‘Good idea. Marmie and I will go home and settle in together first.’ Allowing my father to untangle from the hook.
David offers his hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Smythe.’
Is that his business card Father is slipping to him? They shake on it. Jesus. Wept.
‘Sonya. You know where to find me.’ David nods at me, keeping a professional distance. I don’t watch him leave.
My father breathes out, as if his body has been hostage to a held-breath dread. He holds the car door open. I climb inside, settling Marmie’s purring warmth on my lap, and press my cheek against the cold window. Close my eyes, wait until I feel my father is seated and hear the click of the belt buckle, before I speak: ‘I’m grateful to you for coming, Dad. Means the world to me.’
Those words are both insincere and the truest thing I’ve ever said.
26
My father drives deliriously slowly. He’s being beeped by drivers behind us and I wonder was it this bad on our outward journey – or was I just so off my head I didn’t notice? His hands are gripping the steering wheel, his body bent close to it, allowing him to peer myopically through the windscreen, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
‘Did you forget your glasses, Dad?’
He doesn’t answer. I shift my head at an angle that allows him to be observed without him realising. His skin is mottled grey and red, spots of high colour on his cheeks, a raised dark stain of pigmentation on his forehead, disappearing under his receding hairline into his scalp. I wonder at the circumference of the thing. Has he had it checked? His large frame seems diminished by his hunched posture, his hands suddenly an elderly person’s hands: brown-splotched, high-veined, knuckles protruding. A blast of one of Mahler’s symphonies in a minor key. My thoughts are suitably pitched: how much of Tommy’s growing have I missed? Has he lost all his miraculous toddler pudge?
The drive back home is stretched and strained and the view is shit ugly: long expanses of three-lane motorways, both directions, flanked by industrial warehouses selling electrical appliances and second-hand cars, giant traffic lights looming overhead, pointing in seemingly endless different directions. All I want to do is run back to Sister Anne and beg to be reinstated in my nylon bedroom.
It doesn’t help that my father seems as bewildered as I am. For once we share the same fogged-up outlook. The grey sky starts to spit. The kitten meows, her little body tense, as if she might pounce.
‘Shut that thing up,’ my father snaps. ‘Having a hard enough time concentrating here as it is.’
‘I’m trying my best,’ I say, sounding pathetic to my own ears. I try to soothe the distressed kitten by holding her close to my beating heart. Boom boom boom, Yaya.
My father turns Lyric FM up even higher and a modern, discordant tune fills the spaces in the car, climbing inside me, aggravating my restless, slumbering creatures.
‘Dad, that’s dreadful,’ I say as I reach across to turn down the dial.
He doesn’t disagree, just lets the silence ring out, until the kitten’s bleating interrupts.
‘I hope that thing will be ok,’ he says. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Sonya.’
Soon the car is cruising, or doddering, alongside the canal-bank path that leads directly to the stretch of Sandymount Strand closest to home. The view opens up to include huge numbers of city swans, gliding proprietarily over the oily black slick of the canal. For a moment, there is white. Stop them, Yaya, they’re hurting her. The incident at the duck pond flashes in my mind. The cat jumps free of my grasp and throws itself at the window, hissing.
‘Fuck’s sake, Sonya.’
Did my father just curse? A first. And all it took was a kitten and a gaggle of swans.
‘Sorry, Dad.’ Another first. ‘I have her now.’
At the top of the road we turn right, and the slate-grey body of water reveals itself. The canal becomes the edge of the sea. I long to roll down the window and inhale the salty air but think better of it with the bucking bundle between my palms. The sea is flat and serene, the sky too, as they merge and blur into one. A ten-minute drive along the seafront, then a turn to the right, to the left, to the left.
‘Here we are, Sonya,’ he says as we pull up outside the shocking-pink door. ‘Must be nice to be home.’
Home. He lifts my case from the boot and opens the front door with his own key. Inside everything is shining, clean and ordered, smelling of polish and bleach and camphor. ‘We had to blitz. There was a bit of a moth problem when you were away.’ What a sickening picture: dark flying particles of dust alighting on my life. I place the wriggling kitten on the carpet, where she proceeds to piddle immediately. I lift her, trailing pee through the living room and kitchen as I struggle to open the back door.