We Are All Made of Stars (9 page)

Dad would tuck me in, and read me a story, and brush the hair off my forehead before planting a kiss on my cheek. And sometimes I asked him why Mummy never put me to bed, and he said, ‘Mummy is just very tired, son. She needs her sleep.'

I suppose that's why during the summer I always think of Dad. Of long, hot afternoons on the canal bank, the sunlight dappling the water, midges flitting over its still surface. Waiting in quiet content companionship for that thrill of movement in the water: a sharp tug on the line, knowing that one of you had caught a fish. But in the winter, at times like this, it's her I think of – the way that she could reel you into her world and make you feel so special and wonderful and wanted. How sometimes she'd wake me up and take me out into the garden, gone midnight on a crisp, frosty night, and lay me down on the brittle grass, and we'd paint pictures in the constellations in the sky. And then, after she went, it's always felt like that part of my childhood was never real – that it was just one of the fairy stories she made up. And then I have to remind myself that I am a grown-up now, that I have a great job and a nice house, and only really pathetic men dwell on the holes that their mother left in their life twenty-five years ago.

Maybe I should have gone for a drink with that girl from the British Museum tonight after all. She has an ability to talk non-stop without breathing. It's not exactly beguiling, but it works very effectively as an anaesthetic of the mind; plus she is extremely pretty. Still, I'm nearly home now, so a quick spag bol with Jake – if he's got room in his diary between his daytime roaming and night-time adventures – and then maybe a pint in the pub down the road before bed.

I always forget to leave the lights on when I leave for work, so the house is dark when I get home, with the lights in other neighbouring houses burning so brightly either side of it, lit up with a welcome.

As I approach home, I stop at the gate, noticing that tonight next door's house is in darkness too. And there's something else. A boy, next door's boy, is sitting on the doorstep, huddled up in what looks like a tracksuit top. Whatever it is, it's not enough of a defence against the chill in the air. More of a hoody, if anything. I think about pretending I don't see him, but oddly he reminds me a bit of Jake when he comes in from the rain: half his normal size and shivering; it's the one time he'll let me make a fuss of him, wrap him in a towel and rub him down, huddling close to me for warmth.

They haven't been in there long, the new neighbours. The house was bought by a housing association a couple of years back and seems to be fitted with revolving doors: there's a new face every few months, and this kid is another one of them.

‘Er, hello?' I say. ‘You all right?'

He does not look up from his phone, which floods his face with artificial light, throwing the shadows of his eyelashes in upward spikes.

‘OK?' I ask again, not because I really want to know, except that he looks vulnerable sitting there – about ten or eleven years old, I'd say.

‘Why do you want to know?' he asks me. His voice is sharp, managing to sound nervous and angry at the same time. He is suspicious, and I don't blame him.

‘Well, it's dark and cold, and you're sitting on your doorstep on your own. Isn't your mum in?'

‘If she was, I wouldn't be out here, would I?'

‘I suppose not. Will she be back soon?' While he doesn't appear to be in any imminent danger, and I'm starving for microwaved pasta and a beer, I don't feel like I can just ignore him; my dad would never have ignored him, and he is the benchmark I strive for.

‘I forgot my keys, didn't I?' he says, unconcerned, but he shudders despite himself.

‘How long have you been there?' It's gone seven. School will have finished hours ago.

‘I dunno, couple of hours,' he says. ‘I'm flipping freezing.' Somehow the phrase sounds comical in his high childish voice.

‘Did you call your mum?' I ask him.

‘Yeah, but she works shifts, and if she comes home she doesn't get paid, and it's like, oh I dunno, you have to go every day to keep your job, or something, or they give it to the next person. So I said I'd be fine. I told her I'd go round a mate's house, but there wasn't anyone about. When she gets in, I'll just say I was here for a minute or two.'

‘So that she doesn't worry?' I ask him, touched by his concern for his mum.

‘Are you a pervert?' He looks me suddenly, sharply, as if he's just remembered he isn't supposed to talk to strangers.

‘No … I'm your neighbour. I live here – next door.' I jangle my door keys.

