Читать книгу Letting You Go - Anouska Knight - Страница 7

Not everything can be damned-well helped! Sometimes, all you can hope for is time and if you’re goddamned lucky … distance.

Alex was buttering her way through another loaf of bread with enough vigour that the bulbous handle of the butter knife had indented her fingers. She stopped herself before tearing through another slice of extra value wholemeal and shook the words from her head. There had been other words too, following her down the years like a long shadow. But these were the only words she could do anything with – all she had to offer her family as pitiful recompense for the damage that could never be undone. Time and distance.

Alex pushed her father from her thoughts and reacquainted herself with the view through the kitchen hatch. The twins were still eating their lunch, too busy devouring their own meals to notice their dad, stealthily enveloping his jacket potato inside one of the flimsy serviettes. Alex bulk bought them from the wholesaler’s every other Wednesday along with the rest of the food bank’s sundries. The 2-ply napkins weren’t really built for doggy-bagging, enshrouding food like a precious treasure to be hidden in the earth for safekeeping, but the father quietly sitting across the dining room wasn’t deterred, already slipping the wrapped jacket potato into the rucksack at his feet. Alex felt something inside her ache for him the way it had ached for Bob Cratchit when her dad had taken her and Jem to see A Christmas Carol at the Tower House Theatre. It had been a treat for being such good big sisters to their new baby brother, but Alex hadn’t been able to eat her ice-cream at the interval, she’d been so worried for poor Mr Cratchit. Alex remembered how her dad had gently patted her back through every scene, his broad hand ready with fatherly reassurance. Back when he could still look at her.

‘Three more soups please, Alex my love,’ Dan smiled, blustering into the community centre’s kitchen so quickly that his flop of black hair looked windswept. He began promptly dispensing a flurry of fresh cups of tea from the urn while Alex’s attention returned to the family out in the dining room. There was something voyeuristic about watching a grown adult hiding food for his children. Something akin to slowing down for a better look at a car accident. But then this was what it was all about, wasn’t it? This life she’d chosen. To play her small part, do good – as if a person could even up the tally of all the right and wrong they’d been party to somehow. One of the twin boys glanced up and caught Alex staring. She looked away too suddenly and immediately felt as if she’d short-changed the kid a smile. Alex hated starers. She remembered the staring as they’d all been sat in St Cuthbert’s chapel saying their goodbyes to Dill in front of all of those people. All those eyes. Tragedy and rubber-necking were old friends, her father had said with the arrival of weeping relatives to the church. Wailing like banshees, despite having never sent Dill so much as a birthday card when he was alive. Alex tried to recall their faces now, those obscure weeping relatives who’d come to support the four of them with their lingering embraces and heavy knowing looks, but her memory had clung to very little of that day beyond the desolation in her mother’s features and the stiffness in her father’s back.

‘Bugger me, Alex! How many sarnies are you making? What are you going for … edible Jenga?’

Another slice of bread gave under the rigours of clumsy buttering. Alex took stock of the bread mountain and grimaced. ‘Sorry. I was just …’

‘Away with the fairies?’ Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you OK today? You look tired. A bit spun-out.’

Alex had told Dan, once. The very brief version. Peppered with a few hazy justifications for not visiting her hometown much any more. Busy lives. Long car journeys. A troublesome allergy to her mum’s beloved dogs. ‘No, I’m good, thanks. I didn’t sleep much last night. Bloody car alarm outside the flats,’ she groaned.

‘Yeah, I really hate that.’ Dan looked justly sceptical, but of course he wouldn’t realise what today meant. Few people would, not even the banshees. Would they be thinking of Dill today? Would they remember to imagine him turning nineteen, handsome and strong, towering over his mother and sisters? It was official. As of today, there had been more birthdays spent lighting a candle for Dill than watching him blow one out. Nine years with; ten years without. His short life seemed to get shorter each year.

‘Sure you didn’t just have a hedonistic weekend, Foster? Been out larging it with Mr Right, maybe? About time he turned up.’

Alex smiled. Her weekend had consisted largely of a thousand variations of Dill’s imagined adult life. Drinking in The Cavern with their dad. Globetrotting with a girlfriend. Teaching his kids to ride their bikes. The fantasies were endless, but they always ended the same way – a warm summer’s evening back in Eilidh Falls, a family gathered again, laughter, children with Dill’s quirky dimple or other features of his, running around the same gardens they’d all played in as children.

‘You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Mr Right? If he’d turned up and rocked your world?’

