Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere (6 page)

“You know that letter you posted for me? I wrote that when I was thirteen. It wasn’t really a letter; it was an application form, to find my dad. I could never find him before; my mum would have killed me. I had to wait for her to die.”

“Here,” says Jo, handing her a teacup. Lily sits up to take it, she takes a mouthful.

“I got so impatient at times, I thought of killing her myself.” A memory forces itself into Lily’s mind. She shudders and pushes on. “And then finally she dies and my first thought is ‘I’ll get to meet my dad’. I know that sounds bad, but you don’t know what my mum was like.” Lily stares at the gas fire, smoking.

“Lily? What was she like?”

Lily looks up, almost surprised to see Jo. “She was...” she searches for the right word. “Fat. I mean really, hugely fat. She must have weighed fifty stone. She didn’t leave the house for the last ten years. She sat on the sofa, eating crap and watching telly.” Jo looks around the room. “They repossessed it,” Lily explains. “And she drank about ten cans of Special Brew a night. I was so scared of anyone coming to my house, I used to leave school and head in the opposite direction until all the other kids went home, and then I’d sneak back here. She was so fat she couldn’t climb the stairs, so she used to shit in a bucket. When I left home the council finally put in a downstairs toilet.”

“So, did they find your dad?”

Lily nods her head and bites her lip. She goes back to the gas fire. “He doesn’t want to know. He has
NO
wish to communicate with me. Capital letters, underlined.”

Jo looks confused.

“That’s what he wrote back to them.”

“Prick.” Jo bends a pepperoni until it snaps in half. “Men; emotional sodding retards. Every single one of them; his loss.” She bites into the salami. “He’s not worthy, Lil.”

“Do you see your dad?” Lily knows Jo’s parents are divorced, but they hardly ever talk about their families.

“Yeah, about three times a year to take delivery of his guilt offloading presents. Mind you, I see him more now than I ever did when he lived with us. He was this guy in a suit that I occasionally use to pass in the hallway. He was always either at work or screwing his secretary. He’s married to her now. She’s three years older than me.”

Jo nods her head as she watches Lily absorb what she is saying. “She was seventeen when he started having an affair with her,” Jo continues. “He’s 52. Pathetic.”

Jo picks up the packet of Rizlas and takes three papers out. She lines two of them up and sticks them together, and then adds the third along the bottom. Lily feels her shoulders relax and her stomach gurgles away some of its tension. For the first time since she came here, she wants to go back to Leeds. Escape the memories of this house and its hold over her.

Lily tries to comfort herself with the facts. For years she had tried to get her mother better. On her first day at school she’d asked the teacher if he wanted to come home for tea. She knew then, aged four, that her mother needed saving. He didn’t come. Then as her mother grew larger and the house grew more revolting, she’d stopped trying to get people to come; had concentrated more on trying to get her mum out. Nothing had worked. The day Lily left for university her mother had asked her not to go and Lily had lost it with her. She had screamed, “I am sick of watching you die. I’ve been doing it my whole life. Do it on your own if you're determined to do it,” and slammed the door behind her.

Lily turns her attention back to Jo, pink tongue stuck out, sealing the spliff. “I went to see my Aunt,” says Lily. “I thought she was dead but she showed up at my mum’s funeral. And she gave me this photo album of my mum’s wedding day. I’d never seen a photo of my mum from before I was born. I didn’t recognise her, look.” She pulls the album out of the top of one of the boxes for the tip. “I never saw her smile, not once.” Lily takes the spliff Jo is offering and lies back on the mattress. She smokes in silence, while Jo leafs through the album.

“He’s got your eyes.”

“Do you know what?” says Lily, propping herself up on her elbow. “I can’t believe it’s legal. I can’t believe that you can have a child and then leave it, abandon it to whatever life, without checking up on me… it, at all. He has no idea what kind of life I’ve had. He’s never checked that someone’s taking care of me. What if my mum had died fifteen years ago? Do you know what I mean? And now, he can refuse to meet me or give me any explanation? It should be against the law.”

Jo nods. “It’s called something like breach of promise.” Jo had studied law for a year at polytechnic, before switching to the same politics degree as Lily. “Breach of contract, that’s it. He was supposed to be a father but instead he turned out to be a useless prick.”

“I should sue him.”

“For damages.”

