Lessons for a Sunday Father (22 page)

“Yeah, tea for me as well then, please Sylvie.” My opening remark. Stunning. Who could resist me? And if you thought that was cool, how about my dazzling follow-up? “Got any doughnuts left?”

Anyway, this dream creature in the dotty dress, instead of giving me the pitying look I deserved, actually turns and smiles at me. So I’m a goner then. There’s no hope for me. I’m practically dribbling. And this is when I lead up to the Big Move. I nod at her.

“All right?” I say. Can you believe it? And, remember, I wasn’t fifteen when I met her. I’m too embarrassed to say. Oh, sod it, I was twenty-four—and no problems with the girls normally, I’d been around. But this one reduces me to a bumbling idiot. No patter. No clever compliments. No nifty innuendoes. Bloody hopeless.

“Yes, thank you,” she says, smiling at me as if I’ve said something quite intelligent or amusing. “You?” she adds.

“Yup,” I say, then, thinking it sounds too curt and abrupt, instead of keeping my big mouth shut like any sensible person I carry on: “Yes, indeedy, I’m all right. Certainly. All right, all righty. No worries.” By now I’m swearing at myself inside, digging my fingernails into my palms to jab some sense into me, ready to stick my head in the urn and end it all. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sylvie slowly shake her head to herself and start to pour the tea.

Then she says she hasn’t seen me in there before and I say I do come in there, often actually, meaning to encourage her to come there again so I can accidentally on purpose bump into her but it comes out a bit rushed and a bit strange and it sounds like I’m being defensive, offering an alibi or accusing her of being dumb or a liar or both.

And so I realize that it’s all hopeless and I might as well have two doughnuts and bugger the spots, so I turn to Sylvie for my tea.

“Well, maybe see you around then?” says the dream creature. “I’m Gail, by the way.”

The cup rattles in its saucer as I lift it, slopping some over the side. I stare at it, trying not to spill any more at the same time as trying to look casual as if it doesn’t really take 99 per cent of my concentration to transport a cup of tea all of ten feet to my table.

“Yes. Definitely. Yes.” I risk a quick glance away from the cup to look at her. What a smile. “I’m De—Scott.” This was round about the time I’d decided to skip the Dennis altogether and use my surname instead.

“DeScott?”

“Scott.” I square my shoulders and try to look smooth. “Just Scott.” I nod coolly. “See you around then.”

As I clunk my tea down on the table, more of it slops into the saucer, which now looks like a ruddy soup bowl. I won’t turn round, I tell myself. I won’t turn round. I won’t.

I turn round. She is laughing with her mate, probably giggling about what a fathead I am and about how I can’t manage to hold a cup of tea properly.

“I wouldn’t mind either,” says Roger, my mate. “You jammy bugger.”

He was right. That was it, with Gail. On good days, I always feel—felt—I was a bit of a jammy bugger. And what the hell does that make me now?

Mum said, “Well, of course, I won’t make you go. Don’t see how I
could
make you. But …”

I sat there, yawning, wishing she’d hurry up and get the lecture over so I could go round Steve’s. Mum was watching my foot as I jiggled it up and down and you could tell any second now she was going to say, “Nathan, please stop fidgeting, I’m trying to talk to you,” but she bit her lip. I stopped anyway for a second to watch her face, then started again, trying to speed her up a bit.

“Nat, you know your dad loves you very much …”

I snorted. Yeah, right. Funny way of showing it. That’s why he couldn’t stand to live in the same house as me any more. Mum does come out with some crap sometimes.

“He does, Nat. I know it’s hard for you to see while you’re still so angry with him. You and Rosie mean everything to him.”

I raised my left eyebrow at her to show I knew it was total crud what she was saying. It looks really cool.

“It’s just your dad and I—well—you know, some-times grown-ups find they can’t live together any more and they decide it will be better for everyone if they live apart for a while.”

Give me a break, puh-leese. Why’s it up to the parents to decide? What bright spark came up with that idea? They should have left it up to me or Rosie. I yawned again. I think she’s been reading all those sad self-help books. How To Tell Your Kids You’re Getting a Divorce, that stuff. Should be How To Tell Your Kids You’ve Fucked Up Big Time.

