Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere (3 page)

Lily flicks the stub and watches it sail through the air and land in the grass between the headstones. She wipes the sweat from her palms onto her black canvas trousers. “I was just coming to that.”

Lily props Bert up against the privet hedge while she fumbles with the latch on his garden gate. The nearest street lamp is broken, the light burning a dull orange, too low to make any impact on the surrounding dark. It fizzes as it burns. Lily pulls Bert’s arm around her shoulder again and drags him up the path to the front door, “Key?”

“It’s in me pocket,” says Bert, trying to stand up straight to allow Lily to reach into the front of his suit trousers.

“I’m not that pissed,” says Lily, holding out her hand for the key.

Once inside, Lily leads him into the front room and drops him into the fake leather armchair. The covering on the arm has peeled off, leaving a scorched bald patch where the ashtray would normally sit. Lily glances around and sees it on the floor, its contents spilled. She picks it up and returns it to its rightful position. “See you then, Bert.”

“I miss her, Lil.”

Lily doesn’t reply. She lets herself out of his house and back down the path.

In some ways the estate feels like toy town. As a teenager Lily used to walk home, pissed, at all hours of night, past the rows of identical 1940s council houses, each window trimmed with net curtains. Front lawns the size of handkerchiefs edged with matching privet hedges. She never once felt threatened.

Everyone knows everyone. If it weren’t for the occasional burnt out wreck of a car, you could almost imagine the original vision, ‘Homes fit for heroes’. Lily lets herself into the house next door. The smell makes her retch as soon as she steps over the threshold. She’s spent the last six days here, but the smell won’t go, no matter how many tins of Floral Harmony she sprays.

She turns into the front room and flicks on the light. A bare bulb illuminates the room, which looks even smaller without furniture. When her mother was alive, a reinforced settee had taken up almost all the floor space, but it wasn’t here when Lily arrived and no one has mentioned it since.

Lily sits on the floor and pours herself a vodka from the half empty bottle. She uses the same glass she’s used for the last six days. She rests the back of her head against the wall behind her and wonders for a moment what her mother would have made of her wake. Stupid question, seeing as how her mother hadn’t left the house in ten years. There would have been more chance of getting her mother to the moon than to the back room at the Dog and Duck.

Lily opens her eyes and focuses on the pair of bolt cutters leaning against the side of the gas fire. She bought them three days ago from Mr Bhopal’s Tardis-like hardware store, and they’ve stood, unused, in their current position ever since. Lily takes a mouthful of vodka and crawls across the room to them. She kneels and picks them up, the weight of them pulling on her biceps. She makes a cutting gesture with them, as if practising for the task that lies ahead. She’s told herself, as a mark of respect, she’ll wait until morning; the dawning of a new, motherless, era.

Lily stands and closes the curtains. The minutes tick past on the small carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It’s almost 2 a.m. Occasionally she hears the sound of a car engine on the estate, or the distant echo of a police siren, but mainly there is silence. The only furniture in the front room now is the dresser, its centre drawers on the verge of collapse, and the television. It’s difficult to stand and watch television. Lily drains her glass and reaches again for the bolt cutters.

The metal padlock on the loft hatch has rusted over the years. To Lily’s knowledge it has never been opened. She spent the first two days she was here, ransacking the house for a key, but at the back of her mind she had known she wouldn’t find one. For as long as she can remember she’s fantasized about getting past that padlock, knowing the secrets of her past must lie up there.

Her old desk chair wobbles beneath her as Lily holds up the bolt cutters and snips at the thick metal. The cutters slice through it, just as Mr Bhopal had told her they would, and the padlock falls to the floor, narrowly missing Lily’s head on its descent. Lily pushes against the wooden trap door and sees a set of metal stepladders. They make such a racket as she pulls them down, she’s afraid they will wake the dead.

It’s pitch dark in the loft. Lily flicks the light switch but nothing happens. She climbs back down the ladder and takes the bulb from her mother’s bedroom, standing on piles of yellowing
News of the Worlds
to do so. Back in the loft, Lily has to replace the bulb by the light of her cigarette, her hand shaking. She switches on the light and is momentarily blinded. It takes a while for her eyes to adjust and allow her to focus on the contents of the room. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling, which is so low Lily cannot stand up straight. Two suitcases and a couple of boxes, the proper, old-fashioned, tea chest kind, are grouped together in the centre of the gloom. Lily guesses they were put up there when they first moved in, when Lily was just a baby. Lily reaches for the nearest suitcase and flicks open the catches.

