My Sister's Bones(72)

I watch as he steps out on to the landing and closes the door, thankful that he has gone. There was a time when Paul’s caring nature was a balm to me; now it feels like a straitjacket. I know I should be kinder to him. He saved me. He saved both of us.

I sit up in the bed and open the top drawer of the bedside cabinet. There, underneath a pile of old bank statements, is a silver-embossed photo album.

Our wedding album.

I pause for a second then open it. The first photo is a black-and-white shot of the three of us. Paul looks handsome in his navy suit and the pink spotty tie Hannah bought him as a wedding present. I’ve got a glass of champagne in my hand and I’m presentable but chubby in my ivory trouser suit. Hannah stands between us in the pistachio green bridesmaid dress she picked out a couple of weeks earlier in a little vintage shop in Whitstable. She beams at the camera and I feel a pang of guilt. She was so happy to finally have a dad. And not just any dad but a warm, loving one who helped her with her homework and took her swimming. As I stare at the photo I see that it’s Paul that she is cuddling in to, not me. I’m just standing there with my drink, lost in my own world.

Paul was my route into normality. He took Hannah and me away from that house, away from Mum and her endless criticism, and he gave us a new life, one with holidays and fitted kitchens and barbecues on Sundays. It was perfect. But then it all went wrong.

I close the album and put it back into the drawer, but as I lie down and shut my eyes Hannah’s face is there in front of me, twisted with rage.

‘I hate you,’ she yells at me. ‘You have no idea what it’s like living with a drunk. A pisshead.’

And I want to grab her, sit her down and tell her that I do know what it’s like; that my dad was a drunk and that my childhood had been a battleground that nobody came through unscathed.

It started slowly, the rift between Hannah and me, and then like a disease it just spread and spread until it destroyed us. As I lie here I try to pinpoint when it all started. Was it her fourteenth birthday when she went out with her mates instead of coming to Alfredo’s with me and Paul? It sounds daft but Alfredo’s was a family tradition. It was an Italian restaurant in Whitstable and I’d taken her there on her birthday since she was a little kid. And it hurt when she said she’d grown out of all that; it really did. Paul didn’t understand why I was so upset; he said it was only natural; that she was growing up, asserting her independence. I had no choice. So I spent the evening of her birthday sitting in front of the TV with Paul, thinking about the cake that was waiting for her in the kitchen. But when she came home she said she was too tired to blow out candles and, anyway, all that stuff was for kids.

And so it grew and grew, the divide between us. Hannah would stay out with her mates most nights; Paul had set up his new haulage business and was working late shifts to get it up and running. So that left me stuck in by myself with just the TV and my memories for company. There were no more family barbecues, no laughter, just a big empty house. Wine helped fill the gap, it soothed the loneliness and stopped me thinking about the past. I didn’t know how much I was depending on it until it was too late.

Getting sacked from my job at the bank should have been a wake-up call but I just saw it as an opportunity to lock myself away and drink more. Paul was there but we were like strangers passing each other on the stairs. We were no longer intimate; all the comfort and love I needed came at the bottom of a glass. Hannah would come home from school and I would try to act sober, fuss around her, make the dinner, but she wasn’t stupid and we’d end up having silly arguments over nothing. In the end she would avoid dinner altogether and come down later when she thought I’d be asleep.

After she left I started to think back to those days, tried to work out if I’d missed something. Her moods changed dramatically, I know that much. Paul said it was probably hormones but I suspected she was taking drugs. She became withdrawn and secretive. She stopped going out and started locking herself in her room for hours on end. But now I wonder if it wasn’t drugs – what if it was just me?

I found the internet searches one night a few months later. She’d googled him. His name was Frankie Echevarria. Kate said it sounded like ‘itch of your rear’. That always made me laugh. But the fact that it was an unusual name made the search a bit easier. Hannah had found out that he was a teacher now and living in Brighton. He had a family of his own; he was settled.

I didn’t want her to get hurt, so I tried to stop her.

‘He won’t want you contacting him out of the blue,’ I told her. ‘Just leave it alone.’

‘He’s my father,’ she yelled at me. ‘I need him.’

‘You don’t need him,’ I yelled back. ‘You’ve got me and Paul.’

‘I don’t want you. I want a proper parent.’

And she looked at me so defiantly that something inside me snapped.

My words come back to me now. ‘That man didn’t give a damn about me and he certainly didn’t give a damn about you. He wanted me to get rid of you. And I told him that I’d never do that. I told him to leave me alone and I’d deal with our mistake.’

Why did I say that word? I regretted it as soon as it left my mouth but it was too late.

‘Mistake?’ she said. Her voice was so bitter it scared me. ‘Is that what I am? A mistake. Jesus, Mother, you really are something, aren’t you?’