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“I’m so glad”—it’s Jonathan’s harshest, driest voice—“we made the time to have this chat.”
I put my head in my hands. “Fuck, I don’t mean it like that. I just mean…you can’t deal with stuff you care about by pushing it away.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. I just—there are certain things that lead to arguments, and I try to avoid those things.”
“Like your dad.”
“Fine. Yes.” He gives a sharp little blink. “Like my dad.”
“Because,” I ask, “of how he lost his job and that?”
Jonathan’s expression turns wary. “What’s he been telling you?”
“He didn’t make out like it was a big family secret. He just mentioned he lost his job up north and it was hard for yez.”
“I’m not suggesting it’s a secret. It’s just not something anyone needs to dwell on.”
“If you’re having arguments over it fifteen years later maybe a bit of a dwell would do you good.”
Carefully easing a protesting Gollum from his lap, Jonathan gets up and starts pacing. “It’s funny, when you submitted your CV to me, you didn’t mention you were a qualified therapist.”
“That’s not what I—you know, you are fucking impossible to talk to.”
“You can see why I prefer to keep you at a distance too then?”
He’s trying to needle me now and I’m not going to let him. This is one occasion on which Jonathan Forest isn’t going to be in control. “He thinks he was a bad dad, y’know.”
Jonathan shrugs. “Well, he was.”
“Was he?”
“Yes.”
See. Impossible to talk to. “How?” I ask, much less patiently than a qualified therapist would.
“He got fired, moved us to the other end of the country, and completely failed to find meaningful work.”
“Was he fired, then? Or was he made redundant like half the bloody north?”
Jonathan runs a hand through his hair. “What difference does it make?”
“There was a fucking financial crisis. The entire steel industry collapsed. Surely you can’t hold him responsible for that?”
“I don’t hold him responsible for getting knocked down. I hold him responsible for not getting back up again.”
“He did get back up again,” I point out.
Now Jonathan’s doing his contempt face. I really don’t like his contempt face. “What would you know about it?”
“I just see what I see. A man who did what he could for his family.”
“Well, what he could wasn’t enough.” Fuck me, Jonathan can be icy sometimes. But there’s something under it. Something kind of raw. A child who can’t understand why his dad isn’t protectinghim. “It was bad enough being the gay one with the funny accent without the constant chants ofJohnny Forest Johnny Forest why’s your dad still on the dole.”
I stare at him. “Jonathan, are you seriously telling me that you’re holding playground bullshit against your dad nearly twenty years later?”
“No, of course not,” Jonathan mutters. “I just don’t want to turn out like him.”
And then there’s this silence, Jonathan sort of shocked and wide-eyed and a bit breathless, as if he’d just spat out a chili he didn’t know he’d eaten.
