Black Flowers (3 page)

It wasn’t great. It wasn’t even particularly safe. Round the back of the building, the door to the cellar was half broken. If you were determined enough to push through the rotting litter there, and then the broken furniture in the basement, you could get all the way up to my personal front door without busting a lock. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything worth stealing. There was only my cheap laptop, which normally lived in a drawer beneath a pile of T-shirts – surely beyond the imagination of any thief.

The printer
chittered
to a halt, and I was left with the
gunshots and explosions from below. They were in full effect tonight – the floor vibrating beneath my feet. It was possible to imagine an actual war was occurring down there. I sipped the wine, then picked up the pages, tapped them into line on the desk, and read them again.

Pretty weird.

And pretty harsh too.

But stories are allowed to be, so long as they’re honest.

For example, my father’s last book was called
Worry Dolls. It
was about a small village, and a lonely young boy with a father who beats him and his mother. A doll maker teaches the boy how to make a worry doll – a little figurine fashioned from pegs and coloured cloth. At night, you tell the doll all your fears and place it under your pillow where it looks after them on your behalf, so you can sleep soundly. The boy makes a monster. His doll has used matchsticks poking from its back like burnt wings, and toenail clippings for claws. And that night, when the father is drunk and going to kill the whole family, the creature comes to life and rips him to shreds.

That story works on its own terms, but the book’s about much more than that. The narrator of
Worry Dolls
is a very old man who witnessed the events first-hand. His wife was very sick at the time, and the doll maker taught
him
how to make a worry doll as well. The man created it in the shape of his wife, and told it that he was terrified of dying alone. In his case, the magic didn’t seem to work, because his wife died anyway. And yet, on his deathbed at the end of the book, he realises the ghost of his wife has been sitting beside him the whole time, waiting for him to finish, and when he dies she takes his hand and they leave together.

Dad began writing
Worry Dolls
two years ago, when my mother was fighting cancer for the final time. It was the last battle in a long war, and he finished the novel just after she died.

At one point, the doll maker tells the boy:

It doesn’t really matter how tatty or incomplete it is. All that matters is that it’s yours
.

And to my father, stories served exactly the same purpose as worry dolls, except he confided his fears and troubles in words on a page. That book contained all the emotions he would never have said to my mother out loud. Rather than breaking down and confessing his own pain – that he was scared of living and dying without her – he had concentrated on looking after her. Being selfish in his writing had allowed him to be the opposite in real life.

That was what I’d done. My story was a dumping ground for all the miserable, negative shit I was feeling deep down: the stuff I knew wasn’t fair and which I would never say out loud to Ally. Obviously, this was going to be way harder for her, and require at least as many sacrifices and compromises as it did for me. So the guy on the page could seethe with stupid, childish resentment on my behalf, and I could get on with being a supportive partner, a good person. Close as I got to that anyway.

I finished the wine.

Even so, it did seem harsh – and I had another idea. I picked up a pen and scribbled at the end of the last page:

I stared at that for a moment, thinking it through.

Maybe that would end up better. More satisfying.

More wine. I stood up. The night was young, after all, and fuck it – if you couldn’t get drunk on the day you find out you’re going to be a father, when could you?

I was heading through to the kitchen to explore that question more thoroughly when my phone rang. It was the landline: chirruping away in the corner by the bed. It surprised me; I’d almost forgotten it was there. Nobody ever called on it. My friends were all texters or emailers.

I put the empty glass down by the computer and walked over.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello. Is that Neil?’

It was a woman’s voice, but not Ally.

‘Yes.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘This is Neil.’

‘Oh good. This is Marsha Dixon. I’m your father’s agent.’

It took me a second, but then I thought:
Ah, yes
.

I’d met Marsha a handful of times, and found a mental picture of her now. A woman in her fifties, with grey hair in double plaits, like a schoolgirl. Very bohemian. When I was much younger, my father had explained to me that a lot of the people in publishing were
flamboyant
, and for a while I’d imagined he meant some weird variety of exotic creature, distantly related to flamingos. The last time we’d met, Marsha air-kissed me to either side, and smelled of strong perfume and wine. All of the book-length manuscripts I’d finished had passed – anonymously – across her desk and been returned. I’d actually held one of them up to my nose, checking for perfume. Nothing.

‘Hi Marsha. What can I do for you?’

She paused, then sounded distraught:

‘It’s your father, Neil. I’m afraid he’s missing.’

Dad still lived in the same house I’d grown up in.

We’d had one quarter of an old, converted, gothic mansion, set back down a winding, white-tarmac driveway. It was a flat, really, since aside from the staircase up to it, it ran along on a single level, but the building as a whole was enormous and imposing: soot-black, and built from bricks that, when I was younger, seemed bigger than I was. From the outside, it looked grand and desirable, but it wasn’t. During my return visits there as an adult I’d had two separate realisations.

The first was how genuinely ramshackle my home had been. There was something threadbare about the place; if it had been a jacket, it would have smelled of mothballs and had patches stitched on the elbows. The walls inside were freckled with damp, and the old carpets curled up against the dusty skirting boards, no longer nailed down. In some ways, it reminded me of my own flat – and that brought home to me just how much my father dominated my parents’ marriage. This was the house that he, a struggling, intermittently successful writer, would
always
have lived in, regardless of my mother’s presence. Rather than them forming a new life together, it seemed she’d been content to be a passenger in his.

