something I used to do as a child. We used to call it a genie. I’d watched everything turn to ash and flame; posters, cassettes, photos. It had looked spectacular against the night sky. I’d warmed my hands on the flames, imagining it was my own cremation.

  ‘I was grieving,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘Grieving? To grieve you have to care, Mark! To grieve you need to feel something for someone else and you never cared for anyone but yourself. For what affected you. Your mum and I hoped you’d change, but we knew. We knew really. When I told her you’d gone, she wasn’t surprised. She even said, “Perhaps it’s for the best, all things considered.” Do you have any idea how much a mother has to be broken t
o say that: to give up on her only son? You don’t understand. You never did. These days they’d give you a fancy bloody name, but to me you’re just cold. Cold and vacant and heartless. And now you’re back.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have—’

  ‘What you should and shouldn’t have done doesn’t matter now,’ he said, still standing by the fake gas fire. ‘You can’t fix it, even if you were capable of such a thing, which you aren’t. You’re a spoiler. You broke down my marriage; you destroyed everything. And then you left. Just like that. Just like your work here was done. Did you ever think of me? Did you ever once consider what this was doing to me?’

  ‘I was angry. What you said about Bethany, about how things weren’t what I thought—’

  He laughed dismissively.

  ‘I was protecting her, not you, Mark. Mike came to me and said he was concerned about you and her. That she was throwing her life away on the dreams you were filling her head with. That girl! That beautiful girl! We could all see what was going to happen. We all knew it. You’d do for her what you always did for everyone. Part of me thinks she had a lucky escape dying when she did. I mean it. I honestly fucking mean it.’

  Bethany sat at the head of the dining table dressed in her carnival-queen outfit, her make-up smudged with tears. Don’t listen to him, honey, he’s just angry. He doesn’t mean those things. Honestly, he doesn’t mean them.

  ‘Don’t talk about Bethany that way,’ I said quietly. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘Really?’

  He picked up his can and sat down in the armchair. His face was red and small, patches of sweat had crept beneath the armpits of his shirt. I could hear the clock ticking in the hallway, a grandmother clock that he wound each night before bed.

  ‘You’re angry,’ I said. ‘You don’t mean what you say. I understand that.’

  ‘You understand nothing, Mark. You only see what you want to see.’

  ‘I’ve changed,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  Is it? Bethany said. I thought this was about me. About what happened.

  ‘I’ve been having, I don’t know … episodes. I can’t stop thinking about what happened. About leaving you here, about Bethany, about everything. It’s like it’s consuming me. Taking more of me every day.’

  He shifted in his seat, his breath and body odour close and pungent.

  ‘Welcome to my life, Mark. Welcome to every day for the last thirteen years. This is what it feels like to feel. And if it hurts, then so much the better.’ He smiled. ‘You think I’m joking? I’m not. I want you to understand the bloody dread of it all. They say that you only take your troubles with you when you run away, but I bet you didn’t. I bet you just started out like nothing had ever happened. Scorched earth in the past, green pastures in the future. Even as a child you were like that. You say I don’t know about you and Bethany? I know that you told her your mother was dead and that’s why you never spoke about her. I know that you bought her books about New York and told her all the great things you’d do. That you’d go there and then stay, live in a small apartment and read books and live the lives you’d always dreamed of and—’

  ‘They were just dreams,’ I said. ‘Fantasies. All teenagers have them.’

  ‘Except they never were fantasies for you, were they? You believed them all. And you went and lived them. And sod the consequences.’

  He’s jealous, honey, he’s jealous and angry and sad. Bethany’s tears lined her face, she looked clownish, bedraggled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I did what I needed to do. What I thought was right.’

  He started to cry, his body heaved and his fat pumped and his spectacles fell to the floor. I got up and went to him, placed a tentative arm on his shoulders. His arms extended and he grabbed me. He held me for a long time, his tears dampening my jacket.

  ‘Oh my boy,’ he kept saying, ‘oh my boy, what did you do?’

  *

  We went outside to smoke. We sat on a picnic bench underneath a faded parasol, both on to our second beer. It was warm still and the light was dim and orange.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t mean what I said,’ he told me as he flicked ash into a plant pot. ‘I won’t take it back.’

  He loves you. He always loved you. You just saved all your love for me. You didn’t have enough to share around. Things are different now, aren’t they, honey? Aren’t they?

  Bethany was wearing the clothes she was wearing when she was found. There was mud on her jeans, bite-size rips on her calves. Her hair was a mess.

