The Light of Amsterdam (35 page)

She wanted to raise her head and before the mist filled her lungs shout her daughter's name across the city, shout and shout it so that they could both go home to whatever warmth might be found, but she knew if she were to do so the only echoes would be the stares and indifference of those around her. And then she saw her. Even at a distance she knew it was her and despite everything she smiled as getting closer she saw her daughter, oblivious to everything, inspecting the display in a shoe shop.

‘You don't have enough shoes?'

‘Mum!' she shouted, her face splintering like breaking glass and throwing her arms around her in the tightest of embraces so that the side of her face was curtained by the side of her daughter's hair and smeared heavily by her scent. ‘Where have you been? I've been looking everywhere for you.' And so Shannon was speaking to her, the hot rush of her words pressing against her skin as if her mother was the missing child who had been the cause of concern.

‘I've just been walking, looking at stuff, looking at paintings,' she said, patiently waiting for her embrace to loosen. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I was so worried about you – you've never gone off like that before and somewhere you don't even know.'

There was a novelty in hearing Shannon's concern but there were things that had to be said and so she gently prised her arms from round her neck then smoothed her daughter's frantic hair into calm. ‘Shannon, I'm sorry I hit you.' The words weren't easy to say but she did her best to mean them and in response her daughter shook her head slowly from side to side as if she was refusing the apology.

‘I deserved it,' she said, taking her mother's hands in her own but not looking her in the eye. She watched her bite her bottom lip and they both stepped back a little, perhaps equally shocked by the unaccustomed admission of guilt.

‘Yes you did,' she said before the admission faded on her daughter's lips into the mist.

‘I was going to tell you lots of times but I knew what you'd say and then I thought we'd be here and maybe it'd help me to do it and help us see things in a different way.'

‘So just being in a plane for the first time and being somewhere new would change the past and how I feel about everything?'

Shannon shivered – as always she wasn't wearing warm-enough clothes – and she shivered in reply.

‘We need to go somewhere we can talk, somewhere out of the cold before we both freeze to death.'

She glanced around her but there was nowhere obvious and for a second she caught their reflection in a mirror in the shop window. They both seemed thin, pinched of face, her daughter's riot of hair shocked out of its normal pliant submission.

‘Look,' she said, pointing. ‘We both look as if we've been pulled through a hedge backwards.'

‘It feels like it,' Shannon answered, thrown into a panic about her appearance, her hands pressing and plumping her hair and pulling up her collar.

‘We need to walk and find somewhere before we freeze to death and there's no point going into one of those bars where you can't hear yourself talk. Are you hungry?'        

‘Looking at paintings? Where were you looking at paintings?'

‘In the museum,' and her daughter's surprise annoyed her because it suggested she considered it something beyond her capacity and so she said, ‘I'm not really hungry but we can get something if you want. Something that's not going to cost the earth.'

‘Everything costs the earth when you turn it into euros. Some of the girls are all spent out.'

‘And drunk out?'

‘Mostly, but there's a couple who never reach the bottom of the bottle.'

‘So are you hungry or not?'

‘I could eat some chips. They call them
friet
and if you don't stop them they put mayonnaise on them. How gross is that?'

Hearing her daughter's voice assume a glib lilt of knowledge made her think of telling her the really important things that she had seen in the city, about the paintings with the light coming out of them and about the old houses hidden off the shopping street huddled tightly together like old books on a shelf, but she suddenly realised that these were things that she didn't want to share with anyone, things she wanted to add to her private store. The guy on the plane knew about paintings – if she saw him again perhaps she could ask him about the light. She looked round her at how the suddenly re-forming mist laced and layered itself around the neon lights as if trying to soothe them into softness. All her daughter's upset seemed temporary and shallow and she wondered what it was she would say to her as she pointed the way to where she remembered seeing a chippy in a side street just off a main thoroughfare. As they walked she felt Shannon link her arm.

There were only three small round tables and they sat at the one pushed tight into the corner and studied the menu before each finally deciding on a small portion of chips and two cans of Fanta. Shannon insisted on paying and she let her, staring at her daughter's back as she stood at the counter, her purse in her hand. Her back was straight and slender, making her look taller than she actually was – it would be easy for her to look good in her wedding dress and she saw the way the man behind the counter gave her his full attention and more smiles than he normally served. He called her back to give her an abundance of serviettes and the chance of another look and she heard a familiar voice in her head saying that she could have done better than Wade. Someone who could have offered her the possibility of breaking into a better way of life, someone with the energy to make something of himself. And she realised that Wade must have shared her secret and she thought with bitterness of all the times that she had made him meals and put him up. Of all the times he had sponged off her, taken her hospitality for granted and given nothing back.

‘He asked me if we wanted mayonnaise,' she said, widening her eyes in mock horror while setting the chips and the drinks on the table. ‘I got ketchup.'

‘That's good. So how long have you been looking for me?'

‘A couple of hours. We thought you'd be back earlier and we didn't realise you'd gone until we surfaced.'

‘And that was pretty late, I suppose.'

‘We were all pretty hung-over and I lost track of time and things. But we just thought you'd gone out for a look round this afternoon and would be back later. Then I got worried even though Martina said you'd be all right and maybe it was better if everyone had time to cool down.'

