Dot (27 page)

23 Downland Avenue,

Kelsey, KT1 2GH

07700 900961, [email protected]

8th July 2005

Dear Dot,

This letter will come as a surprise to you, but I have, in some senses, been writing it for sixteen years. It is 4 a.m. right now, a time I’ve become well acquainted with over the years. I spent most of yesterday and last night watching the news, as I’m sure you did, as I’m sure most people in Britain did. It sounds stupid to say that it made me think of you, but it did. As I watched other people’s lives fall apart on streets a few hours’ drive from us, I wondered why I was ruining my own life. It seemed almost rude to all those people who were losing their children or parents or sisters or whatever yesterday. I’ve spent all these years feeling scared of contacting you in case you hate me and it suddenly seemed so pointless and such a waste of time.

I’ll start with the easy bit and tell you something about myself. I’m sure your mother has filled you in on the whys and wherefores. Everyone in the village must have known that I left with Silver, who was the barmaid at the village pub (it was the Hare and Hounds back then, but now it’s the White Crow). I know that she will have told you about that and I know how awful it must sound. All I can say is that I knew I was meant to be with Silver from the first moment I spoke to her. I don’t know if it will make you feel any better to learn that we are still together and we have two sons, Adam who is coming up for 14 and Jake who is nearly 12, who are obviously your half-brothers. I did love your mother, but we were very young and totally wrong for each other, which is not a good combination. I always hoped that she would meet someone who could make her happy. I have sat outside your house quite regularly over the years; it’s only a ninety-minute drive from our home and in my darkest moments it’s calmed me to see you. In a sense I’ve watched you grow up. You look like a lovely young woman. I’m so pleased that your hair has stayed as bright as it ever was and I love the way you dress, so different from all those tiny skirts and Ugg boots and skinny jeans that every other girl of your age seems to wear as a uniform. In all my watchings I’ve never seen anyone else, apart from Alice and Clarice of course, and a nice-looking girl of your age who also has ginger hair and who I presume is your friend. It makes me think that your mother hasn’t met anyone else; she certainly still has that far-off look in her eyes and this has brought me much sadness. I am often consumed with the thought that I ruined her life and that you will hate me for that. Often I hate myself.

I work in a shop that fixes things. It’s a really old-fashioned shop, owned by a lovely man called Ron, who has become like a second father to me, or maybe more like a first father. I’ve spoken to him about you so much over the years I probably should be paying him, rather than the other way round. He’s always told me to contact you, just like Silver, and I’ve always known that they’re both right. I tried lots of jobs before I found this one, but I’ve been with him for ten years now and I doubt I’ll ever leave. All those jobs in call centres and banks and insurance companies chilled my soul. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s what it felt like. I would walk into those offices and it was like someone had put an icy hand into my stomach and twisted my guts. I would sit at my desk and watch people out of my window and it would seem like a waste to be shuffling numbers and papers which in the end amounted to nothing. After Jake was born Silver and I swapped and I stayed at home and looked after him and Adam and she went to work in a builders’ merchants. She runs it now and has just opened their second shop in Cartertown. I’m not ashamed to say that it’s because of her that we have a roof over our heads. I started working for Ron when Jake was 2, just part-time at first, but as soon as the boys were both at school full-time I’ve gone in every day. Ron lets me leave at 3 and I used to walk down the road and pick the boys up and take them home for tea or to scouts or karate or whatever it is they do. Now I go home and cook supper and wait for them to return. Somehow this life makes sense to me. I mend broken things, I look after my sons, I have dinner on the table when Silver gets home and I go to bed most nights tired in my bones rather than my mind, which is so much the best way round. Never let anyone tell you any different, Dot. We all find our bone-tiredness in different places but I am sure there is little meaning in money beyond the obvious and chasing it is a fool’s paradise. What matters to me is us sitting down to supper together as a family every night, welcoming Silver home at five and shutting the door on the world.

I think you have coloured my life to such an extent that this is the only way I can live. For so many years I was a stranger to myself, unable to believe that I could have left you and then never called. My mind would tell me to pick up the phone, but my fingers simply refused to punch in the numbers. I was scared of myself and all the things I could be capable of, frozen in terror at any action. Silver, the boys and Ron are the only reason that I am still breathing today. What I have with them has given me a purpose and yet I still have this great hole in my soul that only you can fill.

Are you still reading or have you screwed up this letter in disgust? I know I sound pathetic and I am not trying to justify what I have done. What you want is an explanation and if I had one I would give it to you. Christ, I’d give it to myself.

Silver says I remind her of a very fat woman who stares incessantly at pictures of models in magazines whilst eating cakes and saying that she’ll start the diet tomorrow. I torture myself with memories and imaginings of you, always telling myself that I will contact you tomorrow. Yet tomorrow never comes, which I know it a terrible cliché, but sometimes clichés are the only words that make sense. I don’t know how Silver has put up with me over the years. There have been two periods over the past sixteen years in which my despair at myself has been so great that I’ve only functioned with the help of those horrid white pills which the doctors like to dole out. I haven’t gone down that route for a while though now; I take my vitamins, exercise well, play football with Adam and Jake, chat to Ron, listen to Silver and life moves on.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me, by the way, I just want you to understand as much as I can explain. When I met your mother I was an angry young man. I had left home a few years earlier and I hadn’t spoken to my parents since then. I remembered them as mean and unloving, which was true to some extent; my father certainly drank too much but I don’t think he was the alcoholic of my memory. He had four young boys, a wife who had to take in other people’s ironing and a job in a mine that was shutting down and sometimes he had to choose between food and heating. Show me a man who wouldn’t fall apart in that situation? Silver made me contact them again after Adam was born. My dad had stopped drinking by then and my mum and brothers were so pleased to see me, it made me feel ashamed. My mum would adore you, by the way. All of her boys have had boys and I know really she’s always wanted a girl. I think she only had me because she thought she was due a daughter. I’ve never told them about you. But I would so love to take you to meet them. And I know you might be thinking: How come he was able to contact them again but not me? The answer is simple. I could have accepted their rejection, but I have so much (possibly everything) to lose if I hear that you have no interest in seeing me.

