Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He calls at four, I’m on the sofa. Celyn went to work at two, the Monday shift, the long one. Kissed me at the door. Held my face with both hands. Looked at me and didn’t say good luck because Celyn doesn’t believe in luck.
Dad.
The screen, no photo, never set one. The number with no face.
I pick up.
‘Ron.’
The voice, lower than Mum’s, flatter. The Rotherhithe under it. Lewisham smoothed it out but it’s still there in the vowels. The voice of the man who put up the crooked tiles and never fixed them.
‘Dad.’
Silence, three seconds, five, I can hear, the telly, low, he’s at home, the flat. The flat he moved into after Ewan, the one-bed above the bookmakers on Deptford High Street. Mum told me the address. I’ve never been.
‘Your mum said something.’ He stops. The pause. Choosing. Dad chooses words like I choose them. Slowly. One at a time. The apple and the tree.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She told me.’
‘Both of you.’ My hand on the cushion. Tight. Said the way you’d say ‘it’s raining’ or ‘the match is off.’ A fact. Both of you. ‘I don’t, I don’t understand either of you, Ron.’
The honest sentence.
‘You don’t have to understand,’ I say.
‘I know that. Your mum says that. Ewan said that, before.’ The ‘before’ with the weight. Before the silence. Before two years of the nothing. ‘Everyone says I don’t have to understand and I’m telling you I don’t. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how to do this.’
‘You don’t have to understand. You have to not disappear.’
Silence, longer, the telly. The flat above the bookmakers. The man in the chair.
‘I’m not disappearing,’ he says. The voice, lower. The Rotherhithe gone. Just the flat voice underneath, the one that has no geography. ‘I’m not, I didn’t disappear on Ewan. I’m trying.’
‘Two years, Dad.’
‘I know.’
‘Two Christmases. Mum crying in the kitchen. Ewan pretending it didn’t happen.’
‘I know, Ron.’
The volume, one word, then back down, the thing Dad does. The spike and then the nothing and the nothing’s worse.
‘I just need time,’ he says. ‘I need. It’s a lot, Ron. Both of you. It’s a lot for a man to change.’ He stops. The sentence that doesn’t finish because the vocabulary ran out. The apple. The tree.
‘Their name is Celyn,’ I say. ‘Celyn.’
Silence.
‘Welsh,’ I say. ‘They’re a writer. Horror.’
The details. The name, the job, the origin. Like if I give him enough facts the facts will make a shape he can hold. Like filling a form, Name, Occupation, Nationality.
‘They’re good, Dad. They’re. I’m happy.’
The word Mum asked about. Happy. A breath in the kitchen and a stone here. Monday. The flat. And I can’t sit with it.
‘I need time,’ he says again.
Not: I don’t want to know. Not: I won’t call again, not: choose.
Time.
The door, not shut, not open.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Don’t tell your mum I said this.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And Ewan will understand.’
‘I’ll talk to Ewan.’
Silence, the last silence. The one before the phone goes.
‘Right,’ Dad says. ‘Right, then.’
‘Right.’
Phone goes. Screen. Number with no face. Sofa. Ceiling with the stain from the leak that I haven’t fixed because there’s always another week.
Celyn’s at the restaurant. The notebook in the bag. The apron. The hands without nail polish because the restaurant says no. The hands that wrote me into a book.
I sit on the sofa. The silence, the telly off, don’t turn it on.
The door, still ajar. His to push, not mine.
Enough.
The phone, text Celyn.
dad called
Three dots, fast. Celyn’s at the restaurant but the phone’s in the apron pocket. Always in the apron pocket.
And?
he said he needs time. said he doesn’t understand
That’s more than my dad said first time
I look at the message. The comparison. Celyn’s father who says ‘he’ every time and nods and doesn’t change. My father who says ‘both of you’ and walks out and might come back. Both still fathers.
he didn’t hang up on me
That’s something
is it enough
The dots. Longer. Celyn typing and deleting. Typing again.
It’s a start, starts are enough.
Phone on the cushion, the sofa. The flat with the stain and the telly off and the silence that isn’t Celyn’s silence and isn’t Dad’s silence. My silence. The one I’m learning to sit in without filling it.
The stars on the ceiling. The charity-shop ones I put up last week. Crooked, wrong constellations, the moon in the wrong corner. Celyn said ‘that’s not where Orion goes’ and I said ‘who’s Orion’ and Celyn did the face.
