Lessons for a Sunday Father (37 page)

“There you go then.” I reached for the mouse and selected “New Game” from the menu.

“There I go what?”

“I want to work in computers, so this counts as work, right?”

She laughs and kisses me on the top of my head, then she ruffles my hair like I’m a little kid or something. I shake her off but she keeps laughing.

“You’re beyond help. Tell you what, Nat?”

“Mn?”

“You work a bit harder at school and I’ll start thinking about getting myself some kind of training too. That’s a promise.”

“Sure.”

She stops outside on the landing and I hear her voice from the other side of the door.

“Supper’s in twenty minutes. Macaroni cheese. And Nat?”

Another android exploded to bits on the screen. 140 points. 160. 200. “What?”

“Do your homework.”

My dad’s got a girlfriend. She’s called Ella and she’s got freckles on her nose and she’s got a little boy whose name’s Jamie and he’s two and a half. On Sundays, when I go out with my dad, sometimes they come with us or they meet us in the afternoon so I still get Dad all on my own in the morning. If we have lunch with all of us, I try to get Jamie to eat up his vegetables because he says he doesn’t like them except for peas and he drops a lot of them. I told him that his carrots were really sweeties just made to look like carrots, so he ate some of them. One time, Dad said we should all go for a picnic on the beach and take a pack lunch. He turned to Ella and he said,

“How about whipping up a few rounds of sandwiches then? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He was laughing. And she put her hands round his neck as if she was going to strangle him, but she was only playing.

Dad likes her, you can tell, because he holds her hand when we’re walking along. I told Nat Dad’s got a girlfriend, but he said, “So? Tell me something I don’t know. I knew that. I told you in the first place.”

I tried to tell him that I don’t think it’s the same one but he wouldn’t listen.

Ella is painting a picture right on the wall in my bedroom at Dad’s. She said she is very rusty at painting but she is miles better than me. Dad is good at walls but he can’t do pictures. What she’s painting is a castle on a hill and there’s birds and clouds in the sky and it’ll be the only painting like it in the whole wide world. Dad said she went to art school and did painting when she was younger and then she made jewellery and used to sell it on a stall in a market but she had to give it up because she couldn’t make enough money. Ella doesn’t get any money in an envelope because Jamie hasn’t got a daddy, so she has to work really hard all by herself. I tried to tell Nat but he put his fingers in his ears and told me to shut up and stop talking about smelly Ella the whole time. But she is not smelly except for sometimes she has perfume on and she let me squirt it on my neck and my wrists like a lady and Dad said I smelt very nice and posh and now he’ll have to take us both out to a fancy restaurant and put on his best suit so as not to let the side down.

Hey—it’s not bad this talking lark, is it? I stay at Ella’s a couple of nights a week now and we do lots of it—talking, I mean. She can’t come to mine, ‘cept at the weekends of course, because she doesn’t want to unsettle Jamie plus she has to get things ready for the van. She’s up at the crack of dawn, buttering away against the clock, then she loads up, with all the spare fillings in plastic tubs, and the paper bags and everything. She’s a one-woman whirlwind. Sometimes I try to help her, but I can’t keep up so I just do the lifting things into the van bit. She gets Jamie up and breakfasted too, though he’s a self-reliant little fellow.

I’m teaching him to dress himself, but it’s a tricky business when you come to think of it and, frankly, at that time in the morning, I’m not all that hot at it myself. Jamie reminds me of Nat at that age, wanting to do everything himself and going mad with frustration when something’s just a bit beyond him. The first few times I stayed there, Ella bundled me out the house as soon as she got up. Then one time, I just could not lever myself upright from the bed until it was seven so I bumped into Jamie and he pointed at me very accusingly and shouted: “You were in
my
mummy’s bed!”

“She said I could because my bed’s broken.”

“I’m
not allowed any more!”

He likes to shout does Jamie, but he’s a sweet kid. Anyway, when I’m there, me and him have a bit of a chat about manly matters over our cornflakes, then Ella’s sister Cora drops in, scoops up Jamie and whisks him off to nursery school which luckily is next to the junior school where her own twin girls go. In the afternoons, Ella sorts out the van and restocks, then she has the twins for an hour or two after school to give Cora a break. They’ve got it down to a fine art, so they tell me, and it mostly goes without a hitch, but they’re both completely knackered the whole time. Cora’s husband works a night shift in the mortuary at the hospital, and so far as I can see his sole contribution during the day seems to be nothing but a lot of snoring.

