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.

Poetry
Khaye Cardenas  - “The Woman’s Silent Prayer” - Every woman’s silent prayer.
Dragon Blogger - “Two Sides To Every Tale” - Poem about a man being wrongly accused and sentenced.
Dragon Blogger - “Why Does Mommy Cry?” - Emotional poem about parents fighting from the mind of a child.
Daisy Bookworm - “Breath” - A poem detailing the evils of wearing real, steel boned corsets for a woman.
exquisite corpse – “Great Is The Morning” – Collaborative Poetry.

Prose
Fiction
Jenn - “Worlds Apart (Chapter One)” - The first chapter of a multi-part story about a relationship doomed by the time in which it occurred.
Jennifer M Scott - “Dear God” - a woman writes a letter to god asking for her death.
Opinion / Non-Fiction / Non Fiction Rant
Harneet Singh  - “Life with an Aim” - Today people are becoming more materialistic. They attach their aim of life with the materialistic things.
Amritbir Kaur - “The Yardsticks of Life - Success and Failure” - Is life measurable? Can we divide it into watertight compartments of success and failure? Find answers to these and much more…
About Writing
Khaye Cardenas – “Please Excuse Me I Am Writing Again” - The writer talks about the things that keep her from writing.

Brought to you by PlotDog Press with the Serial Suspense Screenplay “Intervention” (WOOF participants should re-post all the links above by next Monday. The following links may be excluded as long as you include all the above links.)

Presenting the finest of the writer’s blogs by the bloggers who write them. Highlighting the top 5 posts as chosen by the December 26, 2008 WOOF Contest participants. We are back up and running! Want in to join the next WOOF? The next contest ends January 10. Submit a link to your best writing post of the last 2 weeks using the form at the bottom of this page. Participants, repost the winning link list within a week and you’re all set.

Other WOOF Contestants for 12/26/08

Poetry
Dragon Blogger  - “The Creature” - Random Twitter poem based on 8 words provided on twitter, was one of my better poems.
Dragon Blogger & Jennifer M. Scott - “A Lone Wolf’s Heart” - A co-authored poem created by Summerdragon80 and myself emailing back and forth.
Dragon Blogger - “Coming Out Of Your Cocoon” - Poem about transformation and starting life anew.
Daisy Bookworm - “The Words” - The power of one sentence to save a condemned soul.
Dragon Blogger - “Wash Away These Troubles” - Random Twitter poem about washing away your troubles in the rain.
Dragon Blogger - “Giving In To The Succubi / Chemical Reaction” - Two poems crafted from the same 9 random words, 1 light and 1 dark.
Dragon Blogger - “Patterns” - Poem about an artist painting.
Dragon Blogger - “Sunshine” - Poem about Nuclear Aftermath.
Jennifer M Scott - “Buck Shot” - Poem about getting their first buck.
Dragon Blogger - “The Lost Target” - Poem about an assassin who falls in love with his target.
Dragon Blogger - “The World At Nightmare’s End” - Chaotic Poem that was titled via a contest, was originally untitled.
exquisite corpse – “Great Is The Morning” – Collaborative Poetry.

Prose
Fiction
H. Benjamin Petrie - “Gumdrop Coat” - Desiring a girl in a gumdrop green raincoat, leading up to a kiss.

Opinion / Non-Fiction / Non Fiction Rant
Mike Fried - “Ubiquity in My Town (with apologies to J. Joyce)” - A rant on Blackberries.

5

I stood now in the café on the top floor of the big Waterstones in Guildford, waiting for a coffee. It was Sunday. I had been out to buy a lock for the bathroom door when I had remembered there was a book I wanted and may as well get while I was out.

It was not often that I actually got out of the house anywhere, except to the supermarket or Lucy’s school or to give Gemma lifts to places. I was going to buy the lock the day before, but Gemma had gone to town a little while after the bathroom incident and had not returned until after six, and with her out I had not wanted to leave Lucy alone. I thought as well that the town would be too busy on a Saturday, so I waited until today.

The girl serving me handed me my coffee. I thanked her and sat down in one of the comfortable brown leather chairs. My coffee was too hot for the moment, so I pulled the book I had just bought out of the shiny black Waterstones bag and began to read it.