Inside are clothes, men’s clothes. She pulls out the first item, a brown shirt with thin white stripes, ironed and neatly folded on the top of the pile. The buttons are done up. She holds it to her face and smells mustiness, mixed with a hint of pine aftershave. Lily holds up the shirt in front of her and as the folds drop out so do the arms, falling onto her lap, each neatly cut off at the shoulder. She pulls out a pair of trousers, with creases like tramlines, and a hole where the crotch should be. Lily doesn’t know what makes her feel saddest; the thought of her mother neatly ironing and folding her husband’s clothes after she’s hacked them to pieces, or the fact that her father obviously never returned to notice.

She reaches for one of the wooden packing crates. Inside are books. Her mum was never much of a reader, unless you count Mills and Boon, which Lily didn’t. She picks up the top one; it has a picture of a fat frog and a pink flower on the cover,
You only live twice, Ian Fleming
is written on the front. Lily’s seen the film. She holds the book up to her face and smells the paper as she flicks through the pages. Then, with her hands trembling, she turns to the front page, hope making her hold her breath. But if a name was written there, and it probably was, it has been cut out; a small, neat rectangle of paper missing in the top right hand corner. Lily turns to the back page and realises it’s missing.

Lily swears under her breath and reaches for the second box. It contains a record collection: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, a seven inch copy of
Leader of the Pack
by the Shangri-Las, and
I Got You, Babe
by Sonny and Cher. The box is full. Lily had always thought the theme tune to Coronation Street was the closest her mum had ever come to music. Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield. Lily bites her lip as she slides
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
out. It comes out of its sleeve in three separate pieces.

Lily notices through the cracks in the airbricks that it’s getting light. The bottle of vodka she brought with her is empty, and the heap of clothes feels slightly damp. She stands up too quickly, hitting her head against a low beam and falls to her knees, momentarily stunned. When her head stops hurting, she goes downstairs. She rummages through her pockets and finds, scribbled on a piece of paper, in old lady handwriting, Aunt Edie’s telephone number.

As she listens to the ringing phone, she has a flash of memory of Aunt Edie’s funeral. Her mother, already gigantic, in a black tent of a dress, hurrying her out of the churchyard as an elderly couple had approached them. The man had a gold ring on his finger with a red jewel that had sparkled in the sunlight. Lily had wondered whether he was the Pope. She had opened her mouth to ask, but her mother had pushed her out of the gate so hard she had almost fallen over.

“Hello?” A tremulous voice answers the phone.

“Aunt Edie? It’s me, Lily.”

“Heavens child, what time is it?”

Lily glances across at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It takes her a moment to work out that it’s half past five. “Shit, I mean sorry, I didn’t realise,” Lily takes a breath. “I need to see you.”

Aunt Edie’s house smells of vinegar, perfectly preserved, it’s exactly how it was the last time Lily visited. Memories assault her from all angles. The china dogs that she’d pretended to feed and take for walks are still on the hearth; the ashtray with a black cat in the centre, that Lily’s mother had painted when she was a child, is still on the windowsill.

Aunt Edie is bustling around in her kitchen, wearing her floral pinny, delighted to have company. She hands Lily an American Cream Soda. The glass is the same glass Lily drank out of twelve years ago, with glass bubbles in the bottom. Aunt Edie sings along to Andy Williams on the radio, out of tune and about four words behind.

They sit down at the small wooden table in the corner of the sitting room, where Aunt Edie has laid out lunch. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you, Lily.”

“I need to find my dad,” Lily blurts

“Would you like salmon or beef paste? I got the beef special this morning."

“I want to find my dad.” Lily says, louder this time.

“Of course you do pet, no need to shout. I take it you’ve not seen him? Not ever?” Lily shakes her head and tries to stop herself ripping the skin from the sides of her thumbs. “What did your mother tell you?”

“Nothing, I don’t know anything about him. I looked in the loft last night. Found some old clothes and his record collection, but...” she hesitates at telling Aunt Edie what her mother had done, “but there was nothing that would help me find him.”