Anyhow, because of this hectic frenzy Ella calls a life, she has to be in bed by ten most nights, but if I’m there on a sleepover, as Rosie would say, we stay awake and talk for an hour. In the dark. Ella says she and Cora used to talk with the lights out when they were kids, they’d whisper to each other and make up stories. We never did that. We wouldn’t have had the nerve. The old man would have murdered us in our beds if he’d heard a peep out of us once we were supposed to be asleep.

“He sounds like a barrel of laughs, your dad.”

“Oh, he
is.
It’s like a non-stop pantomime, being in his company.” Her arm slides across me, her skin cool against my stomach.

“You seem amazingly un-bitter about it though. I mean, I know you joke about it, but it must be painful surely? Aren’t you angry?”

“What? Angry that he’s a foul, mean-minded, violent arsehole who wishes I’d never been born, you mean?”

“I’m sure he’s not
that
bad, but—well, yes.”

“Not really. I’ve given up thinking about it. I mean, yeah, it was crap at the time, but none of us knew any different, and—well—we all survived.”

“Yes.” Her hand strokes my cheek. “But much more than that, you’ve made something of yourself and you’re a great father to boot. Still, you must have missed having a dad you could look up to?”

“You don’t miss what you never had, do you? I’m OK.”

“It’s good that you’ve got Harry in your life,” she says. “Thank God for being a grown-up—at least you get to adopt some new relatives if you like. No reason why you should stay stuck with the ones you’re born with. He means a lot to you, Harry, doesn’t he?”

“Mmm, I guess so. He’s all right, is Harry.”

It’s nice, this, talking in the dark. You can say things you couldn’t say in the daytime. Ella’s body curves close into mine, our legs bent at the same angle. Sometimes I barely know which parts are her and which are me.

“My turn,” she says, as we turn together, facing the other way. “Your go to spoon me.” And she wriggles back onto my lap, sighs and settles into sleep.

While we’re on the subject of my wondrous family, did I ever mention that I was a mistake? I may have let it slip somewhere along the line. The Gruesome Twosome had decided to call it a day after they’d had Sheila and Russell. I guess they felt there was only so much happiness they could stand, you know? Yeah, right. More like they decided the carpet couldn’t take the extra wear and tear. Anyway, it wasn’t so much a decision, I think, as that they’d more or less stopped “having relations” as my mother puts it—which, to me, sounds like what you’d say if you asked your aunty and uncle over to tea. But my mother doesn’t like people speaking about the “S” word in front of her. It makes her wrinkle her nose up as though she’s just got wind of a nasty whiff.

Anyway, a brief lapse occurred. Either that or a lone brave sperm made a slither for it across the vast desert of the marital bed and managed to struggle on under the flannel marquee my mother favours as a nightie, elbowing its way bravely like a commando in hostile territory. That’s a horrible thought, I wish I’d never got started on this. Yeuch. However it happened by some happy accident—ha!—I came into the world. It’s no wonder half the time I feel unsettled, like I’m not really supposed to be here at all and any minute now they’ll discover my visa’s expired and boot me off the planet altogether. Still, it’s not my fault, is it? I didn’t ask to be here either. But now that I am here, you’d think the parents could at least put a brave face on it and act like they’re happy. To be fair to them, I can’t accuse them of favouritism, ‘cause they didn’t exactly smother Sheil or Russ with love either. They like them better now, but only because they live so far away and communication’s been reduced to Christmas and birthday cards. My mum’s especially proud of the fact that Russell lives in Canada—bit like the way Harry and Maureen are about their son Chris in Australia, now I come to think of it. My mum’s always saying, “My son Russell, who lives in Canada,” as if it’s her achievement, like it reflects well on her. Which it doesn’t. I mean, why’s she think he moved over there in the first place? Wasn’t for the beaches and the non-stop sunshine, was it? And Sheil up in Scotland. OK, it’s only 400 miles, but she knows they’re too mean to stump up the train or air fare to be dropping in on her every other weekend, and that’s the way she likes it. So how come I’m the only daft sod who still lives within spitting distance of the old dears? No, not literally—they’re a half-hour drive away. It’s not like my mum or dad have ever begged me to stay in the neighbourhood; my mother doesn’t turn to me with a twinkle in her aged eye and say, “Scott, dear, it’s such a comfort having you live close by"; my father’s not on the phone every morning, asking me if I fancy going for a round of golf.

