Fiction: Father pt.6
6
I fitted the lock on the bathroom door that evening. It took about twenty minutes. When I was finished I admired my handiwork, trying out the shiny gold-coloured lock a couple of times to make sure it worked, then I went to tell Gemma.
I knocked on her door and, when there was no immediate answer, pushed down on the handle to go in. The door would not open. I pushed a little harder and still it seemed it stuck. A few moments later I heard a little click and Gemma opened the door.
“Yes, Dad?” She said. I looked at her door to see why it had not opened.
“You put a lock on your door?” I said, surprised, perhaps a little annoyed.
“I told you I was sick of having no privacy in this house.” I was about to argue, then decided against it and stood in silence for a few moments.
“What did you want, Dad?” she asked me, apparently impatient.
“Oh, um, I put a lock on the bathroom door.”
“Oh. Okay, Dad. Thanks.” She was about to close the door, I put my hand out to stop her.
“Gemma,” I said.
“Yes, Dad?” she said, looking at my hand on the door. For a moment I was aware of the sounds of the cartoons Lucy was watching downstairs.
“Are you, um, alright? I mean, in general, kind of.” I trailed off. Gemma looked at me, looked as if she was about to say something, but then a little stiffly, I thought, just said,
“Yes, Dad, I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m here for you, if you ever want to talk about anything, okay?”
“Okay, Dad,” She closed the door. I thought that had not gone too badly, until I remembered that she had actually gone to the effort of going out and buying and then installing a lock on her own door. I suppose it is understandable that she would want her own space and privacy, but she seemed to going a bit overboard with it. That was only the first time I have walked in on her like that, at least that I could remember. And her claim of having “no privacy in this house” seemed a little unjustified.
Maybe Lucy was bothering her, going into her room too much or something, although the two of them had always gotten on well. I could remember countless times when I had overheard Lucy asking Gemma about their mother, and Gemma telling with a sad smile all that she could remember of the mother she had known for eight years of her life. She used to ask me, but even little Lucy could tell how sad it made me to talk about Rachel, even to talk about all the wonderful things I remembered about her.
“I’m going to be out tonight,” I told Gemma at breakfast on the following Thursday morning, “I’ve got to meet my client to discuss the website.” Part of this was true; I was meeting Jack Morris to discuss his garden company website, but after that I was meeting Angela for dinner and to go to the cinema. I neglected to mention this though as I was not yet ready to tell my children about her. After all, I was not sure they would react favourably to the news, and it was not as if anything was definitely going to happen anyway; it was just a date.
“Your grandma is going to pick Lucy up from school and you can walk to hers from school and she’ll give you tea. Okay?” I said.
“Actually, Dad, could I just come back here, I’ve, uh, got some coursework to do, and the files are on my computer.”
“What you going to do for tea?” I asked.
“I could have something from the freezer, or you could leave me some money.” Gemma said. Then came Marisa’s daily knock at the door. Gemma half stood up, apparently waiting for my response.
“Um, okay,” I said, “there’s some chicken nuggets in the freezer, and chips too,”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said, smiling as she went to answer the door.
“Can you remember to tell grandma that Gemma won’t be coming for tea?” I said to Lucy.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said from the other side of the breakfast table.
“Good girl, let’s get you ready for school then.”
At three o’ clock I sat in a coffee shop opposite Jack Morris, a man a maybe five years younger than me, with a thin carpet of stubble across his chin, short messy hair and a friendly face. He was wearing a casual suit to meet me, but seemed uncomfortable in it, preferring, I imagined, his every-day worn-in gardening clothes.
He liked the site, thought the colour scheme we had decided on worked well and was particularly pleased with the slide show of some of the work he and his employees were most proud of. In fact he had no problems with it at all, which meant that my work on it was now finished.
As we were talking, I felt my mobile phone vibrate in my pocket. A few minutes later Jack excused himself to go to the toilet, so I checked my phone. A text message from Angela came up on the screen, saying that she was sorry but she could not make it for our date. At the end of the message she had put a little sad face emoticon and two kisses. I sighed, disappointed.
Jack returned after a couple of minutes and we made general conversation while we drank our coffee, the business of the website being concluded when he wrote me out a check.
When our drinks were finished, I gave him a copy of my business card and asked that he might recommend me to anyone else who wanted a website designing. He said he would do that, then we stood up, shook hands and left.
Gemma was in when I got home, I could hear her music coming from her room. I wondered how modern kids could concentrate with music playing, but she said it helped her concentration when I had asked her about it before. I pushed my feet into my slippers while absently looking at a leaflet on the floor that had come through the letter box. Apparently a new Chinese take-away had opened up near us. For a moment I considered what to do for the rest of the evening, but decided I would begin by making a cup of tea and checking eBay and my emails.
In my office, I could still hear Gemma’s music faintly, despite the walls and doors that stood between us. I went over to the CD player on my bookshelf and put ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ on, then I turned my computer on, and waited for it to load listening to the music of Pink Floyd and , when it had loaded, opened up eBay.
I drank the last of my tea and realised I needed the toilet. I got up, walked to the bathroom and found the door closed. I assumed Gemma was in there so I waited, and a few seconds later I heard the toilet flush, the taps running in the sink and then the lock click back and the door open. Except that it was not Gemma stood there, it was some kid.
He had messy hair, quite long, and a first-growth moustache on his upper lip. I stood there, surprised, wondering who he was. He said nothing, but just stood staring back at me as if I was in his house.
