I ask her what I can do to make it right, and in return she asks me questions about my dad, about what he did to me that had me so rattled. I try, I really do, but each time she scrunches her brow, withdraws from me, or repeats my words back to me in a patronising tone, I internally retreat from her.
Rather than shrink this hole that’s opened between us, it widens and deepens. She sees me as an “attention seeker,” and I see her as an extension of my dad’s power over me. He makes me feel shit about myself, and now, via this . . .associationshe’s had with him, she does too. But I tell her about him in the hope she’ll understand.
My dad would come back into my life in a manner that suggested he’d never been gone. He’d come through the front door with a takeaway coffee and a newspaper underneath his arm as if he’d only nipped to the shops, not vanished for months.
Every time, my mum wept at the sight of him, and he scooped her up into a hug. The minute he came back through the door, he’d change things. Smalls things. The position of the sofas in the living room, the plates in the cupboard, the cutlery in the drawer, the detergent my mum used. He’d swap the hand soap in the bathroom to Pears with its distinctive smell, and convince Mum to stop buying the cereal I liked and get his favourite Bran Flakes instead.
But Keegan would say,“You don’t get on with your dad because he likes Bran Flakes and you don’t?”
These small acts of control my dad could dismiss as childish temper tantrums. I didn’t like a male influence in the house. I was a mummy’s boy. But it wasn’t that. Every day, something changed. It unnerved me. It made me tense in my safe space.
He’d interrupt any programme I was watching and put on his own. He convinced my mum to sell my games console after showing her an article about how it can lead to mental health issues. He brought my bedtime forward by hours to give him and mum more alone time in the living room.
“Everyone had a bedtime, Freddie . . .”
He’d be waiting when I got home from school because he didn’t work. My dad lounged on the sofa, drinking beer and living off the benefits the government gave my mum for being asingle parent, while pretending to look for work. He’d drink her money dry. He’d sneer, and criticize, and although he never used verbal insults, he said enough to belittle me. But it was the look more than anything, the vindictive look that put worms in my stomach.
“All parents can be like that.”
My mum would dote on him. I’d become this thing in the way of their relationship. She’d forget to cook me dinner, or forget to pick me up from football practise, or forget I was even there. It was all about him, and I was sapping money away from them. They couldn’t go out for a meal because I needed new school shoes. They couldn’t go on holiday because I needed money for a school trip to the local museum. He’d show her lavish experiences and paradise islands on his phone before pointing across the room to me and the reason she couldn’t have them.
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
When he was angry, or frustrated, he’d bring the cricket ball out of his pocket. It would go up in the air over and over, with his catching it a drumming beat I could hear anywhere in the house. And then he’d ask me if I wanted to play. He’d get my mum to encourage me, and at this point she would’ve walked off a cliff if he asked her to. My dad would throw that ball at me as hard as he could, and I had no glove to soften the blow. It stung my palms, it jolted my wrist, and when I was unlucky enough to miss, it would strike my body with a dull thud.
Ithurt. He’d tell me to “man up,” and he’d throw it again.
“Did you ever tell him you didn’t like it?”
I might not have said the words “no” or “stop” or “I hate this,” but he knew. He broke my eye socket once, and when I told Keegan, it was the only time she looked horrified and covered her mouth, but then her brow contorted.
And I thought . . .here it comes. . .
She dropped her hand into her lap and asked, while her frown relaxed and smoothed her skin into an expression like relief.
“You mean when you were playing catch?”
Playing catch.
Playing.
And isn’t that the savage beauty in the way my dad operates. He sets me up every time, and people—good-hearted people like Keegan—fall into the trench he’s dug them and walk the way he wants.
“Like an accident?”
Like an accident, but not one. He terrorised me with that ball, but I’m aware of how ludicrous it sounds. My dad hurt me by spending time with me and playing catch. Yeah, I sound like a spoiled brat.
I skip to the part where my dad would leave unexpectedly, and my mum would go into mourning. She was a ghost in our house, and I’d cook and clean and look after her. I practically spoon-fed her some days, with the constant worry she might sink too far into the void and unalive herself. But bit by bit, day by day, she’d come back to me.
And then it was the food we wanted, the TV we wanted, the thingswewanted. She’d tell me I was the only man she needed in her life, and I’d hope and pray he’d never come back.
“You and your mum were close, then?”
That’s the assumption Keegan has made, the one he wanted her to. I’m a spoiled mummy’s boy who hated to share her attention. I told Keegan I was done talking about it, but rather than have some kind of comforting hug at the end of me baring my soul to her, she nodded, stood up, and went to microwave a pizza pocket for lunch.
I wonder how Ryker and Liam would’ve reacted had I told them all this. They knew something wasn’t right, their parents did too, but I feared they would’ve all fallen into the trap set bymy father. There’s no greater terror in my head than telling my best friends about my dad and having them react like Keegan has, and that’s with our friendship seemingly over.
I press into the sofa, and my mind goes back to the day Liam answered the door, and Keiron wrapped his arms around him.