Seeing them again made me realise the importance of family and how we only really know ourselves when we know where we’ve come from. But still I didn’t contact you. God, I wanted to. Every night Silver would ask me if I’d done it and I’d shake my head and feel like the world’s biggest loser.

You see, by then I didn’t know how I was expected to love people and be loved back when I’d let you down so badly. I constantly doubted myself. I would worry that I would find myself walking out on Silver and the boys as if what I had done to you was some sort of sickness. Then I would wonder what the point of contacting you was, considering what a terrible person I was. And then of course time, in this instance, does the opposite of healing; it solidifies like cold porridge, it drags across your mind and laughs at you.

You’ll see that I’ve enclosed a post office book with this letter. I’ve been putting money in an account for you since I left, not much, as you’ll see, and also not nearly enough, but it might help in some way, especially if you’re thinking of going on with your studies. I am hesitating about putting it into the envelope because I don’t want you to feel like I’m buying you off or that I think money in any way compensates for what I’ve done. I know it’s no substitute for all the bedtime stories I’ve missed or the dinners I’ve never cooked you or the kisses I’ve never given you. All it’s meant to be is proof that you’ve never left my mind, not once, in all the years I’ve been away. You are going to be 18 very soon and what I would really like would be to know you well enough to buy you a present that would make you smile. I would love to buy you a present.

I’m also going to put in the other letters I’ve written you and Alice over the years. I never posted any of them, so don’t think that your mother didn’t show them to you. I’ve really deliberated over showing you these. You might get the impression from reading them that I’m unstable, and in some senses you’d be right, but I’m not that person now, I’m the person on this page. In the end I think you need to know as much as I can show you and so I’m going to put them into the envelope.

I wish things were different. Sometimes I can’t believe that time is real. We fix a lot of clocks in Ron’s shop and when all the pieces are lying in front of me waiting to be reassembled I think: We invented that, why do we live by its rules? In the spring and autumn we make it go backwards and forwards and yet it is still our master. And we all know the feeling when it speeds up or slows down. In fact, that first year with Silver was the fastest year of my life and perhaps has some bearing on why I never contacted you (not that I think that’s an adequate excuse). I imagine rearranging time by putting the pieces together differently and going back to the day I left. I would have still made a life with Silver, but I would have been braver. I would have stayed for your birthday party and then told Alice properly and now you’d be coming to stay every other weekend and I’d know things about you. I never planned to walk out like I did. But (and I’ve never told anyone this, not even Silver), I suddenly realised that if I stayed and witnessed you becoming two I would never leave and if that happened I was going to die or become so bitter that I would have been a horrid father and husband. By which I don’t mean that Alice or Clarice are bad people, but they were too different from me, so far removed from anything I understood that I felt completely lost in that life. Even the house terrified me with all its blind turns and false doors. I used to feel like it was laughing at me, like it knew I was no match for it and nothing but an interloper.

I don’t know if she’s ever told you, but Alice never wanted us to live there when she found out she was pregnant. I used to get so annoyed with her when she was carrying you, as she’d go on about how we could live on love and cheese on toast on the Cartertown estate and I used to think: You don’t know what you’re talking about. But maybe she was right and I was the one who didn’t know what I was talking about. Because I was very narrow in my thinking back then and there isn’t ever only one way to travel, you know, Dot.

But maybe we are the people we are only because of the things that have happened to us? Maybe everything has a meaning? I’m not sure; I wonder what the people lying in hospital now after having been blown up on their way to work would say to that. I long to know what sort of person you are. Are you going to university? How did you do in your A Levels? What music do you like? What’s your favourite food? God, and that’s only scratching the surface. I can tell what Jake and Adam are thinking by the turn of their mouths and yet I don’t know the most basic things about you. And yet I love you just as much as I love them. How is that possible? How can I love you when all I have of you is the imprint of that last hug, the smell of the top of your head from that last moment, the sight of your eyes as I walked away?

Dot, I have laid all my cards on the table. I deserve nothing but contempt from you. I know that. But I am asking for your forgiveness. One of the things that I learnt when I took Adam to see my parents when he was first born was that being a parent does not give you some mystical inner knowledge. We have more training when we start a new job than when we have a baby and yet it is the most important, scary and difficult thing we’ll ever do in our lives. As I watched my mother hold my son I realised that she was nothing more than a guessing, fallible human. That she had made mistakes because that is what humans do. I made a huge, grotesque mistake which I have been repeating every day of my life for sixteen years. I’ve paid a large personal price for this and so, no doubt, have you. I am truly sorry and, whatever else comes from this, I hope you will always remember that. My leaving had nothing to do with you. You were, and I am sure are, an amazing, special and beautiful young lady. I have this dream that you will come and visit and we will sit round our kitchen table: you, me, Silver, Adam and Jake. That I will cook us dinner and we will all laugh at something and for a brief second it will feel normal. Although maybe the beauty of it will be in the fact that it isn’t normal, that our family will have been hard won. I am here waiting for you, we are all here waiting for you, and I hang on to this image so hard it sometimes feels like it has been branded onto my brain.