The day my father left, my mum toiled away for hours on end, washing all of our clothes, doing the dishes and scrubbing at the floors until they were so clean I would happily have eaten from them. When it seemed that night that she had lost steam and would finally go to bed, she put on a pot of coffee and stayed up darning the holes in my school uniform. I remember waking up some time around dawn, badly in need of the loo, and I could still hear her pottering around downstairs.
The next morning, she chucked out pretty much her whole wardrobe and disappeared for half of the day, returning with three bags full of new clothes and a box of bleach for her hair. Even though I had homework due on Monday, she begged me to help her with the bleach. I knew it was probably a bad idea given that my own experiments with hair products had once led to me dyeing my head ginger, but there was something so fervent, so desperate in her eyes that made it impossible for me to refuse. We ended up making a mess of it, so much so that there were big splotches of dark brown amidst the blonde where we’d missed with the bleach, but by the end of it that terrible look in my mother’s eyes had abated somewhat. As I watched her stand in the bathroom, inspecting her ruined hair in the mirror, I couldn’t help but rush to her side and wrap my arms around her.
That was the first time I ever saw her cry.
She never married again, and I never questioned it. Of course there were boyfriends and dates and moments with the bloke at the café, but whenever things looked as if they were starting to get serious, she always distanced herself. It was never long before my mum was left alone again, but she seemed to like it that way. I suppose I was glad back then that no one came to take my father’s place in the family. In retrospect, my mother was probably just afraid that the same thing would happen again. She got over him leaving, eventually—with a little help from me, I’ll admit—but it always seemed as if she were barely holding herself together. Another broken heart and I don’t think she could have bounced back.
I don’t really think I took it as hard as she did, to be honest. I know that around my birthday every year, without fail, I felt a sliver of dread worm its way into my stomach whenever I saw the envelopes addressed to me in his handwriting. I know that for the longest time I grew up thinking of him as some shadowy figure that had been cut out of my life, leaving a hole that felt like a strange prickling in my chest. In spite of this, though, life seemed to go on as normal without him and I never found myself wanting for a ‘father figure’. For a short while after he left, my friends always fell into an awkward silence when their own fathers—their own perfect families—came up in conversation, but I wasn’t bothered. My dad left, I know. Was it really such a bad thing to lose him from my life if he was so bloody quick to up and leave us?
Anyway. Being fatherless didn’t destroy me in the long run, but it did leave me hardened. With boyfriends, I was ruthless. I dropped them at the first sign of trouble, no ifs or buts, which led eventually to everyone at school calling me ‘cold’. There was some sort of bet going when we were all 16 about who could go with me the longest before I dropped them; if what I heard second-hand was to be believed, the victor was Davy Pembroke with a grand total of three weeks.
Eight years and two months (to the day) after my father left, I was working on my dissertation in the library at uni when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It was my mum. I needed a break from my work and it had been a good week since we had spoken, so I quickly packed away my things and hurried out into the stairwell to answer the call.
‘Rose,’ she said, her voice oddly strained. ‘Can you talk right now?’
I told her I was at the library. She cut me off before I could ask if it was important.
‘Do you want to come by the house this evening? I’ll cook dinner for you. Bubble and squeak. You used to love that, when you were little.’
‘Mum?’ I blurted, trying to interrupt, but she managed to give me a time to get there with strict instructions to bring a bottle of wine without even letting me get a word in edgeways.
I knew something was wrong when I walked up the drive of my childhood home that evening, that much was obvious. I almost shied away from marching up the steps to the front door, but before I could consider turning back the door was open and she was there, ushering me in.
Dinner was awkward. Mum asked questions about how uni was going in a bid to force a conversation and, try as I might, my best efforts to keep up my half of it always ended with us both sinking back into silence. An hour later my dinner was cold and I had only half touched it. The bottle I had brought was empty but the wine wasn’t making us any more talkative.
She opened her mouth after a while and drew in a deep breath, and I felt the worry nagging at me once again.
This is it, I thought. This is the bad news.
‘I’ll clear up,’ I blurted. Typical evasive action. She knew exactly what I was doing, though, and an instant later her hand shot across the table to grab my wrist.
‘No, Rosie. We can do that later. I… I want to talk to you first.’
Here it is.
I was overcome by the sudden urge to bolt—I knew whatever she wanted to say couldn’t be good—yet at once I found myself rooted to my seat.
‘Your father died last month,’ she said bluntly, and it was as if the life had drained right out of me. She watched me for a good few minutes before asking, her voice quiet, ‘Are you okay?’
Am I okay? Really? ‘Yeah, mum,’ I found myself saying. ‘I’m fine. It’s okay.’
She looked as if she were about to say something else, but instead she got to her feet and set about clearing up the dishes. While she was scraping the leftovers of our dinner into the bin, I stuck the kettle on and brewed us some tea. Not long after that we were both seated on the settee in the living room with the TV on, neither of us paying much attention as Have I Got News for You played on the Beeb.
To my surprise, I was the first to speak. ‘How?’ I asked, simple as that. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to know but, whether I liked it or not, the question was out there.
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged simply and took a sip of tea before continuing. ‘Your aunt Mary didn’t say.’
It took me a moment to realise that she meant my father’s sister Mary, whom she had never once referred to as ‘your aunt Mary’ in all the years after dad left us, but by the time it clicked, she was speaking again.
‘They’ve already had the funeral. Your grandmother didn’t think to tell us before because, well, because it’s been so long. But that’s not why your aunt Mary called.’ At this, my mother paused and shook her head, looking away. It took her a while to speak up again and when she did, her voice was shaky. She wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘They read the will,’ she said. ‘We’re both in it.’
‘We… What?’
I don’t know how long we sat there in silence, or when exactly my mum got up to refill our cups with tea, and when I realised she was sitting down next to me again it felt like it had been a lifetime since she had phoned me earlier that day.
I asked the next obvious question, since I knew I wasn’t about to get an answer to my last one.
‘Doesn’t— Didn’t he have a family?’
I could have sworn I caught her mouth twitching in a smirk. ‘Apparently not.’
Apparently not.
‘Do you know how much he left us?’
‘Not a clue,’ she said. She took another long pause and buried her face in the brim of her mug of tea, and when she looked up at me again I couldn’t be sure if her eyes were watering from the steam, or…
I had a million questions but I knew that she neither wanted to nor could answer them. She was probably just as confused by it all as I was, and I felt like it was my duty to be the rock for her. Just as I had helped her bleach her hair eight years before, just as I had hugged her tightly while she cried, I had to be the strong one again.
‘Do you want me to call them tomorrow and get it all straightened out?’ I asked, and she responded with a nod.
Once I had helped her into bed, I kissed her goodnight and made my way to my old bedroom down the hall. Even though it had been at least two years since I had last truly ‘lived’ in that room, whenever I came home for weekends or holidays, my mum always made an effort to have it exactly as it was when I was growing up. I used to hate the lavender walls and flowery curtains when I was a teenager. As an adult, at the grand old age of twenty-two, it was comforting to lie in my old, tiny bed and look at the faded posters on my walls, comforting to know that some things never change.
I never did make that phone call. I don’t think my mum really wanted me to, and if I’m honest I didn’t want to, either. It’s not as if she were poor, and my student loans would certainly cover me until such time as I got a job. The only reason I would ever have considered calling my grandmother to sort out the will would be to get some sense of closure, and I knew my mother and I didn’t need that. We got all the closure we needed when my father left eight years before.
No, all that mattered to me was making sure that my mother was okay, that I didn’t ever see her break down like I did that day in the bathroom with bleach spilled all over the sink. All that mattered was my mum, and that was how it had always been.