A few pages into it I was interrupted by a woman’s voice from above me.

“Excuse me, is this seat taken?” The voice said. I looked up to see a woman, maybe a couple of years younger than me, with blonde hair tied back, and blue eyes behind plain, black-framed glasses. She was holding a large mug in one hand and indicating the chair on the other side of the table I was sat at with her free hand.

“Um, no,” I said, glancing for a moment at the many other vacant seats in the half empty café.

She put a couple of bags of shopping she had looped over an arm onto the floor, and then put her mug of coffee onto the table a little way from mine. I watched her for a moment, then looked idly at her coffee, until I realised I was just staring blankly at the mound of cream that floated on its surface. I returned to the book, feeling self-concious now.

For a few moments she said nothing and then,

“I’ve read that.” I looked up.

“Oh,” I said, “did you like it?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a good book.”

“I’ve only just bought it, so I’m not far into it.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll like it, I mean, I don’t really know what you like, obviously, but it’s good, so you probably will.” She smiled, gave a little self-concious laugh, then dropped her eyes to her coffee and began to stir it with a spoon. The cream slowly melted into the hot liquid, first streaking it with soft white that reminded me of clouds at sunset, and then turning it a milky brown.

She looked up suddenly and said,

“Oh, I’m Angela by the way.” She smiled again, looked at something to my right for a second, then picked up her mug and took a sip.

“I’m Mark,” I said. I had closed the book and put it back in the bag now. I wondered why Angela had chosen to sit here, rather than anywhere else in the café.

She was quite pretty.

I met Rachel when I was at college. She was seventeen, I was eighteen. A few months later, we were together. I finished college and got a job with an insurance firm. I was on a pretty good wage, and with good prospects. A year later, when Rachel finished college, she got a job at a florist. We got a mortgage and bought a house together. Two years later we married, and three years into our marriage Gemma was born. Another six years later and Rachel was pregnant again, this time carrying Lucy. When Lucy was born our family was complete and, for a year, we all lived in perfect bliss with neither money nor health concerns to upset our happy existence.

But then came the accident, driving back from Brighton that day. My wife was killed, my children were left motherless and our family was torn apart.

The immediate aftermath for myself however was a coma that lasted five days. I had to stay in hospital for just over a week after that before I was discharged. I got a card from work. It said that everyone was sorry about my loss and hoped I would get well soon and they would all see my back at work soon. I never did go back though, except once, a few weeks after the accident, when I had decided that I could not go back to work there, to collect the few things in my desk: A photo of Rachel and the kids, some stationary, and a book.

Before that though, immediately following my stay in hospital, I had had to take a couple of weeks of grieving and recovering time off work. During this time, my mother had taken care of the children during this time (but these weeks had turned into months) and the house had felt so empty, so lifeless. It was so strange, walking through that airless house, with dust that seemed to way down everything and suck the colour from the place.

I was so scared during that time. Scared about a lot of things; scared that I would not be able to bring up the children on my own, scared that I would not be able cope without Rachel, scared that I might never be happy again, now that this huge chunk of my soul had been ripped away.

Gemma, I believe coped fairly well, considering. I only knew this from what my mother told me though, because I went for weeks at a time, unable to do anything except exist, even unable to visit my daughters. But children her age are resilient, they can cope, adapt. Of course there were tears, that is to be expected, but my mother was there to hold Gemma and look after Lucy, absorb all the tears into her own grief; for she had loved Rachel too.

Lucy was just a baby at that time, only just starting to toddle and say her first words. She had it easiest, for she was too young to perceive the loss, and as she grew older, she could not remember a time when she was any other than motherless. I envied her sometimes, particularly then; life went on as always for her.

But for me, life had stopped; staggered to a halt like a clock that someone has torn a gear from. I was diagnosed with depression after a month and was forced to take extended sick leave from work. After the fourth month I realised I could not go back. It was about then, January, after one of the most abysmal Christmases I have ever endured, that I decided life must go on.

It is still painful to me to think back to those miserable times, to that excruciating metamorphosis as I slowly tried to separate myself from my grief that winter. The most painful part was removing all the useless little things that reminded me of my lost wife; her clothes, her shoes, minor things like her toothbrush and even her five months out of date magazines that were still scattered over the floor on her side of the bed.

