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‘I’m not changing my opinion,’ Roberta sniffed haughtily. ‘As I said, my intuition tells me otherwise.’
‘Okay, Mum,’ Shay smiled, amused by the mention of her mother’s famous intuition.
After tea, Shay sorted out Roberta’s tablets and did the washing up while her mother went to watch some TV, except she didn’t because the distraction of the neighbour’s skip proved too much to ignore. When Shay walked back into the lounge, Roberta was once again at the window, her lips moving over the words stencilled on the side like fingers working over the texture of cloth:SHARIF’S SKIPS.
‘Mum?Tipping Pointwill be on in a minute.’
Roberta carried on staring at the skip with a faraway look in her eyes.
‘I knew Omar Sharif once, I’m sure I did,’ she said eventually. Her memory pool had been stirred by somethingand a recollection had popped to the surface like a bubble. A rogue one though, because her mother had never met the famous screen god. But, as Dagmara would say, what did it matter? It wasn’t the worst false memory to have.
‘Did you?’ asked Shay.
Roberta’s brow creased in thought. ‘I think so. I wanted to marry him.’
‘You and every other woman in the 1960s,’ said Shay, giving her a gentle nudge.
But Roberta wasn’t listening to her, she was lost in some other world, eyes closed, holding up her hand as if stroking the cheek of someone, feeling their skin beneath her fingers. Then she opened them and saw she was touching only empty air.
‘Where did you meet Omar Sharif then, Mum?’ Shay watched her mother’s exit from wherever her reverie had taken her.
‘What are you talking about?’ came the scoffing reply. ‘As if I ever met Omar Sharif.’
Chapter 2
Shay’s father, it had to be said, looked nothing like Omar Sharif. Even in his heyday Harry Corrigan was heavy-set with thick sandy hair, muted blue eyes and pale skin, all of which Shay’s sister Paula had inherited. Paula had never tried to make the best of the physical hand of cards she had been dealt: highlights and a different hair style would have flattered her face, make-up would have made the best of her full lips and long lashes. Instead she stuck toau naturel– even when she’d gone prematurely grey – and openly resented that her younger sister Shay was the pretty one with skin like amber honey, large brown eyes and long, shiny ink-black locks. Shay looked like no one in the immediate family except, so Roberta said, her aunt who was a fellow throwback to their Italian ancestry. Underneath her bleach-blonde hair, apparently, Roberta’s sister Stella looked just like Sophia Loren. At least from the back with the light off, or so her dad used to joke.
Shay loved her father, though he hadn’t been that much of a hands-on dad when she was growing up. He was either working or out watching football, playing snooker, havinga pint with friends. He didn’t go and see her act in plays or attend school prize-givings. He didn’t take her to the swings or help her with her homework. He was justthere,an affable presence who painted and wallpapered, tinkered about with his car and mowed the lawn. Then, when she was sixteen, he’d stepped up to the plate and become a dad, not just a father.
She’d never held his hand as a child, but now, here in the Whispering Pines care home, she was feeling the solid weight of it, the gravitational pull of his thick sausage fingers and it made her sad that even though he was a hollowed-out shell of himself, it had still taken her a long time to dare reach for his hand, to place it in her own as if expecting him to shake her off, embarrassed by such intimacy. She wondered if he knew she was there; she had to hope that he did. But then, would that mean he had sense of who didn’t come and see him?
She’d checked the visitors’ book, as she always did, waiting at reception for someone to give her an update on his situation. The book went back three months and only once did Paula’s name appear – three weeks ago. She’d signed in and out within fifteen minutes and Shay wondered why she’d even bothered for so short a time, but that was Paula to a tee: duty over, so no one could say she hadn’t done her bit. His wife Barbara tended to visit in the mornings, so their paths hadn’t crossed for a long time. Out of respect for her mother, Shay had resisted getting overly close to the woman who had dealt the fatal blow to her parents’ marriage. She’d always been polite and pleasant whenever she’d had to pick up her dad to take him to have his kidneys/prostate/ears/eyes looked at by medical professionals now that he didn’t drive any more, but she’d desisted from any cosy chattycoffees in their kitchen. She had also been present at their small registry office wedding, though Paula hadn’t attended, having been struck down with a convenient bout of shingles which gave her the excuse she’d wished for not to attend. It had been very weird seeing her eighty-year-old father so happy because he was marrying his mistress and she’d wondered what it did to children’s heads in similar circumstances because it just about cabbaged hers as a fully grown adult.
