Your Father Sends His Love (5 page)

Dean slid down, down onto the lino of the kitchen floor. He sat there, knees up, his hands on his thighs, listening to the voice.

The first time they had taken the boy out they'd dressed him in layer upon layer of wool and cotton. Rachel wore her best maternity clothes and tried not to worry about bleeding. They took him to a nearby town and pushed him around a large church, around gravestones. Inside the stained glass radiated light. The candles were electric, two men and a woman were praying. It wasn't like the place in which his father had lit a taper. On the way out, Dean put a pound in the donation tray. As they walked past the graves and back to the car, he wished he'd given more.

‘I would have loved to have been a tearaway, a rebel, a fighter, a truant,' the recording said. ‘But their faces, their demeanours prevented it. They looked at me as though I held the secret to the universe. As I amassed language, I used it as a weapon against them. It was the only way to shame them. Bad behaviour and tantrums were met with cloying faces, with the same looks of blessing. One cannot rebel against people or structures that are satisfied only by one's existence. The only rebellion would be one's own death, and even then, even in infancy, I was very much taken with the possibilities of life. A schoolmate died. I remember that now. I do not recall her name.
She drowned in a lake. Ten years old. She was young for her age, boyish. I once saw hers and she once saw mine. I told my parents about her death and realized my error. I felt the already narrow room close in, their attention and vigilance subtle yet wholly obvious. I felt the ache of their love for me and it was exhausting and brutal.'

Rachel went through eleven hours of labour in the hospital and, as she pushed, Dean could not believe how anyone could survive the violence; but then the child came and screamed and it didn't matter. In his arms; the tears and the tears. The we're-going-to-have-such-fun-you-and-mes. The fingernails.

‘I cannot remember a single thing my father said to me,' the recording said: ‘his voice is permanently muted. My mother's the same. I'm always amazed that the dull-witted and ugly fall in love, aren't you? There are no photographs of them in my possession. I have none of their belongings. I sold the house without returning and was given a sum for its contents. Heartless is such a harsh word to use, don't you think? The point is to be honest in this life. I rate honesty as the highest of all the human virtues. Honesty will set us free. The honesty to be the person you truly are. I left home as soon as I could and I never looked back. I made my indifference quite plain, yet still they loved me, loved me right until the end. And that is all there is to say about my parents. I will say no
more on them. There are far more interesting things to talk about. Far more interesting things.'

Dean got up and began chopping a carrot, then an onion. The onion was strong, the house silent. He put the ingredients for the chicken stew in a pan and turned up the heat. He then got a hammer and smashed the baby monitor into small shards of plastic and speaker. He gathered up the bits and put them in the rubbish bin, then took out the rubbish.

When he heard Jack screaming he ran up the stairs, just as a father should; just like that, exactly as he should. He opened Jack's bedroom door and the boy had his hands on the bars of the cot.

‘Hello, Jackie. Are you awake now, boy?'

Jack looked at his father, eyes straight ahead.

‘Dull,' the boy said. Clearly, distinctly.

‘Dull,' he said again. Dean could see a new tooth.

Dean picked up his son and put him to his chest. Tears were in his eyes. He held his beautiful son and wished Rachel was there to share in the moment.

THESE ARE THE DAYS

He warmed the teapot and through the kitchen window watched her spit on the backyard flags. Dark out, the light from inside illuminating her. She had her back to him, her hands on her knees. He saw horizontal lines of filth and silt and sand lashed up her calves. Thin lines, pale skin. He saw her breath, pit-horse clouds from mouth and nose as her back heaved. She spat again, her saliva a silver coin on the stone. He watched her turn towards the house. Framed between parted yellow curtains, she saw him in the window. Dark out, light inside. She jumped, jolted like the ground was wired live. She clasped her hands to her chest and mutely laughed. He watched her shake her head as she approached the house.

She opened the door and shut it on the dark. He was still by the window, still holding the warmed pot. She brought in the smells of outside: of sea and sand and wind and spray; of cooled sweat and unbrushed teeth. He watched her take off her running shoes. Pink and yellow
and green. Mud-raked, difficult to unlace, small when placed on the backdoor mat.

‘Good run?' he said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I took your advice. From the jetty to Peacehaven, then back.'

She was tall. Taller than him, over six foot, surely. He gave her a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. She took it as though there was always mineral water in the fridge. She drank – one, two, three – neck bobbing; a thin channel of water running from the corner of her mouth. He watched her shake out her ponytail, strands of dark hair coiled like coastlines on her forehead. Holding herself against one of the chairs, she stretched out her right leg. The sheer fabric of her shorts reached down to her knees. The shorts were skin-tight, good for support, he supposed; coloured flashes down their sides. The athletes on the television wore them. They provided minimal wind resistance. A pocket at the base of the back for keys or a wallet perhaps. Tight muscles of her calves, tight muscles of her thighs. From the jetty to Peacehaven, then back.

‘Everything okay?' he asked.

‘Just need to stretch, Grandpa, that's all. Be fine in a minute.'

He spooned out tea leaves. Three teaspoons: one per person, one for the pot. He filled it with boiling water and
set it on the table. Somewhere there was a tea cosy. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen it, let alone used it.

