After Ever After (27 page)

‘Kitty! Well, my.’ There’s a long pause. ‘Well. It’s so nice to hear from you.’ I just know that even now he’s dabbing at his eyes with a hanky. ‘And how is everything? How’s that little girl?’

A peculiar mixture of guilt and anger wells in my chest. I feel terrible for not seeing him for so long, and furious that our relationship is so fragile.

‘She’s wonderful. She wants to see her grandpa?’ I say questioningly, taking a deep breath. ‘Listen, Dad, we’re having a bit of a get-together next weekend, a few friends and family. You can come if you want to?’

I know that he would never countenance going on public transport on his own, so as an afterthought I say, ‘Fergus could pick you up and you could stay over and he could take you back the next day.’ There, I’ve done everything I can. When he turns me down now it won’t be because I haven’t really, really tried, it’ll be because he’s too much of a coward to come and I won’t have to feel bad about it.

‘Oh no, dear …’ he begins.

‘Right, well, never mind,’ I say quickly, hiding my relief and disappointment, but my dad jumps in before I can say any more.

‘No, I mean yes. I’d like to come, but don’t worry about Fergus coming to get me, I’ll come on the train.’

I stand stock-still in disbelief.

‘But Dad, you haven’t been on a train on your own in … I can’t remember when. Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ Maybe he’s on some new kind of pill. Ecstasy, maybe.

‘Yes, Kitty, I’m fairly sure I’ll be fine. I’ve been going to a club, a sort of bereavement group.’ Mum died twenty-three years ago! I want to scream at him, but I bite my lip until it hurts. ‘And I’ve met someone there who lost someone violently, like we did. She’s opened my eyes a bit, made me see how much I was missing out on. What with all these pills, how much I’ve let you down, and myself. She said maybe that was why you never really bothered with me. Anyway, I’ve spoken to the doctor and he agrees with me – I’ve started to cut down my dose …’

The stark reality of his words hits me in the chest.

‘Dad! That’s not true, it’s just I …’ The sentence hangs in the air. I can’t find a way to finish it.

‘Look, not to worry. The main thing is I’m fairly sure I can make it to you on the train. It must be your mum, getting you to phone. I’ve been wanting to talk something over with you but was finding it hard to get up the courage to call you. But it’s all arranged. Must be your mum.’

I hold on to the receiver silently. When I should be feeling joyous and happy at his attempts to change his life, I find that his words fill me with a futile sense of dread.

‘And maybe Fergus’ll meet me at the station?’ My dad fills the silence and I snap out of my reverie.

‘Yes, yes, sure,’ I say, and then on impulse, ‘why don’t you bring your friend?’ I really have to see this woman, I have to see in person anyone who in the space of a few short weeks has got my dad out of his flat and even contemplating coming off the pills. And maybe if she’s there he won’t want to do this talking to me thing.

‘Well, that’d be lovely. I’ll ask her. I’ll find out some times and call you back, okay?’

‘Okay, Dad, bye then,’ I say quietly.

‘Bye then, love,’ he says cheerfully.

I sit and stare at the phone for a while.

‘What do you think, Mum? Do you think he means it?’ I say out loud. Mum never answers and leaves me to ponder the question on my own.

With all of my phone calls made and all of them different from the way I imagined them to be, I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. In the last few days I’ve begun to realise that I’m not the person I thought I was any more, and I don’t know yet just exactly who it is I’m supposed to be.

Last night, after Fergus and I went to bed without exchanging more than two words, I tried to remember Mum and Dad arguing, or if they had had a long period of spring frostiness like Fergus and I have begun to experience. I can’t ever remember them raising their voices to each other. That doesn’t mean they didn’t talk in angry whispers behind closed doors, or that maybe, like Fergus and I going to bed last night, they sometimes didn’t talk at all.

For the first few years after Mum had gone, Dad and I didn’t argue, not once. So many people had told me I had to be ‘a very good girl for Daddy’ that I’d taken it totally to heart. I never played up, not with him. They’d offered us a new place then, a house in Essex, but Dad hadn’t wanted to go, he’d wanted as much as possible about our lives to stay the same. Although nothing ever could.