The chips were hot and tasted good. They ate them with the little wooden forks they'd been given and dipped them in the sauce. She saw that there was no sense of tension or apprehension in her daughter as from time to time her eyes flicked to the mirrored wall that faced them. Her casual assumption that everything was fixed between them angered her but she waited until that anger had shaped itself as calmly as she could muster into words.

‘We need to talk, Shannon.'

‘I know.' She dabbed delicately at the corners of her lightly sheened lips with her paper serviette.

‘And I need you to tell me the truth. It's important now for both of us. No more lies.'

‘I didn't tell you any lies,' she protested, her eyes widening with hurt.

‘Not telling me that you had met your father was a lie and not telling me you had invited him to the wedding was one as well. You didn't think that these were things I was entitled to know?'

‘I know you were entitled to know and I tried to tell you lots of times. But every time I couldn't at the last minute because I knew you'd go ballistic.' She drank from the can, hiding her face behind it for a second.

‘And why do you think I'd have gone ballistic?'

‘Because you hate him for running out on you all those years ago.'

She wanted to stretch her hands across the table, take her daughter's shoulders and shake her into the truth.

‘Shannon, he didn't just run out on me – all those years ago he ran out on you, his child. Can't you understand that? And he stayed away all the time you were growing up. Not once did he want to know how you were doing, not once did he try to be part of your life.'

‘I know that, Mum, I know he did a bad thing but . . .'

‘And now he wants to walk you down the aisle and suddenly after all these years play your father.' Her anger was rising, she wanted to strike out at something, scatter everything off the table on to the floor. ‘And that's all he'd be doing – playing being your father.'

There was a sequence of sniffles and then Shannon started to cry, her head bowed over the chips, her hair falling forward and curtaining her face. But she had no sympathy for her and didn't care that the man behind the counter was glancing at them. She spoke quietly to the top of her daughter's head that leaned submissively towards her, but it wasn't submission she wanted, it was understanding.

‘All these years I struggled to look after you and take care of you and I did it with nothing from him and now he wants to turn up on the most important day of your life and waltz you down the aisle like he's never been away, that it's all been some sort of misunderstanding and this'll put it right. Well I don't think so, Shannon.'

She sat back on her seat, suddenly feeling empty inside. It was like the emptiness she had felt in the old man's room, arching over everything, draining the space of all its being. So she couldn't speak or register any emotion when her daughter looked up at her, brushed the hair back from her face and started to speak.

‘You're right to be cross because I should have told you right at the start. But it wasn't easy and I wasn't sure what I was going to do so there wasn't any point that first time he spoke to me coming home and upsetting you if I wasn't ever going to see him again.' She moved the can of drink to a different spot on the table as if to give her more room for what she wanted to say. ‘It was a Saturday afternoon, getting on to closing time, and I saw him looking at me but you get that sometimes, so I didn't pay any attention, and then he came up to the counter and bought something for his wife but I knew he didn't understand or care what it was he was buying. It happens every so often but he didn't look creepy or anything. Then right out of the blue he asked if he could speak to me after work finished and I was just about to tell him to get lost and call the supervisor when he said it. Just blurted it out – “Shannon, I'm your father but if you don't want to speak to me I'll understand and go away and never bother you again.” Said he'd really like to speak to me. And he'd wait in the bar across the way.'

Her daughter's words were inside her, tearing at her, each one a hook pulling her from everything that served to weight her to herself, and all she could do was grip the edge of the rickety table that separated them and yet she didn't want her daughter to stop. She needed to hear it all so she didn't speak but nodded for her to go on.

‘I didn't know what to do. I felt sick at first, my stomach turned right upside down, and then when I got over that I felt curious. All the times I've thought about him as a child, wondered what he was like, imagined stupid things and here he was and at first I was frightened, really frightened, and then I wanted to know, to ask him why he didn't want us. So I went.' She paused again to dab her lips, pressing the tissue gently against them with the tips of her fingers. ‘And he was there in the bar and he was really pleased to see me and he kept asking if I was all right and how he didn't want to upset me so there was no pressure and I could leave any time I wanted and he'd understand.'

She listened to her daughter slip towards what she already knew would be some kind of all-too-easy accommodation and she was filled with a thrilled anticipation of terror. So she sipped slowly from her drink, holding it tightly and then, without meaning to, set it down too firmly so that everything on the table quivered a little before settling again. The seats beside them were taken by new customers and a loud babble of foreign language now threatened to drown out her daughter's voice that had started to flutter into a whisper like a moth trapped against glass.

‘Well we just talked and he told me he was married – which I knew already – and that he had two children, a boy of thirteen and a girl of eleven. So I had a stepbrother and -sister I didn't know about.'

‘Have you met them?' she asked, already knowing the answer from the edge of pride in her voice.

‘Yes. They're nice kids.'

‘You've been to his house then?' She could hardly bring herself to ask the question as more and more of what she had always held secure worked itself loose and slipped away from her.

‘Yes.'

‘And I suppose it's very nice.'

‘It's on the King's Road.'

‘So very nice?'

‘Yes.' Suddenly Shannon looked uncomfortable, her eyes flitting round the other customers whose loud laughter clapped itself about their heads. ‘I've only been a couple of times.'

‘You've met his wife? And I'm sure she's happy to suddenly have a stepdaughter?'