The second realisation cancelled that out. After my mother’s death it struck me just how
empty
the house felt with her gone, and how diminished my father was in her absence. But I thought
I understood. My father had been driven to write, and writers need readers. It’s a partnership, and although it might not seem equal on the surface, it actually is. Just because one person appears content to listen, it doesn’t mean the other – the speaker – doesn’t need and rely on them being there for the whole thing to have meaning. Love can be the same.

I’d never been worried about him though. Over the last year, I had watched him age before my eyes, as though my mother’s presence had kept an older man at bay, one who was now free to appear. With every passing week, he seemed smaller and more fragile than he had the week before. But after the tears had dried up, and he’d begun to adjust his life to fit around the shape of his loss, my father did what I knew he would, what he always had. He began writing.

So I’d never been worried.

And there was no reason to be worried now. Marsha was just being melodramatic. Despite the vague niggling feeling in my chest, I kept telling myself that, as I sat on the bed and listened. My father hadn’t been in touch about a new contract, she said, and he wasn’t answering his phone or returning her calls, and that was
so unlike him
. Which wasn’t true. In fact, from everything she said, it sounded like Dad had been behaving very much like Dad.

‘I’m sure he’s okay, Marsha. You know what he’s like.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he is too. It’s just with your mother passing last year. And I’m so sorry about that, darling. So sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

The niggling feeling began curling slowly into an itch of irrational panic. When was the last time I’d spoken to him? It had been over two weeks ago, I realised – actually, that
was
longer than normal. And, looking back, he’d seemed even more preoccupied than usual. As though there were far more serious things on his mind …

But you can think yourself into all kinds of worries.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I said. ‘He’s not the type to do anything
stupid. Obviously, he took Mum’s death hard, but he’ll be channelling it into his writing.’

It sounded stupid, spoken out loud.

Marsha wasn’t reassured. ‘Do you think you could check up on him for me, Neil? Honestly, it would set my mind at rest.’

I rubbed my forehead. There had been no reason to worry before, and there was no reason to now. I could repeat that to myself over and over, and it wasn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

It was a half-hour’s drive across town, but I weighed up my general state of sobriety and found it a little on the light side. After trying my father’s home phone and mobile, the next call I made was for a taxi. Just before eight, it pulled up outside my father’s house. The engine puttered to itself while the driver stuck the light on in front to consult his plastic charge sheet.

After I’d paid, I walked down the drive, and into the garden. My mother’s old washing line was still strung across, hanging loosely in the middle, as though weighed down by invisible clothes. Old pegs were clipped on by the wall. All my father’s windows faced out this way, apart from the kitchen which was round the corner. Looking up now, the ones I could see were curtained over and dark. Either he was in bed – unheard of at this hour – or he wasn’t here.

I had my own key.

‘Hello?’ I called up the stairs. ‘Dad? It’s just me.’

I was met by silence. The corridor at the top was dark and quiet, and everything beyond it felt still. The house seemed empty, and there was a musty smell to the place, as though the front door hadn’t been opened in a while.

I closed it behind me and went up the stairs. Walking around, I clicked all the lights on. However irrational it was, my heart
thudded every time I stepped into a room and flicked the switch – each time revealing nothing.

He wasn’t here.

I was surprised by how relieved I felt.

Where is he then?

The window in the kitchen was old, held shut by a metal arm that hooked over a nub in the base and clenched the frame tight. I opened it, letting in a hush of night air, and peered out. The garages for all four flats were directly below, and my Dad’s car wasn’t there.

I stayed with my head out of the window for a moment, thinking. My father didn’t go out much on an evening, as far as I knew, and if he’d gone away I thought he would have told me.

I closed the window and walked halfway back down the corridor. Stepped into his office.

This had been my bedroom as a child. It still held wisps of memories now, like cobwebs in the corners, but he’d changed so much around that it was barely recognisable; to picture the room I grew up in, I had to rely on the mental equivalent of dents in a carpet that showed where furniture had stood.

On the right, where my bed had been, the wall was now entirely covered with shelves. The bottom one contained reference materials and box files; the rest, all the way up to the ceiling, were filled with what looked like hundreds of copies of my father’s own books.

I stared at those for a moment. There were all the English editions, and it was easy enough to pick out the hardbacks and paperbacks of each, with updated editions studiously slotted into place. The foreign copies were harder to decipher, but they seemed to have been grouped together by title as well. Had he kept one of everything? I glanced here and there in wonder. The books, along with various anthologies, appeared to be arranged chronologically –
autobiographically
, I thought – so that
Worry Dolls
was at one end of the top shelf, clean and fresh and new.

What must it be like to have your life’s work on display like this? The number of spines visible was impressive enough, never mind all the pages and words contained inside. You could practically hear the pages whispering.

I turned around and walked over to the desk. When it was my room, there had been an enormous wardrobe here, and a standing lamp with an old feathered shade. My father’s desk looked even older than the wardrobe had been; it was made of pitted wood, the texture of a desk in a school science lab. The lamp had been replaced by an angled metal contraption. The only other things on the desk were a battered old paperback and dust. But there was a clean, laptop-shaped space in the middle. So, wherever he’d gone, it looked like he’d taken his computer with him.