Graham Swift - Last Orders

Her transistor radio's going. Round, round, get around, I get around... She moves her shoulders to the beat like she's dancing but sitting down. I knock again on the half-open door. She didn't hear me the first time, what with the dryer going and the radio, so I've stood there for maybe half a minute, holding the mug of coffee.

Carol's down the shops, Sue's washing her hair. Saturday morning. And any second I'll be off myself. The regular run: the baccy shop, the betting shop, the boozer. The cup of coffee's a way of smoothing my exit, but it's also a way of spying on my daughter.

She looks round, smiles, tosses her hair again, this time just for the sake of tossing it, and I say to myself as I said for the first time years ago when she was hardly out of her pram, She's a flirt, she damn well knows how to flirt. She flirts with her own father, she knows when she's doing it and it means she wants something.

She says, 'Thanks,' turning down the radio, and curls her fingers round the mug and takes a quick sip, blowing first across the top. Then she puts down the mug and starts combing her hair and looks at me, suspicious, like I'm up to no good, and says, 'Off down the Coach?' It's not a question that needs asking since I'm off down the Coach most Saturdays, but she asks it anyway to catch me off balance, which is another reason why I know she's after something. And when I make the old joke - 'The Coach won't come to me' - she smiles but she frowns at the same time, there's a little hard pucker just above her nose, which makes me think it's not something small.

She drops the smile and sips her coffee again. 'Well don't go just yet.' She takes a deep slow breath. She holds the coffee in her lap and looks into it, hair tumbling, like she's making a wish, like she's saying her prayers, and I think, Christ. I almost say it aloud. Remembering Sally, remembering how Lenny came to me: 'Raysy, I need a winner, quick.' Remembering the name of the horse that won at Kempton: Bold Buccaneer, eleven to two. She looks up. She can read my face like a results board. 'No, it isn't that! she says, almost with a laugh, almost with relief. 'It's not that, it's something else.'

Then she pats the bed for me to sit down, the little narrow single bed she's slept in since she was six years old.

She said, 'He's looking for his roots.'

Carol said, 'What are they when they're at home?'

She said, 'His ancestors, his origins. He wants to trace his family, he wants to go to where they came from. A lot of them do it, if they're over here for a bit.'

All looking for their roots.

And it was a handy thing that his lot started out from some village at the far end of Somerset, because that way it made a neat holiday, it made a neat little jaunt to the West Country. They could take in Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, Cheddar Gorge, and all those other sights an Aussie over here might care to see. With a tent and an old Ford Anglia he'd cadged off a mate. It was a handy thing that it was summer, her first summer in college, and times were changing, long hair, short skirts and short odds. Don't tell me that wasn't why he was here in the first place, origins my arse, and I don't suppose it would have mattered if they'd never found Little Dunghole, or whatever it was called, so long as they found a few fields of long grass to roll around in together.

We'd never have said yes if it wasn't for his bleeding roots.

But you had to give permission on account of it was the permissive age, never mind what your own folks might have said, your own ancestors.

Can't all have it all, can we, Ray boy? Gee-up! I see Daisy Dixon's getting spliced.

But when they were gone I wished them well. I wished I was them. I thought of them travelling across England. Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, over the hills and far away. I pictured them putting up their tent and curling up together with the smell of grass and only a thin fold of fabric between them and the night. I could tell you some things, girl, about camping out under the stars, desert nights'd freeze your bollocks off. And, whether they ever did or not, I couldn't help imagining them finding some tucked-away churchyard, green and quiet, and looking at the names on the gravestones.

It took a war to make me travel, to make me see the world, if that's what you could call it. But there was him having hopped all the way from Sydney to Somerset, and there was her sharing the journey with him, out on the road, and there was me, still living in Bermondsey, still sitting on the old man's yard to keep Charlie Dixon happy. The boozer, the betting shop, the bus to Blackfriars. And in over fifteen years I hadn't taken Carol anywhere.

I said, 'What's the betting that car packs up on them?'

She said, 'What's the betting she conies back pregnant?'

Her face was all fixed and hard, like it would be all my fault, all my doing because it wasn't her who ever said yes in the first place.

Yes, you two, why don't you just go and run off together?

I don't know which came first: whether it was her daughter growing up and having a whole lot of things she never had that made her act like a woman who'd made a wrong choice, or whether she'd been thinking that, anyway, for years, but shoved it to the back of her mind for the sake of bringing up Sue. She was forty years old, knocking forty-one. She hadn't wanted another kid, one was plenty Sometimes I'd think she'd never wanted Sue. Susie was for me. Sometimes I'd think, It aint a fair world, when you think of Amy.

She said, 'So what's the betting, Lucky Johnson? Why don't you put your money on that?'

She takes another gulp of coffee and there's still that pucker in her forehead, and I think, If she hasn't got one in the oven then what's the problem and why's she having so much trouble finding words? Then it's as though I kick myself inside, a big kick, so I almost give a jolt right there on the bed, because I see what's coming, plain as day, and I should have seen it coming long before, more fool me, and I think she sees that I see it, because it's then that she starts in, as if I've given her the all-clear. She flashes those brown eyes she knows how to flash and says, 'Dad.'

She says Andy's going back to Sydney in the winter and she wants to go with him too, to live with him there. She wants to go and live in Australia.

More fool me. Give 'em an inch. First they drive to Somerset, then they want to fly to Sydney. I think, This is one Saturday I aint going to get down the Coach.

She puts her hand on my arm and gives it a squeeze as if she's trying to say that, just for the moment, it's something between me and her only - Andy boy don't come into it -it's something she and I have got to work out. Like if I said no, she'd accept.

But the one thing I don't say, like Carol wouldVe said if it'd been just up to her, is 'No. No, girl. No again.'

I say, 'Aint you got a home here?' But I know that's a poor start even as I say it because all she has to say, if put to it, is 'I'm eighteen and you don't own me.' But she don't say it, she just gives me the look of someone who could say it.

I say, 'What about college?'

Which isn't such a small point, it's not such a small point that Ray Johnson's daughter is going to college and means to be a teacher. The old man would have been proud.

She says, 'There's colleges in Australia, there's teachers in Australia.' She looks at me as if she's ready and waiting if I want to go further down this line of argument, because she knows it aint exactly through my example that she's done what she's done. It's always been a sore point with her, though she doesn't bring it up any more, like she's started to give her own dad up for lost, that I could've found a better use for those brains I'm supposed to have.

'Got it up here,' Jack would say, 'got it up here, Raysy has.'