Father pt.7
7
It was Sunday night. I was lying in bed and something had awoken me; a scream. I thought I had dreamt it until I heard another one. It was Lucy. She must have had a nightmare. I rolled over, half asleep and switched on my bedside lamp. The little clock underneath it had been knocked over by my book, so I picked it up and studied it through my still-adjusting eyes. It told me it was quarter past two in the morning. Behind me the Venetian blind tapped gently against the window frame, swaying in the breeze from the slightly open window. I sighed and slid out of bed to put on my slippers and dressing gown.
When I got on to the landing, I saw that Gemma’s door was open and a light was on in her room. I wondered if she had stayed up all this time and, before going to Lucy’s room, I stuck my head in through the door frame to see if Gemma was still up. Looking around, all I saw was the slept-in bed, the bedside light casting uneven shadows over the clothes and schoolbooks scattered over the floor, and the open window letting cool air flow into the room, but no Gemma.
For a second I considered going and looking out the window, though not because I thought I would find anything. Then I remembered Lucy. I retreated from Gemma’s room and went a few more feet down the landing to Lucy’s little bedroom. I stopped before I reached the door though, because I could hear Gemma talking softly to Lucy and Lucy quietly crying. Lucy’s little pink bedside lamp was also turned on, and it sent a shaft of light through the crack between the half-open door and its frame. I moved silently closer and discovered that I could see them through the crack.
They both sat on Lucy’s bed, Lucy in her pink Barbie pyjamas, Gemma in a plain camisole and check shorts. Lucy had her arms wrapped tightly round Gemma’s neck and was crying into her shoulder. Through the tears she choked out the details of her nightmare.
“We were in the car – and Mummy was there – and so were you and – Daddy was too – and then the car crashed and you were all gone – and I was all alone.” Her voice rose with these last few words and she began wailing again.
Gemma pressed Lucy’s head tightly into her shoulder and made gentle shushing sounds, encircling Lucy’s back tightly with one arm and rubbing her dark hair with her free hand. It struck me again how much Gemma reminded me of her mother, seeing her now comforting her sister just as I had witnessed Rachel comfort her so many times when Gemma was that age. I felt a little surge of sadness rise from my chest to my throat, and it almost made me choke out loud. I caught myself however and remained silent.
Lucy pulled her head away from Gemma now and looked at her with a red, teary face.
“Do you want to go to sleep now, Lucy?” Gemma asked her. Lucy shook her head,
“Not yet, Gem, stay a little longer. Tell me about Mummy.”
“I’ve already told you everything I remember about Mum,” Gemma said.
“Tell me again,” Lucy insisted, “you remember her.” Gemma sighed, she was obviously tired, but as she began to speak, she started to look more animated and reminded me of how she had been as a child.
“We all went on holiday together this one time,” Gemma said, “to the seaside. I think it was your first time in the sea and you were just beginning to walk. Mum carried you down to the waters’ edge and stood you down in the soft sand. I was there, watching you and running around and swimming in the sea, and you wanted to swim in the sea too. So you broke away from Mum’s hand and you ran towards me before she could grab hold of you again. And then a little wave rolled in, only a few inches high, but it knocked you over, and you fell onto your bum and started crying. And then Mum came over and picked you up, and held you. I remember her standing there in her swimsuit in the afternoon sunshine, the waves lapping at her shins, and her just staring at you as if there was nothing else in the world until you stopped crying. Which you did, after only a little while, staring back up into mum’s face with your little baby eyes. And when you’d stopped crying, Mum carried you out into the deeper water where I was, and she held you waist-deep in it so it was like you were swimming.”
Gemma trailed off when the quietly breathing Lucy began to loosen her arms from around Gemma’s neck, smiling as she slid down onto the comfortable duvet. Gemma eased her into a comfortable position and pulled the duvet up over her, again reminding of her mother, rather than the child she had seemed a few minutes ago. I realised she was about to go back to her own room and so, not wanting to be seen eavesdropping, I slipped silently back to my own.
Lying again in the darkness, wrapped up safely in my duvet, I heard Gemma close her door in the room next to me and then, in the silence of the night, heard the little click as she turned out her bedside light.
