Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 37

The only way to make people good is to make them happy

A weekend at home. Your father picks you up from the train station, a legitimate drive that your stepmother has to allow. His fingertips stray absently to your earlobe, the old caress, and you shut your lids and feel the coming wet prickling in your eyes at the tenderness, so rare in your life, so ached for. Kindness will always crack you now, it is the legacy of your emotionally blunted childhood.

He doesn’t say he loves you. He just gives you his snippet of a touch. It is all you need, it is enough.

Your father’s philosophy of parenting has become: if you want a child to do well you ignore them, so the child will always be striving for attention. It is the rhythm of your boarding life.

‘Look at me. Say something. Notice. Respond!’

You have been screaming it to him silently your entire time away; it is why you do so well in your new school, determined, focused, competitive. It’s the only area of your life you can achieve in. Get right. You’ve always been a thinker, have always devoured anything you could get your hands on to read, being starved of words has worked. Your father doesn’t engage in any of it. Doesn’t read, doesn’t write. The few times you have caught him at it – writing a cheque or a shopping list – he takes careful pleasure in the beauty of the letters, each one strikingly formed, every stroke a pattern, which betrays that he is still a relative beginner; he doesn’t do it much.

And now, in the car, on the way home, his touch. You lean into it. Then as soon as you arrive with a screech of the handbrake and walk into the house he clamps down, no longer shows you the vivid pulse of this love. Is formal, distant, uninterested; veering into coldness, a different person entirely. What is he afraid to show her? What has she threatened?

You’re his daughter.

When you’re at school, in his few, precious phone calls to you – from the mine crib room, never at home – he almost pleads, don’t forget the old man loves ya, and it’s like a momentary weakness, a slip. What bewitchment has she woven around him? What weakness in him lets her? A grown man. So inarticulate, so cowed.

An earlobe caressed; a moment snatched, in secret, too brief. The only warmth you will ever get in this place now.

You will find something else.