Don't You Love Your Daddy? (12 page)

That was what my brother had meant when he had said she was dead, I thought. Dead means that she was gone not only from the house but from my head too.

I tried to talk to Pete about it when we walked to school but the emotion he had shown when I had first arrived home was now well hidden behind an impassive mask.

In the end, finding no solace anywhere, I went to my nana with my fears. I cried and cried as I told her that I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. ‘She said she could see me always,’ I told my grandmother, between sobs.

‘What do you mean, Sally?’ she asked.

‘She told me she was going to a special place where she could see me, so why can’t I see her?’

It took me several attempts to tell the story that my mother had told me the night before I had left to go to my aunt.

My grandmother tried to tell me that it was just a story, but I refused to listen. ‘Aunt Janet said it too!’ I protested indignantly, and my grandmother, faced with my choking sobs and my seven-year-old logic, decided that if I was ever going to accept my mother’s death I had to see her grave.

She took me the following Saturday. We walked hand in hand into the almost deserted graveyard. My first impression of it was how very quiet it was. The thick foliage of old trees hung over the dry stone walls and seemed to deaden the sounds of the busy traffic, and the few people who were walking among the graves seemed to speak in muted voices.

My grandmother tried to tell me some of the history of the cemetery, as she pointed to old gravestones with their inscriptions that time had faded or worn almost smooth. She told me the first ones we passed were hundreds of years old and that generations of local families lay there. We walked on moss-covered paths that led us through the graves, but however much she talked to me, the size of the cemetery with its pale headstones, almost like loose teeth in an old man’s mouth, unnerved me, and I clutched her hand even more tightly.

My mother’s grave was at the far end of the cemetery. Too soon for the headstone to have been erected, it was just a recently dug mound with fresh flowers arranged in a vase that was positioned where later her headstone would be. ‘Your father will have it put up when the soil has settled,’ she said, when I asked why there wasn’t one.

‘She’s here, Sally,’ she tried to explain, ‘but it’s only her body that lies here. Her spirit is in heaven.’

But I was too young to understand what she was telling me. Surely heaven was a beautiful place above the sky? Hadn’t I seen pictures of it at Sunday school? In the ones I had seen there was a kind-faced old man with a long white beard and a gold halo circling his head. At his feet were golden curly-haired angels who, with heads tilted upwards, were looking adoringly at him. That’s what heaven was like: a place where no one was unhappy, animals lived in harmony. It was awash with a warm yellow light. It wasn’t this cold, silent graveyard full of unseen dead people.

Seeing my puzzled look, my grandmother tried again to explain that my mother’s spirit was in heaven and that, yes, it was exactly as I imagined it and that, yes, my mother could see me. But it was a concept that I couldn’t comprehend.

After we had left the cemetery, Nana took me back to her house. Somehow she had picked up from my questions that I thought my mother had died because she had drunk too much, and that I had started to think that it might even be my fault she had died, that perhaps she hadn’t loved me enough to stay.

Knowing it was really important for me to understand that my mother’s death hadn’t been self-inflicted, she tried to explain the illness she had died of. She sat me down in her kitchen, poured me a glass of milk and took my hands so she had my full attention.

‘Sally, your mother did have her problems,’ she said, ‘but she loved you and your brothers very much. I know she drank and, as young as you are now, you know that too. But, Sally, it wasn’t the drink or the depressions that killed her. It was a terrible sickness called cancer.’

Seeing that I needed more, she finally said, ‘Come, I’m going to show you something. I was keeping it for you and Pete. I thought I would show it to you when you were a little older but I think you need to see it now.’

And then she handed me my mother’s photograph albums. ‘I took them from the house when your father said he wanted to get rid of them and I’ve kept them safe for all of you. They’re very important for you all to see,’ she said. I somehow knew that for her to confess that she had gone against her son’s wishes was difficult for her.

My grandmother left me alone at the table with the albums in front of me. Opening the bright purple cover of the first and turning its thick pages, I found my mother again.

At the beginning there were photographs of her when she had been very young, almost as young as me, but even those early photos were unmistakably of her. There was one of her in a swimsuit lying on a beach and smiling into the camera, and others of her and my aunt Janet, looking carefree eating candy floss. I wondered who had taken the pictures.

I flicked quickly over the pages that included pictures of my father. They showed my parents standing together, his hand resting on her shoulder while she gazed up at him with a smile of love and happiness on her face. These made me sad because it seemed to be a look just for him, which I had never seen before. I came to one of her standing in a park. She was wearing trousers that finished just below her knees with a sleeveless shirt and by her side was a little boy I recognized as Pete.

As I turned the pages I came to a photo where I was still a toddler holding her hand, and another that I remembered Pete had taken of us when we had all gone to the park together. It was during his school holidays and just before Billy was born. That day she had packed sandwiches and drinks and we had lazed in the sunlight all afternoon.

One by one I touched them as though, if I tried hard enough, she would walk out of the pictures. And as my fingers traced her features, those lost images of her were again imprinted on my mind. I knew that, without them, my mother’s face would fade completely from my memory, as it had the night before when I’d looked for her and there was a blank space. The one I liked most and just sat gazing at was of my mother standing alone. She was wearing a wide-skirted summer dress and one hand stretched up to hold her windswept hair off her face. It was in black and white but her blonde hair showed clearly. I could see that her skin glowed with health, her mouth was smiling and slightly open, showing even white teeth.

‘Can I have this one?’ I asked my grandmother, when she came into the room.

‘Let me keep it here for you, Sally, nice and safe,’ she said,

‘so when you want to come and look at them, they’ll all be here for you. You can come and look at them any time, Sally. You know that your mother will always live on in your and Pete’s memories, don’t you? She’ll always be a very special part of you.’