I’d walked to school with the kids from two doors down, with my own key on a multi-coloured shoelace round my neck, and when I got in I’d do that day’s tasks against a background of cartoons,
Grange Hill
and then
Nationwide
till my dad came home, and it was like that day after day, week after week. And then, I remembered, when I was eight Dad got us a colour TV for Christmas, as a surprise. They were expensive then, and he must have been saving for months in secret, he must have been thinking for weeks about how excited and delighted I’d be to finally get a TV like the neighbours. Christmas morning I got out of bed as usual, and as usual we prepared our cereal, and as it was a holiday and because we always gave presents after lunch, we went to switch the TV on straight away, to watch the Christmas service. Dad sat smiling at me and nodding at the TV, raising his eyebrows in anticipation until eventually I asked him, ‘What? Do you want your present now?’

His face had fallen and he’d shaken his head. ‘It’s in colour, it’s a colour TV!’ he’d sighed and slumped back in his chair. ‘I thought you’d be so pleased!’

I’d frowned at him and then looked back at the screen, seeing the unadjusted orange-tinted colours for the first time.

‘Oh, Daddy, it’s great! It’s better than Gary Anderton’s.’ I’d gone to him and climbed in his lap. ‘It’s because I always imagine the programme in colour, Daddy, that’s why. I just thought I was imagining it,’ I’d said to him. ‘It’s great not having to imagine it any more.’ And I’d put my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. It was too late; I’d disappointed him and the rest of the day was spent in silence. That was the nearest we came to arguing, perhaps because he became gradually more withdrawn and silent, less of a father and more of a flatmate. It wasn’t until I hit my thirteenth birthday that we really started to argue, and then it was all one-sided. Suddenly angry and scared, I started shouting at him, screaming at him, over every little thing until eventually he didn’t even bother to respond, because by that time he was gone.

Gareth hefts his kitbag on to the kitchen counter and looks at me.

‘Where’s Ella, then? Never tell me she’s in bed already and its not even seven?’ I smile wanly and pull myself up on to a chair.

‘She’s been asleep since five,’ I tell him with a sigh. ‘This means she’ll be up by ten and then up all night. I thought babies were supposed to just fall into a routine. I mean, I’m trying, but it never seems to happen …’ I sigh again and look at the clock. Fergus had told me he wouldn’t be leaving work until gone nine. Mr Crawley had been round for a cup of tea, but he’d left an hour ago and I had sat idly listening to the radio, watching Gareth build my gazebo, not able to muster the energy to actually go and talk to him, feeling that I was so out of practice that I might actually have forgotten how to.

‘Working late today?’ I say at last as he washes his hands and face in the sink. He flicks his hair off his damp face and wipes the water away with his fingers.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t charge you extra.’ He looks at me and reflexively I brush my hair off my face and straighten my back a little. ‘Are you okay?’ he says with a smile. ‘You seem a little down?’

I wonder what he sees when he looks at me now, what he thinks. I wonder if he really cares, or if it’s his famous empathy, aimed at a woman who might be vulnerable, may be open to suggestion. And then I decide that I don’t care. I’m not as naive or as hopeful as Clare, and right now I don’t care why he is listening to me, just that he is.

‘No. No, I’m okay really,’ I say before contradicting myself. ‘I mean, I’m fed up with being alone. I know that I have Ella, and that you and Mr Crawley are usually around, but it’s not the same as having a proper adult companion even so, and I feel alone. I don’t think married people should feel that way, should they?’ I glance at the clock. At least three more hours until Fergus gets in. I’ve been here before not so long ago, and not so long ago I decided definitively that I shouldn’t go here again. But I also decided then to make the most of my life with Fergus, to put energy and effort into ‘us’ – except that Fergus is never here and that seems to be impossible.

‘Do you want a beer?’ I ask Gareth, ignoring the remaining part of me that is counselling caution against telling this stranger what’s going on in my heart or my head. It’s a concern that never touches my thin-skinned surface. I’m just sick of being on my own.

Four crushed cans rock back and forth on their axes as Gareth slams his hand down on the worktop and I laugh again, tears pricking at my eyes this time. I’m not entirely sure how all my good intentions added up to me getting drunk with the garderner again, but right now I don’t care. One drink led to another and I’m having a very rare laugh.