For months I had held onto these relics, feeling as if they might bring some substance back to her existence with their association, even their scent and colours. I could remember countless days when I had sat on her side of the bed, staring blankly out the window, holding one of her t-shirts, the last she had worn before the accident, pressed into my face, breathing in the scent as if she was there in front of me, me kissing her shoulders, telling her I loved her.

Eventually the t-shirt stopped smelling of her altogether and I could only smell my tears on it, and then it became stale and musty from not being washed. The whole house became stagnant during that time, with only myself moving around it, doing only the most basic cleaning with a slow lethargic half-heartedness. And all that time my children stayed with their grandmother, being looked after by her, loved by her, taken to school, picked up, fed, put to bed, read to; all the things I was in no state to do.

But I knew it could not stay like this. I had a responsibility to them as a father, and to myself as a human being. My mother offered to help in the necessary clean-up of my house, in taking the clothes to the charity shops and throwing away the things that could not be given away, but she had done enough already. So over a couple of weeks in January I put all the clothes, all the shoes, the make-up, the magazines, the toothbrush, all the evidence that Rachel had ever existed outside of photographs and my memories, one by one into black plastic bin-bags, each one a little wrench tightening my chest until I felt like my rib-cage might crack.

“This was fun,” Angela said, putting down her second empty coffee mug.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know, I almost didn’t sit here. I almost just went and sat on my own, and I would have wondered what would have happened if I sat here. ‘Cause you know, a lot of time people think about doing things, but then they feel too awkward or whatever and so they don’t, and it makes it hard to meet people, because people just don’t really talk to strangers.”

“Well, I’m glad you did.”

“Yeah, me too.” For a moment we said nothing, and then I said,

“We should do this again sometime.” She smiled, perhaps at what I had suggested or perhaps at the little nervous hesitation in my voice, the way had said it almost like a question.

“Yeah, we should. Wanna swap numbers, or emails?”

We exchanged both and then Angela said that she had better get going. We walked together to the ground floor of Waterstones and parted at the exit, promising to get in touch soon. I walked back to the car with a small smile on my face.

Read Part Six

Too far away to call out now and in too much of a hurry to catch up, I watched her stride away, her feet kicking up water onto the cuffs of her jeans. The rest of her would have been soaked by now too, were it not for that gumdrop-green raincoat, draped over her, keeping her dry if not warm, and suiting that reserved way she shrugged off encroachments on her physicality. I felt jealous: my umbrella only covered my head, and then barely.

.

When she hugged me at that party I was surprised by her solidity, her realness, and I realised that of the handful of times we had embraced before, I had always been the one to initiate it, never her. For a heartbeat I let myself go, physicality forgotten, bodies mingled. Then the separation and the lingering sense of privilege.

.

The evening’s sky had been metallic purple and seemed to stretch into forever. Now clouded, impenetrable sheets of rain fell from it, muddying the dirt in the gutters and choking the drains with sodden leaves. In the wineglass she placed on the table a fractional pool of aqueous liquid remained, sparkling lightly. I offered to walk her home. Already in her gumdrop-green raincoat she consented and allowed me to hold the door. Once outside, I saw how the distorted refractions of street-lights and passing cars danced across the shiny plastic of her coat, but nothing of her skin or the heart that beat inside her. Even her face, determinedly facing the rain, was hidden by her hood, removing her so far from me and making my actions tense and self-conscious. I could not remember the last time I felt like this, especially with such intensity that I almost could not bear it.

Gingerly my feet pushed through piles of rain-soaked pavement leaves, while my hands moved in and out of my pockets. I felt they might at any moment reach out to prove her corporeality, and held them back only through the fear that she might collapse into dust, else might shy away from this breach of our friendship; this attack on her gumdrop green barrier. And then her hand rose up at the edge of my vision. I turned at the movement to see her tuck back a stray strand of hair that had fallen free of her hood. In the half-light her eyes flickered electric blue. From somewhere there came a bang, or a crack, as something was dropped, or slammed, or hit, or fired. The noise made us jump and my arm moved up without thought. Then my fingers closed on her elbow, water running across them as the shiny plastic crumpled slightly. She turned to face me. Eyes locked she laughed a little. On her fast-breathing breath came the faint scent of wine, reminding me of the Chardonnay she drank in the theatre-bar and the way I had longed to taste it second-hand, mixed in with her saliva and the taste of her skin.

