Chapter 27 Dominic
DOMINIC
Lambeth Cemetery, where my mother is buried, is quite possibly the only quiet place in London. Traffic drones in the distance, but the paths here are empty. The sky is dark and overcast, and the weather has turned so cold I almost expect flurries of snow to start drifting to the ground.
My father hasn’t spoken a word to me since I picked him up. Every attempt at conversation is met with tight-lipped silence. I gave up halfway here, helping him wordlessly from the car and setting his oxygen tank on the ground.
We have to stop a few times along the path, pausing so he can catch his breath, and when I try to offer him my arm he waves me off angrily.
The past two days have been a quiet nightmare.
Barry left a very stern email in my inbox stating that he didn’t know if he could remain at the club in light of this scandal.
I didn’t respond to it. If Barry wants to quit right when it looks like we’re about to win the season, then that’s his choice.
I know he won’t. But the fact he thinks so little of me still feels like shit.
The media have been relentless. The picture of Mia and I in her kitchen pops up on every morning show, even the sports channels have latched onto the story. Everyone is dredging up my sordid past, every dalliance, every divorce, every misstep I’ve made as a man.
That feels like shit, too.
But what worries me more is that Archie’s infidelity has fallen off the radar.
While I’m still the villain, the big bad man with too much money and time on his hands, I’m worried the tide will start to turn against Mia.
I’m worried they’ll start portraying her as the adulterer, and that Archie will use the chance to paint himself as the victim.
I played right into his fucking hands with this one. Like an old fool.
My father and I come to stop at my mother’s grave, the pink marble headstone looking dull in the muted light.
The graves of my brother and sister lie beside hers, and I don’t think I’ve ever wished more that they were still here.
I wish I had someone to talk to. Someone who knew me as well as they did.
“An utter bloody embarrassment,” my father mutters suddenly, pulling out a white handkerchief from his pocket to dust down the facade of my mother’s headstone. “I’m just glad she’s not here to see it.”
“See what, Dad?”
His furious eyes flash up to mine. “Her son making a cuckold of her own grandson, that’s bloody what.” He shakes his head and goes back to his polishing. “I can’t even imagine what she’d say.”
“She’d at least talk to me about it.”
“Oh, you want me to talk?” My father straightens up and meets my eyes, fists balled at his sides, the white handkerchief shaking in his hand. “I’ll talk. And you’ll listen. What you’ve done is a disgrace.”
“It wasn’t planned. It just happened.”
“Rain just happens!” My father grits out a low growl and shakes his head. “I told you to look after the girl, to be there for her, not to go and bloody shag her!”
“It didn’t start until she told Archie it was over.”
My father laughs, his mouth curled into a cynical grin. “Is that so? How many hours after she told him it was over?”
I turn away from him and run a hand through my hair, which is damp from the mist settling over the cemetery. “I didn’t plan this. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but… she’s just… she’s wonderful.”
“Plenty of women are wonderful, it doesn’t mean you have to shag them all.”
I spin back to face him, and my lips pour out a laugh laced with so much pain I can practically taste it. “That’s rich coming from you.”
He holds up a gnarled finger in my direction. “Don’t you start that again. I loved your mother.”
“And she loved you Dad, she loved you so much she wouldn’t leave you no matter how many times you bloody cheated on her.”
“That’s enough!” My father’s words are snatched up by a cough, and he presses a fist to his mouth. “Your mother was loyal, and she knew the value of family, and she loved this club! She’d be ashamed to see what you’ve become, what you’ve made of it! Do you have any idea how this makes us look?”
I stare at my father and more venomous laughter falls from my lips.
Forty-five years worth of pain boils in my chest, tearing its way out of my ribcage.
All I can see as I look at the man before me is my mother at our dining table, smoking the endless chain of cigarettes that would ultimately lead to her death.
“How this made us look, Dad?” I raise my eyebrows, my eyes stinging. “How did it make us look when you were getting caught in seedy motels with strippers? How did it make us look when you bought that apartment in Brixton? Hmm? How many kids did you have with that woman?”
My father’s mouth sets in a hard line, and with a muttered Hmph he goes back to polishing my mother’s pink headstone.
“No, come on Dad, have it out with me.” I cross my arms over my chest, watching his hunched figure as he works.
“How many siblings do I have? Because it wasn’t just the apartment in Brixton.
No, there was that fancy one in Shepherd’s Bush for the rockstar’s daughter, how old was she again?
Seventeen? Bet you managed plenty of babies with her. Am I ever going to meet them?”
“Enough,” my father snaps, refusing to look up at me.
“Do you know how many nights I sat up to make sure Mum was OK? Watching her sitting at the table, just waiting for you to come home?” Tears start to blur my vision.
“I was nine years old, and I was sitting at the top of those stairs, making sure Melina and Nico didn’t wake up, while you were out shagging god knows fucking who.
And now you have the fucking gall to look me in the face and tell me I’m a disgrace? ”
“I said that’s enough, Dominic.”
“And don’t think I don’t know where you were the morning Nico died.”
My father springs up, his face filled with rage and pain, and I don’t even care. I stare down this old man, this pitiful old man who caused the most wonderful woman in the world so much pain, and I shake my head.
“What?” My eyes still burn with all the tears that I’ve held back since I was a kid, but they won’t fall, not even now.
“You want to deny it? You know I still hear Mum screaming? I still hear her calling out your fucking name, because she’d just found her baby dead in his bed, and you weren’t there.
