Lessons for a Sunday Father (11 page)

“It’s nothing to do with me, is it, Scott?”

I take a sip of my coffee to give me a moment more to think then immediately wish I hadn’t because it’s burnt my sodding lip and I jerk back as if I’ve been—well, burnt.

“Probably best give it a minute to cool, eh?” Angela smiles at me.

“Cheers. I think I know how to handle a cup of coffee now I’m a grown-up chappie of forty.” Well, apparently not actually, given I’d just gone and scarred myself for life.

She shrugs and wrinkles her nose at me.

“Sorry. I was
trying
to show concern. Come on, what’s up?”

“It’s Gail. She found out about me and you—”

“Found out what exactly? Did you tell her that it really didn’t mean anything?”

This was really making me feel so much better. Proper tonic, talking to Angela.

“Cheers, Angela. Course I tried to tell her that, but she wasn’t listening. One minute she was having a go at me, and the next I’m stood on the wrong side of my front door with no jacket, no keys, no nothing. And saying, ‘I really think we need to discuss this properly, darling’ just didn’t seem to be cutting it, you know?”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Really. But I guess you can’t be all that surprised. I mean, what did you expect she’d do— rap you across the knuckles and say try not to do it again?”

I shrug. Of course, at the time, you don’t think about what to expect because you’re not planning on being caught. If you knew you were going to be found out, you probably wouldn’t do it in the first place, right? Still, I don’t know why Angela was acting so superior. She wasn’t exactly Miss Goody Two-Shoes in all this either.

“Thing is, it looks like she won’t let me come back.”

Realization dawns. Angela clunks her mug down hard on the counter.

“Oh no. No. I’m sorry, Scott, but you’re not thinking for even a second that you might stay here?”

“Just for a couple of nights. I’ll kip on the settee if you like. Just until Gail sees reason—”

“Scott, if you want to patch things up with your wife, do you really think staying with me is the best way to go about it? Use your head instead of your dangly bits for once, for God’s sake. If she doesn’t think we’re having an affair now, she certainly will if you roll up here with a suitcase.”

I start telling her about how I’d had to sleep at work, and hadn’t managed to sleep a wink; I kind of made it sound as if I was still there, curled up under my desk in a sleeping bag.

“What about family? Friends?”

I peer down into the dregs of my coffee. Angela reaches over and gives me a playful shove.

“Oh, Scott—you’re actually pouting. Surely you’ve got good mates who’d put you up?”

I think about Jeff and spending yet another night in that house with its dim light bulbs and its sadness, its stale, endlessly re-breathed air and stench of fag smoke. Jeff sleeps with his fags by the bed so he can light up first thing in the morning. And, instead of an ashtray, he’s got this great big bowl, like a fruit bowl it is, with—literally—hundreds of fag butts in it, like he’s saving them up to give to charity or something.

“S’pose so. Still, I do think you could stand by me a bit. I mean, I don’t remember any reluctance on your part to get into my pants. You’re my partner in crime really.”

She folds her arms across her chest which I figure isn’t such a good sign. I saw some documentary about body language once and they said it was a defensive posture, but I don’t know. All I’ve noticed is that when women get cross the first thing they do is cover their tits up.

“Scott. Now let’s just get one thing
absolutely
clear, OK? Yes, I had sex with you, but no, I am not your ‘partner in crime’ as you so winningly put it. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve never even met your wife. She’s not a friend of mine. I haven’t betrayed her trust or broken any marital vows or anything. Your marriage is
your
responsibility and—frankly
—your
mess. I won’t be roped in. Don’t tell me for one second you thought I was in love with you or that you imagined I’d put my whole life on hold and was waiting in the wings for you to run off with me to the Bahamas.”

She looks at me in a sort of weary way, like she’s told me some long, elaborate joke and I haven’t got it. I unstick myself from the stool and puff out my cheeks. Bugger. Still, I’m not going to beg.

She comes towards me then and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

“Best of luck, Scott. I hope you can sort things out with your wife. Perhaps she’ll come round when she realizes it was just a fling, eh?”

“Yeah.” I button up my jacket again. “You’re probably right.”

I trudge back to the car feeling like a heap of shit, frankly. Another night at Jeff’s. Oh goody.

