The Summer of Secrets (28 page)

‘Hi.’ Her hands were deep in her pockets to stop them from shaking. Under the orange light of the streetlamp, he was old, as if the elasticity in his skin had given up. She didn’t know what to say. He reached an arm out as if to touch her shoulder, but let it fell back down by his side.

‘I thought I could drive you home.’ His voice sounded rough, as though it wasn’t being used much.

‘To the house? Do you mean I can come back?’

He seemed confused, and the realization that he thought of the flat as her home left a hollow space before he even spoke.

‘I mean your mum’s.’

She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘No. It’s OK. The bus stop’s right here.’

He fell into step beside her, and they reached the shelter in silence. The bench inside was full.

‘So, how are things at college?’ He was wearing his old anorak, the one he’d never throw out, with pockets that hung down with the weight of everything in them. Helen took a sideways glance at the hair straggling over the back of his collar and the pouches under his eyes. She dropped her gaze, and had to wait for her voice to steady.

‘OK.’

They stood for a bit longer. A bus came along, stopped. She was aware of the door as it hissed open, the flurry of bodies shifting forwards, waiting to flash their passes and sway along to find a seat. The doors closed, and the lights from the windows drew away.

‘Is there anywhere we can sit down?’

She made a gesture towards the bus shelter.

‘No.’ His smile was sad. ‘Where we can talk.’

The air in the pub smelled of cold cigarettes and bleach spray. Her dad paused as they went through the door, and she wondered if he, too, was wondering how they had arrived at this place. The table had uneven legs, and the faux leather seat of the chair was sticky. She watched as he went up to the bar and waited for someone to appear. He had changed, his shoulders smaller, all his bulk sitting at a lower point, dragging his whole body down. Under the table, she pinched the skin on the inside of her leg, the soft bit above her knee, and felt the pain in her chest subside.

Coke was the wrong drink, too cold, the chinking ice cubes setting off a shiver that travelled up her arm and over her whole upper body. Her dad had beer, the frothy head slopping over the side before coming to rest in a diminishing mass on the table.

‘These were your favourite, weren’t they’ he said, holding out a packet of prawn cocktail crisps.

She let him put them on the table in front of her. She didn’t want to eat anything.

‘I want to say sorry.’ His attention was too much now. All she could see were his eyes, burning out of the greyness of his face.

‘Dad—’

‘No, listen.’ He turned back to his beer, and a tremor passed over his face. ‘I can’t explain why, but … well, things have been difficult lately.’ He cleared his throat, and her fingers closed back on the skin of her leg. ‘I know it’s been difficult for you too, and I’m sorry.’

‘Dad …’ Her voice came out louder than she had expected. It wasn’t fair. He’d had time to think, to prepare for this. She closed her eyes for a second and then tried again. ‘Dad, when can I come home?’

He gave a sort of a laugh, drawn from the back of his throat. ‘Love, it’s not that easy.’

‘But it is.’ She could feel tears starting, deep in her chest. ‘I know Mum doesn’t want me to go, but I hate being in her flat. I thought you’d understand.’ Her voice wobbled, and the last words came out in a rush. ‘I’ll make tea every night. I’ll wash the dishes. I’ll tidy up. I won’t complain about anything. Let me come back.’

But he didn’t touch her or come around or say comforting words. He sat in his seat and she sat in her seat and she let the tears run down her cheeks and felt them drip round the edge of her chin and run under her scarf.

‘The trouble is …’ He stopped for a long time, long enough for her to start to feel scared.

‘Dad?’

‘If I’d made sure, if I’d been more careful.’ His head came up but it wasn’t her he saw. ‘It’s a terrible thing.’

She waited for more but nothing followed. The woman behind the bar went out through a door at the back, leaving it swinging to and fro. From some dim corner Helen could hear the slow ticking of a clock. Her father lifted his glass as if he was going to drink, but his hand stopped halfway. He stared at the glass as if wondering what it was, and then placed it back on the beer mat.

‘I’d better get you home.’

