‘Not here it isn’t.’ And then silence. Classic Steph. Was he meant to apologise that they didn’t have the
proper
time in Northumberland?
He sat upright, the back of his neck feeling sore where the sun had caught it yesterday.
He waited. He’d had to learn how to stay quiet as well, otherwise he was always the one asking and placating – like a hostage negotiator desperately trying to stop a call from ending. Anything to stave off that moment when
Steph said, ‘I’m going,’ and, yet again, he hadn’t got any decisions from her.
He looked at the curtains, already bright-backed by the sun. It was going to be a beautiful day out there, but in this bedroom there would be a deep depression later. And that was just in his brain.
The cheery red numbers on the clock told him it was 04.55.
‘I expect you think I’ve just got in from a party, don’t you?’
‘No,’ he lied, ‘I expect you’re just going out to work.’
‘Well … Yes, I am …’
He could hear she felt cheated out of being able to tell him that he always thought the worst of her, and he should have felt glad he’d wrong-footed her, but he’d had nearly three and a half years of this crap dance and he was bone tired of it.
‘I’d like to talk to Hattie.’
‘She’s asleep, Steph. I get her up at seven-thirty for school. If I wake her up now she won’t go back to sleep and she’s going to be knackered.’
‘If you wanted to wake her up you could.’
‘It would have to be something pretty urgent.’ He just stopped himself from saying
important
.
‘So that’s the only time I can speak to her, is it? When you decide it’s urgent?’
‘Steph, whenever you ring, I put her straight on.’
Because it’s such a bloody rarity
.
‘All right, stop proving you’re Father of the Bloody Year.’
In his head, he kicked things and swore violently. He had a go at tuning into the dawn chorus again, but now the birds were just irritating him. Didn’t they know any other bloody songs?
‘Look,’ he said, ‘compromise. Ring back at seven and I’ll get her up.’
‘All right.’ Pause. ‘If it makes it easier for
you
.’
More kicking and swearing.
‘Did she get my parcel?’
‘Yes, she did. She thought it was all lovely. She’ll tell you that when you have a chat.’
She’ll tell you because we’ve rehearsed her saying ‘Thank you’ and not saying ‘I don’t really like floaty things to wear, Mummy. Or handbags. Could you send me some dungarees next time? With one of those loops on them for tools?’
‘I suppose it would be too much to ask you to send me a photograph of her wearing the dress? With the handbag?’
‘But where would I send it
to
, Steph? And even if I did, maybe that inability to open envelopes that you have would strike again.’
Silence once more and in it he imagined trying to cram Hattie into the Fendi dress after they’d prised it off Monty,
the brown bear who was currently modelling it. Next to the camel in the shorts with marabou trim. Hattie had some of the best-dressed soft toys in the county. The Juicy Couture handbag was full of toy dinosaurs, under the bed.
‘I’m in Milan at the moment with Alessandro. He’s seeing his folks while I work.’
Why was he being handed that piece of information? And what was with the change of tone? Almost chatty.
‘And we were thinking …’
‘You were thinking?’
‘We’re coming back to Milan for Christmas. He has one of those big Italian families, lots of children around …’
Ah, and you don’t have the essential accessory to show off
.
‘So Alessandro said, why don’t we get Hattie to come out? More the merrier.’
‘He said that, in Italian? More the merrier?’
A pause as if she was biting her tongue. ‘Come on, Tom, it would be lovely for her. We could take her skiing.’
‘Good idea. I’ll look into flights.’
‘You will?’ she said unsteadily, as if not sure she’d heard him correctly.
‘Yup. We could come out, say, Christmas Eve, stay in a hotel.’
He could hear her thinking how to say, that’s not what I mean. Not you with her. Her on her own.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you just put her on a plane, Tom?’
‘Like a parcel?’ He waited for the explosion. The fact that none came told him she really wanted this.
‘No, not like a parcel. They have people who look after children on flights. And she’s not
tha
t young, only a couple of years younger than I was when I went away to school.’
He could have said many things in response to that, but they’d all been said so many times before.
05.15.
Time for a change of tack. ‘I sent your parents a letter to forward to you. Yet again. I need you to look at it, Steph, and get this all sorted legally. Stringing this out makes no sense; neither of us wants to get back together so—’
‘I haven’t seen the letter. But … but I could ring Daddy. Ask him to forward it … If you let Hattie come out for Christmas.’
