Waiting for Doggo (10 page)

An articulated lorry thunders by, drowning out Emma’s reply. ‘Sorry, I missed that.’

‘I said it’s easier for you, you don’t have a family … kids.’

I know my sister. Telling her it’s a poor excuse is the wrong way to come at the thing. ‘You’re right. Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, no, I must, I will, I want to.’

‘Don’t leave it too long. If the volcano that appeared on his knee the other day really blows its top, you might not get another chance.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I wish.’

‘A volcano? That’s priceless.’

It’s good to hear her laugh. It’s been a while.

W
E’VE WON THE
SWOSH! account!

Doggo is watching episode three of the first season of
Friends
and Edie and I are playing pool against Clive and Connor when Ralph tips up with Tristan to deliver the news. They’re ecstatic. We’re ecstatic. Everyone’s ecstatic. The creative department soon fills with well-wishers. Champagne appears from somewhere. Doggo weaves through the forest of legs wondering what he’s done to bring about such a merry gathering in his honour. His self-delusion is more understandable since word ripped through the office about his bizarre obsession with Jennifer Aniston. For the past couple of days people have been dropping by to see for themselves. He’s had heaps of attention, and he’s getting more of it now. Margaret in Accounts is still miffed that she can’t bring her cat to work, but she’s the one who says to Doggo: ‘Well, well, well, you’re turning out to be a proper little mascot, aren’t you?’

It’s even better than we expected. Ralph was right: KP&G fell hard for the idea at the pitch last Friday; they just wanted some time to run the concept past the marketing consultancy they use. ‘There’s a guy there, Ben Wood, a bloody genius if ever I met one. He’s convinced the concept can travel, go international.’ This is huge news. It’ll give Indology a foreign profile, opening up lucrative new markets for future business.

I catch Edie’s eye across the crowded room and wonder if she’s thinking the same thing as I am: that we really are a team now, a genuine partnership, not just two people beavering away in a back office, hoping for the best. Fat Trev pops into my head. I’ve been a coward; I really need to get my skates on. If he doesn’t already know about my new job at Indology, he will soon enough. Tristan will no doubt use all his clout with
Campaign
to ensure that news of the SWOSH! account receives the biggest possible splash at the magazine.

Ralph calls for silence, then pays a touching tribute to Tristan for his instinct about pairing Edie and me. Tristan promptly blows the moment, taking the floor and holding forth on how SWOSH! ‘synchromeshes’ with his vision of where Indology is headed. Intended as a motivational team talk, it comes across as a dull homily. I can feel the energy draining from the room. It only returns when Ralph announces on a sudden whim that we can all take the rest of the day off. ‘What the hell,’ he chortles. ‘Just make sure you spend it unwisely.’

Tristan isn’t the sort of boss to indulge the workers, and I glance at him expecting to read disapproval in his face. What I see is the fleeting look he exchanges with Edie before she quickly averts her gaze. Maybe I’m wrong, but I could swear there was something complicit, even illicit, in the momentary meeting of their eyes.

Putting it to the test is easy enough. Edie isn’t up for frittering away the afternoon with me in celebration. ‘I’d love to, but I’ve got a ton of stuff to catch up on,’ she offers feebly. Then, as everyone is dispersing, I collar Tristan and suggest lunch – just him and me, my treat, by way of a thank you. ‘You don’t have to thank me for making me look good,’ he jokes. He claims to have some shopping he urgently needs to do, and the free afternoon is a rare opportunity to pick up his young son from school. I have a strong suspicion he won’t be standing at the school gates later.

Did I misread the look that passed between them? It’s quite possible. I’ve spent the last few days in a deeply suspicious frame of mind, ever since Grandpa dropped his bombshell at the nursing home:
One father is enough for any man.

His words have had me picking at the past like it’s a scabby knee, wondering what lies I’ve been peddled over the years. Admittedly, Grandpa thought he was talking to my mother at the time, so he can hardly be described as being of sound mind, but my gut tells me he spoke that line from some clean, untouched corner of his diseased brain (which then shut down completely the moment I pressed him to elaborate).

