The House We Grew Up In (25 page)

He scanned the crowds filing through the arrivals gate. After a five-minute procession of dairy-skinned Scandinavians, the next influx looked English: pasty and pale-faced after a long winter. He pulled himself up straighter, pushed his hair down over his ears. And then there he was and it took Rory totally by surprise, the flood of emotion, the tears.

His dad.

Colin’s face broke apart at the sight of him and they hurtled towards each other like victorious teammates, bundled up against each other, lost their faces into each other’s shoulders and squeezed hard. Then they pulled apart and regarded each other. It had been four years, almost to the day.

His dad had a rucksack slung over one shoulder, and was wearing classic middle-aged-man gear: sensible jeans, a T-shirt with a logo on it, a North Face jacket, cheap trainers. He looked so old. Or actually, no, not old, he looked like a young person with an ageing disease.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Colin, his eyes twinkling with pleasure, ‘look at you. Just look at you! So brown! So …’ He searched for a word. ‘So laid back. Wow!’

It was the first time that Rory and his dad had been alone together since that afternoon in the pub, when Colin had given him his birth certificate and set him free. Rory had missed him the most, more than his mum, more than his
sisters, more than his niece and nephews (he’d only actually met one of Meg’s boys and he couldn’t even remember his name).

‘Here –’ He took his dad’s rucksack from his shoulder and slung it over his own. He was glad in a way that he’d never grown taller than his dad. It was nice to be able to look up at him, even if it was only a couple of inches. He’d warned his dad about his circumstances, about the bare-wood room behind a shop on the strip, about the people coming and going, the pounding music and shrieks of delight late into the night. He’d told him about the ineffectual ceiling fan and the cockroaches and the mattress on the floor. But he hadn’t told him everything. Not yet.

Rory drove them back in his new car. Well, new to him. It was an old Fiat Panda that he’d bought off someone for a few hundred baht. It smelled of spliff and dog shit but it had air con and Colin smiled into the chilled blast as they cruised down the freeway.

‘Aah,’ he said, ‘that’s nice.’ He still had his North Face jacket on and his grey hair was stuck to his head like wet strips of papier mâché. ‘This heat,’ he said, ‘it’s like a furnace. How do you cope?’

‘I have acclimatised.’ He turned and smiled at his dad. He had not seen a human being he was related to since the day he’d left his baby daughter in Spain four years ago. It was a good feeling. ‘You must be really tired?’ he said.

‘No. Not at all. Doing nothing makes me tired. All this –’ Colin gestured through the windows at the passing scenery – ‘this makes me feel
alive
.’

His father’s life over the last few years was as much of a mystery to Rory as he imagined his own life was to his father. He had no idea how Colin spent his days, who he saw, where he went, what he did. He knew there’d been a memoir of some description undertaken, but he didn’t imagine that that had ever come to much. He knew that there’d been a girlfriend for a while, someone much younger than him called April or May or something. But as far as he was aware that had not come to much either. And now his dad was fifty-nine, retired from the college he’d taught at for all those years, living alone and travelling for the first time in his life to another continent.

Rory parked the Panda behind his building and pulled Colin’s rucksack from the back seat. ‘Welcome to my very very humble abode.’

His room was behind a curtain made of shredded multicoloured plastic. One of the girls from the bar was sitting on his back step, breastfeeding her baby.

‘Dad, this is Rochana. Rochana, this is my dad, Colin.’

Rochana’s face lit up and she pulled the baby’s mouth off her breast and got to her feet, barely five foot in cut-off shorts and a halter-neck top. ‘Aah, your
father
! So nice! So nice!’ She shook his hand and Colin beamed at her and stroked her baby’s hair and said, ‘What a lovely baby. How old is she?’

‘She is nine months. She is my angel!’

Colin smiled again and Rory remembered how much his father had always liked babies.

‘She’s beautiful. What’s her name?’

‘I call her Star. Because when she is big she will be a
super
star!’

Rory realised that he had never asked Rochana what her baby’s name was. Because he was not interested in her baby, just in when she’d be able to go back to work full-time.

He held the plastic curtain back for his father and ushered him through. ‘This is it,’ he said apologetically.

‘Oh,’ said his father, smiling stoically. ‘It’s fine. It’s perfectly nice.’

