“And why can’t you?” Mum demanded. “You make enough, more than enough, but you can’t send what your own kid needs? I have childcare to pay for, food, bills, this godforsaken flat, her school uniform, books—”
The garble of my dad’s shout was loud enough that it carried from the receiver, all the way to me in the narrow bedroom. One single bed, a nightstand, and a lot of mess on the floor that I mostly just kicked into the standing closet when I was told to clean my room.
My hands dug into the mattress, as sagged as my posture, as I listened in to that monthly dance between my parents.
“I told you—” she enunciated the words, like she was talking to an idiot. And she was. “—It goes on childcare. I work nights, Dave.”
The phone garbled with his answer, that muffled underwater sound that made him easier to ignore.
“She isn’t old enough to be left on her own!” Another pause before she shouted, “She’s twelve!”
I bit down on the insides of my cheeks.
With a trapped huff, I pushed off the bed and dragged myself through the gap in the doorway.
I spotted Mum in the kitchen, her back to me, wrapped in a thick nylon dressing gown. Under it, her cleaner scrubs weren’t warm enough for the flat.
She rummaged for the push button on the microwave before the door sprang open, and she tested the heat of the mug inside.
My socks dragged beneath me as I moved for the window. I didn’t even bother trying to shut it all the way—it never did. So I took the crumpled, damp towel from the floor where it had fallen and rolled it up, tight, then pushed it into the gap.
It would fall again.
It always did.
I couldn’t pin it upwards, a vertical standing towel. But I had thought about scotch tape and old scrap fabric.
Before Mum could turn around with her tea in hand—a direct view to the windows—I skittered back to my room.
My shoulder brushed the peeling wallpaper before I kicked my heel back and let the door drift shut.
I fell onto my bed, face-down.
“How can I take you to court?” Mum’s voice carried. “You’re out of the fucking country! I can’t believe I even have to do this—chase you for the money it costs to raise the daughter you abandoned! Is that what it is, Dave? Would you rather pretend she doesn’t exist—”
I twisted around toward the edge of the bed and reached my hand down for the mess on the floor.
My fingertips brushed the gloss of a vinyl cover.
I didn’t even know what record it was; I just snatched it.
The record player—the Christmas present from Dad—sat on the bedside table. It had come in a battered box that still smelled faintly of cigarettes.
Dad didn’t smoke.
The note inside had been plain.
‘Thought you’d like this.’
Just a record player. No actual records that should have come with it, no instruction manual, just the player in a battered box.
The speaker didn’t work. The only audio that came out of it was through the flimsy headphones I jammed into the aux input.
A Christmas gift that hadn’t even arrived on time.
It had come a week into the new year, when everyone else had already taken down their decorations.
I’d left it in the box under my bed until March—and that had always been my favourite month, because it was when Mum took me to the car boot sales every weekend, the rush of second-hand goodies sold in a yard, literally from the boots of people’s cars.
