Father pt.11
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11
“Hi, Mum, I can come pick the girls up today.” It was Sunday.
“Mark, I tried to ring you yesterday.”
“I wasn’t in.” When I got back, I had been overcome with tiredness and had gone to bed and fallen asleep almost instantly.
“I know, but I tried ringing your mobile.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the little telephone. It was switched off.
“I think the battery must have run out, I didn’t notice. What were you ringing me for anyway?” My mother hushed her voice when she next spoke, and I could imagine her looking around the hallway where I knew she stood to check she was alone.
“It’s about Gemma. Son, she doesn’t feel she can talk to you.”
“She doesn’t try to talk to me. She locks herself in her room,” I said, almost immediately blaming her.
“That’s because she doesn’t feel she can. It’s not easy being a teenage girl, y’know, son, and sometimes they need a bit of encouragement.”
“I’m sorry, I know it’s not her fault. It’s mine. I…I can’t be a good father.”
“Son, you are a good father; they’re good girls, and I know you’re always there for them, but sometimes I don’t think they know that.”
“Gemma locks herself in her room all the time though, I took that as a sign that she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Sometimes hiding is what we do to protect ourselves, because we are afraid to reach out to people.” This simple straight-forward advice was one of the reasons that I loved my mother, and one of the reasons why I felt it was such a shame for my children to not have their own mother in their lives. “So your daughters, Gemma particularly, really need you to reach out to them. You left her here with a black eye and I asked her about it. Do you know how she got it?”
“I…I was afraid to,” I said, a child again before my mother.
“You were afraid to?”
“I…how did she…what happened?”
“Mark, she’s being bullied at school. She said that you didn’t know, and she said you never even asked her about it.”
“Bullied?”
“Yes. Why were you afraid to ask? Why are you afraid to talk to your own daughter?”
“I…I thought I’d done it.”
“You? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know, I…had a dream, and then I my epilepsy kicked in and I couldn’t remember what I’d done that day, and then I saw her with the black eye, and I thought I must have done and that she was afraid to say because she was afraid of me and didn’t want to talk to me.” For a second I thought I was going to cry, like I did when I was child, until I was protected in my mother’s lap, cocooned against the world by her enclosing arms, but I was no longer a child, and my mother was not here, she was on the other end of a telephone line.
“Oh, Mark” she said.
“Why?” I asked, “Why is she getting bullied? She’s got lots of friends, and she’s pretty and nice, why would she get bullied?”
“Well she told me about it, but it seemed very complex and she was crying it all out while she was telling me” For a moment I could picture the scene in my head, Gemma against my mother’s shoulders, soaking her soft wool jumper with her tears, and my mother’s arms, a little more wrinkled now, but still soft, enclosing, comforting, around her back, stroking her hair. “From what I could understand, it was over some boy. Apparently Gemma had liked this boy and had been ‘going out’ with him. But then she slept over at his one night and they had a fight, he was being too pushy or something and she thought that he didn’t really care about her, but just wanted her for how she looked. She wasn’t too clear on that bit. Personally, I think she’s too young to be sleeping over at boy’s houses.”
“I never said she could. When was this?”
“She didn’t say, but surely you must have noticed she wasn’t there. Anyway, so she fell out with this boy and came home. Only, you weren’t in, and so she was in the house alone and upset. And then apparently you came home at some late hour with some woman, which Gemma knew nothing about. Do none of you ever talk in your house?”
“It’s complicated and it’s difficult. I’d only met Angela a couple of times, and that’s why I hadn’t told the girls about her, I… I remember now, Gemma said she was sleeping over at her friend’s house, her friend Marisa, she never said she was going to see her boyfriend.” I wondered how I had not worked that out sooner.
“Well, apparently this boy was quite popular, and a few other girls liked him. These girls were apparently jealous of Gemma for being liked at him, and then she fell out with him. So he started being nasty to her, and this prompted these girls to do the same, and that’s when they started bullying her. First they were calling her names, and throwing things at her in the classroom, then they started attacking her after a few days. That’s how she got the black eye.”
“Oh shit,” I said, “how is she now?”
“She’s okay now. I rang up the school yesterday, talked to the headmaster. He’s said that all the girls in question shall be suspended from school and that he will sort the whole thing out, though I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”
“Can I talk to her now?”
“Yes, I think you should.” I heard my mother call Gemma, her voice distant and echoing as she held the phone away from herself. There were a few noises as the phone changed hands, and then Gemma’s voice, a little small-sounding, came out through the headset.
“Hey, Dad,” she said.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said, “How are you?”
“I’m okay now; Grandma’s been looking after me. How are you? How was your trip?”
“I think I’m okay now too. Yes, my trip was good; it felt good to get out. And it gave me some time to think on the journey, and I missed you both while I was gone, even though it was only a couple of days.”
“I missed you too, Dad.” I smiled when she said this. It brought her closer, though she was a few miles away, on the other end of a telephones, she was closer now than she had been on the other side of her bedroom door.
“I’m coming to pick you up in a bit.”
“Grandma’s cooking Sunday dinner. She’s done enough for you.” I smiled again; my mother was an excellent cook, as all mothers should be. “It should be ready in about an hour.”
“I’ll be there in a little less than an hour then.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.” There was a pause, I thought she was about to put the phone down, but she had not yet, so before she did I said,
“Gemma,”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part eleven, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
