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There’s a red button at the top which simply says, ‘Feeling brave?’ – I’m not, but of course I click it anyway, just to see what it is.
Do you want to mark yourself as attending all events, and add all events to your calendar?
Oh, no. No, no, no. I quickly retreat. That’s the last thing I need.
I fill the coffee machine with water in one part, milk in another, and pop in one of the pods. It’s Christmas, so I pour a dash of cinnamon syrup into the bottom of my cup before letting the machine do all the hard work. When it’s ready, I remove my cup and hold the button to blast steam through the milk nozzle to clean it. It’s pretty noisy, so I don’t hear my mum walk up behind me. Eventually, I hear her talking to me.
‘What?’ I ask loudly over the machine.
‘I said your dad needs to talk to you,’ she shouts back. The machine stops halfway through her sentence, so she screams the latter half at me. I imagine her words would have echoed in my ears either way.
‘What?’ I ask softly.
‘Your dad is on the phone,’ she tells me again, holding out her phone for me to take from her. ‘Talk to him, I’ll go wake up Jess.’
Oh, God. This can’t be good. This can’t be good news at all. Is he dying? People don’t just ring up people they don’t speak to very often in the days before Christmas to deliver bad news, do they? Then again, his timing has always been off.
Needless to say, I am not Rowan May’s biggest fan. Sometimes, even having his surname feels like an emotional burden. It always baffles me that my mum kept his name, but if you ask her about it, she just shrugs, says that it’s been her name for years, she likes it more than her maiden name, Turner, and that she’ll be damned if she’s going to let him take everything from her. Of course, she doesn’t say that last part much any more. Mum doesn’t dwell on her split from my dad. They’re not close, they don’t speak or see each other – at least, I didn’t think they did. Obviously he’s called her today.
Jess and I were teenagers when Dad left Mum for someone else, so we were old enough to know what was going on, and to remember everything that happened in real time. Mum never encouraged us, but neither of us wanted anything to do with Dad after that. He’d been distant for a while; we all knew something was up. He was shouting at us all more and obviously the affair he was having cut into our father-daughter time. He gave us space after the split – perhaps a bit too much, because we were never really able to get our relationship back on track. We’re a bit more grown up about things now, I guess, which is to say we’re all just politely going through the motions. We swap cards on birthdays and stuff like that. He didn’t invite us to his wedding, to Gail when he married her last year, but they did have a sort of spur of the moment Las Vegas wedding (at least, that’s what he told us) so we haven’t even met Gail yet. Obviously we’re not in a rush to do so. She might not have been the ‘other woman’ who broke up our family, but if she thinks my dad is worth marrying, you’ve got to question her judgement.
I swallow hard as I take the phone from my mum.
‘Hello?’
‘Billie, love, hello,’ Dad replies.
‘Hello,’ I say again.
‘How are you?’ he asks brightly.
‘I’m okay,’ I reply. This is like pulling teeth. ‘How are you?’
‘Not good, I’m afraid,’ he says. Okay, here it is. ‘Things have been a bit chaotic.’
I pause, waiting for him to say more. Mum is upstairs with Jess, so I can’t even get a read on the situation from her.
‘They say everything happens in threes,’ Dad starts. ‘First of all, we found out Gail’s boys can’t make it for Christmas. They’re both married.’
He pauses for a second and I can’t help but wonder if this is a dig or a hint of something. Well, Dad, sorry Jess and I aren’t married, but we didn’t exactly grow up around the best example of marriage. Even though you couldn’t fault my mum, that only makes things worse. Even if you throw everything you’ve got into a marriage, it’s all for nothing, if the other person decides to throw it all away.
‘We though Michael and his wife and kids might make it, but they live in Carlisle, and Michael’s father-in-law had a heart attack yesterday. It’s awful,’ Dad insists. ‘We bought so much food.’
Yep, that’s the travesty. I feel like he’s bombarding me with small talk, stalling for time, maybe…
‘Gail was running a bath, when she went to take Michael’s call. She forgot about it and, long story short, the bath overflowed, soaked through the floor, and the bathroom is now in the kitchen.’
‘Wow,’ I blurt. Well, take it from someone who has spent the past year doing house jobs, that one is going to be expensive. ‘Will your insurance cover it?’
‘Ah, that’s the thing,’ Dad starts. ‘Last night was fine, we went out for dinner, someone was over from the insurance company first thing this morning and it seems like we’re going to need the dryers in for a few days. Which would be fine, except the bloke who came to check it out reckons we might have asbestos in the old floor tiles, that were under a second layer of flooring someone put down before we moved in. So that’s going to need testing and removing very carefully.’
‘Yeah, definitely,’ I reply, allowing myself to get a little more into the conversation, now it’s something I know about. I might not be married, but I had my own little patch of asbestos removed, shortly after we bought the house. What a weird thing to try to bond over.
‘The problem is, so close to Christmas, we’re having trouble finding somewhere to stay,’ Dad says.
I hear his words. Then I hear them again, when I realise what he’s about to say. No! Don’t say it, please don’t say it.
‘And then I remembered I have a daughter with a big, beautiful house that I haven’t seen,’ he says in a bright and breezy tone that he has absolutely no right to adopt. ‘I thought perhaps—’
