every turn there’s a relic from my past. We pass the swimming baths, where just the whiff of chlorine means I’m ten again, flat-chested and streamlined as a dolphin – through the muffle of the water, I can hear the cheers of my parents, (in particular, my mother and her foghorn voice, which Niamh inherited): ‘C’mon, Bobby!’ as I pound towards the finish line, another medal for Kilterdale Carps.
There’s the tiny cinema where, when Niamh was a baby, Mum would drop Leah and I off for the Saturday matinee, where they’d play old films. I loved those little snippets of freedom, the times alone with my big sister. The building is dilapidated today, but I can still smell the popcorn, the fusty velvet of the seats; I can still feel the ache in my throat as I tried not to cry at E.T. in front of Leah, and the feel of my hand in her bigger one on the walk through the fields back home. I miss Leah, I think. I miss us being children together.
We pass The Fry Up, Kilterdale’s chippy, where every Friday we’d go, all five of us, Mum letting us have cans of Dr Pepper and her always having a battered sausage: ‘It’s not as if I eat like this every day of the week, is it, girls?’ she’d say, grease dripping from her chin. In the summer, we’d sit on the little bench outside, Niamh being fed chips in her pushchair – the same bench on which, years later, I’d sit with Joe eating chips, and we’d talk about our lives that were yet to unfurl, no idea of what was to become of us, what lay ahead. I savour those summers, these memories. In my mind’s eye, they’re like sunbursts, sparkling on the sea. But then, like a current dragging me under, I always come back to the summer of ’97. Those memories feel like the cool, dark waters that run beneath the sunburst-covered sea, beneath everything I do.
We had to go down Friars Lanes. Due to the early warm weather, the hedgerows were high and bursting with green shoots; the fields, brown and cloggy with mud in the winter, were speckled with green. If you looked up, the trees were smudged with birds’ nests. They looked like masses of black thread.
I could feel Dad looking at me. ‘So,’ he said, eventually. ‘Why are you going to this funeral?’
He rarely spoke so directly and I started, found myself feeling defensive.
‘I don’t know, ’cause it’s his mum and it would be nice to support him. Because Marion was so good to me when my mum died?’
Dad nodded slowly and looked at me with this sad smile.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Nothing, it’s just …’ He paused for what seemed ages. ‘I thought you’d left all that behind, Robyn …’
‘I have.’
‘So …’
I tried to look at the fields, the copses beyond, not at the lanes unfolding in front of us.
‘So, what?’
‘So, I’m worried about you, that’s all. I’m just being concerned Dad.’
I was touched he was being concerned Dad.
‘It’s just the service and a few sandwiches back at the vicarage,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it was an excuse to see you.’ I reached over and touched him on his shoulder. He flinched, just ever so slightly, but he did, I felt it.
‘Okay, well that’s all right then.’
‘Dad, I’m thirty-two,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
He patted my knee and smiled. ‘And you’re still my little girl,’ he said.
Silence descended. It was thick and sticky and I didn’t know how to move it.
Dad spoke, eventually, changing the subject: ‘Look at them fields, eh, Robyn? Absolutely marvellous. I bet you miss all this in London, don’t you?’
I wish I did. I wish coming back was like therapy for me, like going back home was therapy for other people.
‘Yeah, not many cow-pats in Archway,’ I said. I kept looking out of the window, so he couldn’t see my eyes water.
I was glad once we’d got to Mildred’s. There was something about travelling in a car with Dad these days that was intense, what with the elephant squeezed in there with us.
We sat at our usual table at the back and ordered the same thing we ordered when Mum was alive: me a cappuccino and a millionaire’s shortbread, Dad a cup of tea and a teacake. Mum used to have a banana milkshake with cream on top and a herbal tea. She thought the latter cancelled out the former. She was a bit deluded like that. It’s probably why she thought three Rothmans a day couldn’t hurt anyone, and maybe they didn’t, who knows? Maybe the Rothmans had nothing to do with it.
Dad pulled up his red trousers, sat down and searched my face.
‘Bloody Nora, you look more like your mother every time I see you. Same beautiful smile.’ His eyes still welled up when he mentioned her.
‘Thank God, eh, Dad? I lucked out, gene-wise.’
‘Yep, you got your mother’s looks. Niamh is more of a King, I think, and Leah, well …’
The teacake had arrived.
‘Have you spoken to her, Dad?’
Dad made sure every millimetre of that teacake had butter on.
‘No, I haven’t managed to yet.’
‘But you know how upset Mum would be if she knew you two hardly spoke.’
‘She’s never in, I’ve tried lots of times.’ I was kind of disappointed he felt he could just lie like that.
‘Dad, Leah hardly ever goes out in the evenings any more, you know what she’s like about leaving the kids.’ He looked up. ‘Okay, you don’t, but I’m telling you, she’s paranoid, especially about Jack and his asthma. She had to take him to A&E the other night.’
Dad had picked up the teacake but put it down again. His whole face sort of slid.
‘Did she?’
‘Yes.’
A blackbird appeared at the window. It sounds ridiculous, but I sometimes liked to imagine it was Mum when things like that happened, checking in on us. I felt like she was urging me to get to the point.
‘Dad, also, about the ashes,’ I said. ‘Please can I have them? I’ve been asking for over a year now.’
‘Well, it’d help if we saw more of you. There’s only Niamh that comes to see us.’
Thank God for Niamh, I thought. I hated what had happened, but most of all I hated what it had done to my relationship with my father, with my home town. As a family, we used to be so close.
‘Anyway, I’ve got some news,’ he said, changing the subject. Dad never had news. ‘Denise and I – well, I … am selling the house. We’re going to move to somewhere smaller. It’s too much for Denise to clean.’
That blackbird flew off then, presumably to have a good snigger.
Weirdly, I didn’t feel emotional about them moving out of the house we all grew up in; it hasn’t been ‘our’ house since Denise moved in, four months after Mum died, anyway, and magnolia-d the living daylights out of it.
‘That’s great news, Dad,’ I said. ‘So when might this be?’
‘We’ve put an offer in on a place in Saltmarsh, so all being well … a couple of months?’
I smiled. ‘I’m pleased for you, Dad,’ I said, and I was. Staying in that house with all the memories of Mum had affected him more than he let on, and whatever I felt about Denise, I couldn’t bear Dad to feel sad. ‘It’ll be good, a new start.’ He looked pleased I’d taken the news so well.
‘So, Mum’s ashes then,’ I continued – he wasn’t changing the subject that easily. ‘All the more reason for me to have them.