A spanking clean silver Merc pulls up just then and the electric window slides down on the driver’s side, smooth as silk. Rich git.

“Excuse me,” says this woman with one of those posh, would-you-mind-not-breathing-the-same-air-as-me voices. Classy looking, but she’s not going to see forty-five again, that’s for sure. “Is that your car?”

“Might be. What’s it to you?”

I know, I know. Not a good start, but with the day I’ve had minding my p’s and q’s isn’t exactly top of the agenda. Her mouth pinches together and her nostrils flinch as if I’ve farted in her jurisdiction.

“Well, if it is your car, perhaps you could move it? It’s blocking our drive, you see? Visitors and—” she pauses, giving my jacket the once over “—delivery persons etcetera are supposed to park over there.”

“Oh, fuck off. I’m just going, can’t you see? This is me, here, getting into my car and driving away from your stupid so-called exclusive sodding estate, all right? So don’t worry—any second now me and my cheap jacket and my common voice and my crap car will cease to sully your fucking poncy driveway to your overpriced, rip-off executive home and you’ll be able to drive right up to your authentic Tudor double garage—”

By this point, she’s started to say, “Well, really—” but I’m on a roll by then. She probably figures I must be some kind of nutter and her protective window glides back up again.

“And another thing—” I bellow at her through the glass, as she starts to drive away. “Those would-be Tudor windows in your ponced-up house aren’t even proper leaded lights. They’re mass-produced crap with stick-on glazing bars and if you really had any kind of class you wouldn’t be seen dead with windows like that!”

That told her.

Afterwards, I felt crap, I admit it. Really ashamed. I’m not the sort of bloke who goes around shouting at women just ‘cause they’ve got a smug voice and a posh car. I realized I’d gone a tad overboard and I thought about going back, take her a bottle of wine or some flowers maybe to say sorry. But I reckoned she’d probably call the police or send her husband out after me with a shotgun. When I got back to work, I just sat outside in the car for a while, staring at the wire fence through the windscreen. I couldn’t understand why I’d gone so ballistic. It wasn’t like me. Two more days of this and they’d have to load me up with happy pills, cart me off and chuck away the key. I looked down at my hands then I pinched the flesh on the back of my left hand as hard as I could, till it made my eyes water. I don’t know why. I think it was because I didn’t feel real any more. And worse. It sounds weird, I know, but I didn’t feel like me.

Dad’s coming on Sunday to take us out. He phoned last night and asked me what I’d been up to and what I’d done at school, like the way Nana and Grandad do. It was funny talking to him on the phone instead of sitting at the table with him or watching TV together. Normally, when we’re eating our tea or having Sunday lunch, Dad talks a lot and Mum says he shouldn’t talk with his mouth full because it sets a bad example. Dad says, “Yeah, right,” but then he forgets.

I went to go in Nat’s room. I knocked on the door first, he goes mad if you don’t, and he said, “Mn” so I went in and he said, “I never said come in,” so then I had to go out and start again.

I did a somersault on his bed. It was all messy, with the duvet all scrunched up at the foot end and things all over the floor. Nat never makes his bed and Mum says she’s given up telling him, if he wants to live in a pigsty, then let him. She says that but sometimes she goes mad and tells him to tidy up his room, no, not later, right now. Then Nat says she’s throwing a wobbly and she’ll calm down in a minute, but he’s just a copy-cat because that’s what Dad always says. Nat picks up some of the stuff from the floor and throws it in the bottom of his wardrobe or hides it under the bed and he straightens the duvet so it looks not so bad and Mum says, see, that wasn’t so very hard, was it, why couldn’t he keep it like that all the time, why does he have to wait to be nagged same as Dad?

Nat was on his computer. He never turns round to talk to me but he says he can do two things at once, so I said,

“You know Sunday? With Dad coming and everything?”

“Mn.”

“Dad said we could do anything. Whatever we like.”

“Mn.”

I wanted to go to the cinema and then go for icecream sundaes. Dad said he knows this place that does really big ones with lots of different kinds of ice-cream. But I thought maybe if Nat picked what we did he wouldn’t be in a bad mood any more.

“We could go bowling. Like you did on your birthday.”