‘That doesn't mean you're not a perv,' he says, standing up, defensive now. ‘Pervs are everywhere. They even look normal. You're wearing a bow tie; perverts wear bow ties.'

‘I …' My hand travels involuntarily to my neck, protectively covering the offending article. ‘I am a professor of history,' I tell him. ‘My bow tie is ironic.'

‘Er, no it isn't,' he says scathingly. ‘If you weren't a professor, then it would be ironic, which doesn't make it un-pervy.'

‘Well, I'm not a perv,' I say, feeling frankly ridiculous. ‘I'm not. I'm Hugh.' I offer him a hand to shake, and then realise how ridiculous that is, inviting him to come all the way down the path to shake my hand, out of the shelter of his doorstep, so I tuck my hand back in my pocket. ‘I was just worried about you sitting there, freezing. I could make you a cup of coffee if you like, bring it out?'

‘Coffee? I'm only ten!' he says, affronted by the suggestion, and I can't help but grin.

‘Er, hot chocolate? I think I might have some left over from this girl … this woman, adult woman, I used to date.' He looks like he is considering the offer, when we are interrupted.

‘Can I help you?' I turn and find his mother, home at last. Small, short and petite are words that might describe her; she's barely five foot, with a tiny build, huge dark eyes and long, straight black hair. Her heart-shaped face is almost dwarfed by a thick woolly hat pulled down to her eyebrows, which are drawn together fiercely. I sense she's used to defending her small family with quite some vehemence.

‘No, I was trying to help your son. I'm Hugh. I live next door? I came home from work and found him sitting on the doorstep. He looked freezing.'

‘I've been here for two minutes,' the boy says, staring hard at me. ‘He wanted to make me a cup of coffee!'

He makes it sound as if I tried to entice him inside my lair with a packet of sweets, and suddenly I wish more than ever that I were in my dark empty house enjoying the prospect of an evening with my beer and my microwave.

‘He's fine. He lost his key, he's been round a mate's,' she says, defensively, bustling past me on her side of the fence, fumbling for her keys. ‘You don't need to worry about us. We're fine. We do really well, actually.'

‘I wasn't questioning whether or not you are a good mother …' As soon as I say the words out loud, I can see I've touched a nerve, frightened her somehow, and I don't blame her. What a stupid thing to say. Why didn't I just take him at his word and go inside ten minutes ago? This is what happens when you engage with the world at random – it starts engaging back.

‘He's fine, we're fine. Mind your own.' She fumbles with the keys and drops them. I am making her nervous, and I feel sorry. The best thing I can do is simply get indoors and we can all pretend we never had this conversation.

‘Well, you're home now,' I say. ‘I'll let you go. Goodnight.'

‘Is he a pervert?' I hear the boy asking just before she slams her front door shut.

Jake is there sitting on the bottom stair, mercifully speechless.

‘How was your day?' I ask him. ‘Sex, drugs, sleeping on the radiator?'

He looks like all three were entirely possible and follows me begrudgingly into the kitchen. I stop without thinking and check the answerphone, but there is no light blinking – just a dusty, empty faux-wooden box, not the portal to mysteries that I don't understand at all. I don't know what I was expecting, or hoping for, from that missed message last night. Or who I thought might have stood in a public call box trying to reach me. But it had given me something I didn't expect: a sense of hope, of something different. Although what I think I might be missing escapes me. I have everything I want. A great job, my freedom, no financial or emotional tangles – everything is exactly how I like it. And that stupid silent-but-not-quite phone message makes me feel like I do when I've left the house and I can't remember if I left the shower running. Some important piece of missing information that is just out of my reach. But it's ridiculous. I'm being ridiculous. I'm thinking like a girl.

Probably all this research into séances and spiritualism isn't helping. Perhaps after spending so many days dissecting messages from ‘the other side', I'd half hoped it was Dad, checking in to see how I was doing, if I had become a better fisherman overnight, or built that new rod stand we'd planned together. But it was probably just a wrong number, which led to a blinking light in an empty house. Which might be a metaphor for my life: the man at the end of the line that only a stranger might call by mistake. A man who is perfectly content, I remind myself, sharply.

