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65
BEFORE
After enduring another term at Port Emblyn School, David Beaufort-Bradley turned up at Trevethan and told me he’d decided I was going to leave and never come back, and could I please inform my father. As an afterthought he picked up a shovel leaning against the wall and smashed the window next to the door with its heavy brass head.
When my dad came home, he looked at the broken glass and asked if I liked the sound of London. I suspect David had also talked to the head at PES, because apparently Dad had had a call pointing out that as my mother was no longer a teacher there, he would have to start paying fees.
The bullying had stopped, but by then it was unnecessary. Everyone in sixth form had been interviewed by the police, and while I think the Beaufort-Bradleys had done their best to sweep everything under the carpet, the line of questioning had made quite an impression.
I couldn’t understand why my dad had sent me back there, or why we were still in Port Emblyn. When he asked about London I was so filled with rage that I thought I might burst into flames. But I simply looked him in the eye and gave him a flat, ‘Yes.’
I enrolled in a normal state school, where I was bullied for being posh and smart, and my dad’s career blossomed. He wrote the music for a wildly popular stage adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that seemed to miss the point that it already was a satire.
Then there was the whole John Lewis thing and a string of gigs through the National Theatre and then he could walk into just about any bar in Soho and get his drinks for free.
I’m not saying I never saw him grieving. I heard him crying sometimes when he thought I was asleep. But once we got to London, it was like he’d neatly put the whole thing behind him.
He liked to have parties at our new flat, another loan from some other patron, all white columns and filigree ironwork and chequerboard tiles on a curved street in Little Venice.
‘Blackbird! Come sing!’ he called to me once, as I hurried away from all the laughter and music and glittery women. He was strumming his guitar and I wanted so much to join him that tears sprang up immediately.
But I would happily cut off my nose to spite my face when it came to my dad, so instead I snuck into his music room and found one of his favourite records and scratched a nail across it, wondering when this little gift would be discovered.
I attempted suicide three times. The first two I had my stomach pumped and my dad told me off for partying too hard, so the third time I used a razor and they had to harvest veins from my legs to fix me.
Dad asked if I needed to take a gap year before uni to ‘level out’ and I asked him what he thought, and he looked at me like I was a fly. I moved out the moment I got my university offer, and between then and the call from the hospital that brought me back to Port Emblyn, I spoke to him five times.
Boo hoo.
But yes, boo hoo. Maybe you know someone who had it harder. Maybe you had it harder. But still, my dad let me down at an unforgivable time and it’s 10,000 per cent valid for me to be angry about all of it. I was a child.
Whatever your situation, seventeen is still a child. If you don’t agree, you’re in denial. Or you’re seventeen.
It took me a long time to recognise that my dad was only human, that he’d been struggling with my mother’s death too, however it seemed, and that he’d not known what to do with me. He’d barely been a parent up till that point, spent half the year away and then only got involved with the fun bits – picnics, parties, performances. Then suddenly he had full responsibility for a grieving teenager.
I’m not excusing it. He should’ve tried harder. But how he reacted wasn’t so unusual, or unpredictable. He wasn’t evil. Useless, but still, not evil.
And on my forty-fifth birthday I finally googled how to find a real boyfriend one lonely night and somehow got sucked down a wormhole that farted me out on a planet where the only way forward was to forgive my father.
People are so obsessed with forgiveness. As though there’s nothing so bad that you can’t hug it out and move on. As if what’s really wrong with the world is not all the people fucking things up but the people who can’t get over it.
And when you’re lonely, because you simply cannot forgive and you simply cannot get close to anyone, it’s nice to think all you have to do is knuckle down to the hard work of rewiring yourself completely. If the problem is you, then you can fix it, right?
And Dad was all I had left. And time was running out. And I started to allow myself to think about sitting on his lap at Trevethan House, his chest warm on my back, as his fingers ran across the piano keys and his music held us close and still.
He taught me how to sing like that. When his mood seemed right, I would sneak into his annexe and he’d run through scales with me, grinning as I pushed myself to reach the high notes and giggling with me as I pulled faces to go down low. We would sing doing the washing up after breakfast, in the car on the way to the beach.
I remembered one morning, creeping into his bed and him looking at me through one eye, half-awake, fully hungover. ‘Sing little blackbird,’ he’d said, holding onto my foot as if it were a lucky charm. I’d snuggled close into his warmth and sung in my softest voice ‘Blackbird’ by The Beatles and he’d joined in, low and gravelly, and the perfection of our mingled sounds seemed like a fairy tale. I closed my eyes and saw a tiny bird tweeting in the branches above a rushing stream.
‘My darling girl,’ he’d said.
He had made me, and only he would ever be able to truly see me.
When he wasn’t home, I would fill the house with song and still feel close to him. He had to go to London, to Dublin, Edinburgh, because that’s where his work was.
Why hadn’t we lived in any of those places? I asked Mum once and she told me that she wanted me to grow up by the sea, and we were very lucky to be able to live in Trevethan House, such a grand home, which was owned by one of Dad’s friends.
I think I understood even then that the real reason was because my dad needed to escape; that this was the compromise, if my mum and dad were to stay together. We could have him, so long as he could have his freedom.
