This Holey Life (26 page)

I could scream. I do scream. And then when I have stopped screaming, I can hear Imo scream.

When I got back from Guides tonight (hurray! I don’t have to be a Brownie anymore) Heidi was around watching Top of the Pops. I peered round the door and they were
snogging. Gross. Martin had his hand on one of her enormous wotsits. I felt a bit funny so I went to find Mum. There was a note on the kitchen table. Mum and Dad had gone to the cinema. Anniversary
treat. I made myself some cheese on toast, learnt my spellings and polished the brass.

Chapter Thirty-One:
Sunday 16th March HOLY WEEK Palm Sunday

We have lived under a cloud this week, a cloud spitting rain on our family, threatening to split open and pour its dark, wet contents over us. I think of the wise man and the
foolish man and wonder if our life is built on rock or sand. What is going to happen to us? Will Desmond sort it out? Will the Bishop be called in? Will Steve be believed, his word against hers?
Will he be suspended? Lose his job? Go back to being a plumber? And will this be what I have longed for?

As my family sits it out at home, having a quiet, low profile day off, and as people sit in church, unaware of what is happening, with their palm crosses, remembering and celebrating
Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, I crawl across the level crossing into Worthing to meet Dad and Martin, my other family, for a pub lunch. No celebration. No hope of better things to
come. No sense of destiny about to be fulfilled. But with a heavy heart and hammering headache.

Go,
Steve said
. Get away. Stop fretting. It’ll be fine.

And I felt guilty, leaving him to it with all the kids, Imo, the bottle, the fallout from Karolina’s revelations.

Martin’s going to love this.

Martin takes me by surprise. He hands me a large glass of red wine despite my protests and makes me drink it, saying I should stay overnight and have a break. Of course my first thought is
Imo’s nighttime feed. And the fact I have no clean knickers or toothbrush. But there is the milk I expressed in the fridge. Just in case. Maybe this is just in case. Maybe a night in Worthing
would do me good. Bizarrely. With Dad. And Martin. And that’s my second strange thought: that I’d quite like to spend time with them.

Meanwhile there’s a carvery to be gathered and eaten. A glass of wine to be drunk. No washing up.

Late. Dad’s front room. A cup of tea and the remains of crumpets and jam on a tray by the fire. A black and white film. Violins and ladies in box hats. Dad snoring on the
dust-free dustbowl. Martin battering away on his laptop in the armchair. Me, on the pouffe, with Mum’s tin on my lap, going through the contents.

‘Have you still got your old tin?’ asks Martin, cutting in on my reverie.

‘Have you?’ I have learnt this technique from Steve, turning a question back on the questioner.

Martin falls for it. ‘I have actually. It’s in the attic somewhere. I hope Claudia hasn’t chucked it out. No. She won’t have. She doesn’t know how to get down the
loft ladder. Not with her nails.’

I find myself smiling.

He stops battering, puts the laptop on the coffee table and stretches. ‘So... what’s in Mum’s tin? Any secrets we should know about?’

I hold up some of the items which he takes off me to inspect: Mum’s birth certificate, marriage certificate, a christening card from some long-forgotten godmother of mine who failed at her
job. Some photos. Martin and me on our bikes in the back garden. Martin’s Chopper, his pride and joy. My three wheeler.

‘I loved that bike,’ says Martin, wistful, examining the photo closely. ‘I can still remember the sound the bell made. The way the pedals felt when I was going uphill.’
He sits back and holds the photo for a moment and I catch a glimpse of nostalgia that I thought I would never see in my scientific, rational, logical brother. All over a bike.

Then I dig out the photo of Dad and Uncle Jack and hand it to him. ‘Do you remember this one?’

‘Never seen it before,’ he says.

‘You’ve probably forgotten.’

‘No. I’ve definitely never seen it. I remember the name, not the face.’ He straightens his arm, to get a better look (someone needs to go to Specsavers). ‘It’s not
exactly expertly taken. You can hardly see his face; he’s squinting into the sun. Must’ve been one of Mum’s. She was a lousy photographer, always lopping off heads, if she even
remembered to open the shutter.’

We laugh at this, kindly, remembering our ditsy mother, the one who always had a smile for us, a kind word, if she actually noticed us coming into the room. She was so often in a dream,
somewhere else. Knitting wonky socks. Sowing seeds for Dad.