“Dad.” I heard Gemma’s voice, surprised, from behind me. “I didn’t think you were home till later.”
“Who’s this?” I demanded. She glared at me, implying that I was being rude when I felt my reaction to a stranger in my house was quite justifiable.
“This is Casey, Dad. We go to school together. Casey,” she said, now addressing the boy, “this is my dad.”
“Alright,” said the boy, speaking to me, but not looking at me as walked past me to Gemma, and then disappeared into her room. I watched him without saying anything, then I looked at Gemma. Her hair was slightly ruffled, and with a sudden lurch of my heart, I noticed that, under her thin t-shirt, she was not wearing a bra.
She must have noticed that I noticed, or thought that I had stared for a moment too long because suddenly she looked down and then back at me with a look of disgust, turned and closed her door. Over the music that had been playing in the background the whole time I heard the faint click of the door.
I went back to my study and fell back into my leather office chair. My initial shock and then anger had given way to embarrassment. Maybe my daughter thought I was perverted. But then again, it is hardly my fault if she is going to stand naked and silent in a room, or if she is not going to dress properly. I sighed and wondered why my little girl had to become a woman.
Then I remembered my original anger, and that boy, and the fact that she was not a woman yet, even if she was beginning to resemble one. What were they doing in there? Surely they were not… I was three years older when I first… She was too young. But how could I stop the inevitable?
My emotions were mixed and I thought I even detected a little flash of jealousy in them, and I realised that Gemma was just the sort of girl I would have gone for at that boy’s age. After all, I had wanted to spend the rest of my life with her mother, and Gemma was very nearly as beautiful as Rachel, or at least would be in a few years.
Had I been that boy’s age, no doubt I would have championed him, or been caught up in the excitement of those first experiences with a girl, just like I was with Jodie Young all those years ago. But then I remembered that Gemma was not some girl I passively knew across the playground, she was my daughter and I, as her father, had a responsibility to protect her, in the way that a father should, from the pernicious advances of boys.
I stood up again and went back to Gemma’s door and knocked three times in quick succession. There was a short delay before the door was opened, then Gemma stood there, wearing a hooded top.
“What are you doing?” I asked her. She looked a little hurt when I demanded this, but then she realised that I was not going to leave, so she said,
“Nothing. Just listening to music, and talking.”
“Okay, well you can do that with the door open.”
“But Dad, you hate hearing my music,”
“You can turn it down then.”
“Dad,” Gemma said, putting a slight whine into her voice which really annoyed me.
“Shouldn’t you be doing coursework?”
“I already finished it; I didn’t have as much as I thought.” There was a pause, then she said, “is that everything?”
“Yes,” I said, “leave the door open, fully open, or Casey can go home and you’ll be grounded.” She looked angrily at the floor then turned away from me.
I went back to my study, and then remembered that I still needed the toilet, so left again and went to the bathroom. As I stood over the toilet I heard the two of them go downstairs and the front door open then close. I hoped Gemma had not gone out anywhere with him.
When I left the bathroom I met Gemma on the landing as she came back up the stairs. She said nothing to me, ignored me completely, and went back into her room.
When I was sixteen I had my first real girlfriend, Imogen Martin. We were together for months, and I thought I loved her. Maybe I was right. We did a lot of stuff together, I learned a lot from her. We never had sex though, something I became sorely bitter about for a time afterwards.
She was my first love, I suppose, and she broke my heart, in the process making me timid and afraid of falling in love in case I got hurt again. This meant that, for what seemed like a long period at the time, I was without a girlfriend, wanting one, but being afraid of forming a relationship as well. I grew jealous as all my friends started boasting of all their sexual achievements, and had to wait almost a full year before I had anything to truthfully boast about, and then that had only been the result of a two week relationship, terminated because I found out that she was cheating on me.
Emma Radcliff, that was her name, my first time. Sometimes, looking back, I wish I had waited a little longer, but I felt desperate at the time, and, even though I knew she had a reputation for promiscuity, I had gone willingly with her, a little tipsy, to a bedroom at her party. Before her were only a couple of other girls, both of whom have faded in my memory, taking their names with them, and neither of whom had stayed with me for more than four weeks. After Emma though, came Rachel, joining my college as I moved up into the second year. She made me realise what a petty thing it was to throw away my first time on Emma.
After Rachel, after the depression, came again the loneliness I used to feel as a teenager. But it was different now. Now I was not afraid of missing out, of remaining a virgin for the rest of my life; now it was the fear of just being alone, of never finding anyone to love again. This fear had been present all through my grief, almost immediately after waking up in that hospital bed, but back then it had been only an underlying feeling, pushed back by all the other changes I had to deal with. Once I had gotten my life back on track, after I had set up my website designing business, after Gemma and Lucy had come back to live with me, it had surfaced, and had become a desperation.
This led to five short relationships over the course of seven years, the longest of which was three months. That was with Carrie-Anne, a woman from Canada who was staying over here on an extended vacation. I thought we were getting pretty serious at one time; she liked the kids and we even talked of her moving in. But then her mother had died in Canada and she had gone back home for the funeral and not returned. We lost touch and I have not spoken to her for three and a half years now.
While I still thought about Rachel daily, and missed her, missed the company of anyone really, familiarity had eased me into a loneliness which I now only felt as a dull emptiness. At the time I met Angela, I had not had sex in two years.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part six, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
