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We’re on our second movie of the afternoon when I decide to angle the conversation.
“I can’t wait for you to meet my family. Just a shame I can’t meet yours.”
“It’ll be great. I can’t wait to see how well you get on with your sister. She sounds like she shares your sense of humour.”
“She does.” I pause, then try again. “How well did you get on with your grandad? Did he share yours?”
“Yeah, he did.”
Such a sharp, short answer.
“Was he into fitness as much as you are? Was he jogging along the hills with you and doing cardio?”
“No. Unfortunately he wasn’t into fitness at all. He may have been around a lot longer if he was.”
I keep going.
“That must have been so hard for you, losing him.”
“It was.”
His attention is on the screen, or pretending to be. He laughs at a joke one of the characters says, but his laugh is over the top.
“What was your mum like?” I ask him. “That must have been a terrible thing too, losing her so young. How old were you when she passed away?”
“Twelve.”
I try to imagine him as a twelve-year-old boy, with the pain of losing his mother to a heart disease. It makes me feel way more sick than a hangover ever could.
I wonder what his mum looked like and if she shared the beautiful green of his eyes. It hasn’t occurred to me before, actually, but there isn’t a single picture of his mum or his grandad in this place. I haven’t seen a single hint of a memento, or a photo of him alongside anyone else. Only of him on his business profile.
I leave it a few minutes before I ask another question.
“Moving from London to Malvern must have been quite a challenge. How did you cope with it?”
“I survived.” He turns his attention to me rather than the TV screen. “Don’t think I don’t feel how you’re pushing, Cass. If you have any deeper questions, just ask them. Don’t beat about the bush.”
I didn’t expect his response to be a direct confrontation. I feel so nervous when I speak.
“I’m not trying to push. I’m just trying to get a picture of what life was like growing up for you. You never talk about it.”
“No. Because I don’t want to.”
Again, so direct.
“Sure, ok. I’m sorry.”
I feel weak backing down, but I’m out of my depth.
His eyes are fierce now, shoulders rigid as he shifts away from me.
“My childhood was shit. My mother never loved me. I’m not surprised either, since she didn’t have a clue who my father was. He could have been any one of the many loser cunts she was dating at the time. She’d slam shitty microwave meals down in front of me every night and leave me to eat them on my own. She was an ignorant cow who smoked in the house constantly and drank vodka every night.”
Fuck, I feel floored. My eyes widen, knocked sideways.
“I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be,” he says. “This is why I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to see pity in people’s eyes.”
“It’s not pity,” I reassure him. “It’s sympathy.”
“I don’t give a shit whether it’s sympathy or pity. When you tell people things like that they imagine you as the weak little kid who couldn’t do anything but live with a mother who was a loser. I don’t want to be seen as anything to do with that. It made me who I am today, so on some fucked up level what she did was good for me.”
I don’t know how to reply to that, so I don’t. I try to hide the sympathy in my expression, because so much of it slots into place for me now. That’s what he’s holding so deep.
“Do you want to know about my grandad next?” he asks but doesn’t give me time to answer. “Want to know how shit it felt to move to a place I didn’t know, to live with a man I didn’t know? I thought Grandad was great, but it took him a long time to feel that way about me. I had to earn my value in his eyes, and I worked damn fucking hard to do it.”
“You did a great job.” I smile a genuine smile. “You’re an incredible man.”
“Thanks. I learnt early that pushing yourself leads to rewards, and valuing yourself comes through those rewards. The more you seek and the harder you push, the more you get back in return.”
I don’t want to push him anymore, but he keeps on going.
“I just hope I instil that in our kids when we have them. I want them to learn the lessons I learnt with guidance, rather than let them scrabble around through childhood, trying to learn those lessons on their own.”
I take his hand and squeeze it, but he’s still rigid.
