Father’s Music. Dermot Bolger

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       FOUR

      IT IS JUST BEFORE my sixth birthday. I remember this because my thoughts are about presents as I rush from school among a flock of children. Now, walking with my mother, I’m anxious to get home to where Gran will have lunch ready and ensure that I finish two glasses of milk before being allowed to watch the children’s programmes.

      But my mother takes a meandering route as if prolonging our journey. She says nothing to draw me into her brooding world, even when I ask for a story. We reach a footbridge across railway tracks and climb up to look across at wintry back gardens where fluorescent lights shine in kitchens. I tug at her hand, but she waits there. Then the train comes, all noise and slipstream and unwashed roofs of carriages. I’m frightened. I know the train cannot hurt us, thundering beneath our feet. It’s my mother I am scared of or scared for. It’s the way she watches the train. She wants to leave. That much I understand. She wants to leave Harrow and Gran and Grandad Pete and maybe she wants to leave me.

      Or worse, perhaps she wants to bring me with her on those speeding carriages, away from my dolls and Grandad Pete’s piggyback to bed, from my shelf of stories and the cherry-blossom petals against my window in springtime. There would only be my mother and I travelling alone, past towns without names, skirting forbidding forests where bears roam. I start crying and finally she looks down. She isn’t like mothers in stories or those my classmates have. It’s Gran I run to when I hurt my knee. Yet even Gran tells me to call her mother. ‘I want to go home,’ I say, ‘I want my Gran.’ I pull at her hand, knowing that if I wait for another train I’ll never see her again.

      I woke sweating from that dream, the morning after meeting Luke. After sixteen years, my stomach was queasy and I instinctively checked my knickers, remembering how Gran would change the wet sheets while my mother comforted me and I pretended not to remember what my dream was about. How long was it since I had last dreamt of that? Certainly not since my mother’s death, even among the myriad dreams I’d had about her after moving into the flat. Dreams where her face hovered among the blouses in my wardrobe, or she stared up from the water in the sink when I bent to wash my hair. In each dream her eyes were the same as during the bedside vigils before she died, disappointed and hinting at unfinished business. My mother’s greatest weapons were helplessness and silence. Throughout my childhood, watching her breakdowns re-occur, they had left me feeling perpetually guilty, like I had to compensate for my birth having irrevocably altered her life.

      For an hour that morning I stood under the shower, scrubbing at my flesh, but I didn’t feel so much soiled by Luke as by myself. I felt caught between conflicting emotions, repulsed by what had happened, yet reliving the excitement of that hotel. I had been so drunk that the memories now held the same dreamlike quality as standing on that railway bridge with my mother.

      I honestly believed I’d never see Luke again, or if I did it would be by chance in a glimpse on some crowded escalator. By then he would just be a vaguely familiar face puzzling me until I remembered and turned away. I had been crazy to allow myself to get so drunk. I said nothing to Roxy and Honor and I knew Garth said little about what happened to him. But Honor claimed he was more withdrawn these days as he came and left at odd hours.

      Fragments of Luke’s character kept coming back to me during the following week, details which didn’t fit together so that it seemed I was remembering two distinct personalities. He’d been a shark certainly, but maybe that was the secret of sharks – not surface confidence but how they manoeuvred you into believing you alone had glimpsed the vulnerablity beneath their cocksure demeanour. Used cars, wall tiles or young women, we were all commodities the same techniques could be adapted to procure or sell. If I hadn’t glanced back, leaving the hotel room, I might have convinced myself this was true. But my final picture of Luke was so desolate that what stayed with me most strongly was the sense of an ache within him.

      If such pain existed, it was his problem not mine. I stayed in on the following Sunday night, trying to put him out of my mind. I might have felt a grim satisfaction at him waiting in that hotel, but I’d no idea if he would show up. If I had got so drunk, how much further gone must Luke have been to risk such an encounter? There again, was I even sure his family were present? I was certain of nothing, except his first name. He hadn’t bothered to ask mine and there was no way he could trace me. Yet later that evening when the hallway was empty, I lifted the receiver off the pay phone so it couldn’t ring.

      But the meal I cooked tasted lousy and there was no life in the rented film. I felt listless, crossing to the bay window to lean against the glass and gaze past the narrow garden at the street. I wondered if he was waiting, still hoping I might come. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be there. I had crept downstairs too often as a teenager to check that the phone was working, after giving my number and trust away, to now feel any qualms about the fake lives I spun for other men.

      This was different though. I had made no promises to Luke and it seemed crazy to contemplate such a risk again. But I was stung by an irrational guilt, even though I remembered his fingers toying with my neck. Luke was too old for me and I didn’t mess with married men. I was ashamed of the way I’d looked at his wife. It wasn’t her fault if she embodied Gran’s dreams. But it was her happiness which I had most resented, for reminding me of how empty my life seemed.

      I didn’t feel like being alone now, yet I didn’t fancy Roxy and Honor’s wildness either. I didn’t know what I wanted, although I never had and didn’t see why I had to. I had sworn that my life would never be black and white or narrowed down to a single job or man. But, as I stepped back to stare at the reflection of myself and the room in the window, my flat looked so shabby and the life I half-led within it utterly shallow. Was this how I really wanted to live? Hungry for two days every week while waiting for the giro, occasionally waitressing or taking temporary jobs in offices I couldn’t wait to escape from? Was I living for myself or still playing games? I remembered as a child the thrill of independence I had felt every time I disappointed their expectations. When I’d left home there was nowhere I hadn’t planned to visit, a street-wise girl travelling alone with no ties. Thirteen miles in thirteen months was nothing to be proud of. The flat was cold. The rented video fizzled out and now, with a click, began to rewind itself. I decided to return it. I knew it could have waited until tomorrow but it was an excuse to escape from that room.

      I kept walking after taking the film back, СКАЧАТЬ