“For the life I could have had if he hadn’t left and taken me mum’s heart with him.” Lily smiles to show she’s half joking. Jo takes the spliff from Lily’s fingers.

“What do you think your life would have been like?”

“What, if my mum would have been as happy as she was then?” Lily nods towards the album. “God, it would have been completely different. I would have had clean clothes and learnt to play guitar. I used to hate kids with two parents; you know the ones that both turned up at parents’ evening, sports’ day. My mum never went to one. I used to make up all kinds of excuses for her, she was ill, my granny had died, she’d got a new job. They must have known I was lying; I got through about fifteen grandparents, but no one ever said anything. I used to fantasize about my dad taking me to football matches. I worried that he’d left because he’d wanted a boy not a girl. Stupid huh? But then why did he leave as soon as I was born? What was so disappointing?”

“He’ll just be another sad ass bloke.”

“I would have been normal. I’d be at the uni, living in halls of residence; one of those ones like what’s-his-face lived in, with wardens on hand in case I couldn’t work out how to use the tin opener. I’d have a big gang of friends with names like Tamara, we’d all be about to move into a house with central heating and a washing machine.” Lily’s spent a great deal of her time at polytechnic observing such students. She starts to laugh. “I could have been ordinary.”

“We wouldn’t be friends though, Tamara.”

“And you know, it’s not just him.” Lily sobers up for a moment. “It’s everyone. Where are all my relatives; his side of the family? I had no one growing up. My grandparents, my mum’s mum and dad, died when I was little. I had Aunt Edie, but my mum pretended she was dead.” Her anger surfaces again and Lily feels sick. “And the least my ‘dad’ could have done was to meet me, just once. Or at least write me a letter. The Salvation Army would have passed it on to me. Why didn’t he at least explain why he didn’t want to see me? He hasn’t considered my feelings at all, ever. Not one moment in my whole life.”

They are down to the last candle and it flickers bravely on. The Ginsters cheese and onion pasty has been at least nibbled and another bottle of vodka lies empty on the floor. Lily reaches for her cup, and as she does so, Jo notices the grubby bandages on her wrist. Lily catches her looking and pulls at her sleeves self-consciously.

“You’re right Lily,” says Jo a few moments later. “He owes you a meeting. So, let’s set it up.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he doesn’t want to see you, let’s go see him.”

“We can’t,” says Lily, at the same time as a feeling of excitement floods her belly.

“Yes we can. Otherwise you’re just another victim. Another woman who’s let a man walk all over her and then beat herself up about it, rather than the arse that’s responsible. This is a war, Lily.” Jo’s radical feminism has become legendary at polytechnic. She handed out photocopies of Solanas’ SCUM manifesto on their first Sex and Gender tutorial. “It's time to start fighting back.”

Lily stands up. “But what’s the point? He doesn’t want to see me. What would I do? Chase him down the street shouting, ‘please be my dad?’” Standing up has made her light headed. She starts to giggle.

“He owes you an explanation, Lily.” Jo is deadly calm. “He’s a spineless bastard, and he owes you an apology at the very least. If the Salvation Army can find him, I’m damned sure we can. What the fuck made you pick them?”

“There are not exactly thousands of people out there queuing up to help reunite you with your birth family, you know. It was either them or Cilla and ‘Surprise, Sur-bloody-prise’. Their motto is blood and fire.” She shrugs. “I thought it sounded good.”

She sits back down on the edge of the bed settee. “I’ve tried to find him. I got the bus to Skipton, that’s where Aunt Edie said he lives, well she thinks. I went to the library and read about a million old copies of the local paper, I went back over ten years, nothing. I looked in births, marriages and deaths, everywhere. I spent all day there, ’til I went bog eyed.”

“Did you try the phone book?”

They look at each other. Lily opens her mouth to speak but no words come out. They both burst out laughing. Lily laughs so hard she worries she may choke.

Two men are chasing Lily; one is wearing a trilby hat and a long dark raincoat, the other is dressed in jeans and a black bomber jacket. Lily knows him from somewhere but she can’t remember where. She runs down a dark side street, her lungs screaming at the effort. She’s halfway down the street before she realises it’s a dead end. She starts trying to climb the wall, but the man in the bomber jacket reaches her and grabs her ankles.

Lily sits up with a jolt, as a police car passes the house with its sirens screeching. Sweat makes her T-shirt stick to her skin. The pile of duvet next to her moves, making her jump. Then she remembers. She takes a few deep breaths and then lays back down, smiling up at the ceiling.