  ‘I can’t take anything back either.’

  And neither would you want to, right? Who’d want to be stuck here? Who’d want that for a future?

  ‘But you came back.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about you.’

  He looked at me quizzically and stubbed out his smoke.

  ‘What’s to tell, Mark? Years slip by, the days get easier. I retired two years ago. Early. I play some golf, go up to Ringway every now and again. See old work friends. There’s a woman I know. Nothing serious.’

  He smiled. It exposed his crooked teeth and a green-grey tongue.

  ‘Not much for thirteen years,’ he said and shook his head, smoke wreathing his fingers.

  ‘You don’t have kids, do you?’ he said. ‘Please tell me you don’t have kids.’

  ‘No. No kids.’

  ‘Wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gay?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked relieved, then partly ashamed.

  ‘And you’ve been in New York all this time?’

  ‘Mostly. I’ve been in Las Vegas the last six months, selling apartments.’

  ‘Estate agent, eh? Might have preferred it if you were gay.’

  He laughed and swigged down his beer, picked up his can and went back inside for more. In the distance there was the mazy sound of a tractor. Time felt oddly out of rhythm, bits of different years tessellating. The bench belonged to now, the sky to the summers we spent reading, the barbed-wire fence to childhood, the beer and the cigarettes to all points in between. Dad returned with two cans and sat back down.

  ‘What do they call you now?’ he said. ‘I looked up the easiest way to get papers. If you’re not married then …’

  ‘They call me Joe. Joe Novak.’

  ‘Sounds like a no-nonsense cop to me.’ He opened his beer and held it up.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Joe Novak.’

  It got dark quickly and we ran out of conversation. We had exhausted old comedy routines, exhausted the little we were prepared to reveal about our lives, exhausted each other. I told him all about O’Neil and Edith and we sat in silence for a short time.

  ‘I went to see Mike,’ I said eventually. ‘I went round this morning.’

  He looked up from his drink, his face carrying all that extra weight.

  ‘Pleased to see you, was he?’

  ‘He told me to fuck off.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

  We sat at the dining table, the bookcases stacked with hardback books, the military history he had always read. There was a picture of my mother there too, when she was younger, her hair big and her dress short.

  ‘I don’t see Mike any more,’ he said. ‘Did you meet his wife? No of course not, you’d have mentioned it if you had.’

  ‘He’s got two kids, he said.’

  ‘Five and three. Both girls.’

  ‘Did you ever—’

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid. At my age? I don’t know where he finds the energy. I really don’t.’

  Something flashed before me for a second. Bethany was standing behind my father. She had her hands on his shoulders. Don’t ask, she said. This is bad. I know this is bad. Don’t ask. It’ll be better that way.

  ‘You said something … wh
at did you mean, you said something like I’d have mentioned his wife.’

  ‘Oh, come on, soft lad, do I need to spell it out?’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be much of a shock. We all suspected it. Even me.’

  ‘I don’t know, I just sort of thought it was rumours, you know. Bethany joked about it, but …’

  ‘Been married about eight years or so now, I’d say. I wasn’t invited.’

  I had always known. That’s why I joked about it. It had to be a joke; it couldn’t be real. If I made light of it then they couldn’t be.

  ‘It explains a lot.’

  ‘It explains nothing,’ Dad said. ‘Look I’m going to have to get to bed. It’s late. You have somewhere to stay? You can stay here if you want, but …’

  ‘I’m staying at the Coach House.’

  He nodded. I stood and he grabbed me again. We embraced, but all I could think about was Hannah. Dad held me like I might never see him again, then when he released me we were back to the same two people, the same strangers in a room both of the past and of the present. I kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I can’t ever forgive you, you know that.’

  ‘I know.’

  I walked to the door. I opened it and he called out.

  ‘You still follow the football?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘When I can.’

  ‘Still Red?’

  ‘Still Red.’

  ‘Good lad,’ he said and waved goodbye. I waved too and closed the door.

  *

  I decided to walk back to the hotel, Bethany shuffling alongside. He had no right, she said, to say those things. I know why you said your mother was dead. I knew what I was doing, I wasn’t an idiot. The arrogance of that man! You didn’t persuade me to do anything, you didn’t force dreams onto me; they were my decision and my decisions alone.

  He could have been right. I haven’t thought about it for so long, maybe he’s telling the truth. He seemed so certain.

  He would, though, wouldn’t he? He’s spent years chewing it over, stewing in it all. Fuck what he thinks; he was never there for you anyway. Not like I was.