Alex took a deep breath and centred herself. ‘Sorry. I guess a lady never tells.’

‘Blimey, twins.’ Dan exclaimed pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Can’t be easy. How old are they, seven? Eight maybe?’

The children out in the dining area were finishing the last of their bangers and mash almost simultaneously. They were at that threshold between little boys and young lads; a few adult teeth peeping from lips unapologetically slathered in gravy. The age of mischief, her mum had called it. Dill had taught them all a lot about mischief.

Alex watched those two boys and swallowed against an unexpected snag in her throat. ‘They’re seven. Dad’s first time. He’s just squirrelled.’

‘Ah,’ Dan acknowledged, his head furrowing beneath his flop of hair. ‘Well no wonder I couldn’t tempt him with the soup. He wasn’t gonna slip that into his backpack for later. Spud was it?’

‘I probably should’ve made the situation clearer,’ Alex replied. But she hated it. Walking bemused newcomers through the procedure, hitting them with the spiel on support workers and benefits entitlement before they could sit down and enjoy a meal in peace. The twins’ father had wandered in to the Trust’s lunchtime session more wide-eyed and bewildered than the kids; that familiar mixed heavy look of desperation and gratitude nearly always held together by a debilitating undercurrent of this is not my life! Alex got it. This wasn’t really her life either, at least not the one she’d once envisaged.

Dan sighed, retrieving a replacement jacket potato from one of the ovens ‘Well, he’s going to need all his strength while the kids are still off for the summer hols. Is Mum here too?’

Alex regarded the two young boys, wondering when their last opportunity to get into mischief had been. ‘I think Mum’s left. After Dad was made redundant.’

Dan finished bothering with the potato and shook his head. ‘Blimey. Tough break for the kids. But who are we to judge, right?’

It had been part of the training when Alex had first started here after ditching uni. Listen, yes. Encourage, yes. Second-guess the mechanics of a family’s downfall? Who was ever really qualified to do that?

‘Put the butter straight on it this time, Dan, don’t give him the little tubs.’ It was a small deterrent to squirrellers, but a deterrent nonetheless.

‘You know, it always stuns me when the mum jumps ship,’ Dan’s said quietly. ‘We bang on about equality and all that, but it’s still a shocker when it’s the dad left picking up the pieces. Know what I mean?’

Alex shrugged, but she knew exactly. Mothers pressed on, held everyone else together while their own hearts broke quietly. Hers had. Blythe would be pressing on right now, right this minute, two hundred miles away.

‘You sure you’re OK today?’ Dan was watching Alex readying the soup bowls with the same look he reserved for the elderly visitors to the food bank he worried needed more help than the trust could offer. ‘I thought it might be love but on second thoughts, you seem a bit …’

Alex’s smile was automatic. ‘Manic Mondays, Dan!’ she lied. Dan was a good guy. He’d be quick to offer his sympathies but it always felt like borrowing clothes she liked the look of, knowing they’d never fit right. ‘Now hurry up and get those soups out, they’re going cold!’

‘OK, OK … I’m going, I’m going.’ Dan loaded the last teas onto his tray and jostled back out through the kitchen doors. Alex’s thoughts meandered straight back to Eilidh Falls. She would call them all later, before they sat down to dinner together. Six o’clock, same time every year, no variations, no surprises. Alex dreaded it. She dreaded the thanks her mother would lavish on her for sending flowers and she dreaded hearing the consolatory lilt in Jem’s voice planted there by Alex’s perpetual absence. But most of all, Alex dreaded the complete normality of the conversation she would have with her dad. The shooting of the breeze. She had to wonder what they would have done for conversation all these years had it not been for oil changes and tyre pressure.

‘Oi.’ Dan’s face popped through from the other side of the hatch and startled her. ‘You don’t fool me, Alex. I might be a speccy kitchen hand with a flair for jazzy garnishes,’ Dan waved the tray of food and drinks flamboyantly past the servery hatch for Alex’s appraisal, ‘but I’m tuned in to the ways of women, you know. I know what’s eating you.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the twins playing air hockey with the condiments on the table. ‘You’re really worrying about them, aren’t you?’ Alex’s thoughts shifted from one broken family to another. She sent a small request into the universe that a little time and distance might help them too.

‘They’ll be OK, Alex,’ Dan reassured. ‘Look at them.’ One of the twins began giggling at something his father had just done with the pepper pot. ‘They might be going through the wringer but they’re still a family. A family can get through anything if they just stick together. Am I right?’

Alex could already feel the return of that automatic smile.