Still, I’ve never really had the urge to move away. I did when I was a kid, I wanted to live on an island and spend my days shinnying up palm trees and swimming with dolphins. I imagined making a dugout canoe for myself and living off the fish I caught in the sea. I don’t know how I thought all this was going to happen, why I’d be chosen to live in some paradise but everyone else at school would end up working in the dog food factory or behind a till at Tesco’s. And then, the longer you’re in a place, the harder it gets to see yourself somewhere else, you know? Your mates are nearby, you’ve got your work, your house, then pretty soon, you’ve got a wife and kids, and the idea of living on an island seems like a stupid fantasy, a daft childhood dream so crazy you tell yourself you never even wanted it in the first place, it was just something you used to think about as a game, playing make-believe, no more than a silly kid’s game.

And it’s not so bad here, after all. I’ve got my kids, well—Rosie likes to see me. And I’ve got Ella. And even when everything went belly-up on me, at least I had my work to keep me together. So it might not look like much to you, but I’ve done worse. I know it can’t compete with being an astronaut, say, or an overpaid footballer—how many little kids say they want to be a glazier when they grow up?—but being a glazier was the first job I ever really liked. Once I started learning the trade, I found I was good at it, and then there was the managing side of things, bringing in new business and that, and I seemed to be all right at that, too. See, all my life I was told I’d never amount to anything and I know it’s not much, but I’ve got my own bit of turf now, you know? And it counts for something. It counts to me.

It was parents’ evening at Rosie’s school. Before, Scott used to try to wriggle out of going to that kind of thing. Not that he didn’t care about the children’s education or how they were doing, to be fair, but Scott has a
big
thing about school. He wasn’t exactly a star pupil himself, as you can imagine—he spent most of his school years messing about and getting in trouble with the teachers, and left as soon as he could. His mum was always keeping one or other of them off school so they could help out at home. He’d be kept off for just about any reason—to chop firewood, dig the garden, even go fruit-picking in season to bring in extra money. Scott said the Truant Officer was round at their house practically as often as the milkman. But his mum just lied, of course, said he’d been poorly or had a bit of a cough or a tummy-ache. I know, you’d think that kind of thing stopped centuries ago.

Scott and I are almost the same age, only a year and a bit apart, but you’d think we were born on different planets so far as our childhoods are concerned. He thinks it’s hilarious that people are always on about how much better it is to raise children in the countryside. He says it’s just as well they got plenty of fresh air because that’s
all
they had most of the time. Mind you, I’m not sure that his parents were quite as short of money as they made out. I think they’re just bloody mean. And it’s not just the money. They don’t even speak much, almost as if they’re too stingy to let any words out. His mum’ll offer you a cup of tea, but she’ll put the sugar in so she can control how much you have. She stands like this, all hunched over, clutching the sugar bowl in case you were going to make a grab for it. They don’t even open the curtains all the way, as if they’re scared the sunlight will come streaming in and steal away some of their hard-hoarded misery.

Oops, I’m getting like Scott, wandering off the point. Anyway, I rang him about the parents’ evening, and told him I’d be happy to go on my own and report back afterwards. But he said he wanted to come too and perhaps we could call a truce for the evening and go together.

“I’m
not at war with you, Scott. I haven’t got the energy. I can manage to behave like a civilized adult—because I
am
one. But can
you?”

Inside my head, even while I was speaking to him, I was thinking, “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Gail, what do you sound like? You’re not a prefect now. Don’t be so fucking smug.”

“Probably not,” said Scott, laughing. “Still, what say I have a crack at it for half an hour and if I feel myself slipping, I can just nip out to the playground and have a run round, OK?”