The Family Remains(3)

I have not seen Phineas Thomsen since I was sixteen and he was eighteen. But last week at my niece’s birthday party, my niece’s boyfriend, who is an investigative journalist, told us that he had tracked him down for her. A kind of uber-thoughtful birthday present for his girlfriend. Look! I got you a long-lost dad!

And now here I am, on a bright Wednesday morning in June, cloistered away in the quiet of my bedroom, my laptop open, my fingers caressing the touchpad, gently guiding the cursor around the website for the game reserve where he works, the game reserve I intend to be visiting very, very shortly.

Phin Thomsen was how I knew him when we lived together as children.

Finn Thomsen is the pseudonym he’s been hiding behind all these years.

I was so close. An F for a Ph. All these years, I could have found him if I’d just thought to play around with the alphabet. So clever of him. So clever. Phin was always the cleverest person I knew. Well, apart from me, of course.

I jump at the sound of a gentle knocking at my bedroom door. I sigh. ‘Yes?’

‘Henry, it’s me. Can I come in?’

It’s my sister. I sigh again and close the lid of my laptop. ‘Yes, sure.’

She opens the door just wide enough to slide through and then closes it gently behind her.

Lucy is a lovely-looking woman. When I saw her last year for the first time since we were teenagers, I was taken aback by the loveliness of her. She has a face that tells stories, she looks all of her forty years, she barely grooms herself, she dresses like a bucket of rags, but somehow she still always looks lovelier than any other woman in the room. It’s something about the juxtaposition of her amber-hazel eyes with the dirty gold streaks in her hair, the weightlessness of her, the rich honey of her voice, the way she moves and holds herself and touches things and looks at you. My father looked like a pork pie on legs and my lucky sister snatched all her looks from our elegant half-Turkish mother. I have fallen somewhere between the two camps. Luckily, I have my mother’s physique, but sadly more than my fair share of my father’s coarse facial features. I have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a chiselled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth and plumped-up lips.

My bedroom fills with the perfume of the oil my sister uses on her hair, something from a brown glass bottle that looks like she bought it from a country fayre.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she says, moving a jacket off a chair in the corner of my room so that she can sit down. ‘About last week, at Libby’s birthday dinner?’

I fix her with her a yes, I’m listening, please continue look.

‘What you were saying, to Libby and Miller?’

Libby is the daughter Lucy had with Phin when she was fourteen. Miller is Libby’s journalist boyfriend. I nod.

‘About going to Botswana with them?’

I nod again. I know what’s coming.

‘Were you serious?’

‘Yes. Of course I was.’

‘Do you think – do you think it’s a good idea?’

‘Yes. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Why wouldn’t I?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s meant to be a romantic holiday, just for the two of them …’

I tut. ‘He was talking about taking his mother; he can’t have intended it to be that romantic.’

Obviously, I’m talking nonsense, but I’m feeling defensive. Miller wants to take Libby to Botswana to be reunited with the father she hasn’t seen since she was a baby. But Phin is also a part of me. Not just a part of me, but nearly all of me. I’ve literally (and I’m using the word ‘literally’ here in its most literal sense) thought about Phin at least once an hour, every hour, since I was sixteen years old. How can I not want to go to him now, right now?

‘I won’t get in their way,’ I offer. ‘I will let them do their own thing.’

‘Right,’ says Lucy, doubtfully. ‘And what will you do?’

‘I’ll …’ I pause. What will I do? I have no idea. I will just be with Phin.

And then, after that – well, we shall see, shan’t we?





3




August 2016


Rachel met Michael in a pharmacy in Martha’s Vineyard in the late summer of 2016. She was waiting for a prescription for the morning-after pill to be dispensed to her by a very young and somewhat judgey man. Michael stepped ahead of her and greeted the pharmacist with a brisk, ‘Is it done yet?’

The judgey pharmacist blinked slowly and said, ‘No, sir, it is not. Could I ask you to take a seat? It won’t be much longer.’

Michael took the seat next to Rachel. He folded his arms and he sighed. She could sense that he was about to talk to her, and she was right.

‘That guy’, he muttered, ‘is just a delight.’

She laughed and turned to study him. Fortyish, to her thirtyish. Tanned, of course; at the end of a long Martha’s Vineyard summer, there was nobody left without a tan. His hair was due a cut; he was probably waiting until he got back to the city.

‘He’s a bit judgey,’ she replied in a low whisper.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘yes. Strange, in one so young.’

Rachel, at the time, had been conscious of the only-just-showered-off sweat of a boy called Aiden still clinging to her skin, the tender spots on her inner thighs where his hip bones had ground into her flesh, the sugary smell of his young man beer breath lingering in the crooks and crevices of her body. And now she was here, flirting with a man old enough to be Aiden’s father whilst waiting for emergency contraception.