What Lies Between Us(93)
I feel a chill in the air so I button up my cardigan and make my way back into the house. I spy Elsie upstairs at her window, making no effort to hide behind the curtains or disguise that she is watching me. She wants me to see her, she wants me to know she is there, watching, waiting, desperate for me to slip up. But I won’t. Ever. She knows nothing of what’s gone on behind these closed doors, I’m sure of that. I give her a wave and my broadest smile but she doesn’t reciprocate.
I place a large frozen pizza and garlic bread on a tray and slip it into the oven. I swam my fifty lengths this morning so I burned my calories in advance and am rewarding myself. I have about fifteen minutes to spare so I make my way downstairs into the basement, my eyes drawn to the dusty old sofa Maggie never got rid of. It’s one of the only reminders left of all the rubbish she’s hoarded and stored down here. Most of it ended up in the skip I hired, leaving me plenty of space to make this a more practical environment.
By my feet is a plastic crate containing half a dozen albums full of family photos, but Dad isn’t in any of them. Maggie has got rid of almost all of them. When I start leafing through them, I stumble across a family holiday we took in Devon when I was a little girl to see Aunty Jennifer. ‘Oh my God, I was so fat!’ I chuckle, and point to the rolls on my arms and legs as an infant version of me sits naked on a potty.
More pages follow and fragments of long-forgotten memories appear in dribs and drabs, some making me laugh out loud, others making me feel melancholic. In one recollection, I can’t be more than three or four years old and I’m dressed in a pink swimming costume with a sponge in my hand and I’m helping an out-of-shot Dad to clean the car. In another, I’m lying stretched out on the back seats of it, no doubt listening to ABBA or Madonna playing from the speakers, and staring at the back of Dad’s head as he drives. I loved him so much.
I’ve been having dreams about him lately and I keep waking myself up out of them, as they don’t feature the man I remember. The landing is dark and I’m standing outside a crack in the door of his office, listening to him telling someone on the phone that they’re his ‘only girl’. (That’s how I know I’m dreaming; he’d never say that to anyone but me.) ‘It won’t be long before we’re together,’ he says to whoever it is, and then he spots me and hangs up. He follows me to my bedroom and he’s talking on and on, telling me I’m his only girl, I’ll always be his only girl (but what about that other only girl, then? I want to ask him). He goes on talking, I’ve never heard him talk so much. He says that while he loves me to the moon, he doesn’t love Mum any more and he’s leaving us. He’s met someone new and wants to be with her. As he disappears, I’m furious that he wants to ruin my perfect world and leave me and I want to make him hurt like he is hurting me. I reach for something . . . but then I wake up and remind myself that he was the kindest, sweetest, most dependable man in the world. And although he’s been out of my life for almost twice as long as he was in it, the gap he left was unfillable. Until Dylan appeared.
‘You’d have liked him,’ I say. ‘He’d have been a brilliant granddad.’
Aside from the rise and fall of his chest, Dylan remains silent and motionless. He sits on the floor, his back to the wall, a few feet away from me, but not close enough to be a danger. ‘I can show you some more pictures of him if you like?’
He doesn’t reply.
‘Okay, maybe another time then.’
An onlooker might describe the silence between us as frosty. To me, it’s typical because it’s like this much of the time. Sometimes, when I come downstairs and I spot him lurking in the shadows of the basement, for a split second, I think it’s Jon. I’ve even caught myself calling him that on occasion. To my eyes, the physical resemblance between father and son is so uncanny, I find it hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
‘Okay,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘The pizza should be just about ready. Shall we go upstairs and eat?’
Again, he says nothing, but he responds by slowly pulling himself to his feet. I take the handcuffs I bought from eBay and slide them across the floor to him. I don’t have to tell him what to do because our routine is well rehearsed. Despite his incarceration, he is bigger and stronger than I am and I’m sure that if presented with an opportunity, he would try to overpower and hurt me to get out of here. But I’ve learned from the mistakes I made with Maggie. And in time, he will become physically weaker and more compliant.
Dylan places his hands behind his back and affixes the cuffs to his own wrists. ‘Show me, please darling,’ I ask, and he turns and pulls his hands apart to demonstrate they are bound. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Now come towards me.’
He turns again and does as I ask. I approach him, as always, with one of Dad’s golf clubs in my hand. I’ve only used it on Dylan once, when he tried to thrust his head back to break my nose. He caught the bridge but it wasn’t hard enough to cause lasting damage. So I whacked him in the kidneys with the club and he fell quickly to the floor. I remember being struck by a moment of déjà vu, but I can’t think why. I’ve never played golf so I have no reason to have held a club before. Hurting my son caused me more pain than he could’ve possibly felt, though. But I suppose that’s what parenting is all about, isn’t it? Doing what’s best for them, no matter how much it hurts you.