Chapter 15
15
‘Dad, the archives are that way.’ Ava points up the road towards the council building because we’ve come out of the hotel and Ren is taking us in the opposite direction.
‘Ah, but one of us has got an appointment elsewhere first.’ Ren steeples his fingers in an evil overlord sort of way, complete with matching ‘mwhahaha’ laugh.
Ava looks to me, silently asking if I know why he’s lost the plot, but I’m as in the dark as she is.
He’s following a map on his phone, and we cut through a couple of small streets full of touristy souvenir shops, cafés with gorgeous smells wafting out, and galleries displaying the paintings of local artists, until we come to a quaint shop with a pink and white striped awning and images of models with fancy hairdos on the windows.
‘A hairdresser?’ Ava looks between the two of us and then gasps as understanding dawns on her. ‘A hairdresser! Oh my God! Are you letting me dye my hair like Mickey’s?’
‘If you want to. You’ve got an appointment at 10a.m.’
‘Daaaaaad! You’re the best!’ She throws her arms around him so hard that she nearly knocks them both into the road. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’
When she releases him, she jumps on me for a hug too. ‘Thank yoooou, Mickey! I don’t know what you did to persuade him, but you’re also the best !’ The last word is squealed at a pitch that, somewhere out in the Irish Sea, has got several dolphins turned around and wondering if their sonar is on the blink.
She rushes inside and drags us both in with her, and Ren goes to talk to the receptionist. Ava is going through their dye selection when he comes back.
‘Do you want to go up to the council place and start looking?’ he says to me. ‘There’s no point in us both wasting a couple of hours here when we’ve only got until Monday.’
‘I want Mickey to stay!’ Ava speaks before I’ve had a chance to answer. ‘Can you go to look through the archives and we’ll stay here? You’ll only sit there and moan constantly and tell them not to do it too bright!’
Ren laughs. ‘All right, fair point. If that’s what you want…’ He double-checks it’s okay with me, and then goes to pay upfront, with instructions to call him if we need anything, and waves as he leaves.
We’re the only customers and a hairdresser comes to take Ava to a chair, shows her colour charts of the shade each dye is likely to go on her brown hair, and she chooses one, has a trim, and then we have to wait for an hour for the dye to take effect with her hair wrapped in a plastic cap.
‘Best day ever!’ Ava declares as we sit in the waiting area, leafing through the selection of glossy magazines. ‘Thank you so much for whatever you did. I’m going to have purple hair because of you. You definitely have Fairy Godmother magic powers!’
I giggle at her childlike innocence. ‘Believe it or not, it was nothing to do with me. He must’ve booked that appointment before we even woke up this morning.’
‘Yeah, but you loosen him up. You make him see another point of view. That, and he thinks about you so much that he forgets to think about the evils of dyed hair.’
It’s a sweet, over-simplified point, but I get a little thrill at where she’s coming from – the idea that I am somehow responsible for loosening Ren up and that he spends so much time thinking about me.
After the hairdresser has washed the dye out, straightened and blow-dried Ava’s new Cadbury-purple hair, she’s over the moon and keeps stroking it and twirling it round her fingers. It’s nearly lunchtime when we step outside and the August sun is high in the Welsh blue sky.
‘Hear me out,’ I suggest. ‘We could go straight up to the archives and see how your dad’s getting on, or we could get ice cream and go for a walk on the beach and?—’
‘You had me at ice cream! He won’t even miss us! We can just tell him the dye takes hours to work and he’ll never know!’
There’s an ice cream van on the seafront, selling the most obscenely gigantic 99s with two flakes, drizzled with strawberry and chocolate sauce, and I get us one each, and we kick our shoes off and skip down onto the sand. The tide is coming in and families under umbrellas and behind windbreakers are gradually moving their way up the beach, but Ava and I head down to the water’s edge and paddle along the shallow lapping waves.
‘Thanks for this, Mickey.’ She holds up the ice cream, and then waves her shoes towards the general area. ‘Dad would never have done anything like this without you, and he’d never let me eat an ice cream this size before lunch!’
I laugh. ‘Maybe we should downplay quite how huge it is when we see him…’
‘He won’t mind, really. You’re the best thing to ever happen to him!’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He’s… um… well, he’s been pretty good for me too. You can’t deny my shop looks a lot better because of his input.’
‘Yeah, but our life looks a lot better because of your input.’
My heart is melting faster than my ice cream in the summer sun, and I nudge my arm against hers gently, because we’ve both got ice creams in one hand and shoes in the other so a proper hug is unfeasible.
‘He likes you. So much,’ Ava continues, licking dripping ice cream off her cornet. ‘He’s so different with you. More like the old dad he used to be. I hadn’t realised how much Mum had broken him. She criticised him all the time, and he changed because of it, and she still complained about him, but then he wasn’t himself any more. And you’ve mended him. You like him just as he is, and you told him that, and it changed something inside him for the better.’
Who knew it was possible to tear up while eating the world’s biggest ice cream? I sniffle and turn away, pretending to be fascinated by the coiled castings of a sandworm while I get my emotions under control.
