Father pt.3
3
“What did you do at school today?” I asked Lucy, trying to drive through the obstacle course of primary school children with a loose grasp of road safety and parents in oversized SUVs with an even looser grasp of road courtesy.
“We did maths in the morning and we learned about cubes and cubic centimetres.”
“Oh, that sounds difficult,” I said, pulling into a gap to let a car with no intention of stopping for me go past, “could you do it alright?”
“Yes, daddy, I got a gold star. See” I glanced quickly at the little sticker on her red jumper.
“Well done, sweetie” I said.
When we got in the house, Lucy went straight into the front room and started watching the children’s television programmes that she always watched. I went to fetch her some biscuits and orange juice and then went back upstairs to do some more work. Since lunchtime I had started coding a Flash slideshow of pictures the garden maintenance company had sent me, and I would have it finished in another hour, if I did not get distracted, and that would be my work done for the day.
I managed to avoid getting distracted, and after finishing it, passed the rest of the evening in front of the television, eating dinner and then watching a film with Lucy. I had asked Gemma if she wanted to watch with us too before it started, but she said she had some stuff to do on her computer. The evening just seemed to drift by and soon I was tucking Lucy into bed.
“Sweet dreams,” I told her, pulling her pink My Little Pony duvet up to her chin and kissing her on the forehead.
“Night night, daddy.” I turned out her bedroom light and went over to the door. For a moment I stood there and looked at her, her hair flowing across the pillow and her stuffed dog held tightly in her arms. She looked beautiful.
I closed the door softly, went to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth, went to the toilet, filled a glass with water. Before going to my bedroom I went to Gemma’s to say good night to her. I knocked on her door. There was no reply for a minute and then she opened a little way, stood there in the door way, almost as if suspicious and then looked at me expectantly.
“Um, I’m going to bed now,” I announced, and then “so, good night.”
“Oh, okay, Dad. Night.” The room behind her was illuminated only by her computer monitor, casting eerie shadows around the room. She seemed about to the close the door, so I said
“You should probably do the same soon, too.”
“Okay, I will.” There was a pause.
“Night,” I said.
“Night.” She closed the door. I stood there for a moment, feeling sort of unfulfilled, as if something was left unsaid, then went to my own room.
I started to undress, and then realised how stuffy the room had become over the day. I went over and opened the window. A cool wind immediately swept in and blew over my chest. For a second it reminded me of childhood, of the seaside, though our house was miles from the sea, and my window did not even face the nearest beaches. Within a few seconds I found the wind too cold though, it being only March at the time, so I closed the window again, brought the Venetian blind down, and continued with changing into my pyjamas.
I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over myself and picked up the Tom Clancy paperback I was reading and finished two chapters before I felt too sleepy to carry on. I slipped the book mark back into the book, put it down and turned the light out, then I stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep to come.
Before sleep though came various thoughts about my day. I thought about my conversation with Gemma. What I had said to her before going to bed was most of the conversation I had had with her all evening. She had been in her room almost continuously since she got in from school. She had come downstairs for tea, but then had not said a great deal, and after tea, when I had asked if she wanted to watch the film with me and Lucy she had refused. And then when I had had a conversation with her, it had been short and stilted and even superfluous.
I exhaled slowly into the darkness. Was it my fault? Did I need to make more of an effort to start conversations? I never knew what to say though, what to talk about with her. It would be a lot easier with her mother around to help, but she was gone, and so I had to work this out on my own. Maybe Gemma just did not want to talk to me. Maybe she had outgrown me and had decided it was uncool to talk to her father. But surely she could not have grown out of talking to me so quickly. But it seemed a little unfair that my daughter should have to grow up at all, that she would ever grow out of seeing her daddy as anything less than all the world, especially when she was all I had.
Maybe it was neither hers nor my fault, maybe it was just the way human society was going as a result of technology that increasingly alienates us. It was true that Gemma spent a lot of time on her PC, and I am certain that she was not doing homework on it all that time. But then, what could I do about that? Computers are wonderful tools; I would be out of work if it was not them, or at least I would find it a lot more difficult to work at home and have time to take Lucy to and from school. And Gemma did need her PC for homework, and computer skills will be valuable for her in later life. So even if technology was to blame for our relationship, perhaps it was a necessary evil.