I wasn’t allowed to go. Mum and me stayed at home and Kira came round for tea and we had trifle as a treat because of not going bowling. Nat said I couldn’t come because I was too young and would spoil things and anyway it was his birthday so it was up to him. Dad took him and his friends, but it was all boys except for his friend Kath and she’s practically like a boy. Nat wanted to ask Joanne Carter too, but he didn’t. Scaredy-cat Nat.

I unpopped all the poppers at the end of Nat’s duvet, then started to repop them all closed again.

“D’you think Dad’ll come back home soon?”

“Nah. Don’t be stupid.”

“Why’s it stupid? Mum said they were just—”

“Don’t you know anything? Grown-ups are always saying things like that, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Nat’s always being mean and trying to make me cry. I used to, when I was little. Nat said I cried the whole time, but that’s not true. I’ve got a trick now. You bite the inside of your cheek and think about something else or you say things in your head over and over. I do the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. When I think each word, I see the word in my head in big letters like it’s standing in a field and I make it the same colour as it says. Indigo is the hardest, but I think that one as purple. Violet’s like mauve. Mauve’s my best colour. I have it for everything.

“I reckon he’s not coming back ever and you better get used to it.” He didn’t even turn round from the screen, just kept playing his stupid game. He thinks he knows everything, but I know lots of things too.

“I know.
Then they get a divorce and have two houses. Like Kira’s Mum and Dad.”

“Yeah, like them and like half our class practically. Jason says you’ve just got to learn how to play it right. He says to make sure and get two of everything so you don’t have to take all your stuff backwards and forwards and sometimes you can get two lots of pocket money.”

“Are you going to ask Dad?”

“What?”

“About the pocket money. On Sunday.”

“Mn. Oh, Rosie, you put me off. I’ve lost a life.”

Good, I thought, serves you right. But I never said it out loud. I went back into my room and looked at all my things to see what I had two of already—not shoes and socks, I mean, where you have to have two, but other things like sets of felt-tips and hair slides and my animals and my posters and stuff like that. But some things you can only ever have one of, like Alfie-Bear, or they’re all supposed to be kept together, like my snow shakers, so it’s quite hard actually in fact.

He’s
turning up tomorrow to take us out, like that’s supposed to mean everything’s OK. Rosie won’t shut up about it. She thinks I’m going too, but I’m not. They can’t make me go. Mum tried to talk me into it and she said he phoned on Wednesday, but I stayed late at practice, doing tumble turns again and again and again until I got it perfect. It was good while I was doing them, I couldn’t think about anything else just when to turn, waiting till you’re just the right distance from the end, then gliding, tight into the turn, my feet finding the tiles, legs bending, one hard push, arms forward, pointing like an arrow, water rushing past my ears. Then there’s only me and the water, see, and no thinking. Only when to breathe and my arms and legs moving, arms slicing through the water like knives, legs making the water boil behind me, head turning … NOW—to take in air, then face down again, ploughing forward, faster, faster, heading for the end.

When I came back, I felt tired and a bit spacey, I do sometimes when I’ve swum like that, on and on, the smell of chlorine still in my nose an hour later. Mum put my food in the microwave and told me Dad had phoned, wanting to know about Sunday.

I shrugged and opened the fridge to get some juice.

“He’s coming at ten, OK? Do you want cheese on your pasta?”

“Mn.”

“Well, don’t stand there looking gormless. Honestly, Nat, there, top shelf. The cheese.”

She came over and leant across me to get it. She says you’re not supposed to lean over people, it’s bad manners. I’d have got it anyway.

I swigged some juice from the carton.

“I’m not going.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going? Of course you are.” She was grating the cheese like a maniac, going at double speed, like she was out to kill this poor little piece of Cheddar, really make it suffer. “You want to see your dad, don’t you?”

“Why should I?
You
don’t.”

Mum sighed and leant against the counter then, like she couldn’t be bothered to stand up any more.

“That’s a bit different, Nat. Your dad and I—”

“It’s
not
different. Why’s it different? I don’t want to see him and have to play at being happy families and going for ice-creams and pretending everything’s OK. I’m not going and you can’t make me. And if you’ve told him I want to see him, you’re a liar and you can just forget it.” I stirred my pasta all around and dumped a big pile of grated cheese on top.