I look at them, the glow. The plastic stars in a flat in Manchester on a ceiling that used to be bare.
The door’s not shut, cracked, daylight through the gap.
It has to be enough.
The phone call was yesterday. Twenty-seven hours. I’ve been counting without meaning to. How I count steps, how I count rebar ties.
Twenty-seven hours since Dad’s voice. The voice I know from football Saturdays and Christmas mornings and the landing at night when Mum sent him to check if we were asleep. Both of you, that’s what he said.
I walk. The route to the pub, not the bar. The bar is for Celyn. The pub is for Ewan. The evening’s cold, April, but Manchester cold isn’t calendar cold, it’s in the air whenever the air decides, and tonight it decided. My jacket’s too thin, don’t care.
Past the canal. The water’s black and flat and the streetlights make orange lines on it like someone drew them with a ruler. A couple on the towpath. Walking, close, one of them laughing. I watch them for three seconds and then don’t.
The Lass O’Gowrie, the door, the noise. Inside is warm and smells like beer and the carpets and the darts machine beeping and it’s a Tuesday and there’s nobody here who matters except the person at the corner table.
Ewan’s already there when I get in, the corner table, the one by the window, two pints. He bought the first round. That’s how I know he knows.
‘Mum called you,’ I say. Sit down. The pint’s Estrella. Not the Northern Soul.
‘Mum calls everyone. She’s a telephone exchange.’ Ewan picks up his pint. Drinks. Puts it down. The hands, the Ewan hands, always moving. Tonight they’re still. Almost. The thumb runs along the edge of the glass. Back and forth.
‘Dad called me,’ I say. ‘He said “both of you.” Like something we caught. A disease.’
Ewan doesn’t flinch, the face, flat, the eyes on me. The same look from the night with the Moretti, the surgical look, except tonight he’s not cutting. He’s just, there.
‘He said he needs time,’ I say.
‘He said the same thing to me.’ Ewan drinks. ‘Two years ago. Still timing.’
The word. Timing. Like Dad’s sat in the flat above the bookmakers with a stopwatch and at some point it’ll go off.
‘Did he ever try.’ I don’t know how to finish the sentence. ‘Did he ring you? After. When he was. Timing.’
‘Once.’ Ewan’s voice. Level. ‘About eight months in. He rang at half seven. Laurence was cooking. The football was on loud at his end. That was the whole call. United at home, going down, and he wanted someone watching it with him. I was the name his thumb landed on. “You seeing this.” Not a question. He just needed to say it out loud to one of us.’
‘What’d you say?’
‘I said I’d put it on. He said right. That was it. Forty seconds. Laurence asked who it was and I said wrong number and Laurence looked at me and I looked at Laurence and we both knew and neither of us said anything and we ate the pasta and went to bed.’
Pub. Noise. Darts machine, someone at the bar, music low. Table. Pints.
‘He’s not a bad person,’ I say. Don’t know why. The sentence just. Comes out. Defensive.
‘No,’ Ewan says. ‘He’s not. He’s a limited person. There’s a difference. Bad people choose. Limited people can’t get past the wall. The wall’s not his fault. What he does about it is.’
Silence, I drink, the Estrella. The taste of it, flat, cold, cheap.
‘My twenty-first,’ Ewan says. Quiet. The voice drops. The thin one. ‘Laurence had planned something. Nothing big, dinner. A cake.’ A quick smile, gone fast.
He picks at the edge of the beer mat. The cardboard peeling.
‘He didn’t call. Mum called, from the house that’s hers now.
She sang, you know Mum, the whole verse, off-key, every year.
But just her this time. No telly behind her, no him in the next room, because by my twenty-first he’d already moved out.
Other years I’d hear the telly and know he was sat right there, and I’d wait for her to pass the phone, and she could never do it.
This year there was no one to pass it to.
He was in his own place, not dialling. The silent room had turned into an empty one, and I couldn’t tell you which was worse. ’
The beer mat, the cardboard. Ewan’s fingers.
‘That’s when I knew. The birthday. Because silence at Christmas you can blame on the day. The stress, the cooking. But a birthday’s specific. A birthday is: I know what today is and I’m choosing not to be in it.’
I look at my brother. The face. The thin voice that’s done now. Back to level. But I heard it. The kid who ate cake with his partner.