The scene she had just described to Lucy had occurred on that last holiday we all had together, the one we had been driving back from when the accident had occurred. I wondered if Gemma realised that she had been talking about something that had happened just a few days before she had lost her mother. I wondered also how much both of my children remembered about the accident.
For a number of months afterwards, mostly during the period Gemma and Lucy had spent living with my mother, Gemma had had nightmares almost exactly the same as Lucy’s; the car crash, everyone being killed, her being left alone. These had become less frequent, though still occasional, as she grew older. I think the last time she had one was about a year or more ago, at least that I knew of.
Physically, Gemma had been lucky in the accident, only baring a scar on her left arm as a lasting testament to her involvement in the accident. The scar was a result of a shard of glass from the rear-view mirror that had been thrown backwards by chance and stuck into her arm. The injury had required a few stitches at the time, but I was not awake to witness these and only saw the resulting scar afterwards.
Lucy was the luckiest in the accident, being completely unharmed; safe and protected in her baby seat, and barely sensible of the collision through her sleepy child’s eyes.
I had not gotten off so easily though. True, having the steering wheel to hold onto had saved my life, offering me support in the collision that Rachel did not have, but the force of the impact had also slammed my head into the top of the steering wheel. That was what put me into the coma. It also left me with acute damage to the memory centres of my brain.
Most of the time it did not affect me, though I was worse for the first few months after the accident, causing a case of amnesia that lasted the time I was in hospital. For a while the doctors thought it might be permanent, but then my memories began to return, patchy and fragmented to begin with, but slowly becoming more cohesive and complete.
Of course I suppose I will never know if all my memories have returned, because anything forgotten is lost forever. For a long time this filled me with a sense of absolute dread that I might have forgotten something about Rachel, however trivial, and then it would be gone. This fear was sharpened into an almost physical pain by the knowledge that memories were all that I would ever have of Rachel from that point onwards.
On top of the long-term amnesia I also developed an acute form of epilepsy as a result of my head injury. Its attacks were sporadic, and unlike some forms of the condition, did not involve debilitating fits. The attacks were neither painful nor long lasting, and it was rarely obvious to anyone else when one was occurring. Their effects were a little more prolonged, often causing me to forget the events of the last few hours. These attacks were rare though; generally kept at bay by the medication I took daily. They could however be brought on as a result of stress.
“Dad.” Gemma broke the silence at the dinner table that had previously been disturbed only by the sounds of us eating, of our knifes and forks clicking against the plates and each other, cutting up chicken burgers.
“Yes?” I said, looking at her. We were not always silent at the dinner table, or at least not through any pre-determined design. It was just that sometimes we did not seem to have anything to talk about. But what could we talk about? There was only so much Lucy could tell me about her day at school, and then she only bothered if something worth mentioning had happened, or if she had a question about something. And my day was even more boring, at least to talk about.
As for Gemma, well, she was a teenager now, and so she would rarely volunteer information unless asked. Maybe she assumed that we would find the events of her day just as boring as we assumed she would find the events of ours. Often she seemed quite distant from us too, locked in her room, staring into that computer screen, though she was only ever a few feet, a few walls away. She was talking now though,
“Is it okay if I sleep round, Marisa’s on Saturday night?” I noticed that she paused for a second before Marisa’s name, but then maybe I had just imagined it.
“Um, yeah, sure.” I said. It had been a while since Gemma had slept round anyone’s house. I had wondered if maybe she had grown out of it, preferring to just visit her friends during the day after school.
It did not take me long to see the sudden advantage that Gemma being out that night had presented; if my mother would baby-sit Lucy that night then I would be free to go out myself. It was only Wednesday now, so I could ring Angela and see if she was busy that night, having not seen her since we first met nearly two weeks before. I smiled to myself.
Looking over, I saw Gemma was smiling too, her Mother’s smile lighting up her young features. For a second I felt I was in danger of being reminded too strongly of Rachel if I continued to stare at that smile, and that might stir within me a vague feeling of guilt, of disloyalty, in thinking about Angela, to a woman that only existed now in my memories. I looked away, looked at Lucy.