” I can’t stop myself jabbing this feeble old man in the shoulder, and his expression shifts from rage to something mournful.
“How fucking dare you call me a disgrace. You put your burden on my shoulders when I was just a little boy. You want to know why I wasn’t a good dad to Archie?
How fucking could I be? I had no idea what that even looked like.
And I did my bloody best, and I know I failed, I know I fucking failed at every bloody turn, but I love him, Dad.
I love him and I loved Mum and I loved Melina and Nico and I fucking loved you even though I hated you. ”
My father blinks at me slowly, his eyes bloodshot. His lips tremble, and he opens them briefly as though to speak, before clamping them shut again.
I sniffle, and look down at the graves beside us. “I don’t know what Mum would think of this, I can’t even begin to guess. But I know that I could talk to her about it. I know she wouldn’t judge me for it. And I know she’d love Mia.”
“She would.” My father’s voice is barely a croak, and when I look back at him, he’s gazing at Mum’s grave.
“Your mother was too good for me. I always knew that. And I knew the second I met Mia that she was too good for Archie. I knew he’d mess it up.
Too brash, too arrogant, too taken with himself.
Nothing like you.” He meets my startled expression with a smile.
“You know I found you asleep at the top of the stairs one night. You’d slept right through your mother and I having a filthy old row.
And then I found you up there and I knew you’d been waiting up to watch over her. ”
“And you still didn’t change.”
“No.” My father sighs. “Because I’m a brash and arrogant bastard too. It must skip a generation.”
“Well, that’s cold comfort to me now, isn’t it.”
“I know, but… You were a good dad, son. You are a good dad.” My father coughs, and adjusts the hose on his face. “And the fact you think you’re not, that’s my fault. Never telling you how well you did, never telling you I was proud of you.”
I stare at him, my shoulders heaving, emotion tearing at the backs of my eyeballs. “But why?”
“Because I was bloody jealous!” My dad rasps, coughing into his wrinkled fist, waving me off when I move towards him.
“I was jealous. That’s all there is to it.
You go from being Billy Boy Graves and having women throwing themselves at you, to a broken down old man who fucking pisses himself when he coughs too much.
” He gestures to me with an open hand, but there’s no scorn in his face.
Just sadness. “And then there’s my son. My son, the incomparable Dominic Graves, leading England to a World Cup win, best striker in the Premier League, goal records that weren’t beaten for bloody years. ”
My eyes drop to the ground, and pain wedges itself into the space behind my heart.
“I only ever wanted you to be fucking proud of me.” I shake my head, feeling small and stupid in the face of the man who seemed like a giant to me when I was a child. “That’s all I wanted. For you to look at me and see something great. And all you ever saw was competition.”
“Yes, but that’s my failing, son, not yours.” My father moves towards me slowly, lugging the oxygen tank alongside him, until he can put a hand on my shoulder. “And I am proud of you.”
I shrug him off and take a step back. “Until now. Because now I’ve just wrecked the club and your legacy, isn’t that right?”
My father sighs heavily. “No.”
My eyes snap up to his. “What?”
“No, I don’t think you have. And I’m sorry I said it.”
“Sorry for a lot of things today, aren’t you?”
He slaps a hand against his thigh and stares at me with a deep frown.
“Yes I bloody well am. Do I think what you’ve done with Mia is wise?
No, I don’t. But you’re both adults. What you do is up to you.
But look.” He gestures to the graves beside us.
“We’ve weathered far bloody worse than an illicit affair, Dominic.
You and me have lost so much, you think we can’t make it through this? ”
I want to fire another cruel retort at him. But I look down at my mother’s pink headstone, at my brother and sister’s names on theirs, and I can’t. Not in front of them. We have weathered worse.
Far worse than this.
“I love her, Dad.” Admitting out loud that I love Mia feels like I’ve given myself a punch in my own guts. But it also feels right. “It’s not some illicit affair. It’s not something I want to move on from and forget.”
My father clasps his hands over his belly and sighs. “Well, then. I suppose you’re going to do the right thing by her.”
“Once the divorce is through and everything is cleared with Archie, of course.” I glance up at him. “I’m still worried what people will think.”
“People will think what they want, son. You can’t change that.” He leans down and puts a hand on my mother’s headstone. “You hear that, duck? Our boy’s only gone and fallen in love with a lass from Yorkshire. Who’d have thought, ey?”
Now tears do fall. Because I want to sit at a table with my mother and tell her everything.
I want her to roll her eyes and sigh, and say ‘Oh, Dominic’ in that tone she always used when I’d gone and done something stupid.
And I really want her to run a hand through my hair as she passes me on her way to the stove and says, ‘Time for coffee, I think’.
“But she’s a good woman,” my father goes on. “She reminds me of you. Same sass. Same independence. But our son’s a better man than me. She won’t have to do it all on her own, will she, Dom?”
I bite my lips together, nodding stupidly as I dash the tears away from my eyes. I haven’t cried in years. What the bloody hell is wrong with me?
My father presses a kiss to his fingertips then places it on my mother’s headstone. He gently pats Nico and Melina’s.
“Good night, you two. Don’t you be getting up to mischief.” He straightens, and turns to me. His face drops as he sees me crying, and he wobbles towards to wrap me in an awkward, one-armed hug.
“Now, now, my boy. It’s all going to be alright.” He gives my shoulders a squeeze. “We’re going to sort this out, don’t you worry.”