We look at Dad, dozing on the dustbowl. Hard to imagine how he carries on without her. But he does. And he’s made room for Pat in this life, back-filling the space left by Mum. People say
men move on quicker than women; they can’t survive on their own. Maybe that’s true... and what about Steve? If I pegged out here and now on the freshly hoovered carpet, would he find
someone else? Would Amanda have to beat off crowds of needy women rampaging after their widowed priest? Would Karolina step in?

Some men can’t wait around forever.

Karolina.

The echo of her name, her words, rattles around my head, makes me feel nauseous. I can taste the strawberry jam at the back of my throat. The tin feels heavy on my lap and I pass it over to
Martin.

‘You alright?’

‘No.’

‘Want to talk about it?’

Want to talk about it?

I have never heard Martin utter that particular collection of words in that particular order and somehow this makes me start babbling. I tell him everything that has happened over the past week.
The accusation. The suspicions. The uncertainty. He doesn’t snort. He doesn’t comment. He doesn’t once say ‘Vicky-Love’. He just listens.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he says, after a few minutes silence when I believe I have finally found a way of pulling the rug from under his big fat feet. ‘It’ll
get sorted.’

Profound words from Professor Martin Bumface.

‘Shame about Uncle Jack,’ he says, re-examining the photo. ‘He would’ve been company for Dad in his old age.’

It’s then that we notice Dad’s eyes are open. He has this odd expression, hurt mixed in with something darker... He sits up and reaches out to Martin who hands over the photograph
wordlessly, a boy returning something he shouldn’t have. And I remember the look on Dad’s face, up in his bedroom, when Rachel held the same photo in her cold hand.

‘I don’t know why your soppy mother kept that old picture. It’s years old.’ He stares at it, the first time in a long time, and I wonder if he might actually lob it on
the fire.

‘He was your friend, wasn’t he, Dad.’ My voice sounds patronising even to my ears, like I’m talking to Rachel about Jessica.

‘Yes, he was,’ he mutters.

And to our horror Dad starts crying. I’ve never seen him cry like this and it snatches the breath out of me, swirls it round the room and shoves it back in so I feel sicker than ever.

‘Dad?’ I go and sit next to him, take his hand in mine. It feels smaller than it should, the skin tissue-soft. I hold it gently, no hand-patting. ‘What’s
wrong?’

‘She wouldn’t want you to know. But maybe you should know.’ He brushes me away, the way he always does, and takes out a grubby hanky before comprehensively filling it with the
contents of his nose. This calms him down a bit.

But not me. ‘You’re ill, aren’t you, Dad? The anaemia... ’ I want Martin to help me out but he is staring at the fire, like a soothsayer or something, trying to work out
what is going on around here.

‘I’m not ill.’ Dad is firm, dismissing his neurotic daughter. ‘I wasn’t eating properly. My blood’s fine. Pat’s sorted me out, got me back on the veg.
She’s got an allotment.’

‘Pat?’

‘You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, Vicky-Love. Didn’t Jesus say that?’

‘I don’t know, Dad, I’m not an expert. So you’re alright?’

‘A bit doddery, that’s all. Getting old, aren’t I?’

I don’t answer this. It seems rude. But the relief makes me light-headed – it’s not cancer! – and I breathe deep, from the stomach.

Martin is up on his feet, pacing, giving up on the psychic properties of the fire, which is fizzling out. I should get up and add another log but I don’t want to break the moment.

‘Sit down, son,’ Dad says. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

‘She wouldn’t want us to know what?’ Martin slumps onto the pouffe, stares Dad outright. ‘It is Mum you’re talking about, right?’

Dad caves in, quickly, as if he’s been waiting for this moment. This is it. His time to tell us something. ‘It’s your Uncle Jack.’

‘Is he still alive?’ I ask, flailing around for ideas, recent relief so quickly usurped by confusion.

Dad shakes his head, almost smug. ‘He’s dead as a wotsit.’

‘What then?’ Martin fires at him. ‘What did you want to say?’

Dad sniffs, pulls at his cuffs, studies his knees, looks up slowly at Martin. Then he goes for it. ‘Hesyourfatheryourrealfathernotme.’ One breath so he can get it out quick, before
he changes his mind and pulls the words back into him. Because he knows that once they are out, the words, things will be different round here.

He’s your father your real father not me.

