“That’s enough!” My father’s words are snatched up by a cough, and he presses a fist to his mouth. “Your mother was loyal, and she knew the value of family, and she loved this club! She’d be ashamed to see what you’ve become, what you’ve made of it! Do you have any idea how this makes us look?”
I stare at my father and more venomous laughter falls from my lips. Forty-five years worth of pain boils in my chest, tearing its way out of my ribcage. All I can see as I look at the man before me is my mother at our dining table, smoking the endless chain of cigarettes that would ultimately lead to her death.
“Howthismade us look, Dad?” I raise my eyebrows, my eyes stinging. “How did it make us look when you were getting caught in seedy motels with strippers? How did it make us look whenyou bought that apartment in Brixton? Hmm? How many kids did you have with that woman?”
My father’s mouth sets in a hard line, and with a mutteredHmphhe goes back to polishing my mother’s pink headstone.
“No, come on Dad, have it out with me.” I cross my arms over my chest, watching his hunched figure as he works. “How many siblings do I have? Because it wasn’t just the apartment in Brixton. No, there was that fancy one in Shepherd’s Bush for the rockstar’s daughter, how old was she again? Seventeen? Bet you managed plenty of babies with her. Am I ever going to meet them?”
“Enough,” my father snaps, refusing to look up at me.
“Do you know how many nights I sat up to make sure Mum was OK? Watching her sitting at the table, just waiting for you to come home?” Tears start to blur my vision. “I was nine years old, and I was sitting at the top of those stairs, making sure Melina and Nico didn’t wake up, while you were out shagging god knows fucking who. And now you have the fucking gall to look me in the face and tell meI’ma disgrace?”
“I said that’s enough, Dominic.”
“And don’t think I don’t know where you were the morning Nico died.”
My father springs up, his face filled with rage and pain, and I don’t even care. I stare down this old man, this pitiful old man who caused the most wonderful woman in the world so much pain, and I shake my head.
“What?” My eyes still burn with all the tears that I’ve held back since I was a kid, but they won’t fall, not even now. “You want to deny it? You know I still hear Mum screaming? I still hear her calling outyour fucking name, because she’d just found her baby dead in his bed, andyou weren’t there.” I can’t stop myself jabbing this feeble old man in the shoulder, and his expression shifts from rage to something mournful. “Howfucking dare you call me a disgrace. You put your burden on my shoulders when I was just a little boy. You want to know why I wasn’t a good dad to Archie? How fucking could I be? I had no idea what that even looked like. And I did my bloody best, and I know I failed, I know I fucking failed at every bloody turn, but Ilovehim, Dad. I love him and I loved Mum and I loved Melina and Nico and I fucking lovedyoueven though I hated you.”
My father blinks at me slowly, his eyes bloodshot. His lips tremble, and he opens them briefly as though to speak, before clamping them shut again.
I sniffle, and look down at the graves beside us. “I don’t know what Mum would think of this, I can’t even begin to guess. But I know that I could talk to her about it. I know she wouldn’t judge me for it. And I know she’d love Mia.”
“She would.” My father’s voice is barely a croak, and when I look back at him, he’s gazing at Mum’s grave. “Your mother was too good for me. I always knew that. And I knew the second I met Mia that she was too good for Archie. I knew he’d mess it up. Too brash, too arrogant, too taken with himself. Nothing like you.” He meets my startled expression with a smile. “You know I found you asleep at the top of the stairs one night. You’d slept right through your mother and I having a filthy old row. And then I found you up there and I knew you’d been waiting up to watch over her.”
“And you still didn’t change.”
“No.” My father sighs. “Because I’m a brash and arrogant bastard too. It must skip a generation.”
“Well, that’s cold comfort to me now, isn’t it.”
“I know, but… You were a good dad, son. You are a good dad.” My father coughs, and adjusts the hose on his face. “And the fact you think you’re not, that’s my fault. Never telling you how well you did, never telling you I was proud of you.”
I stare at him, my shoulders heaving, emotion tearing at the backs of my eyeballs. “But why?”
“Because I was bloody jealous!” My dad rasps, coughing into his wrinkled fist, waving me off when I move towards him. “I was jealous. That’s all there is to it. You go from being Billy Boy Graves and having women throwing themselves at you, to a broken down old man who fucking pisses himself when he coughs too much.” He gestures to me with an open hand, but there’s no scorn in his face. Just sadness. “And then there’s my son. My son, the incomparable Dominic Graves, leading England to a World Cup win, best striker in the Premier League, goal records that weren’t beaten for bloody years.”
My eyes drop to the ground, and pain wedges itself into the space behind my heart.
“I only ever wanted you to be fucking proud of me.” I shake my head, feeling small and stupid in the face of the man who seemed like a giant to me when I was a child. “That’s all I wanted. For you to look at me and see something great. And all you ever saw was competition.”
“Yes, but that’s my failing, son, not yours.” My father moves towards me slowly, lugging the oxygen tank alongside him, until he can put a hand on my shoulder. “And I am proud of you.”
I shrug him off and take a step back. “Until now. Because now I’ve just wrecked the club and your legacy, isn’t that right?”
My father sighs heavily. “No.”
My eyes snap up to his. “What?”
“No, I don’t think you have. And I’m sorry I said it.”
“Sorry for a lot of things today, aren’t you?”
He slaps a hand against his thigh and stares at me with a deep frown. “Yes I bloody well am. Do I think what you’ve done with Mia is wise? No, I don’t. But you’re both adults. What you do is up to you. But look.” He gestures to the graves beside us. “We’ve weathered far bloody worse than an illicit affair,Dominic. You and me have lost so much, you think we can’t make it through this?”
I want to fire another cruel retort at him. But I look down at my mother’s pink headstone, at my brother and sister’s names on theirs, and I can’t. Not in front of them. We have weathered worse.