‘It’s really easy to feel unloved sometimes, and to take it personally if someone doesn’t stay,’ I say carefully, aware that they’re both struggling with the way Ava’s mother abandoned them. ‘It can make you feel like you’re not good enough or like you did something wrong, when really it’s the other person who was wrong to do what they did, and it can be really hard to reframe it as being a problem with that person and not with you… you understand that, right?’
Ava nods, the cornet forgotten in her hand.
‘And the greatest thing in the world is to be loved for exactly who you are. To know someone wouldn’t change any aspect of you. And in a strange way, maybe that’s part of why your dad wouldn’t let you get your hair dyed and doesn’t always want you to do grown-up things – because he loves you exactly as you are, and he’s worried that you’re going to change and grow up and stop loving him too.’
‘Everyone has to grow up, except Peter Pan.’
I can’t help giggling at the analogy. ‘It can take dads a while to get used to the idea of their little girls growing up, and for what it’s worth, he’s trying. It’s not easy to be a single parent, I know his job is stressful – for you both,’ I add before she can say it’s stressful to have a parent working at your school too. ‘Maybe he doesn’t always get things right, but he is trying his best.’
‘Did your dad get things wrong?’
‘All the time. But we only had each other so we got through it together. He apologised when he was wrong, and I apologised when I shouted at him and slammed doors, and things did get easier. Even when it doesn’t seem like they will, things will always get easier.’
Ava nods and we finish our ice creams in comfortable silence, and then she hands me her shoes to carry and starts collecting shells to take home.
‘I wish he’d stop treating me like a child and be honest with me about Mum,’ she blurts out. ‘He says he drove her away, but I know it was her. I know she never wanted to spend time with us. He’d make special dinners and she wouldn’t come home in time, and sometimes we planned special outings for the three of us and she never bothered to come. And then after the divorce, when I was supposed to see her, she never wanted to see me. I knew she wanted to be somewhere else when we were together, doing something else, with someone else, and I just want him to admit she was a selfish cow and we’re better off without her.’
I probably shouldn’t laugh, but I can’t hide the half-snort at her straight-talking wisdom.
‘He’s always trying not to take sides and he doesn’t want me to think badly of her, but she made me think badly of her, and it should be okay for both of us to be angry and hurt and upset.’
‘I… cannot argue with that, and I actually think your dad could learn a lot from you. Maybe you could say all that to him sometime? Because from what I’ve gathered, he takes responsibility because he thinks everyone blames him, so maybe it would be good for him to know that you know it was a problem with your mum and nothing that either of you did.’
‘Oh, I know that. Look at this.’ She shoves the handful of shells she’s collected into her pocket, and when they won’t all fit, hands them to me to juggle with the two pairs of shoes, and gets her phone out.
I bend down so I can see the screen she’s showing me as she cups her hand around it to block out sunlight. She’s opened her text messages and is showing me the conversation thread with ‘Mum’ at the top, except… every single message is from Ava.
She’s been texting her mother often. I catch a glimpse of a few dates as she scrolls up the endless message thread, one message a week, sometimes two or three, going back months. Some are chatty, telling her mum what she’s been doing at school, complaining about her maths homework, and some are raw and painful, begging her to come back, telling her she misses her, and not one of them has had a reply.
My heart feels like it’s being torn apart in my chest. This is the most heart-wrenching thing I’ve ever seen, and it does make you wonder about the heartlessness of a woman who could get so many texts from her young daughter, who clearly desperately needed her at the time some of these messages were written, and never once bothered checking up on her in any way.
She sighs and scrolls back to the bottom and my eyes focus on the most recent one that’s telling her mum they’re going to Wales with Dad’s new girlfriend.
‘Ava, me and your dad aren’t…’
‘Well, you should be! See?’ She changes message threads to the one with ‘Dad’ written at the top and shows me one of the most recent ones from Ren, telling her what a good time he’d had with me while she was at her grandparents’.
‘Scroll up a bit,’ I ask, and she does, and although I don’t want to read her private text messages, I want to prove a point. Even though they live together and probably don’t have much reason to text each other, every single message has a reply from Ren, because that’s what good parents do.
‘Do you want my advice?’ I ask as she puts her phone away and nods enthusiastically. ‘If it were me, I’d text your mum less often and text your dad more often. After all, the best people in your phone are the ones who always want to text you back. If someone doesn’t make room for you in their lives, sometimes it’s worth backing off and letting them see what they’re missing.’
‘Like you, you always text me back.’
‘Why wouldn’t I text you back? You’re a little ray of sunshine in my lonely life.’
‘Thanks, Mickey.’ She throws her arms around me with such force that we both overbalance and end up on our bums in the wet sand, both pairs of shoes splash into the sea, and her shell collection scatters everywhere.
We’re both giggling as I quickly rescue the shoes and Ava gathers up her shells.
‘And maybe give your dad a few extra hugs too? I think he needs that.’
‘Maybe you should hug him more often too.’ She stops shell collecting long enough to look up at me with waggling eyebrows.
‘Hah hah,’ I say out loud to cover the fact I’m blushing bright red. ‘I think I’ve probably given him enough hugs lately. He’s bound to start complaining sooner or later.’
We’re still laughing about it when my phone rings and Ren’s name flashes on the screen. ‘See? He’s starting already.’ I hold it up to show her before answering.
‘You two need to come up to the archives,’ Ren says down the line. ‘I’ve found something.’