‘No,’ Rory laughed, ‘it’s a shithole. But it’s just temporary, while I’m saving.’

You could hear the lunchtime show through the back wall, the bang-bang of Evanescence, the tinny drone of the MC announcing the names of the girls.

‘Wow,’ said his dad, ‘I see what you mean about the noise. What a racket.’

‘Yeah,’ said Rory, ‘all day, half the night. You get used to it, I promise.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Colin. ‘I didn’t come here to sleep.’

Rory smiled and didn’t ask the question that threatened to spill from his lips:
Why did you come here?

He pulled a beer from his fridge and handed it to Colin. Then he opened one for himself and raised a toast. ‘To you, being here. I really appreciate it.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Colin, slurping back the cold beer. ‘Thank you. For letting me come. And I promise you I won’t cramp your style. Whatever you need to do, just let me know and I’ll make myself scarce. I’ve wanted to come to Thailand since I was a student. There’s plenty I can be getting on with.’

From the strip beyond the bar came the sounds of traffic: horns blaring, mopeds humming, people shouting. ‘Well,’
said Rory, ‘I’m not working until tonight, so we can just hang for a while. What do you fancy doing?’

‘How about some lunch? Some street food. Somewhere that does a good Pad Thai?’

Rory smiled. If there was one thing he knew about his neighbourhood, it was where to get the best noodles. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘get that jacket off, put some shorts on, I’ll take you out for lunch.’

It was strange seeing his neighbourhood through somebody else’s eyes. So much of what Rory saw was under cover of night, standing on the street, in the phosphorescent glow of street lights and neon, sunburned tourists who’d been drinking since noon, stag parties and sad fucks, perverts and freaks. He slept most of the day, while the families and the normal folk were gallivanting on the strip and on the beach. By the time he woke up they were moving on, packing up their bags, heading to hotels and guest houses for showers and early suppers. Even when he was awake during the day, he only really absorbed the elements of the world he knew; he saw the girls from the bars looking wan and out of sorts; he saw the punters, the dealers, the ravers, all rendered strangely distorted by being out of their night-time context.

But now, here, in this clean midday, with his sweet father by his side, he saw that he lived in a bustling seaside town, a town where you could buy souvenirs and suncream,
Now
magazine and the
Daily Mail
. If you hadn’t witnessed the underbelly, you might not even notice it was there.

They sat on pavement-mounted stools by a small noodle
stall. The guy who ran the stall was the son of the woman who ran the girls at the club. He was married to one of them. Even lunch was interwoven with sex.

‘Hello, hello!’ said the noodle guy.

‘Hi, Rak. This is Colin, my dad.’ He didn’t bother introducing him to his father.

‘Ah, good,’ said the man, ‘very good. You want Pad Thai?’

Colin rubbed his hands together. ‘Yes, please!’

‘Chicken, pork?’

‘Chicken, thank you.’

Rory walked away from the stall, leaving his father there watching intently as Rak threw things around in a wok. He would have to tell him eventually. He was going to be here for four days. He would have to tell him that he worked for Owen as a door manager at Owen’s girlie bar and as a runner for Owen’s small but ever-growing cocaine dealership. He would have to tell him that he was a criminal.

He’d tried to put him off coming – he’d told him his room was too small, he worked too many hours – but his dad had just said, ‘
I don’t mind
.’ He’d batted away every attempt to make him change his mind and eventually Rory had capitulated. Because, in fact, the benefits of seeing his father after all this time had far outweighed his discomfort at having to come clean about the life he was living out here. He just had to hope that his father would not judge him too harshly.

‘Oh, good God,’ he heard Colin saying behind him, ‘oh, my God.’ He was halfway through a mouthful of noodles and his eyes were rolling back in his head with pleasure. ‘This is the most incredible Pad Thai I have ever tasted in my life.
Oh …’ He lifted another forkful to his mouth. ‘How do you say “thank you” in Thai, Rory?’

Rak passed Rory his noodles and then Rory and Colin sat up at the bar and ate them together, facing a wall.

‘So,’ said Rory, ‘how is everyone? Dare I ask?’

Colin groaned and wiped some grease from his chin. ‘You mean Mum?’

‘Well, yeah, mainly, I suppose.’

‘She’s OK,’ said Colin. ‘She’s still not got over Beth moving away. I mean, she was thirty-one years old, for God’s sake, I don’t know what your mother was expecting, that she would stay at home for ever?’

