AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And I sit here and I know that none of this is happening.
I know that he is still watching the television with his feet on the table, I know that she is already talking on the telephone, that she will not mention what I have just said.
I listen to the answerphone message from Sarah, and I think about calling her back.
I realise how pleased I am that she’s called me for a reason, not just because it’s been a long time and she thinks she should.
I wonder what she means by met somebody, who it is, why she wants to tell me.
Perhaps I can tell her my news in return, now that I’ve spoken the words aloud, now that it’s a reality outside myself, perhaps now it can just get easier and easier.
I could just drop it into the conversation, like exciting news, like by the way guess what I’m pregnant I’m having a baby.
We could talk about baby clothes and cute names, meet up and go browsing round Mothercare, pretend that there was nothing strange or frightening happening at all.
She could wind me up about childbirth, make jokes about gas and epidurals and yelling give me some fucking morphine.
Except that she couldn’t because she doesn’t know anything about it, not really, not anything more than she’s seen on television, not anything more than I do.
But I thought my mother would know what to say, and she didn’t, she didn’t say anything.
She’s never said anything to me, not really, not when it mattered.
Our conversations always seemed to be functional, brief discussions about how something was to be arranged, a passing enquiry about a state of health.
She never told me things about her life, what was happening at work, who she saw at the shops, stories about her growing up and meeting my dad and moving down south.
It surprises me now that I took it for granted, knowing so little about her, knowing so little about her family and where she came from.
And she didn’t ask me questions either, she never used to ask where I was going, or who I was going with, or what time I was coming back, and if I mentioned it to my friends they’d say I was lucky but I wasn’t so sure.
She never asked me how my schoolwork was going, not even when I was steamed up in the thick of exams, she seemed to take it for granted that I went out in the morning and came back in the afternoon and that was all there was to it.
I asked her once, sarcastic and spiteful, I said how about you mum, how did you get on at school, how did your exams go, did you do enough revision, did your mum help you?
And my dad said that’s enough now, leave it now, turning to look at me, reaching a hand out to meet my mother.
That was all he’d needed to say, he only spoke like that occasionally and when he did I knew that I had done something very wrong and it was time to leave the room.
And I think about the question my mother didn’t ask.
Do you know who the?
I imagine her asking it just like that, hesitating, unable to say the word, leaving the sentence unfinished.
I don’t know what I would have said if she had asked, I don’t know if I want her to know who it was.
Or perhaps it’s more that I don’t want to acknowledge his part in it, to give him a role by giving him a name
.
I think about him, and I think about the word father, and it feels like the wrong word to use.
He was there, and what happened turned into what there is now, but there is nothing between us, there is nothing between him and what is inside me.
He was there, and that is all, and I don’t feel as though I should give him the place of father for that.
I wonder what he would think, if he knew.