He shouldn’t be surprised at the way that screamed naked manipulation with overtones of blackmail. Steph was a mistress of naked manipulation. Literally; it was one of her skill sets.
‘Not going to happen, Steph. And you know why it’s not going to happen.’
Silence.
‘And, quite apart from that, I’ve no bloody idea what Alessandro or his family are like. They could be the Corleones, for all I know.’
Nothing.
Perhaps he’d gone too far with that Corleone comment. ‘Listen,’ he said, in a more conciliatory tone, ‘you can see Hattie any time, we’ve been through this. I’m not stopping you. I just want to be nearby.’
A sudden, ‘You know what? You’re a fucking control freak, Tom. And I really, really hate you.’
‘Then divorce me.’
And she’d gone. He gripped the phone. The same arguments over and over again like some German existentialist remake of
Groundhog Day
.
05.30.
He’d never get back to sleep now. He thought of ringing Steph’s parents to see if they
had
actually forwarded the letter, but imagined them lying stiffly in their single beds, like a medieval knight and his wife cast in stone. No. Too early, too old, too much afraid of antagonising Steph.
He went to look in on Hattie. She was on her back, a dead-to-the-world starfish with her mouth open. He thought of her out in Milan at Christmas. Was he jealous of the idea of her having fun without him? Please God he wasn’t turning into one of those creepy fathers – ‘Oh, don’t
mind me sitting in the seat behind you and your boyfriend. Go right ahead and enjoy the film.’
No, it was lovely to think of Hattie in a glow of candlelight and Italian hospitality, a mug of hot chocolate in her hands. But he knew with certainty that Steph would, somewhere along the line, get bored with playing mamma and irritated that Hattie wasn’t keeping to the script of darling, delicate daughter. Then she’d lose her temper or sub-contract responsibility for her to some relation of Alessandro’s.
Hey, Hattie, you hold the horsa steady while I cut off hees head
.
He saw Hattie feeling rejected, Hattie trying to make it work. He saw, oh God, Hattie left behind on a ski run because nobody thought to check.
He straightened out Hattie’s duvet and tucked it around her. No one was going to leave her anywhere.
He returned to his room and decided he might have a go at getting back to sleep. There was no way Steph would ring again this morning. She’d punish him by punishing Hattie and he felt guilty about that – more guilty than Steph did, no doubt.
He picked up the clock and reset the alarm – Mondays were good – school uniform and sports kit all clean, any letters from school answered. They could have an extra fifteen minutes’ sleep and still be out of the house in good time.
He closed his eyes. The wood pigeons were chiming in now; restful, lulling …
*
‘Dad, am I going to school? Only they said I could change the date on the calendar and if I miss my turn, I have to wait another twenty-two whole days to do it.’
‘I’m sure they’ll let you do it sooner than that,’ he told the pillow before his brain went ‘hang on a mo’. He jerked his head up to look at the clock.
08.15.
He stared at Hattie standing by the bed, still in her pyjamas.
‘Oh, fu … fu … fudge with another fudging lump of fudge on top,’ he shouted, translating it in his head to the full bellowing Anglo-Saxon version.
‘Eight-fifteen, it can’t be eight-fifteen.’ He picked up the clock and shook it as if that would help. Damn, he’d nudged the hour on as well when he’d altered the minutes.
‘Right, Hattie. Listen to me.’ He was trying to wrap the duvet around his bottom half and get out of bed at the same time, which was making him flail about like a demented, partially hatched butterfly.
‘We have fifteen minutes, Hattie, just fifteen minutes to dress, grab something to eat and get out of the house.’
Hattie was looking at the clock. ‘It says 08.16 now.’
‘Yeah, time does that, keeps right on fudging moving. Come on, get dressed, the quickest you’ve
ever
got dressed.’ Hattie did not look galvanised. He thought about that and changed his tone. ‘OK, Midshipman Howard,’ he bellowed, ‘we’re holed below the waterline and we only have minutes to abandon ship.’
Hattie was suddenly fuel-injected. ‘Yay,’ she shouted, hurtling from the room. ‘Can I wear my eye-patch?’
