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And as I drove back to Port Emblyn, I asked myself if that was really so bad. My parents had been best friends since they were three years old. They had never been together, not officially, and when my mum had found herself pregnant at twenty-eight with his baby, he had convinced my mum that he had always, always loved her.
But he hadn’t. I think he was just trying to do the right thing.
Not evil. Just useless.
‘Forgive me, Gee. Please forgive me,’ he said when I arrived, his eyes meek, uncertain.
I kissed his lined forehead and wiped the dried spit from around his mouth and held his tumbler of water to his lips.
I hadn’t sung since the day my mum died, but that night I held his hand and let my voice drift from lyric to lyric of half-remembered songs, a nineties R&B Songs of Praise mash-up, and I felt all of my anger starting to seep away.
Without it I felt like a deflated balloon, limp and empty.
What had I made of my life?
Every day after teaching at Port Emblyn school I would go to visit him in his new home, a gated estate of serviced bungalows with nurse visits three times a day, activities in a community centre, a church and, no joke, a pub.
I would do my marking, writing elaborately kind comments in the margins of Jenna’s essays, while he watched old films and documentaries about musicians.
On Wednesdays I would walk him down to bingo and help him mark his card, and we’d talk about musicals with Gladys, the woman who lived next door to him and kept her hair dyed a deep red.
On Fridays I would take him to the pub and he would play the piano, his fingers remembering the tunes even if his lips didn’t always remember the words. Sometimes, I even sang and watched the eyes of all of those sad, dying people light up, as if they were young again. It’s one of my special powers.
Every now and then my dad would start to tell me a story about him and my mum, getting lost at a zoo on a school trip, revising together at uni, dancing in a London club, but he would always falter, meandering away from the punchline, giving way to coughing fits and misty-eyed, middle-distance staring.
It was four months after our reunion that I came into his house to find him on his mobile phone. I hadn’t known he even owned one, and he was speaking as if he hadn’t had a stroke, hadn’t lost half his mind to dementia, didn’t live in a soft cloud of nice memories and swelling music.
‘Now why would you want to do that?’ He nodded as he plucked some dry leaves from a peace lily on the windowsill. ‘No need, no need. And you’ll be done by when? Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Good man. Yes. Perfect. Thank you.’
He hung up and smiled at me as I stood in the doorway.
‘Gee Gee,’ he said, holding open his arms so I could walk into them.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘The electricians.’
‘What electricians?’
‘Coming to fix the electrics.’
I frowned. Oakridge was kept in immaculate condition. ‘Dad, I think someone else handles these things.’
‘Not this place,’ he said, like I was mad. ‘Home – Trevethan.’
I held myself back. ‘Oh, Dad,’ I said. ‘Trevethan hasn’t been our home for thirty years.’
‘Well, it bloody has since I paid two point five mill for it.’
‘You what?’
‘Why do you think I came back here? A weekend visit?’
I stared at him. I’d only asked him twenty separate times what he was doing back in Port Emblyn, how long he’d been here, where he’d been staying.
‘You bought Trevethan?’ Surely, this was fantasy.
He started picking at the yellowing leaves again. ‘Sometimes I wished we could just shut the doors and never leave.’