He meant it. Her home, the flat. With her mother. Helen pushed her drink from the table. The glass shattered, the ice skidded and the liquid hit the floor and bounced up and crashed against the edge of her world like a wave. She dragged her coat sleeve over her eyes, the rough material scraping at her skin.

‘I’ll get the bus.’

Her dad stared at the glass on the floor and the widening pool of Coke. He didn’t seem to be able to understand what had happened.

‘I’ve got the car, I can take you home.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ A whiteness flared in front of her eyes. ‘I don’t want you to take me back to that place. I don’t want to see you ever again!’

And as she grabbed for her bag and stumbled against the chair, he was saying something, but she wouldn’t listen.

Somehow she was in the bright box of the bus watching him getting smaller and further away. In her pocket was the bag of prawn cocktail crisps.

In the end, she couldn’t keep the silence going, not everywhere, not with everyone.

November turned out to be a month of unseasonable warmth, a delayed Indian summer, the days beginning with the lightest touch of winter’s bite that was gone by the middle of the morning. On the news, statistics were bandied about: it was the warmest November since records began, they’d found the earliest duckling, photographed the most unseasonal blossom.

Other, gloomy, voices warned that the cold would come and these unseasonal portents of the new year would die, and nature would withdraw, wrong-footed and bruised. In the meantime, Helen felt herself uncoil, allowing approaches towards friendship to extend their roots and conversation to draw her in. Sometimes, she found herself laughing. It was only at home, now, that she kept the blanket of silence pulled down close and heavy, and even this began to show some fraying edges. Until the day in December when her mother called her from her room and asked her to sit down, as she had something she had to tell her.

Her mother seemed to be spitting out waves of energy. Her eyes glittered and a restless force kept her pacing over to the window, back to the door, across to the fireplace where she fidgeted with the china figures.

Helen kept her eyes fixed on the carpet, at the spot where some of the nylon pile had snagged and a curly tuft sprang out, no matter how many times her mother poked it back under with the point of a knitting needle.

She didn’t understand: in what sense was he gone?

‘Is …’ Her voice was croaky, as if the remembered smoke had come back to steal it. She coughed, swallowed. ‘Is he going to come back?’

‘That’s what we don’t know.’ Her mother took a deep breath. Helen wanted to shut her eyes, to block her ears. She wanted her mother to stop, but the tension rising up in her chest, the sort of feeling she had when she was going to be sick, told her that it was coming, whether she liked it or not. Her mother came to sit down, tried to take hold of Helen’s hand. ‘The house has been left as if he’s gone out for a walk. The car is in the driveway.’ She stood up again, smoothed her skirt over her hips. ‘There are no reports of anything, the hospitals, the police …’

With a remote part of her brain, Helen could see there was worry there, but as ever, none free from the taint of anger. She watched as her mother forced a smile. ‘We thought you should know, that you needed to be … prepared. He may turn up. They do, sometimes.’

‘Who’s “weî?’ Helen finally had something to grab hold of, something recognizable. ‘Who decided I should know?’

‘There’s a very nice policewoman, she supports people like us.’

People like us? What did that mean?

‘How long has he been gone?’ Rage was starting to build in her stomach now, but it was cold and heavy, weighing her down in the chair. ‘When did he go?’

‘They’ve given me some leaflets, and you can go and talk to them as well.’

‘How long has he been gone?’

Her mother had been standing by the fireplace, one hand on the mantelpiece, looking at her with an expression that must have been aiming for understanding compassion. Had that policewoman been teaching her how? Her eyes met with Helen’s, and she faltered, turned, and seemed to be studying the painting on the wall.

‘The milk in the fridge was dated from the beginning of November.’ She swung back round. ‘It’s been a terrific strain, you know, trying to find out what was going on, not letting you worry.’

From somewhere, the impulse came to get up, cross the room, escape. But as she reached the door, she stopped.

‘What about the boat?’ She knew what had happened. He’d taken the boat and sailed away. And she didn’t blame him, not one bit. A tiny bubble of relief detached itself from the weight in her midriff and forced its way up towards her brain. A whole month they’d waited to tell her, and she was the only one who knew what he’d done. ‘Has anyone tried to find his boat? Why don’t you ask your police friend about that, Barbara?’

