‘She’ll survive.’ There was a bitter tone to her voice that wasn’t very pretty.
‘Don’t be like that, Alex,’ I told her. ‘Bob’s been ghost-hunting for as long as I’ve known him, even though it’s futile. It isn’t Aileen’s fault that she’s not your mum.’
Bob Skinner
‘I’m a lousy dad, and I’m ashamed of it.
‘That’s not what my daughter would tell you, and I don’t imagine that my younger children would either, if you were to put the question to them. But it’s what I believe.
‘Jesus, what have I just said? How self-revelatory is that? I called Alex, “my daughter”, as if I had only one, yet I have two. Seonaid’s approaching the age that her half-sister was when Myra’s car hit that tree. When that happened, afterwards I was consumed by the need to care for Alexis. My employer, the police force, understood completely; my bosses went out of their way to ensure that my shifts were synchronised with the hours of my childcarers, even though I was in CID, at the sharp end. They told me that they wanted to keep me, and that they’d do whatever it took to make things work. But it wasn’t easy. I was demanding of the people looking after my kid, and a few of them bit the dust. It reached the point when I was considering walking away from the job, but just then we found the perfect woman to take care of Alex. Daisy was an artist, and she lived in the village, so her career dovetailed perfectly with mine, and everything was sorted. I was able to do a proper job as a police officer and be a responsible loving dad at the same time, and Alex and I made it all the way through as a family unit until she flew the nest and went off to university in Glasgow.
‘I look back on that now, and I ask myself, “Skinner, how selfish was that?”
‘For I had an option all along: my old man was a successful solicitor in a prosperous town. He was the founder and head of a law practice that could easily have accommodated me while I finished a law degree, and would have given me a job for life afterwards. The firm would have become mine. That route was open to me at every point in my young adult life. I could have taken it whenever I chose, moved back to Motherwell, studied, and then put in a conventional working day that would have let me spend as much time with my kid as other dads did. Mr Skinner junior, man about town, director of the football club, member of Bothwell Castle Golf Club, Rotarian, all that conventional stuff that we need people to do to make the respectable world turn. Would it have harmed me as a person? No. Would it have been better for Alex? Yes.
‘But you know that I didn’t. No, I stayed put in Gullane and I would not be moved from the cottage that in truth had been Myra’s more than it had been mine. I stayed in the force and with Daisy Mears’ help I climbed that fucking ladder. . as relentless and ruthless as folk will tell you I was. In other words, I put my career before the best interests of my lovely wee daughter. I was a hands-on cop; I was famous for never holding back. And no kidding; there were times when if things had gone wrong, Alex might have been an orphan.
‘I’m not proud of that, any of it. I’m not proud of the fact that I haven’t learned either. Did you hear me just now? It was as if I was ignoring Seonaid’s very existence. I have a second family, and I love them, yet it feels as if they’re on the periphery of my life, in a great big bubble. I can see them, touch them, be with them, but somehow they’re not real. . apart from James Andrew that is, apart from the Jazz man.
‘He’s my firstborn son, and in my macho mind that makes him special. Mark, though, he’s more like my charge, my ward. . which he is in a way, I suppose being adopted. And Seonaid, she’s lovely, just lovely, but she’s like a wee doll, and I just can’t relate to her, because I don’t know how to, I’ve forgotten how to, because my second family has become almost entirely subordinate to my job. Just like my third marriage is, and ours was, only now I’m married to a woman who seems to have the same crap priorities as I do.’
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And all I asked was what was on your mind.’
I gazed at her.
‘I haven’t learned a fucking thing, have I, Sarah?’
She gazed back at me across the breakfast bar in her brand new kitchen, in her brand new old stone house. Two plates lay between us, each one cleaned of all but a few strands of dark fried onion, and a couple of smears of mustard. Her elbows were on the dark wood surface and her hands were cupped around a crystal tumbler, half filled with clear sparkling water.
‘Not a fucking thing,’ she agreed. ‘But you’re not a lousy dad. You’ve just described most of the men in this country; job first, family second. Overall, in terms of your contribution to parenting, I’d say you were ahead of the game. What about me? I’m a career mom, always have been, always will be; that’s my choice. Do I beat myself up over it? The hell I do.’
She took a mouthful from her glass then set it down. ‘As for differentiating between your two daughters, I see it, but I can understand it. It doesn’t rile me, even though I’m Seonaid’s mother. I can put your past behind me, Bob, even if you can’t.’ She let her point sink in, before continuing.
‘Alex is an adult now, and she’s been part of your life for the best part of the last thirty years. By the way, you go ask her whether she’d rather have been brought up by a lawyer in Lanarkshire or by a cop in one of the nicest places in Scotland and see what she tells you. Our Seonaid, she’s just past being a toddler. If anyone who didn’t know you saw you, Alex and her in the street they would assume that she was Alex’s kid, your grandchild, not yours, your daughter. But what they would see, and they’d be right about, is that you love her like crazy, and if you haven’t learned yet to relate to her in the same way you do to her sister, then that is no big deal to me.’
‘And my marriage?’ I said. ‘That’s all perfectly normal and understandable as well, is it?’
‘Now that,’ she replied, ‘I cannot say. I’m not part of it. You have to work that one out for yourself.’
I whistled, and took a sip of the red that I’d brought for my own consumption, although I hadn’t planned on drinking more than a glass. ‘At the moment, that’s a hell of a lot easier said than done. I wouldn’t know how to begin, that’s my problem. Give me a clue.’
‘I’m a bad person to ask,’ she warned. ‘I don’t like the lady; I never have, and I never will.’
‘Nevertheless, you’re honest.’
She smiled, in a way that I hadn’t seen for a while. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘Okay. Describe your marriage to Myra, in one word.’
‘Passionate,’ I replied instantly.
‘Beyond doubt,’ she agreed. ‘Now describe ours.’
I had to think about that, but not for too long. ‘Volatile,’ I replied.
‘Agreed. Now describe your marriage to Aileen in one word.’
That took me much longer. Eventually I murmured, ‘Sanitised.’
She nodded. ‘I think I get your drift. Everything clean and stainless steel, all the forks and knives in their own section of the drawer.’
‘That’s it.’
‘And now it’s been pulled out and the cutlery’s all over the kitchen floor.’
I chuckled softly. ‘You could say that.’
‘I just did. But the thing is, do you prefer it that way? Would you rather have it chaotic than neat and ordered?’
‘I. .’ I hesitated.
‘You don’t need to answer that one, honey,’ she told me. ‘You can’t do neat and ordered. It’s not how you are. You might have been repressed for most of your childhood, but once you broke out there was never any going back.’
She picked up the crystal and took another drink; I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. ‘From what I know of Aileen, she must,’ her forehead wrinkled, as she leaned on the word, ‘have everything neat and ordered, including you. Ah, but now she’s discovered that she can’t bend you to her way. .
‘Fuck me, Bob,’ she exclaimed; her change of tone startled me, ‘isn’t it obvious? The woman’s the leader of a political party, she’s led the country for Christ’s sake! She’s a fucking dominatrix, but you, my man, will never be dominated.’