It’s as though I’ve taken a punch to the stomach. I stare at her, unable to breathe for a few seconds. Eventually I manage, ‘You went to see Dad?’ Neither of us have ever visited him – at least, that’s what I always thought. ‘What do you mean? When? Why?’ I shake my head at her. ‘What the actual fuck, Alison?’
She swallows and pushes her plate away. ‘Last week. For the first time.’
‘But … why? Why now?’
‘He wrote to me. He’s been writing to me for a while, after he didn’t get parole, and I’ve never read his letters or replied. I always threw them straight in the bin as soon as I saw they were from him. And then, last year he stopped, he just … Stopped. And I was relieved, but then a few months ago he started up again, and I suppose curiosity got the better of me because I read this one. He wrote that he has liver disease and he didn’t know how long he had left and that he wanted to see me.’ She pauses and looks at me, breathlessly. ‘And, I dunno why, maybe because I’m now a parent, maybe because he’s dying, but I suddenly started panicking and thinking that if I didn’t go to see him I’d never have any answer. There was a time when he was a good dad.’
I almost choke on my drink. ‘Oh, come on!’
‘What? He was. To me, at least.’ Her voice softens. ‘I know it wasn’t the same for you …’
She was always his favourite. Going by Alison’s memories of her early years, she started off with a very different childhood – a very different father – to the one I had. She was nearly seventeen when he started drinking. I was ten with fewer memories of happier times with him: me sitting on his shoulders at the balloon fiesta, him teaching me to ride my bike, to swim. But they get fainter and fainter every time I try and recall them.
In the summer of 2004, my grandparents – my dad’s parents – were killed in a helicopter crash while on aonce-in-a-lifetime holiday to the US. They’d moved to Cornwall so we didn’t see them that often, but it had devastated our father. Alison said he was never the same afterwards: the odd evening down the pub became a regular thing. Alison likes to blame the drink for his violence – but I don’t agree. Yes, he was a nasty drunk, but the anger, the resentment, the aggression, must already have been in him. I’ve always suspected that Alison had more compassion for my father than I had, even after Mum’s death. But I still never expected her to forgive him.
‘So you went?’ I sit back in my chair, disappointment lodged in my chest. ‘And did you get the answers you were looking for?’
The waitress pops up again, preventing Alison from replying. We both order a latte and she takes our plates away, our food unfinished.
‘In some ways, maybe,’ Alison says when the waitress has gone. ‘He’s aged so much. He seemed so shrunken and old.’
‘He’s sixty-seven. Hardly old,’ I say, somewhat petulantly.
‘He looks way older. Like eighty-odd. Honestly, I was shocked. I was expecting him to look … well, like he did back then.’
He had been broad-shouldered and strong at fifty. Intimidatingly tall with a thick neck that flushed red when he was angry and deep grooves between his eyebrows that spoke of a life lived in disappointment. Althoughhe hadn’t always looked that way, of course. His wedding photos tell a different story – handsome, optimistic, gazing adoringly at his young, pretty wife.
The waitress is back with our coffees. She sets them down in front of us and then moves to clear the next table. Alison stares at me silently. I’m not sure what she expects me to say.
‘He seemed so sincere, this time,’ she says as she spoons the froth from her coffee. ‘He told me he didn’t want to die with me – and you, he mentioned you too, of course – still thinking the worst of him. Even after all these years, he’s insisting he didn’t kill Mum.’
I laugh bitterly. ‘You’re joking. He actually said that? Even before he killed her, he beat her up, on more than one occasion. I saw it with my own eyes.’ I take a deep breath, fury lapping at the back of my throat. ‘He made us all sit through a trial because he refused to plead guilty.’
‘I know, I know …’ She looks down at the tablecloth and a surge of anger almost lifts me from my seat.
‘You don’t believe him … do you?’
‘I … don’t know. Why would he lie now, when he’s dying? He’s served most of his sentence. What would he gain by insisting he was innocent again now? There was always something about that night that didn’t make sense to me. He had stopped drinking. He was having therapy. Why would he suddenly flip?’
She’d intimated this to me before, when we were much younger, but I’d always refused to listen, so she’d stopped telling me about her doubts. But they must have beenthere, all this time, hidden beneath the surface, which was why she’d opened his letter and gone to see him.
I push back my chair and stand up. ‘I can’t listen to this.’
‘Immy, sit down,’ she says firmly when the diners from the next table turn to look. I sink back into my seat. ‘I’m not denying he hit Mum when he was drunk,’ she says in a hushed tone. ‘I’m just saying I think he might be telling the truth about not killing her.’
‘A jury found him guilty. He was seen on CCTV arguing with Mum before she headed down the towpath. Eyewitnesses saw them arguing before that at that Halloween party. She had his skin under her fingernails, he had a scratch on his face. The mask to his Halloween costume was found chucked in the river …’
‘Yes, they argued. They always argued. But the evidence was circumstantial …’
‘Are you telling me that, for all these years, you’ve believed he was innocent?’ I’m aghast. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
‘No. Of course not. I’m not going to deny I’ve had doubts, you know that. But it’s only after I went to see him. Would he still continue to lie when he knows he’s dying? What would be the point?’
‘You can’t believe a word he says, Ali.’
‘But it was always the drink … you know that. He had stopped drinking when Mum died and he wasn’t drunk that night. He said he wouldn’t have put us through a trial if hehadbeen guilty. You know the prosecutionconceded he could have pushed her by accident, and she hit her head. He said if that had been the case he would have admitted it. Gone for the lesser manslaughter charge.’
I’m absolutely speechless that she’s defending him like this, after everything that man put us all through, and I feel her betrayal like a sharp slap.
