Father pt.5
5
I stood now in the café on the top floor of the big Waterstones in Guildford, waiting for a coffee. It was Sunday. I had been out to buy a lock for the bathroom door when I had remembered there was a book I wanted and may as well get while I was out.
It was not often that I actually got out of the house anywhere, except to the supermarket or Lucy’s school or to give Gemma lifts to places. I was going to buy the lock the day before, but Gemma had gone to town a little while after the bathroom incident and had not returned until after six, and with her out I had not wanted to leave Lucy alone. I thought as well that the town would be too busy on a Saturday, so I waited until today.
The girl serving me handed me my coffee. I thanked her and sat down in one of the comfortable brown leather chairs. My coffee was too hot for the moment, so I pulled the book I had just bought out of the shiny black Waterstones bag and began to read it.
A few pages into it I was interrupted by a woman’s voice from above me.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?” The voice said. I looked up to see a woman, maybe a couple of years younger than me, with blonde hair tied back, and blue eyes behind plain, black-framed glasses. She was holding a large mug in one hand and indicating the chair on the other side of the table I was sat at with her free hand.
“Um, no,” I said, glancing for a moment at the many other vacant seats in the half empty café.
She put a couple of bags of shopping she had looped over an arm onto the floor, and then put her mug of coffee onto the table a little way from mine. I watched her for a moment, then looked idly at her coffee, until I realised I was just staring blankly at the mound of cream that floated on its surface. I returned to the book, feeling self-concious now.
For a few moments she said nothing and then,
“I’ve read that.” I looked up.
“Oh,” I said, “did you like it?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a good book.”
“I’ve only just bought it, so I’m not far into it.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll like it, I mean, I don’t really know what you like, obviously, but it’s good, so you probably will.” She smiled, gave a little self-concious laugh, then dropped her eyes to her coffee and began to stir it with a spoon. The cream slowly melted into the hot liquid, first streaking it with soft white that reminded me of clouds at sunset, and then turning it a milky brown.
She looked up suddenly and said,
“Oh, I’m Angela by the way.” She smiled again, looked at something to my right for a second, then picked up her mug and took a sip.
“I’m Mark,” I said. I had closed the book and put it back in the bag now. I wondered why Angela had chosen to sit here, rather than anywhere else in the café.
She was quite pretty.
I met Rachel when I was at college. She was seventeen, I was eighteen. A few months later, we were together. I finished college and got a job with an insurance firm. I was on a pretty good wage, and with good prospects. A year later, when Rachel finished college, she got a job at a florist. We got a mortgage and bought a house together. Two years later we married, and three years into our marriage Gemma was born. Another six years later and Rachel was pregnant again, this time carrying Lucy. When Lucy was born our family was complete and, for a year, we all lived in perfect bliss with neither money nor health concerns to upset our happy existence.
But then came the accident, driving back from Brighton that day. My wife was killed, my children were left motherless and our family was torn apart.
The immediate aftermath for myself however was a coma that lasted five days. I had to stay in hospital for just over a week after that before I was discharged. I got a card from work. It said that everyone was sorry about my loss and hoped I would get well soon and they would all see my back at work soon. I never did go back though, except once, a few weeks after the accident, when I had decided that I could not go back to work there, to collect the few things in my desk: A photo of Rachel and the kids, some stationary, and a book.
Before that though, immediately following my stay in hospital, I had had to take a couple of weeks of grieving and recovering time off work. During this time, my mother had taken care of the children during this time (but these weeks had turned into months) and the house had felt so empty, so lifeless. It was so strange, walking through that airless house, with dust that seemed to way down everything and suck the colour from the place.
I was so scared during that time. Scared about a lot of things; scared that I would not be able to bring up the children on my own, scared that I would not be able cope without Rachel, scared that I might never be happy again, now that this huge chunk of my soul had been ripped away.
Gemma, I believe coped fairly well, considering. I only knew this from what my mother told me though, because I went for weeks at a time, unable to do anything except exist, even unable to visit my daughters. But children her age are resilient, they can cope, adapt. Of course there were tears, that is to be expected, but my mother was there to hold Gemma and look after Lucy, absorb all the tears into her own grief; for she had loved Rachel too.
Lucy was just a baby at that time, only just starting to toddle and say her first words. She had it easiest, for she was too young to perceive the loss, and as she grew older, she could not remember a time when she was any other than motherless. I envied her sometimes, particularly then; life went on as always for her.
But for me, life had stopped; staggered to a halt like a clock that someone has torn a gear from. I was diagnosed with depression after a month and was forced to take extended sick leave from work. After the fourth month I realised I could not go back. It was about then, January, after one of the most abysmal Christmases I have ever endured, that I decided life must go on.
It is still painful to me to think back to those miserable times, to that excruciating metamorphosis as I slowly tried to separate myself from my grief that winter. The most painful part was removing all the useless little things that reminded me of my lost wife; her clothes, her shoes, minor things like her toothbrush and even her five months out of date magazines that were still scattered over the floor on her side of the bed.
For months I had held onto these relics, feeling as if they might bring some substance back to her existence with their association, even their scent and colours. I could remember countless days when I had sat on her side of the bed, staring blankly out the window, holding one of her t-shirts, the last she had worn before the accident, pressed into my face, breathing in the scent as if she was there in front of me, me kissing her shoulders, telling her I loved her.
Eventually the t-shirt stopped smelling of her altogether and I could only smell my tears on it, and then it became stale and musty from not being washed. The whole house became stagnant during that time, with only myself moving around it, doing only the most basic cleaning with a slow lethargic half-heartedness. And all that time my children stayed with their grandmother, being looked after by her, loved by her, taken to school, picked up, fed, put to bed, read to; all the things I was in no state to do.
But I knew it could not stay like this. I had a responsibility to them as a father, and to myself as a human being. My mother offered to help in the necessary clean-up of my house, in taking the clothes to the charity shops and throwing away the things that could not be given away, but she had done enough already. So over a couple of weeks in January I put all the clothes, all the shoes, the make-up, the magazines, the toothbrush, all the evidence that Rachel had ever existed outside of photographs and my memories, one by one into black plastic bin-bags, each one a little wrench tightening my chest until I felt like my rib-cage might crack.
“This was fun,” Angela said, putting down her second empty coffee mug.
“Yes,” I said.
“You know, I almost didn’t sit here. I almost just went and sat on my own, and I would have wondered what would have happened if I sat here. ‘Cause you know, a lot of time people think about doing things, but then they feel too awkward or whatever and so they don’t, and it makes it hard to meet people, because people just don’t really talk to strangers.”
“Well, I’m glad you did.”
“Yeah, me too.” For a moment we said nothing, and then I said,
“We should do this again sometime.” She smiled, perhaps at what I had suggested or perhaps at the little nervous hesitation in my voice, the way had said it almost like a question.
“Yeah, we should. Wanna swap numbers, or emails?”
We exchanged both and then Angela said that she had better get going. We walked together to the ground floor of Waterstones and parted at the exit, promising to get in touch soon. I walked back to the car with a small smile on my face.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part five, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