“Scuse me? You talking to me?” I leant back in my chair. “I’m not Rosie, you know, you can’t pull that ‘sometimes grown-ups need to be apart for a while’ stuff with me. Why don’t you cut the crap and just tell me when you’re getting a divorce?”

She sighed and slumped down onto my bed and started trying to straighten the duvet out which was a non-starter because she was sitting on it.

“Oh, Nathan. I don’t mean to talk to you as if you’re a baby, but you’ve no idea how hard this is.”

“Shouldn’t have got married in the first place then, should you?”

She looked up at me.

“How can you say that? You and Rosie are the best thing that’s ever happened to me and your dad …”

“Yeah, yeah … and the divorce?”

“We’re not at that stage yet, Nathan. Your dad and I—”

“Can I go yet? I said I’d go round Steve’s.”

“Well, I think this is pretty important, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“It’s no big deal. People get divorced the whole time. Celebs never stay married more than two years. It’s to keep themselves in the papers—big battle slugging it out in the courts then fairytale wedding to the next one.”

“That’s hardly the same thing, is it? This
is
a big deal, Nat, because this is
us.
Anyway, I just can’t bear the thought that you or Rosie would ever think—even for a second—that your dad and I having this time apart means we don’t love you.”

I put my feet up on my desk to loosen my laces, thinking when I got round to Steve’s I would check out this new game he got sent from his aunt over in LA. She sounds pretty cool. How come he gets an aunt who knows all the best games and sends him brilliant new ones like months before they’re even out here and I get the kind of aunts who knit me crap sweaters barely big enough for a four-year-old and who ruffle my hair and ask me how I’m enjoying school. ‘Cept Sheila, that’s Dad’s big sister. She’s cool, but she lives all the way up in Scotland.

I looked back at Mum. She had that look, like she was waiting for something, so I figured maybe she’d asked me a question.

“Mmn,” I said and sort of smiled a bit.

“Good.” She got up and put her arms round me and tried to give me a hug.

“Mu-uum.” I pulled away.

“Oh, you. You’re not too old to give your mum an occasional cuddle, are you?”

“Mn.”

“Anyway.” She stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders. “I’m glad we’ve had a chat. And you will think about it, eh?”

“Right.” Think about what? I got up, shrugging her off. “I’m off to Steve’s.” I stopped in the hall as I grabbed my jacket and shouted back up the stairs. “What’s for tea tonight?”

“Not sure. Pasta with some devastatingly delicious and unusual sauce probably.”

“Pasta
again.
Can’t we go down the chippie?”

“We’ll see. No promises. And Nathan?”

“What?”

“Back by quarter to seven at the latest if you want to eat, please. If you get held up,
phone.
No excuses.”

“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah. Why don’t you just get me an electronic tag so you know where I am the whole time?” Unbelievable.

When I come back from seeing my dad, Mum is ironing or getting the tea ready. She kisses me and says, “Had a good day, darling? Do something nice?”

Now I know what to say and what’s best not to tell. One time, I came home and told Mum that I had chips and a Coke and a chocolate nut sundae and then we had cake in a little café. She said I must be sure and make Daddy give me a proper meal, not just chips and then I heard her on the phone to Dad and she was very cross and said he was like a bloody kid himself, didn’t he know anything, what was he thinking of and that he would never change, he was always irry-something and he must jolly well get a proper hot meal inside me with vegetables and not be pouring rubbish down my throat all day long and spoiling me for normal food.

Natty doesn’t ask me about what I do with Dad, but I know he wants to know, so when I come in I creep up to his room. I lie on his bed while he watches his TV or plays on his computer. He says he is not playing but “doing stuff” but it is mostly games or e-mailing his friends or surfing the Net or talking to people in chat rooms until Mum notices and gets cross about the phone bill and that she can’t use the phone. Nat says she’s mean and how come we’re the last people on the planet with only one phone line, then Mum says he’s becoming a right little spoilt brat and that lots of people don’t even have enough to eat and he should be grateful. Then he makes that face he does when he’s in a funny mood. He doesn’t say anything, but he tilts his head like this so his hair falls forward over his eyes and there’s no point saying anything to him then because he won’t answer.

