In the chrome and white lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, Joseph Aloysius Reddy stands out like a creature from a more provisional primitive age. Visitors in suits can’t take their eyes off him. The disbelief he arouses is so strong he might as well be a bad smell. With a third hand herringbone coat and a skein of gray hair, he’s like a tinker come to sell his pots and pans to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Two security guys with crackling walkie-talkies are trying to persuade him to move, but Joe is planted mulishly on one of reception’s perforated steel benches, a white plastic bag slumped at his feet. He has the drunk’s huffy dignity. Catching sight of me, he uncrosses his arms and points a triumphant finger. “There. There’s our Kathy. What’d I tell you?”
“Thanks, Gerald,” I say quickly to the guard. “My dad’s not himself today. I’ll take over now.” Steer him to the door, making sure to look straight ahead to avoid the pitying smiles that have been the Reddy family’s constant companions for almost as long as I can remember.
Once we’re safely outside, I mention a Cheap side coffee shop far out of the orbit of my colleagues, but Dad pulls me down the steps towards the King’s Arms. A pub that Dickens knew, it has sawdust on the floor and a teenage barmaid with white skin and a studded tongue. We sit at a corner table under the portrait of a red-cheeked earl, my father with a double Scotch and a maxi pack of peanuts and me with a bitter lemon. Bitter lemon was always my mum’s drink. First it was a nonalcoholic beverage; only later did it become a state of mind.
“’Ow’s little Emma then?” asks my father. His breath is a powerful mixture of Johnnie Walker and boiled eggs.
“Emily.”
“Aye, Emily. Must be going on seven now.”
“Six. She’ll be six in June, Dad.” He nods decisively, as though six is close enough to seven to make no difference.
“And the little lad? Julie says he has a look of me about him.”
Jesus, there really is no parent so bad or so absent that he can’t get a kick out of his genetic legacy. I stare furiously into my sour fizz. The mere idea that some ribbon of DNA with Joe Reddy printed on it is unfurling inside my darling son! “Actually, Ben looks like me, Dad.”
“Well, we were always alike, you and me, Kathy duck. Both lookers, good with figures, both with a bit of a temper on us, eh?” He snatches a swallow of whisky and throws a handful of peanuts into his mouth. Everything in immoderation, my father; in that at least we are the same.
“Well, aren’t you gonna ask your dad how he’s going on, then? Come all this way to see you.”
The accent is northern, so thick you could cut it like fruitcake, but there is an echo of a lilt from his mother’s native Cork. Did I really used to talk like that? Richard says that when he first met me I sounded like something out of Monty Python. That was when I still said baff for bath; before I learned that class rhymes with arse. Although no one says arse, down here; they say bum or bottom. I say bottom to my children now and each time I falter on its plump, prissy contours. My tongue feels like that barmaid’s: heavy with foreign objects.
I know that Dad wants me to make it easier for him to ask for what he’s come for. But I won’t make it easy. I can still remember him standing outside the Abbey National in Holborn when I’d got my first paycheck and licking his finger to count the tenners I handed him. My own father. If he wants my money let him ask for it.
“Same again?” The barmaid has come over to clear our glasses.
“No.”
“Aye, same for me and get one in for yourself, love.”
Dad smiles and the girl flushes and straightens up in a way I have seen women do before in his presence. He was once a beautiful man, my father — beautiful rather than handsome, and therefore doomed not to ripen but to rot. “Tyrone Power,” my grandmother used to murmur fondly when she saw him, and I, being young and not knowing any old Hollywood stars, assumed that Tyrone Power was the electric effect my father had on people rather than a proper name — an unruly but irresistible force of nature. I look at him now and try to see what others must see: face the shape of a swollen heart, the nose and cheeks stippled with red routes like the delta of some rusty river. Long lashes fringing what my mother claims were the most remarkable blue eyes you ever saw: indigo pools where all that charm and intelligence drowned. A ladies’ man, my first boyfriend called him. “Your dad’s a bit of a one for the ladies, Kath. Should have seen him down the club with that Christine on Saturday night.” How I flushed to hear mention of his sex life so close to mine.
“See what you reckon to this.” My father fumbles under the table and out of his carrier bag produces a black box file and from that several well-thumbed sheets of graph paper. There is a drawing of something snouty and padded with squared-off wings at the side. Pigs might fly? I turn it the other way up.
“What is it?”
“The world’s first biodegradable nappy.”
“But you don’t know anything about nappies.”
“I do now.”
My dad, you should know, has a history in this area. One of the world’s great undiscovered inventors, there is very little that he himself has not discovered. When Julie and I were still small he cooked up moon rocks, powdery lumps of resin that were sold as souvenirs from the Apollo 11 landing off a market stall in Chesterfield. “Just think, madam, your hand is holding the very rock that Neil Armstrong held in his!” They bombed, did the moon rocks, and later, when space travel lost its luster, they had another incarnation as fancy pumice stones for the hard skin of the ladies of Worksop.
Next came a cat flap that prevented pets bringing prey into the house — a good idea, but the cats kept getting garroted in the springback mechanism. Sometimes Dad’s inventions had been invented already, like the blindfold he devised for in-flight passenger naps without having been on an airplane.
“Joe,” said Mum cautiously, “I understand that they have eye shades on planes,” but he refused to let such womanly nitpicking get him down. In our house, Dad was the one for the broad sweep; Mum picked up the bits with a dustpan and brush. On his card, my father describes himself as an entrepreneur.
As I skim through his business plan for Reddy’s biodegradable nappy, he says happily, “I’ve had a lot of interest, you know. Derek Marshall at the Chamber of Commerce says he’s never seen anything quite like it. But I’m a bit stuck for capital, love, and that’s your line of work. What do they call it, adventure capital?”
“Venture capital.”
“That’s the one.”
Dad says we’re not talking big sums this time: seed money, that’s all.
“How much?”
“Just enough to get production up and running.”
“How much?”
“Ten grand plus development costs; then there’s packaging. Say thirteen and a half. I wouldn’t ask, love, only cash flow’s that tight at the minute.”
I’m not aware of my expression having altered, but it must have, because he shifts in his chair in a manner which, in another man, you might take for discomfort. For a moment, I think it must have occurred to him how sick these transactions make me feel. He reaches across the table and places his hand on mine. “Don’t worry, love,” he says. “If you’re pushed I’ll take a check.”
I leave my father at Old Street Station. From there he can get the Northern Line directly to King’s Cross and take a train home. I give him money for the fare — a crazy amount, it’s cheaper to fly to Boston than to go to Doncaster these days — and extra for a cab at the other end. Dad is a bit vague about where he is living at the moment — for which read who he is living with — but he promises me that he will go there directly. I stand outside the station, round the corner by the photo booth. When I look back inside a few minutes later he has engaged a young busker in conversation. Casually, magnanimously, he flicks one of the tenners I have just given him into the boy’s open guitar case, removes his coat, lays it gently over the busker’s sleeping dog and now, oh, dear God, he is going to sing.