parents’ evenings at school, ensured ends met. She was perfectly adequate in every way. But I’ve often thought that the day my father left, I lost my mother too. It seemed she decided that loving was too risky and settled into the sanitized safety of simply caring for me. Even looking back, it seems unfair. I’d never leave her.’ I wish I’d shut up. I’m boring myself, never mind Darren. I mean it’s hardly the most entertaining anecdote that I could have come up with, is it? Yet I can’t stop myself.
‘I’m not blaming her. I mean I understand where she’s coming from. But occasionally it would have been nice if she could have read a fairy tale and closed the book without sniping that the prince would have a new woman by the end of the year.’
Darren smiles sadly and I force a wry grin back. ‘Side by side, we worked our way through Christmases and birthdays, holidays in Devon, O-levels, A-levels and finally university. Mum ironing and singing her anthems, ‘Does Anybody Miss Me?’ and ‘If You Go Away’. My formative years. She is a fine mum and I know she always did her best for me. But sometimes I wish that my father had left behind brothers and sisters to fill the rooms and disguise the sound of the hissing iron and the clanking radiators.’
We both wait silently as the waiter lowers two cups of coffee on to our table. I’m sure it’s instant; it’s served in the type of teaset that you collect from garages and with a plastic carton of UHT milk. Still, the waiter presents it as though he’d grown the beans himself and he was serving it in a seventeenth-century silver service. I would be annoyed that he’s interrupted our conversation but I like people to be involved in their work.
Darren asks, ‘Do you look like your mum or dad?’
‘I have two pictures of my father and, to my eternal disappointment, I am the image of that callous, deserting bastard. The pictures were taken in 1967 and 1975. The first is a wedding picture. I rescued the half my mother cut away.’
Darren looks bemused. Of course, he comes from a family wrapped in bliss – how could he understand about wedding pictures being cut in half? I try to explain it for him. ‘Oh, don’t worry, it wasn’t a violent, passionate act. She was very calm about it. She wanted to keep the pictures of herself because she did look wonderful, so she carefully cut around her dress. I remember her using my round-ended scissors from a play weaving kit. She sat at the kitchen table for two days. She erased him from the wedding photos, the ones of my birth, all holiday snaps. Everything. It was a thorough, systematic extermination of all evidence that he ever existed. I stole the 1975 picture before she got to it.’ Darren doesn’t interrupt. I check he’s listening. He is. He’s put down his coffee cup. Deliberately I pick mine up. ‘That was the year he left us. It’s a picture of him helping to blow out the seven candles on my birthday cake.’
How could he have left us, me – the very spit of him?
‘Do you miss him?’
‘Miss him? I don’t even remember him.’
We both fall silent again. I determinedly chew the mints. Just to show that I’m not bothered. It’s difficult to swallow.
‘For years after he left I tried to imagine what his life was like. When I was in a traffic jam I wondered if he was in it too, or another similar one. When I listened to the radio I wondered if he listened to the same channel. But I didn’t know and I’ll never know because I know so little about him.’
‘You could trace him,’ suggests Darren gently.
‘I don’t want to. He’s made it clear where I fit into his life – i.e. I don’t. He never paid a penny in alimony or even sent a birthday card. He’s given me one thing in my life and I’m grateful for it. He’s taught me about loss. He’s saved me from ever having a broken heart.’ I try to grin. ‘I’ve turned my heart to steel. In fact, even my closest friends question if I have one at all.’ I’ve always believed this.
‘You have a heart to break, Cas, just like everyone else.’
I’m indignant. There’s no call to be insulting. ‘I do not,’ I assert defiantly.