“She was a different woman altogether in those days, Lil. She loved him so much. Never looked at another man. She got with him when she was seventeen. Always said she was going to marry him. He didn’t stand a chance.” Aunt Edie chuckles to herself. “Ay, she was determined, stubborn as a mule. Always was. The happiest bride I’ve ever seen.”

“So, what happened?”

“He ran off with another woman,” says Aunt Edie, as she tears the cellophane lid off the beef paste. “And it broke her heart, simple as that. She swore she’d never recover and she never did. Like I said, stubborn as stubborn.” Aunt Edie stands up and fiddles with the teapot. “That’s what I told her in the end. She was determined not to get over it and it wasn’t fair, Lil. It wasn’t fair on you, or on anyone around her. I told her she had to move on and that was that. She never spoke to me again. Once she made her mind up about something. Well you know what she’s like, was like.” She sits down heavily in her chair again. “Oh dear, I still can't believe she’s passed over.”

“What was he like,” Lily asks, “my dad?”

Aunt Edie spreads a dollop of butter as thick as clotted cream on her bread roll, while she considers the question. “He was handsome,” she says after some time. “But never trust a handsome man, that’s what I always say. Thank the good Lord my Arthur wasn’t anything to look at.”  She pauses for thought and to spread a broad smear of salmon paste on her barm cake. “He were carrying on, course, but no one knew a thing about it. He used to play snooker with our Terry and he didn’t have an inkling. And there was your mum, all pregnant, just about to have you. Terrible really.” She takes a large bite out of her creation. “It did for your grandmother,” she adds with her mouth full, “Sent her to an early grave.”

“I need to find him, Aunt Edie. I need to get some sense of where I’m from. I want to know about my past.”

Aunt Edie looks her up and down as she chews. She finally swallows. “I have something for you. Your granddad gave it to me for safekeeping when your granny died. I think he knew he wouldn’t last long without her. I didn’t really know what to do with it while your mother was alive. She’d have had my guts for garters if I’d given it to you.” She stands up again. “Mad as a wasp she’d have been. Wait there.”

A few minutes later Aunt Edie returns carrying a rectangular box. “I don’t know why he wanted you to have this. You see, your granddad never did like David, your dad. Always said he weren’t to be trusted. And turns out he were right, of course. But I think your granny must have wanted you to have it. I think she knew you’d be curious one day.” She hands the box to Lily. “You have a look at it love, while I check on the custard.”

Lily takes the box. She puts it on the table in front of her and eases off the cardboard lid. Inside she can see a large, cream coloured book, with a sheet of see-through crepe paper laid over the top of it. Lily’s hands start to shake. She slides off the crepe paper and reads the gold lettering on the front, ‘Wedding Album’. She’d often wondered whether her parents were married. She opens the first page:

In celebration of the marriage of David Winterbottom

and Miss Pamela Lillian Tattersall

16th May 1965

At the Church of our Virgin Mary, Clitheroe

Lily holds her breath and turns over the page, ready for her first glimpse of her father.

But the first picture is of the bride, and Lily’s first thought is that Aunt Edie’s given her the wrong wedding album. That wasn’t her mother. Confused, Lily turns back to the front page. Her father’s name was David Winterbottom. She only knew that because she’d ransacked the house eight or so years ago, when her mother had been admitted to hospital for a few days. Lily had found her birth certificate hidden in an old teapot. Remembering a news item she’d seen, about a child whose estranged father had abducted him from school, she’d stashed the birth certificate inside the lining of her school bag  just in case. Pathetic really.

Lily brings her mind back to the page in front of her. Her mum’s name was Pamela. Lily had long suspected Appleyard was neither her maiden, nor her married name. Lily turns the page again. The photograph is of a slim, beautiful bride with long blonde hair, laughing as she runs along a stone path. Slim, like Marilyn Monroe slim. Six men line the way, holding umbrellas up to protect her from the pouring rain. She’s holding her skirts up  as the rain bounces on the ground around her. The men are smiling at her, admiring her verve. The rain is torrential; Lily can almost make out the individual drops. She squints at the picture again. The woman laughs back at her, attractive, happy and slim.