Father pt.2
2
I dropped my keys into the little dish on the shelf by the side of the door, next to the waist-high rubber plant. Then I slipped off my shoes, pushing them with my toes side-by-side next to Gemma’s battered trainers, and Lucy’s shiny pink-and-white light-up ones next to Gemma’s, and then, on the other side of my shoes, my plain fleece slippers, a present from Lucy last Christmas, which I slipped on now.
There was no mail so I went straight upstairs to my office and sat down into my green-leather office chair. For a moment I sat and did nothing other than cast my eyes lazily around the room and then settle on looking out the window while listening to the sounds of the quiet house. Without Gemma’s music, or Lucy’s cartoons playing, or the myriad other noises of three people living together, I could hear the pipes in the walls as they expanded and contracted, and the dull swoosh of the traffic on the other side of the house, and even a few birds that commuted, chattering to each other through the air, around the area, landing occasionally and temporarily in the few trees in mine and my neighbours’ gardens.
After being, for a minute or more, lost in these muted sounds I realised I had not yet turned on my PC, so I leaned down in my chair, pressed the big button in the centre of the tower, and then switched the monitor on. I idly stared at the loading screens until I felt the need for a drink. I stood up, walked out and padded across the plush cream carpet of the landing, leaving a wake in the dust motes that hovered lazily in the morning sunshine as it shone in through the skylight.
I filled up the coffee machine, switched it on. While waiting for it to boil I rinsed out Lucy’s bowl, put it in the dishwasher, and tipped the remainder of Gemma’s toast into the waste disposal and turned the water on over it. I flicked the switch on the wall and watched as the soggy pale toast sank between the black rubber flaps and disappeared into the whirling blades. I released the switch and the sounds of the coffee machine, of liquid moving through it, of steam coming rising from the top and of its various internal clicks, could again be heard in the kitchen.
It was not done yet though, so I wiped down the kitchen table, toyed idly with a fridge magnet and opened the fridge to get milk for my coffee. Of course there was none left. I sighed, went over to the blackboard by the door and wrote ‘milk’ in white chalk. As an after-thought, I underlined it, and then went back to the coffee maker and picked up my mug of black coffee.
Back in my office the computer had loaded up, and was sat, waiting, expectant; a screen of items waiting to be clicked. I ignored these for a moment though, being again, as I always was, distracted by my desktop background picture. It was a photo taken years ago with a cheap disposable camera, scanned onto my computer one day when I found it in an old photo album.
We were on holiday in Tenerife at the time, all of us together. The photo was taken the day we had gone to a water park. Rachel was stood in the photo, laughing, with Lucy, only a few months old cradled in Rachel’s right arm, and Gemma, who must have been only seven at the time, holding her mother’s free hand. Lucy was looking up at her mother, mimicking her smile as best as she could, and Gemma was looking at something in the middle distance, some giant colourful plastic octopus that was part of an attraction at the park, but Rachel was looking fully at the camera, at me taking the photo, directing the full force of her radiance at me.
She was so beautiful in that photo, in all photos, in life. She was thirty-one then, but barely looked a day over twenty-five, stood there in a plain black one-piece swimming suit, her slightly wavy, dark-brown hair tucked behind one ear, the two children that had left no mark on her figure, next to her, and all her teeth shining in the bright Spanish sun. Often Rachel’s beauty seemed like a dream, something imagined, and sometimes I was scared it was. Sometimes I was afraid that my memories had become distorted, that my mind was playing tricks on me. It was times like these that I was thankful for the photos I had, that I could look at and remember clearly that she really was that lovely. And though it made me sad to recall my loss so sharply, it also filled me with a vague sense of pride that I had once been with the most beautiful woman I had ever met.
I looked at the clock. Five minutes had passed since I had first been drawn into the picture, into my memories. I sighed and pushed away the memories, sweeping them to one side as I focused on a work mentality. I could not afford to spend all day dreaming of the past; I had work to do and a deadline to meet.
I worked now as a freelance website designer, creating pages at a competitive rate for small to medium sized businesses. Currently I was working on a site for a small garden maintenance and landscaping group. I already had the basic designs for the pages down (a lot of greens fading into neutral whites, and various faded-border photographs of brilliantly coloured hyacinths, perfectly shaped lawns and neat little border-hedges) now it was just the coding that I had to finish and checking that all the links work and all the other boring tasks that come at the end of the project. Still, I always felt a strong sense of satisfaction at the end of a successful project.