There had been a lot of information for Shay to get her head around six years ago when seemingly out of the blue her seventy-three-year-old mother had filed for divorce on grounds of adultery. Shay’s loyalties hadn’t just been split, they’d been chopped up and mascerated.
It was only then that all the truth came flooding out with the force of the water behind an obliterated Hoover Dam: Harry Corrigan had been a serial adulterer for many of the years of their marriage, Roberta finally admitted to her daughters. She had forgiven him over and over to keep the family intact, and she’d mainly succeeded because neither Paula nor Shay had ever had the slightest inkling what had gone on behind the scenes of their parents’ relationship. There were some years when Harry’s priorities were focused first and foremost on the family unit but then, as the need for his command of the ship subsided, his faithfulness began to wane again. Harry’s affair with Barbara had gone on for a long time behind their spouses’ backs before they walked out of their marriages for each other. They enjoyed four and a half years of wedded bliss before a stroke clobbered him from left field, robbing him of everything but his breathing. Barbara had chosen, with care, a nursing home for him with a peaceful air and where the staff were kind and skilled.
He would have felt guilty to have people worrying overhim, Shay knew. He’d never liked a fuss, didn’t want to put anyone out. This would be hell for him; it was hell for them all.
She’d never spoken to her father as much as she had since he’d been in this comatose state and she didn’t know if he could even hear her; but she’d taken another lesson from Dagmara, that hearing was often the last sense to leave, and never to assume the father she knew wasn’t still there inside, needing comfort and familiar voices. So Shay sat there for hours sometimes, reading the newspaper aloud to him, talking to him about what Sunny and Courtney were up to. Sometimes she gave him a shave because the nurses never quite gave him the perfect one his exacting standards required, and she’d splash some of his aftershave on for him. He’d always smelt lovely, her dad. Nothing expensive, but clean and fresh as pine trees.
‘What’s the point in going?’ Paula had said once. ‘He’s not Dad any more, is he? He’s more or less a vegetable.’
‘How do you know what’s going on in his head?’ Shay snapped back.
Then Paula had come out with the classic, ‘Well, I don’t like to see him like that. It’s upsetting.’
‘Do you think I do, Paula? But I’m willing to take the risk he knows we’re there and is comforted by it.’
Then Paula would let loose her final big gun. ‘Well, he doesn’t deserve us after what he did to Mum.’
In a past life Paula must have been an eel, Shay thought. She could wriggle out of anything. She’d have made a great politician. Shay didn’t judge her dad as a husband, and as a father he’d been there for her when she needed him to be. He hadn’t let her down; she wouldn’t let him down either.
Sitting here with her father, just being with him,breathing the same air, her mind unwrapped memories like sweets. Today, she remembered seeing her father come in late one night, head and shoulders covered in snow, carrying a bag that didn’t quite cover the doll in a box, the doll she desperately wanted for Christmas. She remembered him painting Paula’s bedroom ceiling black with glow-in-the-dark stars on it, so it would be a surprise when she got back from her school camping trip. She remembered him leaving a Mars bar on her desk when she was revising for her GCSEs, telling her it was ‘brain food’. And that same summer, she remembered overhearing the conversation going on downstairs when she couldn’t sleep. Her mother and father, a rally of heated voices:We can’t leave. We have to. It’s totally the wrong thing to do. I won’t have her living it over and over again. She’s done nothing to cause this, and that’s why she has to stay. No, we’re leaving and that’s that.Her mother’s will had won, and they’d moved from their home village to the city at what felt like breakneck speed. It meant her father had a little further to travel to work; it meant leaving behind everyone they knew; it had meant upheaval and cost and disruption but they’d moved, shed their old life like a skin. To protect her.
She didn’t like to admit this, but Harry had seemed happier these past six years than he had ever been with her mum. His and Barbara’s love for each other was clearly true and tender; they were always out having lunch or catching a bus to the coast and they’d been looking forward to many more years of the same, only for their hopes and dreams to be snatched away one Sunday morning when he was lazing in the conservatory. Barbara thought he’d died; maybe it would have been kinder if he had.
Shay placed her father’s hand onto her face, moulding thefingers around her cheek, wishing they’d stay there when she let go, but they didn’t. She spoke into his palm, in the hope that the soft whisper would sink into his pores, join his bloodstream, drift into his brain.