I’ve tried to construe what he said in any number of ways, but only one interpretation holds water: that the man I have always thought of as my father may well not be my real father. It seems ridiculous, but it’s not inconceivable. People have always remarked that I take after my mother in the looks department. The mouths are strong and the noses long on her side of the family. The Larssens are also tall, which I suppose I am, and which my father definitely isn’t. I shot past him when I was fourteen years old, the year before he and Mum divorced. Could there be a correlation? Did he look up at me and think, ‘That lanky monster can’t possibly be mine’? Did he confront Mum? Did she confess under duress? It’s possible. Then again, anything’s possible once you’re trapped in the paranoid world I’ve been inhabiting since Saturday.

Emma and I have always been led to believe that Dad fell in love with a colleague, a fellow lecturer in modern history at the University of East Anglia. I remember Mum telling us at the time, ‘Your father has left me for a lesbian. Somehow, I think I’ll get over it,’ which gives some idea of what my mother is like: not great when it comes to delicacy of touch in situations requiring it.

I’m not convinced Carol is a lesbian, although I suppose she might once have been one. She’s a bit younger than Dad, which means she went through university in the mid 1970s, when being straight probably marked you out as someone who condoned the massacre of innocent Vietnamese freedom fighters. I’m being facetious, of course, but only because it’s easy to be when it comes to Carol, to the two of them, in fact. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it took most of their left-leaning theories with it. I was only seven at the time, but I remember Dad’s blank stare as we watched the East Berliners on TV taking their sledgehammers to that symbolic wall, reducing it to rubble.

Dad proved to be more resilient, twisting his arguments to fit the new, post-communist age. To admit he’d been wrong all along would have been career suicide. Switching horses in midstream doesn’t go down well in academia. It’s like those art historians who built their reputations on theories about the sombre colours of the ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel bearing witness to Michelangelo’s depressive state of mind at the time, only for the true, almost garish vibrancy of the master’s palette to be revealed when centuries of grime were finally removed. Did those professors hold up their hands and admit it was a fair cop? No, they went on the attack, falling over each other to discredit the cleaning process that had also stripped away their academic standing.

Dad has always been a remote man, caught up in his studies and his writing, his mind on higher things, but it strikes me now that, if anything, he grew even more withdrawn following the divorce, whereas most men would surely have extended themselves with their children to take the sting out of the separation. Emma is hardly ever present when I see him, so I can’t say for sure whether he’s different with her, more loving, more ‘fatherly’.

I followed Emma’s advice and did something I swore I’d never do: sign up to Facebook. Mum accepted me as a ‘friend’ and then promptly made me do something else I swore I’d never do: sign up to Skype.

We’ve set a time to talk. I can’t believe it’ll work, but it does. At exactly 8 p.m. she appears as if by magic on my laptop screen in a white halter-top blouse, or possibly a dress (I can’t say for sure because she’s seated at a table). Behind her is a swimming pool fringed with palm trees. The sun has yet to set in Morocco and there’s a glass of white wine in her hand.

‘Danny,’ she beams.

She’s the only person I allow to call me that. ‘Hi, Mum. How are things?’

‘Oh, you know – coping,’ she jokes, with a nod over her shoulder.

We haven’t communicated in months, so I tell her about the new job and the account that Edie and I have just won for the agency.

‘Mouthwash? That’s great!’

I know she’s happy for me; she doesn’t mean it to sound like an insult. And it’s not as if I make it easy for her. My biggest successes to date have included oven chips (‘That’s wonderful, darling. What are oven chips?’) and fabric softener (‘I’ll switch brands immediately’).

‘Mum, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Are you alone?’

‘Alone? Yes.’

Not convincing.

‘Good,’ I say, ‘because it’s about Nigel. Maria called me in a state. She’s carrying his child and she doesn’t know what to do.’ Maria is the dark beauty who cooks, cleans, shops and generally runs their lives for them.

Nigel’s face appears at the side of the screen. ‘Lies, damned lies. The paternity test will prove it.’ You have to hand it to him, he’s funny and quick on his feet. ‘Looking good, Daniel.’

‘You too, Nigel,’ I reply, although I’m not convinced by the collarless shirt and paisley cravat combo.

‘If you want a word in private with the old bag, that’s fine by me – I’m gone.’ He waggles his fingers, then disappears from the screen.

‘Old bag?’ Mum calls after him.