Lucy looked puzzled. First she was looking at Gemma, questioning I thought, the smile on her face, then she turned to look at me when she was conscious of my gaze on her, with the same look, as if wondering why we were both smiling. Perhaps she felt that she was missing out on some private joke. I said nothing though, as I planned to not yet tell them about Angela unless anything seriously developed between the two of us.
Not that I thought they would react unfavourably to the news. After all, they had both gotten on well with Carrie-Anne when she had been around them. Lucy had seemed particularly fascinated with Carrie’s red-orange hair, that had been long and springy and the rich colour of autumn leaves. Lucy was only little more than a baby then, just coming up to her fourth birthday.
Thinking back, that had been one of my happiest times since Rachel died, particularly the time we all went on holiday together to the seaside and it had felt, for a little while at least, almost as if we were a family. It was that feeling I was reminded of whenever I thought about Carrie, that feeling and that holiday. In fact, Carrie-Anne had become synonymous in my memory with that summer, and particularly when I remembered her hair, completely unlike Rachel’s; the colour of the setting sun.
Of course those happy memories were always tinged with a little sadness, coloured by the remembrance that Carrie-Anne left me alone again when she went back to Canada, and that she was not the only woman in my memories synonymous with summer, with love, with life.
It was only when I heard Gemma’s knife and fork tap lightly on her plate as she put them down, heard her chair slide back along the vinyl floor as she stood up, that I realised I had been absorbed completely into my nostalgia, ignoring completely for a few minutes the half-eaten chicken burger and chips on the plate in front of me.
My attention was now drawn to Gemma as she put her plate and cutlery into the dishwasher, then left the room. When I had watched her leave, I began to eat again, but Lucy had already finished her meal and was now sat there, watching me. Then asked,
“What were you thinking about, Daddy?”
“When?” I said.
“Just a moment ago. You stopped eating and just stared at the wall.”
“Oh, nothing really.” She sat there for a few moments more and then pushed back her chair, jumped off, and carried her plate over to the dishwasher. As she put it in I said,
“Do you remember Carrie-Anne?” She shook her head.
“No, Daddy. Who is she?”
“Just this woman who we all went on holiday with once when you were about three” I said, and then added perhaps a little unnecessarily, “She had red hair.”
“I remember a little bit a woman with lots of red hair,” she said, thinking hard, “and I remember we were all at the seaside. Was that her?”
“Yes,” I said. Lucy paused, wondering whether or not to say what she was thinking, I watched her. After a few seconds of apparent deliberation she said,
“Sometimes when I thing of that I think that it must have been Mummy, because she took us all to the seaside once, didn’t she?” I nodded, “and so sometimes I get confused between them, but Mummy had dark hair, not orange.” She began to trail off, not really sure what she was trying to say, then said, “and I wondered who the other woman in my memory was, and now I now.” She nodded as if having just confirmed something she had been thinking about a long time and then was silent.
I was silent too, not knowing what to say after that. I looked back down at my half-eaten chicken burger and began to cut another chunk off. Looking back up I saw Lucy still looking at me, her features expressing something like concern, then she turned away and walked out the room. I finished my dinner alone, having only my thoughts, and the muffled noise from the living room next door of Lucy’s cartoon shows, as company in the empty kitchen.
Sitting there, I wondered what Gemma remembered of Carrie-Anne, her being eleven at the time of that holiday, and ten when she first met Carrie. I seemed to think that she had not taken to her at first, being suspicious and often rudely avoiding her, or trying to fix all my attention on her rather than Carrie. But eventually Carrie had won her over by taking her part in arguments when I had reprimanded Gemma for her rudeness, and by cooking food for us all, and taking the children to the park, and buying Gemma a doll she had really wanted on that one Christmas we spent together.
I also remembered that Gemma had become sullen after Carrie had left, and for quite a few months afterwards frequently asked me when she was coming back. All I could say (and hope) was “soon”. I wondered now if Gemma had forgotten all about Carrie, or if she even missed her still, but it would be weird to just ask her out the blue, so I did not.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part seven, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
