Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

He watched me for a second or two, then he grabbed the bag from me and began hauling the contents out again. ‘It’s my book.’

‘I know, but I can’t publish it for you because I’m not a publisher.’

‘My book’s important, I’m telling you. It’s taken me a long time, these things take time to do properly.’ His voice was rising. We tussled briefly with the bag, me putting in and him taking out. The bacon rind dropped in a limp ringlet on the counter. ‘I’m not stupid, don’t make that mistake. I’m as good as anyone else and I was born here, not like these blacks and the rest of them.’

Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.

Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’

Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.

Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters . Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’

He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’

‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’

I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.

‘What do you think of it?’

Penny gave me a grateful thumbs-up. She wedged the handset under her ear and reached for the order book and work diary. ‘Yes, Quintin, I’m sure we can do that for you.’

‘It’s nice,’ Colin admitted, rubbing the green interior with a heavy thumb.

‘We could make you a beautiful case like this, and you can put your recipes and pictures in it, and then your mum can show it to all her friends.’

‘Can I choose the colour?’

‘Of course.’

‘And it would have to have my name on the lid, not this Neil’s.’

‘Of course.’

‘Any colour?’

‘Any colour you like, Colin.’ Including sky blue pink.

He expressed a preference for red. He left his bag of papers with us, stressing that it was to be kept in the safe whenever we were not actually working on it, and promised that he would call in again tomorrow to see how the job was progressing. Penny hung up, after asking after Quintin’s wife and the Farrelly children.

‘Christ on a bike,’ Leo muttered as the three of us raised our eyebrows at each other. ‘Anyone want a coffee?’

Jack was sitting in his armchair again when I got home from work, apparently absorbed in Neighbours . He looked dirtier, if that were possible, and even more exhausted than he had done yesterday. An empty plate blobbed with jam and dusted with toast crumbs rested on the floor beside him. It was Lola’s last night at home. She was ironing, also with her eyes fixed on the television. The forgiving winter gloom that usually hid the worst of our semi-basement kitchen had given way to a watery brightness that announced summer and showed up all the layers of dust as well as the peeling wallpaper. The place needed a spring-clean. The whole house needed a spring-clean and a new stair carpet wouldn’t have done any damage either. I let my bag drop to the floor.

‘Good day, Mum?’ Lola asked.

‘Er, not bad, thanks. What about you?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Jack?’

Just the way that he shrugged his shoulders made me want to yell at him. I took a deep breath and began rummaging in the freezer. It was going to have to be defrost du jour tonight, because I didn’t have the energy to start a meal from scratch.

As soon as Neighbours was over Jack removed himself upstairs. I sat on the sofa and watched the remainder of Channel 4’s News, and when Lola finished her ironing (leaving a pile of Jack’s and mine untouched) she brought over two glasses of red wine and joined me. She kicked off her shoes and curled up so her head lay against my shoulder and I stroked her shiny hair.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, as I always did when she was about to go off. I did rely on her, more than I should have done, for companionship but also for the lovely warmth of her life that I enjoyed at second hand – the parties and nights out clubbing that she’d describe in tactfully edited detail the next day, the long phone conversations, the friends who dropped in and lounged around the kitchen, and the certainty that anything was possible that seemed to govern them all.

‘I know, Mum. I’ll miss you too. But I’ll be back for the weekend in a couple of weeks.’

‘So you will. Is there any more of that red? How does he seem to you, the last couple of days?’

‘He’ was always Jack in Lola’s and my conversations.

‘Very quiet.’

‘But he’s been making less fuss about school the last couple of days. I think maybe the worst’s over.’

Lola said, ‘I hope so.’

Jack ate most of the dinner, finishing Lola’s portion even after he had devoured his own second helping, then wiping his plate clean with chunks of bread torn off the loaf.

Lola tried to tease him about his appetite. ‘Hey, bruv. Is school food getting even worse?’

‘I was hungry, okay? What’s wrong with that?’

‘I never said there was anything wrong. Sorry I asked.’

After dinner Jack retreated again and Lola went out to meet some friends. She had left the ironing board folded but hadn’t put it away. I did the obligatory brief two-step with it as if it were a reluctant dancing partner and finally managed to set it horizontally on its metal strut. I took the first of Jack’s school shirts out of the basket and began pressing a sleeve. The steamy smell of clean laundry instantly filled my head. The olfactory nerve is the largest of the twelve cranial nerves; smell is the swiftest as well as the most powerful of the senses. My eyes stung, then filled up with tears and as I bent my head they dripped on to Jack’s shirt, making translucent islands of damp in the white polycotton. I finished the shirt and began another but I was crying so hard I couldn’t see properly. I hadn’t been able to cry for weeks on end and now I was sobbing over the scent of clean laundry just because it reminded me of the way home should smell, of cleanliness and care and therefore security.

‘The ironing? Don’t do the bloody ironing,’ Mel said when I called her.

I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I didn’t properly understand the tears, that was the worst part of it. If I had been thinking of Ted, it would have been different. But in the last month whenever he had come into my head it was with a numbness that cut me off even from the relief of missing and loving him. I thought with dry precision instead about our life apart.

‘Are you there? Sadie?’

‘Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. I really don’t know what this is all about.’ I could hear Mel at the other end lighting up a Marlboro and exhaling.

‘Your dad died. You’re grieving for him.’

I was going to say, I almost did say, ‘It’s not like that.’

Mel had told me how bereft she felt when her adored father died and that wasn’t how it was with me.