Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Would have been the first. Eleven months and not a Christmas in it.
First Christmas Celyn and me aren’t doing together.
Except there’s no together left to not do it in.
They’ve gone to Wales: Catrin and Owain and the kids, and a dad who says ‘he.’ I’ve come to Lewisham.
Not long ago there were two families and a careful line down the middle, the halves kept apart till one of us was ready.
Now there’s no line to keep. Just the two countries, the whole map between them, and a thing I broke standing in the gap.
Mum’s kitchen: the goose fat, the bird, the cloth with the holly she’s had since I was six. I do the potatoes the way she likes, the fat smoking before they go in, carry the good plates through, set the table.
I set four.
Four’s what this table’s always been. Mum, Dad, Ewan, me. The hands lay it before the head catches up, and when it does it’s still four, just a different four. Mum. Ewan. Laurence. Me. Nobody at the head.
Mum’s in the doorway with a tea towel. Neither of us says anything about the place I didn’t lay.
First Christmas the chair at the head’s going to be empty. He moved his things out in October, what fit in his car, and the rest’s still here because leaving’s easier than coming back for a record box. The house he built.
Four places, none of them his, and I don’t know if leaving his chair where it is is habit or just the chair.
Ewan and Laurence come at twelve. Good drive down, no traffic, Laurence says, like the M6 on Christmas morning is a thing worth a sentence, and it is, it’s the thing you say when you don’t know where to put yourself yet. A tin of something he made, a bottle that cost more than the meal.
They’ve been in the same room, Mum and Laurence.
His flat, his food, his ground, Mum asking about his mother and the house in Lancashire that backs onto the canal.
But never the Lewisham kitchen with the holly cloth, never Christmas.
First time for that, and Laurence knows it, you can see him clock the room, the photos, the chair at the head, and decide to be easy in it anyway.
Mum hugs him like she’s done it a hundred times.
Takes the tin, looks inside. ‘Oh, you didn’t.
’ Laurence picks up a tea towel without being asked, dries because his hands need a job, in the kitchen where Dad taught me to tie a tie when I was fourteen and had a funeral to go to.
Ewan watches him do it with the face I know now. The wrong-temperature face, gone right.
The phone goes at half twelve. The landline. Nobody rings the landline.
Mum wipes her hands. ‘Sean.’
The kitchen changes, and not loud — the opposite. Ewan’s shoulders go up. Laurence stops drying.
‘They’re here,’ Mum says, into the phone. A pause. ‘All of them.’ A shorter pause. ‘Right.’ Then, flat, no edge on it, because the edge wore off somewhere back in the autumn: ‘Suit yourself. Happy Christmas, Sean.’
The receiver down.
Forty seconds. That’s the whole call. Forty seconds on Christmas Day from a man in a one-bed in Deptford.
It was never Laurence. And it was bigger than Ewan, in the end. It was the quiet, all the years of it. Dad going quiet and Mum filling every gap, talking enough for two so the silence never got a seat at the table.
Then me and Ewan left, and there was nothing left to fill it with, and she stopped, and the quiet was the marriage. He won’t drive the twenty minutes because the twenty minutes end at a table where nobody talks over his silence for him any more.
Ewan told me he managed a record once. The first family dinner at Laurence’s, the pair of them bent over a Pink Floyd sleeve, Dad’s arms uncrossing for the first time in years over a Harvest label and no barcode. He can do a record. One sleeve, one man, one evening, no audience.
He can’t do this. The table. The holly cloth. The all-of-it-at-once.
We eat. Mum, Ewan, Laurence, me. The chair at the head empty.
Mum talks enough for two, fills it, Maeve’s hip and the church roof and the terrine, which is what Laurence’s tin turns out to be, and nobody at this table except Laurence has met a terrine. She asks him about his work. Gets the maths wrong. He corrects her gentle and she laughs the real laugh.
My phone goes under the table, face up before the head catches up to the hope. Not Celyn. The thread sits where it’s sat for days, nothing new under it.
Across the table Ewan catches me at it. Doesn’t say anything, just tips his head at the pudding Mum’s carrying in, the blue flame going round it.
She’s outdone herself. And she has. Laurence has gone at the terrine, properly gone, eyes wet over a tin of paté, and nobody says a word about it because letting him off is the kindest thing in the room.
Not Celyn. Of course not Celyn.
The thread with the green nails and the cat sits up there, untouched since the door closed. It’s you, last thing in it, my own silence under it like a read receipt I can’t argue with.
I look at the chair at the head, empty, that Dad emptied an inch at a time.