‘Long as you’ve got your school uniform and all your underpinnings on too, yup.’
He plunged around the room, grabbing items of clothing and shoving himself into them. Damn Steph. Damn the clock.
He hated arriving at school as if they were being chased by demons. It was what people expected of single fathers. ‘Poor Mr Howard. He tries, doesn’t he?’
He worked hard to make sure it rarely happened and had the drive to Hattie’s school in Lowheatherington and then back along the valley to work precision-planned. But not today, today he’d be bringing up the rear with the woman who delivered her kids to school still in her dressing gown.
Hattie was at the door – dressed and with eye-patch in place. ‘Ready, Captain.’
‘Brilliant! I mean, very good, Howard.’
‘Permission to take on supplies,’ she said and he mouthed ‘What?’ and she whispered ‘Breakfast’ and they were back on track.
‘Good idea,’ he boomed, hustling her down the stairs. ‘Suggest cereal bars and box of juice. Permission to dispense with teeth brushing. I have mints in the glove compartment.’
He went to the loo, glugged down a large glass of water, gathered up his papers, his bag, the car keys. Hattie returned from the kitchen, her arms full.
‘I don’t recall mentioning Tunnock’s tea cakes,’ he said.
Her expression was serious. ‘We could be drifting for days.’
He laughed and combined a hug with getting her nearer the door and thought, what the hell, it’s free dental treatment till she’s eighteen.
Her reading bag was scooped up, along with some suntan cream and her hat in a plastic bag.
‘Well done, Midshipman. Eight-thirty exactly,’ he said as he helped her into the car. She was pointing at the house and shouting, ‘Look, it’s sinking, it’s sinking,’ so convincingly that he was beginning to worry that a sudden attack of subsidence might mean it was really going down with all hands.
‘Pipe down or I’ll ping your eye-patch,’ he told her as they set off. At the gate he stopped. ‘Got Gummy?’
He watched her root around in the book bag and hold
up the blue gum shield. Rob had bought it for her for Christmas and she’d spent the entire holidays looking like an extra from
Planet of the Apes
. But one night he’d checked on her in bed and it was still in, so he’d confiscated it. Cue a run of fretful evenings. Which is when he realised it was a more grown-up version of the yellow cot blanket with the silky edging that she worried between finger and thumb when going off to sleep. They’d brokered a truce which allowed her to mess about with it while he read a story and then it had to go on the bedside table next to the lumps of plasticine and the photo of Steph.
When it appeared at other times, he knew something was up. And that something usually involved Steph. A phone call promised that didn’t come. Another parcel of stuff that didn’t fit Hattie’s body or her character. Sometimes it would also be popped in after she’d talked to Steph, even if the call had appeared to be a good one. Those times he made a point of going back over the old mantra: ‘Mummy loves you very much, it’s just that Mummy and Dad don’t love each other any more. And because Mummy has to work and travel, she wouldn’t be able to look after you. Dad can. Mummy sees you whenever she’s able to and she’s always thinking about you.’
At those moments he thought how funny it was that you told your children not to lie, and yet from the word go you
did it – even if it was only to preserve their belief in something they thought was magical. Was he any different to all those parents who chose not to say ‘It’s your dad, a little pissed, who puts the presents in your stocking on Christmas Eve’?
Gummy back in the bag, they were off along the lane, and when he wasn’t concentrating on where he was heading, he was looking at Hattie in the rear-view mirror as she tucked into a breakfast that would have sent Jamie Oliver ballistic.
‘Gorgeous day,’ he said, ‘you’re going to need that sun hat.’ She pulled a face, having a natural aversion to hats unless they were pirate ones.
He slowed down at the speed camera and checked his watch. On time and back as Dad in Control. Past the farm on the left, take the tight corner, just this long stretch with trees either side before the descent into Lowheatherington. Easy peasy.
‘Dad, I really, really need a wee.’
Nooooo
.
He looked at her in the mirror.
‘Can’t it wait? We’re only a few minutes from school.’
She was pressing her lips together and shook her head. He had ignored a look like that once before and had to have the car valeted. Steam wash, top of the range.
‘You didn’t go before we came out?’ It was the kind of stupid question parents asked where it made no difference what the reply was. Her bladder was full
now
.