Chapter 22 #2
At the bar, Robbie says, over the pint, like it’s nothing: ‘Henderson and Roe are hiring. Project manager, that Rotherhithe riverside thing. Your mate Kev mentioned your name.’
I look at the Stella, the foam ring on the glass.
‘I’m in Manchester.’
‘I know you’re in Manchester.’ He drinks. ‘Just saying. It’s Rotherhithe. Twenty minutes from Mum’s. Proper money.’
He doesn’t push, the match comes back, someone fouled someone.
But the word sits there, Rotherhithe. Like a measurement I wrote down and forgot.
My phone goes on the table. I turn it face up. A year ago it’d have stayed in my pocket.
I open the thread. Happy Christmas. Send.
The cat, the neighbour’s ginger one that comes through Celyn’s window and sits on the laptop. Celyn’s hand in the frame, the nails green, bright. He asked about you. Then, a second later: The cat, not me. I don’t ask about you. I just think about you constantly which is different.
I read it twice. Put the phone back down.
‘Who’s that.’ Trav, the squint. The leak-finder. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’
A year ago I’d have said nobody. Said it was the cat and made it a wall. I look at the phone, then at him.
‘Seeing someone,’ I say. ‘Up north. Was.’
In a pub I’ve drunk in since I was eighteen, and the ceiling stays where it is. Trav waits for the rest. The name, the shape of it. I don’t give it, not here, not yet. But seeing someone is true and I put it down on purpose.
‘Right,’ Trav says.
Robbie, over the glass: ‘About time.’ He doesn’t push. The match comes back, someone fouls someone, the ref’s a prick. Trav lets it go because Robbie did.
Small. The smallest. But I said it out loud in the Nag’s Head, and nothing broke.
I drink. Match on the telly. Chair, carpet, broken quiz machine, a Stella that tastes correct.
It tastes correct and I miss the Northern Soul which is a bloody stupid name for a beer and I miss the bar where it’s poured and I miss the table in the corner where a person sits with a laptop and green nails and a ginger cat that comes through the window and a voice that makes the vowels soft and a mouth that does the lift-on-one-side thing that is, the thing. The thing I can’t.
The last train’s at eleven. I finish the Stella and I watch the clock.
I drink.
This is the thing I asked them for. A room where nobody turns round.
Robbie who doesn’t dig, Trav who lets it go because Robbie did, a quiz machine that’s been broken since before any of it, a Stella that tastes correct.
The simple. I stood in a flat and told a person I wanted the simple back, and here it is, poured and set and holding, and there’s nothing in it.
Simple’s not the opposite of hard. Simple’s just the room with nobody in it I want to be seen by.
Simple. This is simple.
The morning I go back, Mum makes eggs and I eat the eggs. She irons a shirt I didn’t ask her to iron. I tell her I don’t need the shirt ironed because I’m going back on the train and the shirt’s going in the bag and the ironing’s wasted. She irons it anyway, that’s Mum.
The sofa, the telly. The photograph on the shelf. The four of us, Margate, five years ago. Me and Ewan in the front. Dad behind. Mum’s hand on my shoulder. Everyone’s squinting because the sun’s out and nobody thought to stand with their backs to it.
I look at the photograph. The four of us.
The version where everything was, not simple.
It wasn’t simple then either. Dad was already withdrawn.
Mum was already watching him be withdrawn and not saying anything about it.
But the photograph has four people in it and the kitchen has two plates and the table has four chairs and the maths doesn’t work and nobody’s fixed the maths.
Mum comes in with the tea. Two mugs, the mugs from the cupboard, the ones with the chips, the ones that should’ve been thrown out years ago. She sits.
‘Ewan says hello,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘He says you had your tea round theirs last month. The fish.’
‘Sea bass.’
‘Was it nice?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And Laurence?’
‘He’s smart. He’s alright. He’s good.’
She drinks the tea, I drink the tea. The photograph on the shelf. The four people squinting.
‘I’m glad,’ she says. Quiet. Into the mug. ‘That you see him. That you go there.’