Jo lifts her head an inch off the pillow. “What you grinning like that for? God, my head hurts. Roll me a fag and stop smiling.”

Lily absent-mindedly sticks two cigarette papers together. Then she realises what she’s doing and looks across at Jo. “Don’t let ’em go to waste,” says Jo, flinging her the dope tin.

“You know, it’s Saturday,” says Jo thoughtfully, as she inhales the last of Lily’s spliff. “The library probably closes early. We should get going, we can clear up later.”

Lily has never been to Accrington library. The lady at the desk directs them upstairs, to a shelf that bows under the weight of a complete set of phone directories.

“I can’t believe you’ve spent all this time wondering where he is and never once picked up a phonebook.” Jo scans the shelf for the Skipton edition. “I mean, Winterbottom. It’s not exactly John Smith.”

Lily starts to rearrange the poetry section, starting with shades of red. “Hey, so I’ve not been thinking straight. I never knew they kept phone directories in libraries.”

Jo pulls out a directory, slings it on the table and flicks through the pages. “Here we are,” says Jo, “David Winterbottom. There’s only one.”

Lily grabs the directory from Jo. “Let me see.”

“Have you got a pen on you?” asks Jo.

Lily shakes her head. “There’s seven other Winterbottoms. They might be my relatives too. What if I have a massive family out there?”

Jo glances around the room and then carefully rips the page from the telephone book. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They go to the pub across the road, and despite the drizzle, sit outside. “We could just ring him. Ask him if he used to be married to your mum.”

Lily smokes in silence. She’s spent nineteen years imagining meeting her father; she can’t help experiencing a feeling of anticlimax.

“Or, we could pretend to be solicitors, trying to track him down because he’s inherited something.”

The drizzle turns to raindrops. The majority of them bounce down on the green umbrella fixed to the table. A few hit Lily’s back. They drink in silence. Lily lights another cigarette from the butt of her first. “He’s going to be suspicious. He’s just had the Salvation Army on his case.”

“What about if we said we were doing some market research? We could ask him if he’s got any children…”

“He doesn’t want me to find him, remember?” Lily looks up at Jo for the first time since they arrived at the pub. “He’s hardly going to say, ‘oh yes, I’ve got a nineteen-year- old daughter I abandoned at birth.’ Is he?”

“Well, there’s only one thing for it then. We’ll have to go and see for ourselves. We’ve got a photo.”

“It’s twenty years old.”

“So what? We’ll still be able to tell if it’s him. We’ll just have to camp outside his house. We could do with a car.” Jo takes a drink and then almost chokes. “I can get us a car. I’ll borrow our Ste’s, my brother’s. He never uses it; it’s rusting on my mum’s drive. She’ll be well pleased to get rid of it.”

“What about poly, Jo?”

“What about it? It’s hardly rocket science. We break up in a few weeks anyway. I told them you needed some compassionate leave. I talked to Wardle, he said fine, so long as we promise to get the lecture notes copied up. Oh and he gave me a couple of essay titles we have to hand in by January. I’m sure we’ll both be able to catch up.” She emphasizes the both. Lily looks uncertain. “We’re both going back, Lily. We’ll get this sorted out and then we’re both going back, to continue our fabulous education and then get on with our fabulous lives.”

Lily wishes she had Jo’s optimism. She has a sense of foreboding that she can’t shake.

The bus to Manchester arrives half an hour late, and they almost miss their connection to Liverpool. Lily sprints down the bus station with Jo lagging behind, and just manages to catch the driver’s attention. From Liverpool they catch another bus to Kirby where Jo’s mother lives on a housing estate, one of those Barratt ones Lily’s seen advertised on television, the one where the helicopter flies in.

A Mini is parked on the drive. It has a white roof and red sides. “What do you reckon?” asks Jo. “Thank God he stopped short of painting a Union Jack on the bonnet.”

Jo’s mother opens the door, dressed in a pale blue, velour tracksuit. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’ve got nothing in for tea. Why can’t you ring like normal people?” She mock cuffs Jo round the back of the head and smiles at Lily. “I don’t know what your friend’s going to think of me, and look at the state of you,” she says, drawing Jo in for a hug. “When are you going to get your hair cut? You look like no one cares for you. Oh it’s so good to see you.” Lily looks at the floor as Jo hugs her mother again.