A knock at the door makes me jump, and Jake speeds out of the cat flap before I've even opened him a tin of tuna. I sigh. The last time I opened the door to strangers, it was to Christians who did not know the Bible as well as I do, and who certainly weren't expecting to have every quote they gave me returned with one from
The Origin of Species
.

‘If you're a politician …' I grumble as I walk down the hall, but I know the answer to that as soon as I see the distinctive outline on the other side of my bubbled glass. It's my very short neighbour, in her large woolly hat.

Oh, Christ, I hope she hasn't come round to be confrontational. I hate confrontation. I am a person who is really happy to be dumped by text, or to be given negative feedback in an email. I don't care for face-to-face angst at all, but it's too late to pretend that I am not here: if I can see her, that means she can see me. Perhaps if I apologise as soon as I open the door, she will go away quickly.

‘Hello, I'm sorry about before,' I say hastily. ‘I realise that adults aren't supposed to talk to kids any more. I didn't mean to make either of you uncomfortable.'

‘No, I'm sorry,' she says, and I am taken by surprise.

‘Oh.' I don't really know where the conversation can go from here, so I simply wait, holding on to the door.

‘About before …' She gestures at her doorstep. ‘I'm sorry about that. I didn't meant to be rude and that, it's just, you know, where I lived before, people always had an opinion, and thought if you are on your own with a kid, living in a housing association place, you have to be either sponging off benefits or neglecting the kid. I work. I pay rent. I love my son. I guess I'm touchy about it, but I know you were trying to be nice and that.'

‘Well,' I say inadequately. ‘Not to worry … Cheerio, then!' Cheerio?

‘I do take good care of him, though,' she says before I can close the door. ‘Just so you know. I do, and he should have told me he didn't have a friend's house to go round, but he tries to take care of me too, and he didn't want me to have to leave work early, because he knows that I struggle to pay the bills. Normally, I'm home an hour after school finishes. But today there was some overtime, cleaning at this hospice up the road, and I heard they might be looking for permanent staff … and if you say no, you don't get offered it again …'

‘You don't have to explain it to me,' I say, finding my voice at last, and frankly feeling like the world's biggest shit for making this young woman feel that way, even if it was by accident. ‘I'm glad he's OK. I'm glad you're OK. I don't have an opinion about your skills as a mother, except that I am sure they are very good – I mean, to come round here … I wouldn't have done it.'

‘Really?' She looks relieved. ‘So we're OK, then?'

‘Sure,' I say, sort of touched that she should care what I think about her or her kid. There's something heartening about it.

‘Great.' She gives me two thumbs up, which hover there in tableau for a few awkward seconds, neither of us sure of what comes next. ‘I'll be getting back, then.'

‘Me too, I've got stuff,' I say, as if spag bol and beer counts as stuff.

As I close the door I see that Jake has slinked in from the garden again.

‘You're all meow and no claws,' I tell him. ‘She seemed all right, to me.'

But, as I pierce the cover of my ready meal and whack it in the microwave, I wonder if the blinking of the phone message and the knock on the door tonight are ways the universe is reminding me that this perfect, carefree, no-strings life I've made for myself can be kind of disappointing sometimes.

Dearest Lizzie,

This is a to-do, isn't it? Here I am about to be carried off into the wide blue yonder and, well, to say the way that fate is taking me is a bit of a joke is to say the least!

You have been a remarkable daughter, a remarkable person, actually, and I know you don't get your patience or tolerance from me. I was never so selfless, kind or forgiving as you.

You were fifteen on the day I said I was leaving home to become a singer on a cruise ship. I suppose that had something to do with my age – approaching forty and still I felt like a stranger in my own skin. You do see that, don't you, darling? You see that it was never you I was running away from? It was me I was running to. Oh dear, and now I sound like that awful song about having never been to me. God save us from hippies.

You could have hated me then; you had every right to, but I told you what was happening and why, and you listened and you – well, you've always been wise beyond your years – you decided to understand. I don't know if you really understood then, or if it was years later, but it hardly matters, because you were there, on my opening night, when I came back to shore, in that smoky godawful dive. You'd even brought your pals.