The silence is big. The tea, the chipped mug. The living room that hasn’t changed since I was fifteen except the chair where Dad sat has a cushion on it now. A new cushion, bought recently, like she’s trying to make the chair belong to someone else.
‘Mum.’
‘Hmm?’
The word’s right there, right behind my teeth. The shape of it, Ewan said shape. The shape I’d need to pour the sentence into. There’s someone, in Manchester, their name is Celyn. They’re everything.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just, the eggs were good.’
I drink the tea, she drinks the tea. The word goes back behind my teeth and sits there. Heavy. Like a concrete block that needs lifting but the crane’s not on site yet.
The doorbell. Eleven fifteen. Mum goes still. The mug stops halfway to her mouth.
‘That’ll be your dad. Picking up more of his stuff.’
She doesn’t get up, I do.
The hallway, the door. The frosted glass with the shape behind it. I open it.
Dad. Sean Carrick. The brown coat, the one he’s had since I was ten. He’s thinner, the face thinner, the skin looser on the jaw that’s mine. Bricklayer’s hands. He sees me and the eyes do that half-second where the face hasn’t decided what to be.
Then the arms cross. Looser than they used to be. Ewan said that, after the dinner at Laurence’s. Looser. A wall with a window in it.
‘Ronan.’ The full name. The flat South London.
‘Dad.’
‘Your mum said you were up.’
‘Just a few days.’
He nods. Looks past me into the hallway. The hallway he painted twice. The shoe rack he built. His eyes land six inches to the left of mine. The old habit, the one Ewan clocked years ago. Except today they flick back. Land on me. Stay for a second.
‘How’s the site?’
‘Good. Block D’s on schedule.’
‘Good lad.’ He shifts his weight. ‘I have the records to pick up. Your mum’s put a box together as well.’
‘I’ll get them.’
The spare room: three crates of vinyl, labelled in Dad’s square handwriting. Pink Floyd, the Stones. In the kitchen, Mum’s left a cardboard box on the counter, tins: tomatoes, soup, beans.
I carry the vinyl out first, go back for the box. Dad’s on the path, hasn’t come in.
‘I’ll give you a hand.’
We go down to the kerb. A black city car, not the Mondeo. Smaller car, smaller life. I open the boot. The vinyl first. Then the box of tins. Our hands on the crate at the same time — his knuckles, my knuckles, same shape, same width. The bricklayer’s grip and the foreman’s grip.
He straightens. Looks at the house. Not at me.
‘You’re looking well,’ he says. The voice gives for a fraction. The kind you feel in plaster before you see it. Then nothing. ‘Right. Well.’
‘Cheers, Dad.’
He closes the boot. The brown coat. The path back to the gate.
He doesn’t look back. But at the gate he pauses. One hand on the latch. The hand stays there two seconds longer than it needs to. Then he goes.
I close the door. Stand in the hallway. The hallway with the shoe rack and the paint he chose and the ghost of a man who still calls me good lad and asks about the site and loads his records into a car parked outside a house he built and left.
Nobody tells you about fathers. The cost isn’t the silence. It’s the almost. The hand on the gate. The good lad that still works. The version of Dad that talks to me because I’m the son who hasn’t said the thing yet.
When I say it, and I will, I know I will. I lose this, the site questions. The full name at the door. The hand that paused at the gate. I lose the almost.
Mum’s in the kitchen, she doesn’t ask. She already knows what just happened because she’s lived thirty years reading the shape of that man leaving rooms.
I sit at the table. The eggs are cold. Two plates. Tea.
The 16:42 from Euston: two hours twelve, the same train in reverse, the same coffee from the trolley.
I open the thread on the way through Stoke.
It’s you.
I type three words, delete them. Type two, delete them. The cursor blinks at me the way the laptop blinked at Celyn the night I sat in the chair too small for me and said nothing. I put the phone face down on the tray table.
Piccadilly. Manchester air, wet, sharper than London.
No cab to Oldham Street tonight. The flat the other way, the one with the blue mug and the bare ceiling and the bed that’s somehow too big.
I walk to it. The body that always moves first doesn’t even try for the other direction. It knows it hasn’t earned the door.