chew the nail of my left thumb while I try to build up the nerve to call Ciara.
Alex, my husband, tells me getting her involved might be a good thing. She may be able to lessen any burden on me. Which sounds great, but still I’m not so sure. I’m not sure I have enough emotional energy to deal with a second toxic relationship just now.
I sigh as I realise that despite my misgivings, I have to do this. I just have to suck it up.
Alex is at least sitting close to me as I call Ciara’s number. I draw a little strength from him. My hands are shaking, my tummy tight. Even the sound of her voice makes me nervous.
I take a deep breath. Remind myself that she is an adult now. As am I. I’m a wife and mother, for goodness sake. I should be able to speak to another grown woman without losing my nerve.
But the truth is Ciara has always intimidated me. At times she has utterly terrified me, if I’m being honest. She was the loud to my quiet. The tall to my short. The confident to my terrified. The angry to my sad. She was always bigger and badder and more able to dominate a room than I ever had been or ever could be. She’s the kind of person who can shred your self-confidence to ribbons with just one look.
I hear a soft voice say hello in a calming Scottish lilt. ‘Hello, Ciara’s phone.’
I’m momentarily thrown. ‘Hello,’ I stutter, ‘I’m … I’m Heidi Lewis. It’s about Ciara’s father, Joe …’
I hear an intake of breath. An awkward ‘uhm’, which tells me what I suspected. This phone call will not be welcomed.
‘Is she there? I need to speak to her about him.’
‘One moment please, I’ll check,’ the voice answers, efficiently as if she is speaking to a business associate.
Perhaps Ciara is still at work. Maybe this isn’t the best time to call. I think about hanging up. It would be easier and I’d have a good excuse to do so.
I’m just about to take my phone away from my ear and end the call, when I hear the calming Scottish lilt replaced by a brusque Derry hello.
‘Ciara?’ I say, to be sure.
‘Yes. It’s me. Heidi, what can I do for you?’
She sounds as pissed off now as she did as a truculent teenager. I revert to type and feel inadequate. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. I feel unable to form coherent sentences.
‘Erm, are you still at work? Because maybe, you know, this would be a call better taken later, a conversation … you know … to have when you’re free to talk.’
I sound like an imbecile.
It annoys her.
‘I’m at home,’ she says, her voice terse. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s your father,’ I begin. I wait for an interruption that doesn’t come. ‘He asked me to call you. Look, Ciara, maybe this really is a conversation better had face to face.’ I realise I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to have to be the one to say those words to her.
‘I’d rather you just spat it out,’ Ciara says. ‘What is it? Does he need money? Has he met someone else?’
I take a deep breath.
The easiest way to do something you really don’t want to is to do it quickly, like tearing off a plaster. That’s what my mother would say, so I say the next sentence quickly. Probably too quickly. The words rattle off my tongue.
‘It’s nothing like that. Ciara, he’s not well. He’s just been in hospital for surgery and well, the news isn’t good. It isn’t good at all, I’m afraid. And he has asked me to call you to let you know he’d like to see you if you’d be willing.’
There’s a pause. ‘Are you telling me he’s dying?’ Ciara asks, as forthright as she always was.
I nod before saying, ‘Yes, Ciara. It’s cancer. He’s been given maybe three to six months, at best.’
The phone line goes quiet. I wonder if she has hung up, take the phone from my ear to see if the call is still connected.
‘Good,’ she says eventually, although I hear a trace of emotion in her voice that wasn’t there before. ‘Good. He’s dying. Good enough for him.’
‘Ciara …’
I start to talk but the line goes dead. She has hung up. I sit staring at my phone, my face blazing, wondering how I tell Joe what has just happened.
Now
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Stella calls from the kitchen.
I don’t answer. I’m staring at my phone, trying to process the conversation I’ve just had with Heidi bloody Lewis. The golden child. It had to be her to tell me, didn’t it? It couldn’t have been anyone else. He couldn’t have spoken to Mum and got her to break the news. No, he was always one to go for maximum impact. Maximum distress.
The bastard.
Anger wells in me and I throw my phone at the sofa, watch as it bounces off the cushion and hits the solid wooden floor with a crack. I’ll have broken the screen, in my anger.
‘Good enough for him,’ I’d said to Heidi. It had been my gut reaction, to feel angry and shocked and think fuck him for getting her to contact me only to tell me he was dying.
He is dying.
My father, for all that word really meant to me, is dying.
‘Ciara,’ I hear Stella, ‘are you still on the phone, only the pasta …’
She walks into the room, glass of white wine in hand, and looks from me to the phone on the floor and back to me again. The glass is put down on the table and she is across the room beside me before I can figure out what to say to her.
‘What is it?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face for information that I’m still trying to process.
‘He’s dying,’ I say, thinking about how the words feel on my tongue. How they sound in my voice. Alien. Weird. Melodramatic.
Her eyes on mine, her blue eyes, deep and dark and able to see the real me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she says, one hand gently caressing the side of my face. It’s her sympathy, not the news of my father’s terminal illness, which brings tears to my eyes.
‘The bastard has cancer,’ I tell her.
One tear falls and she brushes it away with the pad of her thumb.
Stella knows I have a complicated relationship with my father. Or had. We haven’t had much of a relationship at all in at least ten years. I’ve been more than happy about that.
‘He wants to see me,’ I say as she leads me to the sofa. All thoughts of dinner, or glasses of wine or the movie we had planned to curl up on the sofa to watch, are gone. ‘He asked Heidi to call me. Not enough balls to even call me himself.’
That angers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he is now just a frail old man facing a death sentence and I should give him some leeway; but then again, when did he ever give me leeway for anything? He walked in and out of my life, leaving damage in his wake without so much as looking back. So much damage.
‘Do you want to see him?’ Stella asks.
Only she could ask that question and not have me bite back at her. She understands me in a world where it feels like no one else does.
I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d like to tell him exactly what I think of him.’
‘Or