Claire Allan - The Liar’s Daughter

She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again. The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.

‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for information that I’m still trying to process.

‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.

Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.

‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.

One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her thumb.

Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father. Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.

‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’

That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway for anything? He walked in and out of my life, leaving damage in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.

‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.

Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back at her. She understands me in a world where it feels like no one else does.

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’

‘Or maybe it would help you find your own peace and move on a bit?’ Stella asks. ‘But, you know there’s no right or wrong in this? You do what you want to do. If you want to see him, I’ll come with you. If you want to tell him to go to hell, I’ll hold your hand while you do it.’

I brush away a second pesky tear, take a deep breath. I’ll be damned if he can force me to make a decision like this quickly. Who does he think he is to get his mousey little minion to call me and ask me to come over?

‘Is there much wine left in that bottle?’ I sit back and ask Stella.

‘Not much,’ she says. ‘But there’s a second bottle in the fridge and I’m sure there’s another bottle of something in the rack.’

‘Okay,’ I say, sniffing and sitting up straight. ‘That dinner we spent all of fifteen minutes cooking is going to be absolutely ruined if we don’t eat it now. So, I say we eat. I don’t want to waste any more energy today thinking about that man.’

I was an only child and I was deliriously happy in my only-child status. I was never lonely. I had lots of friends. We lived in a busy street in the Creggan Estate – a proudly working-class area on the west bank of the River Foyle.

There was always someone to play with. Come rain or shine we would be riding up and down the streets on our bikes, or on scooters or roller-skates. We would play ‘padsy’ or ‘tig’ and occasionally a gang of us would disappear en masse into one of our friends’ houses to watch a movie and eat crisps and biscuits.

I’d seen how friends with a houseful of siblings didn’t get the same treats that I did. Or the same attention from their parents, either. I was the apple of both of my parents’ eyes – but at heart I was always a daddy’s girl.

Right up until the day he left.

At thirteen years old, I experienced the worst, most painful, heartbreak of my life.

It didn’t make sense. I thought my daddy loved me. I was his special girl. I trusted him never to hurt me. But then he left – on a Thursday afternoon. I came back from school to find my mother perching on the edge of the sofa, a cigarette in her hand and a tautness to her posture that screamed that something was wrong. Being thirteen, my first thought was that I was in trouble. I braced myself for her to launch into some rant about my messy bedroom or the three pounds I’d nicked from her purse that morning. I expected her to use my full name and though my heart sank at the thought of the rollicking I was about to receive, I was already preparing my best eye-roll and ‘But, Mammy …’ response.

‘Sit down, pet,’ she said.

It was the ‘pet’ that threw me. She was hardly going to give out yards to me if she was using ‘pet’. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.

‘Look, there’s no easy way to tell you this, Ciara, so I’m going to come right out and say it. I want you to know that I love you very much. And your daddy loves you, too. You’re not to doubt that, ever. Okay?’

There was a strange buzzing sound in my ear. I could feel something build up inside of me, a burst of adrenaline that made me want to fight or run. I dug my fingernails as hard as I could into the palm of my hand to try to ground myself. I’d seen enough corny movies to guess where this was going.

‘Daddy has moved out,’ she said, the shake in her voice belying her true feelings. ‘It was a mutual decision and it’s just that we don’t make each other happy any more.’

‘Where has he gone?’ I asked. I needed to know where I could see him. When I could see him.

My mother’s face coloured. She sagged momentarily before straightening her back again. ‘He’s gone to live with a friend,’ she said.

Of course it wasn’t long before I found out that friend was another woman, and that woman had a daughter.

My father had left us to go and be with another family. A family he’d known for less than a year. A family with a daughter for him to love.

My teenage heart hurt so much that I cried until I threw up.

It’s two days since Heidi called and I’m now standing, with Stella, outside the front door of my father’s house. It’s less than ten minutes’ walk away from our riverside apartment, but it might as well have been another country for all these years.

I have avoided the shops I know he frequents. Stayed away from the library where he used to work, and where he still liked to spend his mornings drinking strong tea from polystyrene cups and reading over the day’s papers.

He holds court there, talks to everyone who comes in. Shares his stories of old Derry and snippets of local history. It’s laughable for the man who barely looked at a book when he lived at home with my mother and me. Once he left, he transformed himself. Discarded his working-class persona entirely, lost himself in books. Went back to college. The few old friends he still deigned to spend time with gave him the nickname ‘The Professor’ because he was considered so learned. He enjoyed feeling superior to them. He enjoyed revelling in their new-found respect for him.

Learned and respected. It galls me to this day.

I feel Stella give my gloved hand a little reassuring squeeze.

I see lights on through the stained-glass panelling of the front door. It might be the middle of the day but it’s dull and dark, and January has us firmly in its grip. The darkness is as oppressive as this house looming over us. Semi-detached. With a big back garden. There was a wooden swing set there when I first visited all those years ago – a sure sign of wealth, along with a phone in the hall that didn’t have a lock on it to stop anyone from running up a big bill.

I’d felt intimidated then, but that was nothing compared to how I feel now.

‘I’m not sure I can go in,’ I say to Stella.