I say nothing. Martin says nothing. His eyes are blank. His face empty. And then he laughs. A dry laugh that swamps the room, sucking everything in its path so that’s all there is: his
laugh.

When at last it fades, he gets up and leaves us. Leaves the room behind with all the unspoken questions and explanations. Walks quietly down the hall and out of the house.

We listen to the door click.

‘That shut him up,’ Dad says. ‘Thought he’d never give it a rest.’

That’s when I decide I’d better go after my brother.

He’s your father. Your real father. Not me.

I’m pretty sure where he’ll be. So I wrap up well, despite the mild spring day because it’s flat, windy Worthing and knowing Martin, he’ll be on the
seafront. I walk through Marine Gardens, past the bowling greens and the old-fashioned cafe, reminiscent of an earlier era, of women in hats and men in flannel trousers. A time when you addressed
your parents’ friends by their formal names. Or, if they were better known, by Auntie or Uncle.

Uncle Jack.

Was Dad making some kind of joke back there? Did he really mean that Uncle Jack was Martin’s father? Which means... Mum and Uncle Jack? Our mother, the daydreamer, in whose eyes you
sometimes glimpsed other lives. Other possibilities.

Other men?

Uncle Jack?

Over the road and onto the prom, past the beach huts – a quick check in the shelter – and then onto the shingle. Tide out and a vast stretch of grey beach beyond the pebbles, the
waves reticent and far off. The fresh smell of seaside. Vestiges of burnt wood. Gulls dive-bombing, squealing, in search of chips.

I trudge along the sand, firm under my sensible-Vicky shoes, Marks and Spencer’s, wide-fitting to allow for bunion growth, and it’s not long before I spot him: a tall, substantial
figure lobbing stones into the retreating tide, aimlessly, aimless.

I decide to join him, first retreating up the shingle to retrieve a fistful of stones, shoving them in my jacket pockets. When I catch up, I offer him a pile and chuck one myself for all
I’m worth, till my shoulder hurts. It disappears into the water, without a sound, the merest splash.

‘Call that a throw?’ He has a go himself, stretching his arm right back, like it’s serious, a competition. Which, of course, it is. There’s nothing I can beat him at.
After several minutes of exertion, he turns away from the sea and starts striding away along the tide line, kicking at random bits of wood so I have to jog to keep up. Eventually I go for it, in
between gulps of cold air: ‘You alright? Want to talk about it?’ I realise I have never uttered these words to him in that order either, and we both laugh, both of us dry, but because
we are out in the open, the sea and the sky stretched before us, there’s more freedom, more emotion.

‘Is he winding me up?’ Martin stops, pinning me to the sand with a look, a possibility.

I consider this. I wouldn’t put it past Dad. He can have a cruel streak to him. Maybe he’s losing the plot. But my gut instinct is that this is the truth. And the photo backs me up.
Though you can’t see Uncle Jack’s face there is something about the presence. I always thought that Martin took after Dad, with that presence, going in a room and holding court. But the
two of them together, friends captured in time, you can see something hanging around Jack. An aura or something. I don’t of course say this to Martin, whose aura has always cast a shadow over
me. Stunted Vicky. ‘I reckon he’s telling the truth.’

‘Right.’ He grabs another stone off me, grappling in my pocket the way he used to hunt out my Hubba-Bubba and he throws the stone so hard it almost hits a gull, but the crafty thing
gets away and perches on a groyne, its small, pebbly eye fixed on my brother. ‘Let’s get some chips,’ Martin says, surveying the bird. ‘I’m starving.’

Much later, after chips, after miles of walking in the gathering dusk, after I’ve been to Boots and BHS and got my toothbrush and a packet of knickers and tights, after
I’ve called home and cleared it with a curious Steve, we get back to find Dad in the kitchen with Pat. I say hello politely – Martin lingering in the hall – and leave them to
their scrambled egg on toast, while we set ourselves up in the front room, Martin constructing the mother of all fires, me getting out the Scrabble and a bottle of Teacher’s. It’s going
to be a long night.

Martin thrashes me, trebling my score, making me feel like I’ve never read a book in my life. It’s been a while (must go to library).

The fire is dying down and the whisky bottle much depleted by the time Pat puts her head round the door. ‘I’m off,’ she says. ‘Your dad’s tucked up in bed, should
be fine till morning.’ She disappears, clattering into the night.