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I had worried all the way here about how to explain this to him, but in the end I’d said, ‘Dad, these girls are staying here tonight,’ and he’d told me I looked pretty and made us all tea. He hadn’t even asked their names.
Why had I waited so long to reconcile with him? He was my dad. Failure is human.
I kissed him on the forehead and he smiled. ‘I’m glad you’ve made some new friends,’ he said, meaning Jenna and Rose. In his head, was I still the same age as them?
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He squeezed my hand. ‘I never liked the boy, Tristan, and those girls running around after him. But I was sad about Frances. She seemed nice.’
I sat next to him. ‘She was nice.’
‘What happened?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
He put an arm around me. ‘My little blackbird.’
Was he stuck in that moment? I needed to go, but there were so many things about that time I wanted to understand.
‘Did you ever love her?’ I asked, my voice cracking.
‘I’ve loved your mother from the moment I first saw her.’
They met at three. He came in clinging to his mother’s leg. She was naked, dancing around her garden with a watering can. He had run forward, stripped off and joined her.
She had told me the story so many times.
I watched my dad’s eyes, milky now, flickering in the TV light. ‘Just, perhaps, not the way she wants me to love her. Not the way you need me to.’ He swallowed. ‘I’m trying, Gee.’
I closed my eyes but tears fell anyway.
So much pain caused by trying to do the right thing. If he had just walked away, admitted he didn’t want to be with my mum, maybe we could all have been happy.
I squeezed his hand and promised myself I’d take care of him. I wouldn’t waste his last years hating him.
I got back in my car and as I was driving home, Neil called. I wanted desperately to pick up, but that would have been pure idiocy. I put the phone on silent. If I spoke to him now without saying anything, and then later…
My God, what if someone called my old school, Redmoor? What a mess. I had pulled that poor girl Meadow up from the other poor girl she’d been attacking, and Meadow had sprained her wrist. The mother had put it in a sling and threatened legal action, and because I’d been trying to get them to engage about Meadow’s issues – so many emails – it looked a bit OTT. I had done nothing wrong but the college was scared of bad publicity and it would all be murky now and it was going to look as though…
I pulled over and started crying again. The sun hadn’t quite set yet and dust from the road hung in the hot air.
I was going to lose him.
Even if Neil never found out, if Jenna followed the plan and went home and told everyone she and Rose had just been wandering around all night, I would lose him. Because I would know. I’ve done lots of things teachers aren’t supposed to do. But this really took the biscuit. It was so far beyond the biscuit, they hadn’t even covered it in teacher training.
In three decades, I hadn’t been honest with a single person. But I couldn’t lie to Neil about this. And if I told him, well, it was just too utterly batshit for a normal human to get over. And Neil was normal. That’s what I loved about him.
84
NOW
Tristan pulls out the long ribbon of brown tape. ‘I guess we’ll never know,’ he says. ‘You’ll just have to trust me.’
The ribbon falls on the green carpet mottled with stains.
Ava and Ash sit against the wall by the door to the corridor. Their faces are so pale they’re almost translucent.
‘Did you do it, Tris?’ Mina asks.
