We lay in the gloom for a while, hand in hand. Our sellers had made the rather absurd move of taking all the light bulbs with them, and we didn’t own a lamp. Soon the darkness would swallow us whole.
‘We should go and get bulbs,’ Rachel said. ‘Before the shops shut.’
‘They took the curtains, though, too. It’ll be like we’re on stage.’
She thought for a moment. ‘We can put newspaper on the windows.’
I guess, having lived in eight different houses in as many years, she’d learned all the tricks.
‘So, how does it feel?’ I asked her. ‘Having a home of your own.’
I could just make out the shine of emotion in her eyes. ‘Unbelievable,’ she said.
I rolled over so I was lying above her, propped up on one elbow. ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking. I could get another job. While we’re doing this place up.’
Firmly, she shook her head. ‘You’re going to write a bestseller, remember?’
I smiled softly. ‘You always sound so sure.’
She blinked up at me. In the darkness, her eyes were tiny tidepools. ‘Some things you just know.’
I dipped my head to kiss her. Because she was definitely right about that.
18.
Rachel
May 2000
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance? You didn’t hit your head?’
My father slowly swivels his neck from left to right. ‘Fully intact. I told you, it was just a little stumble.’
He’s downplaying it now. But he called me earlier, mortified, to ask if I could pop round and help him up off the floor after he tripped on his way to the bathroom.
I make tea and we sit together by the open fire, because today's been unseasonably chilly. Dad’s house is a time-warp mid-terrace, all terracotta carpets and flower-power curtains, wood-panelled walls and rattan lampshades straight out of the seventies. To anyone else, aesthetically I’m sure it’s mayhem. To me, it represents my father, comfort, home.
I feel Dad watching me over the rim of his cup. He certainly seems okay, if a little embarrassed by what happened. He’s in his mid-seventies now, has the white hair and laughter lines to show for it. But his mind and eyes are still diamond-sharp.
‘And how are things with you, my darling?’
He asks me this because he knows. Always does, always has.
It is not easy, of course, explaining the concept of the pill to a man who’s lived through two world wars and once extracted three of his own teeth because he was too impatient to wait for a dentist’s appointment. But luckily Dad has never not taken me seriously. Growing up, I could always rely on him to enter make-believe worlds with me, indulge my imagination, patiently helpme pick through whatever maze of overthinking I’d got lost in that day, however trivial it was in reality.
After I’ve told him, he stares for a long time into the orange flare of the fire.
‘We were going to start trying for a family next year,’ I say.
‘Stability,’ he says slowly, eventually. ‘That’s what children need.’
He has always felt deeply guilty, I know, that he could not offer me this.
‘I think a lot of Josh. You know that, darling. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t advise you to consider the direction your life might take if one day you’re... fifty, and Josh is twenty-nine.’
The first afternoon I ever introduced Dad to Josh, at the Cat and Fiddle, they both somehow seemed to sense they could skip over the small talk, not bother with routine pleasantries. They just wrapped their hands around their pint glasses and got straight into the miners’ strikes, and Margaret Thatcher, and why Josh had written his first book, and how he’d felt growing up without a father, and the peculiarities of his family tree, and Dad’s own tricky childhood in Lincolnshire. Which was classic Josh, I’d already learned, after just a month together. Heart on his sleeve, no pretensions. Years later, Dad told me that, by the end of that first evening, he felt he’d made a friend.
‘You know,’ Dad says thoughtfully, ‘in the end, I did actually grow to respect your mother for leaving. Once some time had passed, I mean.’
