Wrong Place Wrong Time(64)

And her father is alive.

Her father who loves her unconditionally, even if that is in his own way. Just as Jen feels she must examine her own parenting in order to save her son, she wants, now, to turn to the person who raised her.

‘I’m going to go see Dad,’ she says. It comes from nowhere. She can’t resist. She needs to feel his warm hand in hers. She needs to watch him lay out the beer and the peanuts that he dies beside. She won’t stay. She’ll just – she’ll just tell him she loves him. And then leave.

‘Oh, cool,’ Kelly says. ‘Have fun,’ he calls, as she races down the stairs. ‘Say hi from me.’

Kelly and her father have always had a cordial relationship, but never close. Jen thought Kelly might search for a father figure, adopt hers willingly, but, actually, he did the opposite, always keeping Ken at arm’s length, the way he does with most people.

She calls her dad from the car, part of her brain still thinking he won’t answer.

But, of course, he does. And this proves to Jen, above almost anything else, that this is really happening. It really is.

‘A nice surprise,’ Jen’s father says to her. And there he is, on the end of the line. Back from the dead. His voice – posh, reserved, but mellowed into humour with age. Jen leans into it like a captive animal feeling a breeze after so long, too long.

‘Up to much? Thought I’d come over,’ Jen says, her voice thick.

‘Sure. I’ll put the kettle on.’

She closes her eyes into the phrase she has heard a hundred thousand times, but not for eighteen long months.

‘Okay,’ she says.

‘Great.’ He sounds happy. He is lonely, old, dying, too, though he doesn’t know it yet.

Everything Jen knows tells her that she shouldn’t be here. All the fucking movies would agree. She should only change things that might stop the crime, right? Not get too eager, so selfish that she tries to alter other things, too. To play God.

But she can’t resist.

He lives in a double-fronted Victorian house, three storeys high including the loft conversion. Double sash windows either side of the front door, dark-wood frames. Old-fashioned, but charmingly so. Like him.

She stares at him in wonder as he steps back, gesturing to let her inside. That arm. Full-bodied, warm-blooded, actually attached to her father’s alive body. ‘What …?’ he says, a mystified expression crossing his features.

‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, ‘I … I’m having a strange day is all.’

Her father remained in the matrimonial home after her mother died. He’d insisted, and she had nobody to help her convince him. The life of the only child. He told her the stairs would be fine, that he would still keep the gutters clear himself. And neither the gutters nor the stairs killed him, in the end.

‘How so?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Jen says, shaking her head and following him down the hallway that seems smaller, somehow, now that she is an adult. A very specific feeling settles over Jen when she comes here. A kind of just-out-of-reach nostalgia, covered in a fine film of dust, as though she might be able to grasp hold of the past if only she could try hard enough. And now here she is, right here, the spring of the year before her son becomes a murderer, the day her father dies, but it doesn’t feel like it.

‘You sure?’ he says to her. A backward glance as they move through the tired lounge. Sage-green carpets, hoovered carefully, but nevertheless grey-black at their edges. She’d never noticed that before. Perhaps she inherited her disdain of housework from him.

A round grey rug with geometric shapes on it. Ornaments he’s had for decades sit on various dark-wood shelves that jut out above fireplaces and radiators.

He switches on the kitchen light even though it’s the middle of the day. A striplight. It hums to life. ‘Did Morris vs Morris settle?’ he asks, a raise of his eyebrows. He pronounces the vs as and, the way all lawyers do.

‘I …’ She hesitates. She can’t remember at all, obviously.

‘Jen! You said it would!’

She tilts her head, looking up at him. This. She’d forgotten. Don’t all familial irritations get subsumed by grief, in the end? This sort of exchange would have annoyed her then, but it doesn’t today. She’s just pleased to be here, in the arena, not cast out by death.

‘Sorry – I’m tired.’

‘You’ve got four days before they take it off the table,’ he says. Suddenly, with the benefit of hindsight, she can see precisely where some of her insecurities have come from: here. In adulthood, she gravitated away from people like her father, made friends with misanthropic types like Rakesh, like Pauline. Married Kelly. They allow her to be the real, true her.

‘I know – it’ll be fine. We’ll settle it on Monday,’ she says.

‘What does the client think about the offer?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember.’ She waves a hand, wanting the conversation to be over. It wasn’t an idyll, was it, working together? It was hard sometimes, like this. Her father, driven, devoted, a stickler for detail. Jen, driven too, but more to help people than anything else.

She vividly recalls attending an important joint-settlement meeting with her father, who huffed when she didn’t have one form or other and she’d texted, My dad is a twat, over and over to Pauline, who sent back emojis. She almost laughs, now, it’s so bittersweet. The children we are with our parents.