And for the first time that day I had some understanding of what she meant and, too choked with the emotion that looking through the album had raised in me, I just nodded.

I didn’t notice then that she hadn’t mentioned her son at any stage.

‘I have all their wedding photographs as well,’ she added. But those held no interest for me.

‘Have you got her scrapbooks?’ I asked, thinking of the hours my mother and I had spent together sticking in the little drawings she had done just for me and the sheets of paper where she had written her stories.

‘No,’ she said. I didn’t ask her what my father had done with them. Instinctively I didn’t want to know.

‘Sally,’ my grandmother said, as she took me home, ‘if you want to talk about your mother you must come and talk to me. Your father’s not ready to talk about her yet.’

I didn’t tell her that the only words my father ever uttered about my mother were too painful for me to want to hear.

Our house was a cold, unhappy place. Pete spent as much time as he was allowed to at his friends’ homes, and for six evenings a week I was almost ignored by my father.

From every Saturday morning through to the following Friday he didn’t come into my room either to say goodnight or to touch me in the ways I hated so much. I felt almost as though I was being punished by him for the acts he forced upon me.

I walked to school with Pete and in the afternoons went to my grandmother’s house until my father came and picked me up. He said nothing to me about what had happened that Friday night after my grandmother had gone. He just cooked my evening meal and then allowed me to have a bath and put myself to bed.

On Sundays the routine never changed: it was always Sunday school, followed by church and then lunch at my nana’s. On Saturdays I played on my own in the garden during the day and in the evening my grandmother brought over our groceries and supervised my bath. After that was done, my clean clothes, which she had washed and ironed, were laid out ready for me to wear at Sunday school. Before she tucked me into bed she listened to my prayers, then read me a short Bible story.

I dreaded those Friday nights. Pete often stayed at a friend’s house and my father had soon got into a routine of regularly going out. The fear of his return made me burrow my head under my blankets every time I heard my grandmother leaving and the front door shutting behind her. I would start to pray that this time my father would go to his own room, but he never did. However many times I pretended to be asleep, however much I tried to huddle under the bedclothes and however many times I protested, I would feel the bulk of his body as he crawled in beside me. My nose would be filled with the fumes of beer and sweat and when he left I ached from him prodding me.

In those early days he took care not to penetrate me, but he hurt me all the same.

It was on one of those evenings that he returned home with a puppy. That Friday night my grandmother had delivered me back to the house. ‘Come along, Sally, stop dawdling! Your father’s been held up at work,’ she said, when I asked why he hadn’t picked me up himself. And, thinking my dismal expression reflected disappointment at his absence, she hurriedly reassured me. ‘Don’t worry, dear, he’ll be back for supper. And I’ll be staying with you as usual this evening – it’s the weekend, you know.’

Once we had arrived at our house, my grandmother busied herself with getting the supper ready. ‘Some homemade soup and your favourite meal, cheese on toast,’ she told me cheerfully.

I heard the sound of his car coming to a halt, then footsteps on the path and finally the front door opened. Instead of the cold, distant father I had grown to expect, in walked the one I remembered from when my mother was alive: the father who wore the smile I had thought was just for me. ‘Here, Sally,’ he said, as he walked into the kitchen, ‘see what your daddy has for you,’ and, poking out of his jacket, I saw a small white head.

I gasped as he unbuttoned his jacket and I saw that the little head belonged to a tiny puppy. ‘Here, take her, she’s yours.’ A ball of wriggling fluff was placed in my outstretched arms. I saw a shiny black button of a nose, a pair of bright brown eyes looking up at me and then felt a warm wet tongue as, seeming to recognize me as her new owner, she licked my cheek enthusiastically. With the maternal feeling that very young children have towards puppies and kittens, I cradled her protectively in my arms. ‘She’s for me?’ I asked incredulously.

My father laughed. ‘Yes, Sally, she’s all yours. Your grandmother and I thought you might need something to look after,’ he added, still with that warm Daddy smile on his face. ‘She’s a miniature poodle,’ he told me, ‘and as she’s yours, you even get to name her.’

‘She’s beautiful.’ I was almost overcome with joy that this darling little creature belonged to me alone. At that moment I forgot everything that had happened and saw once again the father I had loved. The corners of my grandmother’s mouth turned up and, seeing her face crinkling with pleasure at my delight, I realized she had known full well why he was going to be late home.

As soon as the little dog wriggled out of my arms, Nana fussed over her, getting out food bowls and puppy food, which, unbeknown to me, she had brought with her. One was filled with water and the other with small biscuits and tinned meat. ‘This will be your job from now on, Sally,’ she said. ‘She needs a feed three times a day until she’s bigger. And once she’s had her injections and can go out further than the garden, it’s you who will have to take her for her walks. Your daddy’s too busy to walk and housetrain her.’

Newspaper was duly spread out and I was given the task of taking her into the garden to encourage her to go to the toilet there instead of inside.

After we had all had supper my father looked at his watch and said that he was going out in a few minutes. ‘Come here, Sally,’ he said. ‘You’ll be asleep when I get home.’ Picking up the puppy I went to stand in front of him.

His arm went around me and he pulled me towards him. ‘Come and sit on my knee,’ he said, still in the old voice of the caring father. ‘Not too big for that now, are you?’

And, still overcome by my present, which I held lovingly in my arms, I did.

‘Aren’t you going to give your daddy a kiss?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Sally, say thank you to your father,’ said my grandmother.

Dutifully I puckered my lips and kissed his cheek.

‘What are you going to call her?’

I thought of the times my mother and I had watched a pretty blonde country and western singer and how my mother had hummed along to all her songs when she played the cassette or heard her on the radio. ‘Dolly,’ I replied.