Friday Reading

Having met her father, Deb ponders the meaning of the word 'home' in this weeks chapter from Family Lines

Sorry Marge, this is taking an age. Maybe I’m relieved to be finally sharing the whole story. Call it therapy! For so long it’s been hidden away in a corner of my head (or should that be my heart?) and I’ve tried to go on with life as if I could ignore it and walk away. Only that’s not how it works. Instead of staying put in the shadows of my mind it drags at me like the broken chain of a runaway animal. And yes, that’s me.

Now that I’ve been forced to turn around and view it from a new angle, I want to tease out all the details for hints I missed at the time. I hope this doesn’t seem self-indulgent. Maybe I’m the trapped animal chewing off her own leg to escape. I’m beginning to understand why long ago you advised us to write a diary. Not that you intended for it to be so morose. You told us it was good discipline to note the events of our day, to confide our worries to it and to always end with one good thing that had happened that day. I think I’ll have to go out and buy a special notebook to finally start.

For now this will have to do (it’s the middle of the night!). Going back to that miserable day when I met my father for the first time, which it was, I discovered later: I followed him as he ducked and elbowed his way through the crowd in the railway station, afraid every moment that he would disappear. Again. I glued my eyes to his shabby red anorak, not caring who I barged into as long as I didn’t lose sight of him. When we got outside he halted and glanced around. For one moment I felt like he was hoping he’d shaken me off. Again.

I tugged at his sleeve and said, I’m here.

Oh so you are, he said. Now, where will we go?

I don’t know, I shrugged. I’ve never been here before.

Of course not, he said. I think I spotted a café down the way, when I was on the bus.

Off he went, bustling ahead, me having to skip every now and then to keep up with him. When we sat down at last I got a proper look at him. The same probably went for him too. First impressions: he looked old. I mean a good bit older than Mam. He was wheezing from the rush. His eyes were a greeny-brown, the whites slightly bloodshot. A thin combover of sandy hair crossed his balding crown.

We ordered coffee and I asked for a plate of chips. While we waited he swivelled his head around, taking in the café. Was he trying to avoid looking directly at me or was he afraid of us being seen by someone he knew? After waiting so long and coming this far I was determined to get answers to the questions that had been simmering in my head since Mam told me Denis wasn’t my dad. I asked Jim was he surprised to get my letter. The question seemed to frighten him. He hedged and hummed and hawed before saying Yes, well it did come out of the blue.

Once he’d started there was no stopping him. He rabbited on about leading a quiet life with Ellen, the missus, and how he didn’t come into the city much so this was an excursion for him but he liked the area and the people were nice. He didn’t draw breath till the coffee landed on the table. I jumped in then and said coming here was an excursion for me too. He asked about the journey, and whether the train was crowded. For a moment I burned to tell him about my journey from Dublin but I could tell he wanted to keep the talk superficial. I said it was long. From London? He asked, and I realised that he thought I lived at Mark’s house, which was my postal address. Something stopped me telling him about the camp at Greenham, so I said, Yeah. A bit outside.

There it was, I had lied to him. I felt stupid and angry because I had come all this way to get the truth, and I despised Mam for keeping it from me, for living a lie, by my book. Yet here I was hiding behind a big fat porky. No matter how much I’d tried not to build up a romantic image of my missing father I couldn’t help being disappointed. Jim wasn’t what I had expected, or hoped for. There was no magical click of recognition. It could have been a blind date that wasn’t going nowhere. I was probably wasting my time. If that was so I had wasted the past two years. Should I get up and leave? Or hang on to try to get through to him? My rumbling tummy answered for me. I was dying to lash into the plate of chips.

He watched me eat for a couple of minutes then said, You were a hungry scrap. Do they not feed you at home?

I gaped at him, fork half way to my mouth. He knew nothing about me. Yeah. But like I said the train journey was long.

He nodded. How long have you been here?

I got here this morning.

I meant in the UK.

Couple of years.

