Perfectly Ordinary People(6)

‘Phone Jake and apologise,’ I told him. ‘And do it like you mean it.’

‘I will,’ Dad replied. ‘Of course I will.’

‘Good,’ I said, and I let him give me a hug.

But then he glanced at the waiting car and gave a little nod. ‘What she said, your friend, Gina . . . You’re not, are you?’

‘Not what?’ I honestly wasn’t following his drift.

‘You’re not . . . into the ladies . . . are you?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ I asked, starting to bristle all over again. ‘Would that be a problem as well?’

Dad shrugged. ‘Not, you know, really. Not in a big way. Though I’m not sure your mother would be thrilled, either.’

‘Either?’ I repeated.

‘I only mean it wouldn’t be ideal . . .’ Dad started.

But the anger was still upon me. I was so disappointed in him, that was the thing. Because in the space of half an hour, he’d shifted from being the tolerant, generous centre of my world – someone I’d always been proud of – to an Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic old dobber. It was like I’d stepped into some dreadful 1970s sitcom.

‘Yeah, you got me. I’m a lesbian,’ I muttered. ‘And as soon as it’s legal, me and Gina are going to get married. Oh and Gina’s a Muslim, by the way. She forgot her burka today, that’s all. Just in case you were wondering.’

And with that I climbed into the car and slammed the door.

‘Why did you say that?’ Gina asked. ‘Why did you, like, tell him I’m a Muslim?’

‘Just drive, will you?’ I said. ‘Just drive and get me out of here, OK?’

And Gina, being Gina . . . Gina being the perfect friend, she did exactly that.



So, yes . . . Christmas dinner was the start of The Great Falling Out, as we came to call it. Jake and Dad didn’t speak for months.

Dad did call Jake to apologise as instructed, it’s just that Jake had caller ID and refused to take Dad’s call. Faced with Jake’s answerphone, Dad left a stuttering, abrupt message which – though I’m sure the lacklustre nature of his apology had more to do with Dad’s dislike of voicemail than any reticence to apologise, per se – Jake interpreted as ‘absence of remorse’. They were stuck in silly, angry stasis.

Jake and I stayed in touch, and Mum, ever the peacemaker, played go-between so that everyone continued to know slightly more about everyone else’s business than they needed or indeed wanted. But none of the news – not Jake cutting the top of his thumb off with a Stanley knife in February, invisibly stitched back on at A&E, nor Dad becoming bedridden with the flu in March, was enough to convince either of them to pick up the phone. In the end, it wasn’t until October that they spoke again, and in our family, such discord was unprecedented.

I tried to talk Jake round but he was being stubborn about it all. In addition to providing a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to Abby how PC he was, I felt that the argument had come at the perfect time for him. He was busy with a new job and increasingly involved with Abby’s extended family. He was in need, I suspected, of some distance from our rather suffocating clan. So though what Dad had said was totally unacceptable, and though Jake was understandably mortified that Abby had witnessed such a spectacle, I couldn’t help but think that the repercussions had been amplified for the simple reason that the resulting ‘time out’ suited him.

The person who turned out to be the most forgiving about the whole episode was Abby herself. I had dinner in a restaurant in Soho with them both a month after Christmas and Abby explained that she was ‘pretty used to low-level anti-Semitism’ and that it was ‘far more common than people tend to realise’. She had learned to brush such comments aside, she said, because otherwise she’d just be annoyed all the time, and what was the point in that? ‘If Jake hadn’t made us leave, I probably wouldn’t even have remembered it,’ she told me, and though that seemed unlikely, it has to be said that she seemed pretty authentic when she said it. She even made a joke about how Dad was right, and not using light switches on Saturdays could get incredibly complicated, which was why she was dating a ‘goy’ so that he could operate all the electrical items for her instead.

But when, laughing, I turned to face Jake, I saw he was staring intently out of the restaurant window, pretending that this conversation wasn’t even happening. When Abby moved the subject on to my job, and Jake snapped back into the room, I understood that the subject had become taboo, even between them. And from that I deduced that Abby, too, had been trying (and failing) to talk Jake down from the ledge he’d got himself stuck upon.

So no contact whatsoever between Dad and Jake from Christmas until October. And I don’t think they would have come together even then had it not been for a death in the family. Yes, it actually took a death before they would talk.

Dad wasn’t the one to tell Jake; in fact, if I hadn’t happened to visit them that Sunday in October, I’m not sure that he would have even told me.

It was a sunny afternoon, and I found Mum stacking the dishwasher while Dad, in the back garden, slept off all the chicken he’d eaten. Tom and Harry had gone to the pub, while their wives had taken the kids to Lloyd Park.

I chatted with Mum for a bit – she told me that Harry was ‘still made up despite everything’, because he’d won ￡600 a month before betting on Frank Bruno. ‘Such a shallow boy, that one,’ she said.