Then at the seat beside me. Empty too. Where Celyn would be.
Except I didn’t lose that one slow. I did it in an evening, a drawer and a wardrobe and a wash cycle, and then I did it again with one word in their own bed.
Two empty chairs at one table, and only one of them’s my father’s doing.
Ewan catches me looking. The eyes that miss nothing.
Doesn’t say it. Kicks my foot under the table, soft. The kick from a hundred dinners.
I kick back.
Mum brings the pudding in lit, Ewan does the lights, the brandy going blue in the dark.
Laurence’s hand finds Ewan’s knee under the cloth, I see the cloth shift, and Ewan leans into it, into a man at a table his father wouldn’t drive twenty minutes to sit at.
Nobody looks at the chair at the head. Looking at it would make it a thing, and Mum’s not letting it be a thing, not today, not on the first one.
She’s holding this table up with the same arms she’s held every other thing up with, and the holding is the loudest part of the room.
I pull a cracker with my mother. The hat’s purple. I put it on.
Somewhere under the mountains Celyn’s in a paper crown next to a dad who says ‘he,’ loved out loud across a table too small for everyone on it.
Two tables. One word each, and neither of us said ours.
I stay down a few days at Mum’s, the box room, the bed a foot too short.
The old pull of the place around me the whole time, the simple one, the one with no words in it: Lewisham, the 171 bus, the kebab shop open till three, Big Steve who sells Marlboros and doesn’t ask how your week’s been because he doesn’t and that’s the beauty of it.
Boxing Day. Robbie and Trav text: Nag’s Head, eight. The usual, except there’s no usual any more, just the one night I’m down and they know it.
Mum’s kitchen. The table with the plastic tablecloth, the one with the flowers.
The radio on, violins. She’s got the oven going and the flat smells like, home.
Roast, potatoes, gravy from the granules because she’s never made it from scratch and never will and that’s fine because the granules are right.
She looks at me, that look. Mum look. She doesn’t push. Turns back to the oven, opens it. Blast of heat. Potatoes.
‘Set the table,’ she says.
I set the table: two plates, her and me, the empty place that used to be Dad and now it’s just the empty place.
We eat, the roast is good, the potatoes are good.
The gravy is the granules and the granules are good.
She asks about the site, and I tell her about the pour that went wrong in November and the steel delivery that was a week late and the lad who dropped a spirit level off the second floor and nearly killed a sparky.
She laughs at the right bits. She doesn’t ask about anything else.
She doesn’t ask.
I eat the potatoes and I’m grateful and I hate myself for being grateful and I eat more potatoes.
The Nag’s Head, eight o’clock. Robbie and Trav at the usual table, the one by the quiz machine that hasn’t worked in years. Two pints already down, the empties pushed to the edge.
‘Fucking hell,’ Robbie says. ‘He’s alive.’
‘Alright.’
‘Manchester hasn’t killed you then.’
‘Nah.’
The pint arrives. I don’t order it. Trav’s already been up. Stella, the right Stella. The Nag’s Head one, different from every other pint of it because this is where it tastes correct.
I sit: the chair, the table, the quiz machine with the busted screen, the carpet that’s been the same carpet since I was eighteen and first came in with a fake ID that Robbie’s brother made on his mum’s printer.
‘You look different,’ Trav says.
‘I don’t look different.’
‘Something’s different.’ He does the Trav thing, the squint, the assessment. Trav’s a plumber. He finds leaks. It’s what he does. ‘Dunno what. Something.’
‘I’ve been up north eleven months.’
‘That’s not it.’
Robbie, from behind the pint: ‘Leave him. He came.’ He says it like that’s enough.
Robbie’s right. I’m here, that’s it. And the thing about being here is nothing needs explaining.
Robbie doesn’t need to know why I moved.
Trav doesn’t need to know what I did on most nights.
The Nag’s Head doesn’t need to know anything about anyone because the Nag’s Head is where you come to not know things.
The match is on, Spurs. I don’t support Spurs, none of us do. But it’s on and your body finds the chair anyway. Your brain somewhere between the commentary and the silence and nobody needs you to say what you’re thinking.
‘Heard from your dad?’ Robbie asks. During the ad break. Casually. Like he’s asking about the weather.
‘Nah.’
‘Right.’
That’s it, that’s the whole conversation about my dad. Robbie doesn’t follow up, Trav doesn’t lean in. The next thing is: the match comes back. Someone fouled someone, the ref’s a prick. Robbie goes to the bar, the empties stack up, the quiz machine stays broken.
Simple.