‘I think she thought we’d
all
stay at home for ever. I think she thought that none of us would ever want to be anywhere else.’

Colin sighed. ‘I know, I know. Poor Mum.’

‘And how’s she doing without Vicky?’

‘Not good. I mean, Vicky still comes to stay every other weekend, when the girls are with Tim, and Meg comes up with the little ones as often as she can. And obviously I’m just next door. But basically she’s on her own, for the first time in her life.’

‘And the house?’

‘Appalling. Health-and-safety hazard. She completely filled Vicky’s girls’ room – your old one – the minute they moved out, and then about thirty seconds after Beth went to Australia she started dumping stuff in there. And there’s been a worrying development – she’s started hoarding newspapers …’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Yes. I know. I’ve written to that TV show.’

‘Which TV show?’

‘
Life Laundry
. You know, on the BBC. They clear out people’s houses for them.’

‘Cool,’ said Rory. ‘Have you told her?’

Colin rolled his eyes at him. ‘What do you think? Anyway, I doubt it will come to anything – I don’t even know if they’re going to make another series. But it seemed worth a try. I mean, I just really don’t know where to turn. We all keep trying, me, Vicky, Meg. We’re always trying to persuade her, thinking up new and ingenious ways of convincing her to part with things. But if anything it makes her worse. So …’ He shrugged and blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, you know, you just kind of give up eventually, don’t you? When someone doesn’t want to help themselves. There’s only so much you can do and …’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m not sure I can help her any more.’

Rory scraped the last noodles from the sides of the container and licked them from his plastic fork. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel and considered the issue of his mother. He was so distant from it over here, he barely thought about it. The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.

‘I can’t say I blame you,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.’

Colin smiled and dropped a screwed-up paper napkin into his empty noodle container. ‘I’ll try not to,’ he said. And
then his face became serious. ‘And what about you, my boy? What’s the story with you and Kayleigh and the little one?’

Rory groaned. He dropped his head into his hands and growled. Just the merest thought of Kayleigh and Tia always felt like a knife in his chest. ‘There’s nothing to say. No story. I haven’t heard from her. But then, she doesn’t know where I am, so I wasn’t expecting to, really.’ He braced his body for his father’s response to his next question. ‘Have you … has she been in touch with you lately?’

‘Yes,’ Colin replied simply. ‘Yes. We email each other a lot. At least once a week. And as you know, she comes over every Christmas, just for a night, on her way back to Ireland. She and Tia. She’s a lovely little thing, you know … really quite spectacular.’

Rory shrugged. He’d already had a full report on these Christmas visits; his father sent him long emails about them, attaching photographs which Rory did not open. He’d made that mistake once before, when his father had gone to Spain to visit Kayleigh and the baby a few months after Rory had left. He’d clicked on the attachment unthinkingly and then nearly fallen against the wall with the shock of it. His baby. Who had still been a colic-ridden screaming blob of nothing much when he’d said goodbye to her at eight months old. And there she was suddenly, magically, at fourteen months, with a ribbon in her hair, smiling and long-lashed, standing upright in jeans and sandals. A proper little girl. He’d looked at the photo for long enough to gauge that Tia looked just like him and then he’d pressed Delete. He’d made his decision, he had to live with it.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘She’s got a new partner, you know, Kayleigh?’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yes. He’s an artist, I think, a fair bit older than her, has a daughter of his own. I think she’s very happy.’

Rory nodded, just once. He wanted to scream at his dad to
shut up
. To
stop talking
. He wanted to yell at him that he had moved on. That he had drawn a line. That that was then and this was now and he had made a deliberate decision not to lug his baggage around with him. But Kayleigh had other ideas. She had completely inveigled her way into Colin’s affections, her and the girl. And Rory could not, in all reasonableness, expect his dad not to bring it up when it was such an important part of his life. But it was
not
an important part of
his
life. Kayleigh was supposed to have left him
breathless in her wake
. Instead she’d tied him up with string and wire, to live out the rest of his life putting food on the table and having to beg for sex. She had broken the terms of their unwritten agreement. She had taken him to the wrong place. He had learned not to feel guilty about what he’d done on that shocking June afternoon nearly four years ago. He had dealt with it.