He watched Anna unzip her running jacket. Black with yellow and green trim, reflective surfaces, good for safety. The T-shirt underneath was yoked with sweat, the fabric thin and engineered; designed to ‘wick moisture away from the body' – salesman's words that sounded impressive when he'd bought it for her last birthday.

She hung the jacket on the back of a chair and looked across the kitchen to the stove. The frying pan was already on the unlit hob, beside it a butter dish, a carton of eggs, fatty bacon in greaseproof paper.

‘Don't wait for me,' she said, nodding to the food. ‘You eat your breakfast.'

‘Oh no,' he said. ‘We'll eat together, you and me. You take your time. Have a bath, a shower, whatever you want. There are towels in the airing cupboard, nice and warm. We'll have breakfast when you're ready. There's no rush.'

Her socks were tiny. He watched her quick-disappearing footprints on the laminate. Bobby socks, at the hop. Earphones trailed from a device strapped to her upper right arm. On her wrist, a rubber-coated watch continued to time her run. From the jetty to Peacehaven, then back.

‘I didn't know if you'd be awake,' she said. ‘I know you said, but . . .'

‘Us old bastards get up with the larks,' he said. ‘I blame the sea.'

She laughed at ‘bastard'.

‘I do,' he said, ‘it's like an alarm clock for the retired and useless. The whole street's up before sunrise. Probably the whole town. In the summer at four, five in the morning the coastal path's full. If you see any of us approach, run away, that's my advice. Run away from us old bastards and keep on running!'

Anna giggled, put her hands on her hips; stretched to the left then to the right. Her joints cracked as she rolled her shoulders. He watched her kick out her legs. The muscles in her arms were defined and tight. Mens Sauna and so on. She walked past him, the half footprints on the laminate following her.

‘You're the funniest old bastard I've ever met,' she said.

‘You're a lousy liar,' he said. ‘But I'll take any superlative as a compliment.'

Soon after her fifteenth birthday he began to write her letters. There had been a family gathering for Anna at his son's house, and Ben had made one of his quarterly excursions
from the seafront to the city. In the late-summer sunshine he briefly caught up with his son and daughter-in-law, then retired to a corner of the garden to drink red wine with a widower and a divorcee of his own age. Sitting at the rattan table, top buttons undone on their waistbands, they looked like close, old friends.

Whenever the conversation took a tedious turn, Ben would stare past his companions to Anna across the lawn. She was curled up on a picnic blanket with her three best friends, fingers worrying at the shorn grass. As he passed them on the way to the bathroom, he overheard their conversation.

‘She makes me write thank-you cards.
By hand
. Can you believe that?'

‘Serious? Not even email?'

‘No. Must be handwritten. Takes for ever.'

‘By hand? Serious?'

‘What's the fucking point in sending a letter?' Anna said.

There was a stationery shop at Victoria station and before boarding the train he picked up some writing paper – cheap, flimsy stuff, but writing paper nonetheless – and an ink cartridge for the fountain pen he never used.

The following morning, sitting at the kitchen table, he wrote:

Dear Anna

It was lovely to see you at your birthday celebrations yesterday. While I was there, I overheard you ask why people write and send letters. I hope the following answers your question.

We write letters for the way they make the recipient feel: for the elation caused by their discovery on the doormat; for the thrill in recognising the sender's handwriting; for the delightful promise of the tearing of the envelope (though using a letter-knife is even more wonderful!); for the physical and emotional exchange that only a handwritten letter can provide.

I am not against technology, far from it (you should see me go on the Internet!); but if you do not feel any of these emotions upon receipt of this letter, I will happily receive an emailed thank-you note in future. I am – for once – confident, however, that you will understand why we still send letters, and perhaps even correspond with me in this most venerable of ways.

I shall watch my doormat with eager eyes.

Love always,

Grandpa B

Anna's response arrived a week later, written on a page torn from an A4 notepad.

Dear Grandpa B

Thanks for the letter. And thank you very much for the book and the H&M vouchers. I can't remember ever having got a handwritten letter before, and I loved it. I am busy with exams at the moment, but when they are over I will write and tell you how they went.

Love from

Anna

Over the next six years he wrote whenever the urge took him. He was pleased with the way his script curled and the neatness of his hand. He often prefaced his reminiscences, or things that had occurred to him, with, ‘Forgive me if I have written this before . . .' He wrote, ‘It is a curse of old age to one day assume you have said everything, and the next assume the opposite. Each is as tedious to the recipient as the other.' This he could remember writing, sitting in the pub on the other side of the Seven Sisters, his trousers roasting by a fake open fire.

Anna's replies were erratic, though she never forgot a
thank-you note for a Christmas or birthday gift. There was a period of six months when she sent him a letter every two weeks, but mostly they were spread-out, badly written, poorly punctuated, scrawled on good-stock paper (his gift to her each birthday). He kept her letters in an unmarked suspension file. He had no idea how many letters he had written. Hundreds, he assumed. When he read through her letters, he wondered whether she kept his, and what the sum of those letters would say about him. Perhaps she had thrown them away, destroyed them as though never written or read. Still he wrote the letters. Still he licked the envelopes and affixed the stamps and walked to the end of the road to post them. Still he listened for the postman's trolley on the pitted asphalt.