Caryl Phillips - In the Falling Snow

‘All right, Dad?’

He pats his son on the shoulder, then squeezes. ‘I’m fine, son. Just fine.’

He waits on the pavement outside the Cineplex for Laurie to emerge from the toilets. While they were watching the film it grew dark, and a little chilly, but for some reason the streetlights now seem unnaturally bright. He blinks hard, realising that he is having some difficulty adjusting his vision to the glare of the night, and he wonders if the many hours that he has recently spent at the computer screen have affected his eyes. He turns up the collar on his leather jacket and thinks that it might be best if they simply make a dash for Pizza Express. He had toyed with the idea of taking Laurie to a Greek or French restaurant, somewhere semi-formal so that at least the two of them might have somewhere quiet to talk, but a part of him knows that Laurie will regard any restaurant with cloth napkins and two forks as a pretentious dump. As he waits with the cluster of nervous smokers, he suspects that a longer walk to a proper restaurant would also irritate Laurie, whose patience seemed to be wearing thin for much of the second half of the Will Smith film. Not that there had been much choice, for it was either this, a cartoon featuring talking penguins, or an Italian art movie that looked a little bit too risqué, as he wasn’t ready to start watching bedroom scenes with his son. Predictably, the Will Smith film had been little more than a special-effect-laden action feature, with the obligatory light-skinned romance, and he sympathised with Laurie when he noticed him take out his mobile phone and furtively begin texting. As he glances at his watch, he imagines that his son is most likely in the toilets engaged in exactly the same type of clandestine communication.

Pizza Express turns out to be a good choice. Laurie asks for some extra breadsticks while he waits for his ‘special’ pizza, and he seems happy that his father is letting him drink a small bottle of Italian beer. ‘Thanks, Dad.’ He slops it quickly into the glass tumbler.

‘Does your mother let you drink beer? Or maybe wine. You know, with a meal.’

‘Are you losing it? She’d have a fit if she thought I was out boozing with you.’

‘Well you’re not exactly boozing, are you? Just a bottle of beer.’

‘But it’s more than she’s gonna let me have.’

‘Well, maybe she has her reasons for it.’ He looks at Laurie, who shrugs his shoulders and takes another gulp of his beer. ‘You know, she told me about you getting wasted last Christmas with your mates.’ Laurie lowers his eyes and swirls the beer in the glass. ‘Listen, it’s all well and good drinking too much, but the real problem isn’t the headache, or the puking, it’s the lines you cross because your judgement is off.’ Laurie looks up at him and he can see frustration in his son’s eyes. ‘The point is, it’s the things you do and say when you’ve been drinking that usually come back to haunt you, because they’re not always things that you mean. Am I making sense?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Listen, what’s done is done, but all I want to say is don’t disrespect your mother by coming in drunk, all right. She was pretty upset about what happened last Christmas.’

‘Is that the end of my lesson, then?’

‘You think this is a joke?’

His son stares at him, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

‘No, I don’t think it’s a joke.’

‘Keep control, son. Keep it together. There are enough people out there trying to knock you out of your stride. Trust me, you don’t need to be helping them.’

Both pizzas seem too large for the plates. He understands that ‘value for money’ is supposed to be the special feature of Pizza Express although, to him, it looks like small plates are their real speciality. He watches as his son eats quickly, tearing at the pizza with his hands rather than cutting it neatly into slices, and he realises that there are some things that he cannot talk to Laurie about. It is probably too late.

‘So you have no idea of what you would like for a present after your exams?’

‘You mean after passing my exams, ’cause you’re not giving me anything if I fail them, right?’

‘You’ll pass. I’m not worried. I thought maybe a trip to the Caribbean.’

‘The Caribbean?’ Laurie pushes a particularly large piece of pizza into his mouth, and he speaks through the food as he chews. ‘Why there?’

‘What do you mean “why there?”? Your grandparents come from there. Are you saying you’re not interested?’

‘Whatever.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? You’re supposed to know something about where you come from. Or at least be curious. I’m not asking you to go and live there or anything, but at least just take a look. It’s the Caribbean, Laurie. How bad can it be?’

‘Well how come you’ve never been there if it’s so important?’

‘I suppose a part of me was waiting until you were old enough so we could go together.’

‘Your dad doesn’t want to know, does he?’

‘I’ve already explained to you. He’s very private about everything.’

‘Weirdo, more like. Sitting up there in that house by himself.’

‘Come on, that’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair? Am I lying?’

He stares at his son and understands that, from his point of view, his grandfather must appear to be a somewhat eccentric man. However, this is not a topic he feels comfortable discussing with Laurie. The one time he took Laurie to meet him, his father simply sat and looked at his twelve-year-old grandson, before abruptly picking up his pork-pie hat and leaving for the pub without saying a word. Annabelle had warned him that she did not want their son to be as upset by his father as she had been on the one occasion that he had introduced her to him. After they had moved to London, the theatrical agency that Annabelle worked for had informed her that they had a play opening at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and asked her if she might be free to view it. When Annabelle told him that she would have to travel to the north, he realised that he could go with her and take this opportunity to introduce her and, if truth be told, reintroduce himself to his father after many years of estrangement. However, when he and Annabelle presented themselves at his father’s house, the stubborn older man retreated into a silence which resisted Annabelle’s quietly expressed appeals for there to be communication and, as she put it, ‘fence-mending’. On the train back to London, a pregnant Annabelle sat and stared out of the window with the occasional tear rolling down her face, and although he found this uncomfortable, it was better than the anger he had been expecting. By the time they reached London, Annabelle seemed to have pulled herself together again.

‘He’s your problem, Keith. You’ll have to sort things out between the two of you before he ever accepts me, so I’m going to make the effort not to take it personally. At least I tried, right?’ She looked across at him. ‘Right?’

He helped her down on to the platform, and then picked up both of their bags. ‘I know you tried, and I’m sorry. I told you he was out of order.’

Twelve years later, his father gave him and his son the same silent treatment when they stopped to see him after he had taken Laurie to visit the National Railway Museum in York. After looking at them both for some minutes, and then muttering something under his breath, his father simply picked up his hat and walked out of his own house. Laurie seemed to deal with the rejection better than Annabelle, but five years later, given the unpleasantness of the encounter, he can’t argue with his son’s description of his father as a ‘weirdo’. He watches as Laurie pushes the final piece of pizza into his mouth and then wipes his fingers on the crested serviette.