I concluded that this must be the case, and then tried to push the thoughts of Gemma from my head. I managed this quite easily because, within a few minutes, they were replaced by the images of that road accident I passed earlier. Throughout the day I had not been able to shake off these images, the crying woman, the crumpled car, the blood on the tarmac, and now, in the darkness, they came back clearer than when I had first seen them.
I tried again to clear these from my mind, but with nothing to distract myself with, they refused to disappear. I tried rolling over onto the other side of my large empty bed, and staring out the window, but they were still there. Eventually I got up, pulled up the blind, opened the window and let the cool air blow on me, through the gaps between the buttons of my pyjama top and onto my stomach.
For a little while I focused on nothing but that feeling, and slowly I felt the thoughts fade into nothingness. I took a drink of the water on my bedside table, partially closed the window and climbed back into bed.
The following day I again watched the news while I ate my lunch, having taken Lucy to school, had a shower and done some more work. Nothing particularly significant had happened since yesterday, just a shooting in London, and a possible arson attack on a pub in Nottingham and a story on the latest inadequacies of the NHS. And then, on the local news a story caught my attention.
It was a report on an accident on Edgerton way, the dual carriageway I had driven down yesterday. I had not thought about it since last night, but here were all the details of it. Apparently some kid had been playing football in his back garden, next to the road, when he had kicked the ball over his fence. He had then climbed over, run down the small incline and, in an endeavour to get his ball back, straight into the road.
The driver of a white van, a Mr. Fretley, had had no chance of stopping in time when this eleven-year-old boy darted out of nowhere in front of him. He immediately slammed on the breaks, but had been unable to avoid the kid. The kid, something Marshall, had gone flying, landing about twenty feet down the road. He had been killed instantly. Then the green Subaru that had been following the van, “way too close” according to Mr. Fretley, had ploughed into the back of the suddenly stopped vehicle.
There was an interview with Mrs. Marshall after the main outline of the incident. She was not a particularly attractive woman, a little dumpy, and with her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail and her face and eyes blotchy and red from crying, but she was distraught, and her open, abundant grievance almost moved me to tears: I could sympathise with exactly how she felt; Rachel had been killed in a road accident.
For a long time I had blamed myself. After all, I was the one driving, although I do not remember much from either right before or right after the accident.
It had happened about seven years ago now, when we had been driving back from a family holiday in Brighton. Gemma and Lucy were sat in the back, Lucy asleep in her baby seat and Gemma playing ‘I spy’ with Rachel. The last thing I remember before the collision is those two talking and laughing together as I drove us down a long, single lane national speed limit road.
I remember that I was careful not to go above fifty-five because there seemed to be a lot of long blind bends for a road with such a high limit. I was road safety conscious even back then. Unfortunately for us, the driver on the other side of the bend was not. He had decided to overtake the person he was following on that bend just as we were going round it. This I was only told afterwards, because, as I have said, I can not remember the incident itself.
Seeing our Maestro estate suddenly appear round the corner the driver, who was only a year younger than myself, had slammed on his breaks and lost control, skidding right into our path. I too hit my brakes, but was unable to get out of his way and he slammed right into our car, hitting us head on, a little to the left. All I remember was driving with my family, blackness and then waking up five days later in a hospital bed in Crawley.
I turned off the television, stood up, crossed the room to the phone table, picked up the photograph that stood next to the telephone, and sat back down on the sofa with it in my hand. It was a family portrait, minus Lucy because it was taken two years before she was born. Rachel was twenty-six then.
For a long while I just stared at the picture, at the little image of my wife, static, eternally young in the photograph while the world continued to move. I wondered what she would look like now if she was still alive. Still beautiful, I am sure, because she would do no matter how old she lived to be, and still full of energy, but also, somehow I am sure, wiser, more experienced, a calm, gently lapping energy like a lake, rather than an impulsive sweeping energy like the sea.
I felt momentarily, as if the glossy ink would draw a few choking tears from my throat, but there was only a slight tightness in the muscles and then dull ache. When this had passed I replaced the picture frame to its position by the telephone and the lamp on the table and rubbed my face with my hands. I breathed in deeply a couple of times then wiped my hands on my trousers and went to the kitchen to put on the coffee maker.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part three, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