‘Vintage,’ I hear Nigel say out of shot.

Naturally, being her son, I’m slightly repulsed by the look of love in her eyes, but I’m also moved by it. The truth is, she married a curmudgeon the first time around and has been given a second shot at happiness. There’s a danger that I’m about to shake up her life in ways she doesn’t want, need or deserve, but I have to have it out with her.

She listens in silence to the account of my visit to the Seaview Rest Home, but when I tell her what Grandpa said to me, thinking I was her, she gives a loud and amused snort. ‘He said that?’

‘He did. In all seriousness.’

She stares straight at me and says, as if speaking to the village idiot, ‘Danny, Grandpa is off with the fairies.’

I want to ask her how she knows that, seeing as she hasn’t set eyes on him since Christmas. ‘Not completely. Not yet.’

‘Come on, it’s rubbish, nonsense.’

‘Is it, Mum? Is it really? I have to ask. You must see that.’

‘I do. I understand. But you’re not thinking straight and we both know why.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I heard what happened with Clara.’

‘Oh?’

‘Emma told me.’

‘And you didn’t think to call me?’

‘And
you
didn’t think to call
me
?’ she fires back. ‘No, you didn’t, because we don’t have that kind of relationship any more. Thank God. You’re a man now, thirty years old, for goodness’ sake. You really want your mother meddling in your affairs? I have great belief in you, Danny. You’ll sort out whatever needs to be sorted out. You’ve always been like that – strong, independent, wilful. Oh yes, certainly wilful.’

I’ve played this conversation over and over in my mind. I’ve imagined what she would say and what I would say in return. I now reach for one of those rehearsed lines.

‘Mum, listen, nobody else needs to know, not Emma, not Nigel, not even Dad if he doesn’t already. But I do. It’s my right, you know it is.’

‘What I
know
,’ she corrects me, hardening, ‘is that you’re working yourself into a state over nothing. At best, at worst, it’s wishful thinking on Grandpa’s part. He was never a fan of your father. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it’s true.’

I know it’s true because she has hammered home the point over the years, as she well knows.

‘Swear it on Grandpa’s life.’

‘What?’

‘You heard. Swear on the life of your own father that Dad is my biological father.’

I watch her take a sip of wine. ‘What a horrid thing to ask. But if it makes you feel better, I do – I swear. There. Are you happy now?’

Yes. And also disgusted with myself. ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

‘So am I. But it’s not your fault, or Grandpa’s, it’s the Alzheimer’s. Just try and be a bit more, well, circumspect about what comes out of his mouth.’

‘I will.’

‘Now show me this new dog of yours Emma mentioned.’

Doggo and I definitely had a bonding moment in the Cuckmere river – I’ve had stroking and ear-fiddling rights conceded to me since then – but I know that if I call him he won’t come, so I unplug my laptop and carry it to the sofa.

‘Gosh,’ says my mother. ‘He’s hardly a shoo-in for Crufts, is he?’

O
NLY WHEN
I wake do I realise just how much the Grandpa thing had been dragging me down. I feel light, liberated, at peace with the world.

Clara used to kick off the day with a few minutes of silent contemplation, a sort of private prayer, offering thanks for the precious gift of life and resolving to honour it through her actions. I tried it for a while, the two of us seated in the lotus position on the living room floor, facing each other. Then one morning she told me to breathe through my anus. I was never able to keep a straight face after that, and soon found myself banned from the morning ritual.

On my own, it works a whole lot better, even with the distraction of Doggo circling me, curious but aloof. I let the important realities of my situation seep into me: I’m healthy, young(ish), gainfully employed and living in a country that cherishes personal freedoms. This makes me considerably better off than billions of other people on the planet. Any miseries in my life are either unavoidable or of my own making.

No stranger has stepped from the shadows and killed someone I love in a random act of violence. Yes, a month ago my girlfriend ran off to be with another man, but the truth is, I’d grown lazy, not just with Clara, with myself too. I spent six months in a self-indulgent slump following Fat Trev’s breakdown, wallowing in my misfortune. It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for to finally launch into the novel. Lack of time was no longer an excuse, so I dredged up some others. Clara could easily have flung them back in my face, but she waited patiently for inspiration to strike and my fingers to start dancing across the keyboard.