Her mother stepped forwards and put her hands on Helen’s shoulders. Helen was not going to fall for the pretence of understanding; she was not going to listen.

‘Helen, the boat was tracked as far as the sea.’

Helen pulled away, took a step backwards. So they knew? Why was everyone so sombre, then?

‘So he sailed away. Don’t you see? He made it! He went out to sea like he always wanted to!’

‘I’m so sorry.’

Her mother’s voice was relentless. ‘He had no navigational equipment, no radio. And his boat hasn’t been seen since it left the estuary …’

I have been angry for such a long time. In the journal I kept over the winter that followed my father’s disappearance, it spilled out in automatic writing, the words scraped into the page and spilling dark thoughts in long and furious sentences. I kept the notebooks hidden, but not well. I wanted my mother to find them, read them, see what she was doing to me. It was anger that propelled me from my mother’s flat, from my mother’s life. It got me to Manchester, has been sustaining me for my entire adult life.

I can hear Larry’s voice, coming across the counter, followed up by his rattling cough.
You should call your mother, get it all out in the open.
He made me tell her where I was, that was a condition for me staying. Other than that, he largely left it alone. Not one for emotions, Larry. Even so, he would occasionally let something drop.
Young girl like you, should be out having fun. You need to leave it behind, whatever it is. Face it or leave it
. I couldn’t do either, and he was generous enough not to force it.

He saved me, Larry did. He gave me first a job, then a home, and finally, by leaving me the shop, he gave me the option to stay hidden. I think of him as I sit on the train, watching the flat Lancashire land roll past. I have my back to my destination, even though travelling backwards makes me feel sick. I can’t bear to look at where I’m going.

The station has that jarring sense of being the same but different. I’m not even sure of what I should be remembering. There are so many things I’m not sure about. Will my mother even be in the same flat? Can I remember how to get there? What exactly am I going to say?

Southport. The end of the line. When the train pulls in, I am submerged with the memory of unhappiness. The word feels inadequate, what I felt was misery, despair. The air is so heavy around me that the thought of getting off the train is too much, and I’m there in my seat when the conductor gets back on. He asks me if I’m all right, but he wants me out of his way. I can see it in his eyes. I’m another loony tune, sitting in his carriage wearing a knitted hat in spite of the sun. It was the best I could find, I want to tell him. You should see my hair. But he’s already moving away and there are people climbing into the carriage for the return trip, so I force myself to stand and, before I’m ready, I’m down there on the platform.

Things are familiar but wrong. There’s a brown china jug with a highly glazed swirl of green and yellow running around its belly; a pair of brass ducks, one larger than the other; an owl made out of shells. They belong in a different house, in my childhood world. If I were to reach out, I feel as if I could touch the wallpaper from that time, step back into myself and be back there, Dad in front of the TV, the boat in the garage, the world intact.

I sit on a hard chair and anchor my hands beneath my thighs. There is a smell, a subtle combination of minutiae of life: cleaning products and food, breathed air, soap, the Welsh wool blanket on the back of the sofa, a particular type of hand cream. I’ve not smelled it for more than half of my life but my brain recognizes it immediately.

We haven’t said anything yet. Quite literally, we haven’t said a word. I found the flat by not thinking about it. I kept my head down and put one foot in front of the other until there I was, ringing a bell, and there she was, peering out at me. I followed her into the room I’m in now, and she silently left me to make a pot of tea. At least, that’s what I assume.

The woman who finally comes back, carrying a tray, is too small. She has the hands of an old lady, and I can see scalp through the thinning waves of her hair. I feel too big here, as if I have been pumped full of air. The lightness in my head is tugging me towards the ceiling, and I hold on to my seat with both hands.

The mugs are new, white and slightly tapered towards the base, but I recognize the teapot: stainless steel, the inside darkened to the mahogany tint of many hundreds of spoonfuls of tea.

‘I went to a gallery opening last night.’ The words come out with no preamble. ‘It was Victoria.’ I take a breath. ‘Do you remember her?’

What am I expecting? Guilty silence? Denial? Tears?