In those early days they had taken any work going, had stretched themselves to the limits of their expertise to avoid being late on the rent. They’d do powers of attorney alongside residential conveyancing alongside personal-injury claims. ‘Drafting codicils with the textbook under the desk across my knees,’ he says with a laugh.
Jen smiles sadly. ‘Do you remember the timeshare conveyances we did?’ she adds, happy to reminisce.
‘What’s that?’ her father says, but there is something strange about his tone. Something performative, as though somebody is watching.
‘Yeah – remember we did timeshare conveyances, and we had to keep that mad list of whose slot was when?’
‘Did we?’
‘Of course we did!’ Jen says, momentarily confused. Her father has a phenomenal ability to recall events from the past. She must have misunderstood, the memory not quite what she thought.
‘I don’t think so. But weren’t those the days, anyway?’ he says. ‘Pizzas in the office …’
Jen nods. ‘Sure were,’ she says, though it’s a lie.
‘And then it kind of all tipped over, didn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’ She remembers the spring when she met Kelly. The firm had finally started earning money. A few big client wins. They hired a secretary, and Patricia in Accounts. And now look at it. A hundred employees.
‘Stay for dinner?’ he says to her, pouring out two cups of tea.
She hesitates, looking at him. It’s four o’clock. He has between three and nine hours to live. Their eyes meet.
She takes her steaming mug wordlessly from him and sips it, buying time. She knows she shouldn’t do it. Don’t change other things. Stick to what you are supposed to be doing. Don’t play the lottery. Don’t kill Hitler. Don’t deviate.
But her mouth is opening to answer on her behalf. ‘Love to,’ she says, so quietly she hopes the universe might not hear if she says it under her breath, just to him, no witnesses, a private communication from daughter to father. She wants to stop being alone, just for a while, to stop figuring out all the incomprehensible clues, never moving forwards, only backwards, backwards, backwards, a game of snakes and ladders with only snakes.
‘What’re we having?’ she adds.
Her father shrugs, a happy shrug. ‘Whatever,’ he says. ‘Another person just sort of makes life feel official, doesn’t it? Even if we just have beans on toast.’
Jen knows exactly what he means.
It’s five past seven. Jen and her father have put a fish pie he’d had frozen for ‘God knows how long’ in the oven. She should be leaving, she should be leaving, she keeps thinking, her rational brain imploring her with a kind of panicky reasoning, but his feet – in slippers – are crossed at their ankles and he’s put Super Sunday on, and he’s so close to it, and she can’t leave him, she can’t, she can’t.
‘Might put a garlic bread in the oven, too,’ her father says. ‘I can eat for England these days. You know, your mum hated garlic. Says she ate too much of it in pregnancy.’
‘Did she?’ Jen says, getting up. ‘I’ll put it in.’
‘God, I hate Super Sunday. Vacuous.’ He begins channel-hopping.
‘Let’s watch Law and Order and criticize the procedure,’ Jen says over her shoulder.
‘Now you’re talking,’ her father says, navigating to the Sky menu. ‘Get me a beer, too,’ he says. ‘And some peanuts for while we wait.’
The hairs on the back of Jen’s neck rise up, one by one, like little sentries.
‘Sure,’ she says. She walks into the quiet of the kitchen and puts the garlic bread in the oven. The interior lamp illuminates her socked feet.
The beer is already chilling in the door of the fridge.
‘Help yourself to whatever,’ he calls through.
Jen finds the peanuts in a cupboard which seems to contain just about everything – orange squash, two avocados, chocolate-covered raisins, teabags, Mint Club biscuits – and brings them through for him.
‘I didn’t know Mum ate garlic when she was pregnant.’
‘Oh yes, tons of the stuff. Even raw, sometimes. She’d stick a few cloves in a roast chicken and eat them one by one,’ her father says. Jen can just imagine it. A woman she lost too soon, eating garlic cloves at the kitchen counter, greasy fingers, Jen inside her body. Todd inside Jen’s. Todd’s potential, anyway.
‘She said she overdid it. We always said’ – he takes the beer and peanuts from her in one hand, one deft movement. God, he is so healthy – ‘she wouldn’t eat her favourite foods in pregnancy if we had another, so she didn’t get put off.’
He leans forward and lights the fire. He wasn’t found with the fire on, a garlic bread and a fish pie in the oven. These are all changes Jen has made. It lights easily, zipping along from left to right, like words appearing on a typewritten page. The room is immediately filled with the soft, hot smell of gas.
Jen sits down next to it on a stool her mother embroidered the top of that her father has kept, no snack or drink for her, just watching him. Waiting.
What do you say to somebody when you know they will be your last words to them? You just … you don’t, you don’t leave, do you? Anxiety rushes over Jen like the fire her father has just lit, making her hot. She was never going to leave. How could she possibly leave him all alone?
And what if this could stop it? Somehow?
‘But you didn’t have another child,’ she says to her father, instead of cutting short the conversation, instead of leaving, instead of finding a way to say goodbye to him, now and also for eternity.
‘Never a right time, and then too late,’ he says simply. He opens the bottle of beer with a hiss. ‘The law – it takes so much, doesn’t it? You give it an inch … I always thought Kelly had the right idea, never letting work in so much.’
‘Who knows what ideas Kelly has,’ Jen says tightly, and her father looks embarrassed.
‘He’s got the right idea,’ he says softly. A strange and prescient feeling settles over Jen. Almost like … almost like, if her father knew he was going to die, he might tell her something. A key. A piece of the puzzle. A slice of deathbed wisdom that she could use. A side of the prism currently still in darkness.
They lapse into silence, the gas fire the only noise, a kind of rushing, like distant rain. It pumps out such a fierce heat, the air above it shimmers. She could stay here for ever, in her father’s quaint old living room, while a garlic bread cooks.
And that’s when it happens. Jen watches it pass over her father like a storm cloud. Peanuts and beer right next to him, just like they said. Sweat is the first sign, a milky dusting of it across his forehead, like he’s been out in drizzle. ‘Oh, wow,’ he says, puffing air into his cheeks. ‘Jen?’
Jen feels hot with panic. She didn’t think it would be like this. She thought it would be sudden.
He brings a hand to his stomach, wincing, eyes on her. ‘Jen – I don’t feel good,’ he says, his voice anxious, like Todd’s when he was little and fell over, looked to her first to see how he felt; his maternal mirror. And now here she is, at the end of her father’s life, their roles reversed.