Flicking the hair back from my shoulder, I tip back my head until I can feel my neck stretch and the floor swoon beneath me. If I was the old, young Kitty Kelly, this would be my second date with Gareth, maybe even a sex date. I giggle at the entertainingly dangerous thought, but Gareth doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, he’s in full raconteur mode and any reaction from me is bound to be because of him.

‘So I said to him, I’m sorry, Woody mate, but rules are rules and you can’t be one of us until you’ve been initiated. Winter it was, mind, February, and the sea was
freezing
, but he so wanted to be in with us that in he went, not a stitch on, and stood there up to his waist for five minutes like we said …’

I wipe my hand across my face, focusing on his story. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, it’s not funny. It’s horrible. Poor Woody! I can’t believe you made him do it!’

Gareth giggles helplessly, his eyes bright at the memory.

‘I know, I know, it’s just some people are so gullible you can’t help yourself. So anyway, five minutes go by and out he comes, shivering all over he was. He was
so
cold you couldn’t hardly even see his dick, like a shrivelled up little acorn it was!’ He laughs uproariously. ‘Poor bloke. We did him give half a bottle of whisky after that and he was okay in the end. Off work for two weeks with pneumonia, but no harm done. He was a good bloke, Woody. Do anything for anyone, one of those types. The twat.’ He smiles at me. ‘You look a bit better. You’ve got a bit of your sparkle back.’

I shake my head, conscious of my clean hair rippling around my shoulders.

‘What sparkle?’ I giggle, pursuing the compliment, forcing myself to draw back as Gareth fixes me with his predator eyes. He leans a little closer to me over the counter and cocks his head to one side as he regards me.

‘I mean you have a glow, a sparkle about you. I can see it in there burning brightly, just waiting for a bit of passion to ignite it, to burst back into glorious flames.’

For two, maybe three, heartbeats I allow myself to float a little closer to his lips before pulling myself up in my seat.

‘Sounds like a health hazard,’ I say, and then, ‘You’re funny, with all your charm and chat-up lines. I bet you get any woman you want with all your la-de-da fancy lines. Never taking no for an answer. What happened to that girl you saw after me the other day? Still on, is she?’ As I speak I realise that the two cans of lager have gone to my head and that I sound maybe a little more challenging that I had intended.

Gareth smiles to himself and seems to box away his cut-price charm before my very eyes. ‘I do all right,’ he says affably. ‘And what about you? Do you do all right?’

I giggle. ‘Of course I do all right! I’ve got it on tap, I’m married!’ I insist loudly, losing my balance a little on the kitchen stool. I should have eaten, but eating on your own turns out to be boring. Gareth is still smiling to himself as he stands and begins to gather up his belongings and pack them away.

‘Yeah, well, that must be what’s given you back your sparkle then, except if it were, you would never had lost it, would you,’ he says quietly. ‘Still, thanks for the drinks, but I’d better get going, don’t want the gardener here half cut
again
when your husband gets in, do you?’

I toy absently with a crushed can, my beer-lagged brain just catching up with his previous comment.

‘It’s just because I’m not tired any more. That’s why I look better. I used to look like this before Fergus, you know, and Ella. It’s got nothing to do with Fergus, or you!’ I say defensively.

Gareth smirks and leans across the counter towards me.

‘
I
never said it did.’

His fume-filled breath warms my face momentarily, and then I watch him as he zips up his jacket, and decide, despite his half-baked attempts to conquer anything in a skirt (or in my case a pair of jeans), that I wish that he did want me. I wish that he did make a play for me, because then, just for one fantastic moment, I would feel alive, I would feel free of everything stacked up on top of me. At least he’s here. At least he listens. At least even the thought of a man like him seriously thinking sexually about a woman like me does make me sparkle, just a little bit.

‘Thank you,’ I say suddenly. ‘For talking to me tonight when you could have been out with one of your flunkies. Thanks. You’ve been a friend?’ I phrase the statement as a question just so that I can reaffirm the exact nature of our relationship for us both.

‘No worries,’ Gareth says, and suddenly he stoops to kiss me on the cheek and I feel the slightest graze of his stubble. ‘See you tomorrow, pal,’ he says, and he heads for the door.

After he’s gone the house seems suddenly cold and grey again, and I feel the weight of the two dark floors above me, empty except for my tiny baby. I resist the urge to rush up the stairs and bring her out of her cot to sit in front of the fire with me. Instead I go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I look at the clock. It’s ten to ten.