‘Ewan.’
‘Don’t.’ Quick. Not sharp. Defensive. ‘It’s filed.’
It’s not filed, nothing like that files. I know because the both of you is sat in my ribcage like a brick and it hasn’t moved in twenty-seven hours.
‘We’re a pair, aren’t we,’ Ewan says. Full stop where the question mark should be. The mouth softens, almost a smile.
‘A pair.’
‘Both Carrick boys. Both the same.’ He waves the hand. ‘Mum must’ve done something in the water.’
I laugh. The sound surprises me. Big. The one that uses the chest.
Ewan grins, the real grin. The one from the wall outside the Lewisham flat, the two of us sharing a bag of chips and Ewan telling me about some equation and me understanding none of it and both of us laughing.
‘Laurence sends his love.’ Ewan stops. ‘Actually, Laurence made a cake. Victoria sponge. He’s been making cakes. It’s a whole thing. Don’t ask.’
‘Laurence makes cakes.’
‘Laurence makes cakes. He watches the videos. He has an apron. There’s flour on the ceiling.’
‘On the shelf.’
‘The ceiling, Ron. Don’t ask.’
I drink, the Estrella, the pub. Tuesday night in Manchester and my brother across the table and the ceiling with the flour and the father in the flat above the bookmakers and the mother with the kettle and the partner at the restaurant and the whole stupid mess of it.
‘How’d Celyn take it,’ Ewan says. Knowing.
‘Quiet. The Celyn quiet, not angry. The one where they’re filing it somewhere.’
‘They’ll write about it.’
‘Probably.’
‘They’ll write about Dad and the door and the both-of-you and it’ll be the best chapter in whatever they write next and you’ll read it and feel it all.’ Ewan waves the hand again. ‘Everything.’
‘Yeah.’
Ewan opens his mouth, closes it, I know this face. The kitchen table face, the I-need-to-tell-you-something face. Except this time it softens into nothing.
‘We’ve been good. Me and Laurence.’ He stops. Drinks. ‘That’s all. Just. Good.’
‘That’s allowed.’
‘Apparently.’ The kid grin, brief. ‘Took me long enough to believe it.’
I look at him, the face. The way he holds the glass. Easier than it used to be.
‘Good,’ I say.
Pub. Table. Pints.
‘Another round?’ Ewan says.
‘Yeah.’
He goes to the bar. The walk, the narrow shoulders, leaning on the bar with one elbow like he’s way younger. My little brother.
Ewan comes back, two pints, puts mine down.
‘We’re a pair,’ I say.
‘We’re a pair,’ Ewan says. Picks up the glass. Holds it out. I hold mine out. The clink. Cheap glass on cheap glass in a pub in Manchester on a Tuesday.
The Carrick brothers.
Walk home. Route to Celyn’s, I know by muscle now, the turns and the streets and the door with the buzzer that doesn’t work.
The key, their key in my jacket pocket, mine in theirs. Small, warm from my hand.
Lamp, green shade, books, post-its. More now, overlapping. The novel’s map I can’t read but Celyn can navigate in the dark, the laptop open but sleeping.
Celyn’s in the bed, asleep, the hoodie. The hair on the pillow. The breathing that I can hear from the door.
I kick the boots off. Jacket on the chair.
Celyn shifts, doesn’t wake. The hand reaches across the bed. Finds my side, the empty side, the fingers spread on the sheet where I’ll be.
I get in, hand finds my hip, fingers close, breathing stays even, grip stays.
Both of you, Dad’s words.
Both of you, Mum’s words.
I close my eyes. Celyn’s hand on my hip. The key on the table. The pub in my blood and the brother in the city and the father in Lewisham and the ceiling with no stars because this is Celyn’s flat and the stars are at mine.
Both here.
Both of you, Dad said on the phone. Both of you, Mum said in the living room. Same words. Dad meant: this is wrong. Mum meant: you’re both mine, and that’s enough.
I’m not going to fix Dad, that’s not my weight.
Ewan said nobody could sit that exam for me.
I thought he meant strangers. He meant this.
The only thing I control is whether I stay close or move far.
I moved far, from London, from the version of me that was waiting.
And then I moved close. To the bar, the table, the person.
The thing that reaches out and holds even in sleep.
That’s the choice. The key catches the lamplight from the street. A small gold flicker on the table in the dark.
I sleep.