We continued like this for another while, him lobbing random questions at me without much caring about the answer. I’d have got more communication from a stranger on the train. For instance, he asked me what I liked best to study at school. I reminded him that I was twenty– I left out the bit about not having sat the Leaving. Amazing how easy it was to dodge the truth. When he asked would I go to college I said I didn’t think so. It’s not the be all and the end all, he said.

Photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash

He changed tack and started to ask about Dublin, saying he heard it had changed a lot since he left, twenty years ago. At least he had the decency to blush when he realised what he’d said.

So you never saw me, I said.

He shook his head, looking confused. I couldn’t, it wasn’t possible, he blathered then jumped out of his seat, excusing himself, to go to the Gents. I finished my chips and waited. It occurred to me he might have done a runner out the back, sticking me with the bill. He’d left his hat on the table, the flat grey one he should have worn in the station when I arrived but didn’t. Moments later he was back at the table flustering about the time because he had to catch a bus in ten minutes. He crammed on the hat, paid the bill and we left the café together. He shook my hand and told me if I was ever in the area again to be sure to look him up. Then he vanished. Again.

Thanks to Barb’s money I got a bunk in a hostel for the night. Next morning I took the first train out. Tears blurred my view of the passing countryside. I couldn’t make head nor tail of what had happened. Even in the muddle of my bitterness, anger and grief I realised that Jim wasn’t the real problem. Sure, he hadn’t been very enthusiastic about meeting me but in truth why should he have been? He had chosen to abandon Mam and me twenty years ago and he didn’t seem to regret his decision.

Most of all I was overwhelmed by an urge to go home. I wanted to speed the train along the tracks like a stagecoach driver lashing the horses forward in a cowboy movie. But home wasn’t our house in Drimnagh. I suddenly understood the old cliché about not knowing where home is until you leave and return to a place. My home was the camp, my friends there, and Rose, who was due to visit the following weekend. If I return to Dublin in the summer what will it feel like? I’ve been here for almost as long as I lived there. People associate home with their birthplace. I meet Irish people who’ve been here longer than me and still talk about going home for a few weeks in the summer. Back then, on that train I rejected the idea of going back to my first home.

I pictured my return to that house, Mam crying with relief and reading me the riot act at the same time, no doubt telling me I’d got too thin. Gentle Denis would cup my face in his palms and plant a soft kiss on my forehead. He would make no criticisms no recriminations. Lucy would be going loopy like a big puppy, gabbling about her latest doings and letting on she didn’t miss me at all. The kitchen windows would steam up with all the talk and the laughter and the crying and the kettle going and suddenly neighbours would be tapping on the back door to ask Is it true?

The phone would be ringing off the wall. And you, Marge. You would have been the first person summoned and you’d have rattled over in your VW beetle to welcome the prodigal daughter. We’d have got takeaway fish and chips because Mam would be too wound up to cook and someone would produce a sponge cake. My friends would turn up, including poor Mirror and there’d have to have been a reckoning with her. Yes we’d have been celebrated but when the next day dawned I’d be lying in my childhood bed, feeling the suffocating weight of expectation on my chest again and I’d know it had been a mistake to come back.

Photo by Damien Dufour on Unsplash

On the train I had a sudden insight. I thought I knew why I felt out of place in that house, feeling I had to be something I wasn’t. This is where maybe you can help me Marge. Is it possible that overheard something when I was small, a conversation, a question, a passing comment about me and my real father? Could you and Mam have talked together thinking I was too young to understand what was being said? Or would she and Denis have spoken about me? Did certain words engrave themselves on my brain and come to the surface as I approached the age Mam was when she had me? Is this a far-fetched notion?

When I was expecting Pearl I learnt that a baby’s brain is like a sponge or soft clay, every sound and sensation is embedded there, like tracks laid down on an LP, and helps to build the personality. Someday those tracks will reveal themselves, and if they’re not spun from lightness and joy and love the person will suffer. We make only happy sounds in her presence. Rose reads poetry to her. I tell her about the birds outside the window, point to the trees and flowers coming into bud. That probably sounds corny but I want to protect her from my frailty for as long as possible. She will always know who her parents are.

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