‘Bill! Heather!’ Julian stepped forward and shook hands with my dad then hugged my mum. He shook hands with Jim next, leaving me until last given that I was a deplorable little freeloading wastrel who was transferring her debts from her parents to her partner (or was I being paranoid?).
I shook his hand and hugged Melanie. She smelled of too much Chanel, like always. ‘I saw about Jean on Facebook,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s thrilled.’
Mel smirked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d be thrilled about any baby — what is it she calls them? Human grubs?’
Jim snickered.
‘Don’t start,’ I said.
‘Start what?’ Mel’s nails were a shiny maroon colour and she had one of those bras on where you weren’t supposed to be able to see the clear plastic strap but you could.
‘The Tyler-bashing.’
‘You look great, Jim,’ Mel said, hugging him. ‘Great.’
‘Nearly three months now.’
‘It’s really agreeing with you.’
I looked at Jim. He did look good but then he always looked good. I wondered whether the vein on my face was visible. I looked around the restaurant and saw my dad looking around, too. He jerked his head towards the bar and I nodded and went over. We ordered a Guinness and a red wine, followed by the other drinks in order of interestingness: half a lager, an orange juice, a diet coke, a lime and soda. The Guinness swirled stormily on the drip-tray.
‘Know what I’ve been thinking?’ he said.
The barmaid put our drinks on the bar. My dad picked up his pint. His fingers flickered around the glass, tightened, loosened, flickered again. He spoke in little fanfares, swinging his head from side to side, posing and gazing for a moment before carrying on. Children and animals flocked to him. How many times had he caught something in the old pond behind our estate and held the net up to show us. Look here, girls! Hard to believe that within this tiny space is a beating heart, a circulatory system, a rapidly sparking brain… Me and Mel standing there, leering in our anoraks. He was why I picked stranded worms off the pavement and threw them into gardens even when I was on my way out. He was why I couldn’t kill wasps even though I hated them. He was why I looked for, and loved, the creatures in people. They were always there. As family legend went, it was my dad who’d got the first proper grin out of me. I was six months old; he was thirty. We were sitting at the dining table. Way he told it, I was sliding soggy Wotsits around the plastic tray of my highchair, he was eating chops and gravy. He stopped eating for a minute and angled his head to one side to match the angle of mine. Stayed that way until I noticed. He said he saw it dawn on me that there was no sensible reason for him to be doing that — so what then? Something else… Something… Something… Searching… Then, CRACKLE. A spark by the black obelisk. Delight. So it was his fault, you see, when I was at the blaming stage of my existentials. He didn’t fuck me up; he funned me up. Despite all the years my mum smashed loaded dinner plates onto the back patio; despite all the nights he didn’t come home because he didn’t want the men he owed money to following him; despite the countless bookies’ I’d stood outside, kicking the toes of my trainers in the cracks in the pavement, desperate, desperate to see what was beyond the No Under-18s sign and the postered-out windows. Despite his selling atheism to me as a simple truth. He was forever the man who let me balance, buttocks tensing, on the back wheel-arch of his window-cleaning van as he drove down Jutland Street (the steepest street in Manchester) at a friction-hot forty-five. He’d taught me to read: a double-edged sword. I wanted to learn to read so badly. Learned quickly. But then came the frustration at not being able to look at words without understanding them. I tried to glance at road signs and away, but it was always too late: to see words was to understand them. I sensed a loss there. (Later, Emily Dickinson would confirm it: Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words…). Meaning was everywhere. And once you started with meaning, well, you got a taste for it.
In Los Nachos, Guinness in hand, my dad said: ‘Lately I’ve had this feeling that as a species we’re on the brink of something; something that redefines everything. Like when they discovered the world was round instead of flat.’
‘They’re closing in on the God particle… ’
He grimaced. ‘The Higgs boson, you mean. Maybe it’s that at the back of my mind. Although it doesn’t feel that specific, it’s more a general feeling of… ’
‘Vertigo?’
He looked at me. Swigged his pint and grimaced again. Mel said he had mouth ulcers. ‘Yes.’
We ferried the drinks to the rest of them and then went back over to the bar, just the two of us. I said: ‘This brink, Dad. Don’t you think every generation has thought the same thing?’
He cleared his throat. Sipped his drink and swallowed hard. ‘Laura, I’ve been alive for the equivalent of two and half generations now and this is the first time I’ve felt it.’
I did think he was being sincere even though the harder part of me thought: Dad, you’re shit-scared, that’s all this renaissance talk is. You need to feel something mind-blowing might happen before… Before the curtain’s pulled back and you see the man with the megaphone. Or worse stilclass="underline" the great big Fuck All that’s there, waiting, just behind the Irony.
And of course I’d heard him, hadn’t I. At his outer limits. Hedging his bets. It was six months since he’d found out (five months since he’d told me and Mel, on Mum’s insistence, two days before his operation).
A grey day. The world in ugly molecular detail. Stones in the driveway. Dust in the air of the house. I went upstairs to use the bathroom while Mum and Mel sat downstairs not drinking tea out of matching floral mugs. Mel kept saying, I can’t believe we couldn’t tell—as though our ignorance was more horrifying for her than the fact of the cancer itself. I heard him as I got near to the bathroom, whispering at first and then a shout breaking through on certain syllables. At first I thought he was on the phone. I crept closer.
You cunt. You fucking cunt. You waited until I’d retired, didn’t you?
I stood rigid on the landing, knowing how mortified he’d be to know I’d heard him.
Just give me ten more years. Ten more years and then you can do what the fuck you want with me.
We sat down to eat. I ordered a rare steak and a salad and another glass of wine. The waiter took my dad’s order next.
‘I’ll have the beef fajitas.’
‘No, he won’t,’ said my mum.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Four more months and you can eat all the red meat you want, that’s what Dr. Grayling said. Now behave.’
The waiter looked to Mel. ‘Salmon, please,’ she said.
My dad leaned towards me. ‘I had a bacon sandwich yesterday. Slipped through me like a greased otter.’
‘Bill!’
He turned to my mum. ‘I need iron, woman!’
‘Have some greens!’
‘I’m not a pet bleeding rabbit.’
‘Oh, just let him have the fajitas, Mum,’ I said.
She looked at me. ‘You haven’t been up with him all night when he can’t sleep with cramps. You haven’t washed your bedding five times in twenty-four hours. Mel saw what it was like when she stayed… ’