Nat has old toys under his bed which he says he doesn’t play with any more but when Mum said we should pass them all on to the children’s ward at the hospital, he said he had to sort them out first and then he didn’t do it. Also he has magazines with pictures of motorbikes in and one time I found a rude one with naked ladies in it and I said I was going to tell Mum but Nat said he would give me a Chinese burn if I did and I better not. I wouldn’t have told anyway. Nat said it wasn’t his, but that Steve must have left it to get him in trouble, and the next time I looked it wasn’t there.

I look through whatever’s lying around on his floor or under the bed and say where we went and what we did and what I ate and what we bought and what we saw. Nat never asks anything but when he wants to know more about something, his hand goes still on his mouse and he leans back in his chair and kicks his feet forwards until they touch the wall. Mum will tell him off because he’s always kicking things and he leaves big black marks everywhere from his shoes. He leans back and I tell him things like, “So then we went to the beach and we saw a funny man with a hat on and he was talking to himself and I said he must be a loony and Dad said no, he might be a spy or a detective working undercover and was just pretending to be a loony so that no-one would suspect anything and that we should just act natural and then run and hide behind the breakwater. So we did and we crouched on the pebbles and Dad looked over the top and then I looked over the top to see if the man was still there. But he wasn’t.” Then Nat said the man was probably hiding behind another breakwater because he thought we must be the loonies because we were acting so daft and suspicious and if we weren’t careful someone would call in the men from the loony bin. But Nat was only saying it to try to scare me. He didn’t mean it. I could ask Dad. Mostly he doesn’t know the answers to things when you ask him, but he doesn’t mind. Before, when he was at home, if I asked him questions, he’d say, “Ask Mum” or “Ask your teacher” only now he says, “Mmm, let’s see now, where would we find that out?”

Hello, yes, it’s me. Here I am, back home again, playing silly buggers, acting like a prowler round my own house. Well, I had an hour or two to kill before my next call and I couldn’t be arsed to go back to work. I wander through to the kitchen. Looks tidy. Pick up an apple from the bowl on the counter and bite into it. Ha! I guess it’s a bit of a pathetic victory but I feel as if I’ve just pulled off a major bank job. At least it’s a crunchy one. Have a stretch out on the settee for a few minutes. I mean, it’s still half mine, right? Do you think you can get, what’s it called?—you know, access rights or whatever, to a settee? It’s dead comfy, this one, and big enough so your legs aren’t hanging off the end.

Then I trudge upstairs—yes, shoes off first. You’re proud of me, aren’t you? I can tell. Quick look at Rosie’s room, everything all neat and in its place, even the postcards and photos on her pinboard are all pinned on dead straight. Go into Nat’s room and snort with laughter at the contrast with Rosie’s. You’d never guess they were related. Don’t even see how I can get in without treading on everything. Not that he’d notice. You could let a Tyrannosaurus rampage around in there and the place’d probably look a whole lot tidier than it does now.

I sit at his desk for a minute and lean the chair back on its rear legs the way Natty does, pushing my feet against the wall. The monitor and hard drive lights are on on his computer, so I just sort of nudge the mouse a tad to clear the screensaver. He’s supposed to turn it all off if he’s out for hours but he’s always forgetting. Can’t think who he gets that from, must be Gail’s side of the family. Well, I reckoned he might have left it mid-game and I could just play for a couple of minutes. Sure as hell wasn’t likely to be his homework on the screen. Anyhow, I was just looking, OK? Not snooping. All right, maybe a bit of snooping, but I didn’t think it was going to be anything, nothing private.

It’s a word document, with his address at the top, on the right, like you do for a business letter, as if he’s applying for a job or something. And then there’s the date but three days ago. And then underneath that, it says,

Dear Dad

And that’s it. The rest of the page is blank.

I sit there for what feels like forever, a lump in my throat. I keep trying to swallow. Then those two words go kind of blurry and my chest feels tight and I can’t move. I feel like I might stay like that for the rest of my entire life, picture them finding me, a skeleton in Nat’s chair, my bony fingers still clinging to the mouse, my jaw gaping.

I’d probably still be there now if something hadn’t jolted me out of it, something that’s the one thing I absolutely don’t want to hear, can’t believe I’m hearing: the slam of a car door right outside and Gail’s voice from the front step.

“Can you manage that, Rosie? Leave it if it’s too heavy.”