I worked solidly for a couple of hours, getting quite a way into the project and bringing it only a few more days of finishing touches away from completion. I decided I had earned a break after this, and also, I needed to get the shopping done, so I closed the work, took a final glance at my background, and shut down the computer.
It was nearly half eleven when I walked into Tesco. At this time it was generally old people doing their weekly shopping, stopping in the aisles to talk to each other, and occasionally the professionals on an early lunch, dashing in to grab a ready-made sandwich, or low-calorie salad, and then dashing out again.
I grabbed a trolley and pulled the crumpled shopping-list I had written on the back of an envelope from my pocket. “Something for tea (wed-fri)” was the first thing I had written, then “something for lunch” immediately after. “Milk” was scrawled under that, then underlined, then with two exclamation marks. The rest were items such as “yoghurts for Lucy”, “Toilet roll” and “cheese”.
I wandered around, picking up the items on the list as I passed them, and deliberating for a while over the more ambiguous “somethings” at the start of my list. For my lunch I eventually chose a microwave cannelloni ready-meal pot, because it was on offer. For tea for the three remaining nights of the week I picked up some pizzas (because Lucy likes them), some pasta (because Gemma likes it) and, for Friday, I eventually decided we would have fish and chips, as a small treat.
I went to the checkout, declined the offer of help with my packing robotically offered by the cashier and walked to the car, carrying the two bags of shopping. I loaded them into the back of my light blue, slightly rusty, Ford Sierra, got in and started the engine. The radio turned on with the car, an old Pulp cassette was in the deck and halfway through ‘Lipgloss’ I tapped my hands in time to the music on the steering wheel as I pulled out of the car park.
Driving home I have to go down a busy dual carriage way. It seemed busier than usual that day, with all the traffic in front of me just crawling along. I thought it was strange, but ignored it and drove on with the lethargic traffic. After a while all the vehicles went into a single lane, separated from the other lane by a row of orange cones. A few hundred metres further down the road I saw why: an accident.
It must have happened while I was in Tesco; otherwise I would have noticed it on my way there. As I passed by, barely above ten miles an hour, I saw policemen in bright yellow jackets stood around, and an ambulance with its lights flashing. There was a white van as well, tyre marks trailing behind it and, in the wake of the tyre marks, a Subaru with a crumpled front, which had evidently ran into the back of the van. There was a man, maybe my age, stood with the van, and a couple, maybe ten years younger than me near the Subaru, with a police officer talking to them. The woman was crying.
It looked as if the van had stopped suddenly and the Subaru had run into the back of it. But why had the van stopped? As my car crept further forward I searched for a reason and then, for a moment, thought I saw the black tarmac glistening in the spring sunshine.
I looked away quickly, out of the windscreen. I had slowed down more than I realised and the cars in front of me were now moving much faster than I was. After I had put the accident scene a few hundred yards behind me, I suddenly noticed the music from the car’s old speakers again, as if it had been turned down when I had been focusing on the accident and had suddenly been returned to full volume. It even seemed suddenly louder than before. In fact it felt quite oppressive in that tiny space, so I reached to turn it down, and then to open the window a little. It was only when I took my hand of the steering wheel that I realised how tightly I had been gripping it; my knuckles had turned completely white.
When I got in I swapped my shoes for my slippers, walked into the kitchen and put the shopping down on the table. Then I sought for the microwave pasta pot amidst the other groceries, pulled off the packaging, stabbed the film lid a few times with a fork and pushed it into the microwave. While that was cooking I put away all the shopping and stuffed the bags into a space under the sink. The microwave still had a couple of minutes more before the meal would be ready, so I laid out a knife and fork on the table, either side of a place mat with a picture of a box of herbs on it.
The microwave pinged and I took the hot plastic container out of it, holding the container by the corners so as not to burn myself. Then I sat down with it, ripped off the plastic film and began eating. I put down my knife and fork after only a couple of bites though. With nothing in the room to distract me, my mind kept returning to the accident I had passed earlier, to the blood I am certain I saw on the tarmac. It made me sick to think about it and I just sat there for a few minutes, staring at the warm cannelloni in front of me. I had lost my appetite suddenly, but I could not let the food go to waste, not when I knew I was hungry.
After another minute I stood up and grabbed a tray from the sideboard. I put the pasta on to the tray, filled a glass with water, and carried it through to the front room, where I turned on the television and watched BBC news because it was the only thing on worth watching at that time of day, even though I had over two hundred Sky TVchannels to choose from. It was not particularly good news that day, it never is, but at least it helped push thoughts of car accidents to the back of my mind until after I had eaten, and then I had work to distract me until I had to go pick up Lucy.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part two, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