I placed my other hand a little below her right shoulder, my heart beating like a frightened bird against a cage, and hers doing the same only inches away through the green plastic of her coat and her flesh and her ribs. She might have pulled away by now, standing there all surprised and expectant, colouring up a little in the cold, looking so lovely that the bird could no longer be held back: So it escaped, and brought together our lips with awkward force, so that our tongues writhed against each other, fighting their mouth-bound anchorages looking for a oneness, a boundarilessness, while my hands sought the same along the smooth curve of her back, before coming to the warm contours of her cheeks and her neck, and knocking back the gumdrop-green hood. Now, with the rain beating against her exposed crown, her hair curled up into the long loose waves of an Emily Bronte heroine. It was an image that stayed with me as I pulled away and blinked the water from my eyelashes, and might even have stilled my still-beating heart, had she not pulled up her hood and turned away from me, slipping easily as she did so her hand into my outstretched fingers. Then, with a little half-nervous acknowledgement of what had passed between us in the grip of her fingers, and the quick smile of her red lipsticked-lips, our walk through the puddles and leaves of the undulating, rain-drenched tarmac resumed.

]]> http://theaspiringwriter.net/2008/12/06/fiction-gumdrop-coat/feed/ http://theaspiringwriter.net/2008/12/04/fiction-father-pt4/ http://theaspiringwriter.net/2008/12/04/fiction-father-pt4/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:36:32 +0000 Henry http://theaspiringwriter.net/?p=202 Read Part One

Read Part Two

Read Part Three

4

“Dad, will you give me a lift down to the sports ground in a bit?” This was Gemma. It was Friday evening.

“What for?” She sighed when I asked this, looking at me as if it was perfectly obvious, then said in a slightly patronising voice,

“To go hang out with my friends.” I was about to reprimand her for speaking like that but decided against it and instead asked,

“What time?”

“About seven.”

It was half six already.

“You haven’t eaten yet.” I said.

“What we having?”

“Fish and chips.” She wrinkled her nose and I felt a little dismayed; she always used to really like fish and chips.

“I’m not hungry yet,” she paused, thinking, “you could drop me off on your way to the fish shop.”

“So what will you do for tea?” I asked. She shrugged and looked at something on the wall, then back at me,

“You could give me some money, and I could get something later.” I sighed and then said,

“Okay.”

Twenty minutes later we were in the car on the way to the sports ground. Gemma had ejected my cassette and the radio was playing, filling our void of conversation. I glanced at her for a second while we were on a quiet stretch of road. She was looking away from me, her elbow on the window frame and her cheek resting on her knuckle. The sun was low in the sky beyond her, highlighting part of her face while casting shadows over the rest.

“How are you going to get home?” I asked, turning down the radio a little. She watched my hand turn the dial and draw away, then said,

“I’ll walk with Marisa.”

“What time?”

“Ten.” I looked at her, then back at the road.

“I don’t want you back any later than nine.”

“Everyone else stays out till ten”

“I don’t care what everyone else does; you can be in at nine.”

“Aw, please, Daddy, let me stay out till ten.”

I sighed; she used to call me ‘daddy’ all the time, now she only did when she wanted something.

“Half nine, then.” I took another quick glance at her. She opened her mouth as if about to argue, looked at me, then said,

“Okay.”

We had reached the sports ground by this time. I pulled up in the car park, looked out my windscreen and saw a group of kids, mostly around Gemma’s age, some maybe a little older, stood around the children’s play park area. A couple of them were rocking idly on the swings, their dark hooded tops turning them into silhouettes in the setting sun. Three more were sat on the see-saw (one at either end and one in the middle) and there were few boys with their arms around girls, or holding girls’ hands. I noticed some of them were smoking as well and some had cans of cheap lager in their hands. They turned to look at the car when I pulled up, then most of them turned away again, though a few continued to stare blankly at us.

I looked doubtfully back at them until Gemma brought my attention back to her.

“Can I have the money now please, dad?”

“Oh, yeah sure,” I said, pulling my wallet from my back pocket and taking out a five pound note and offering it to her. She reached out then halted her hand in mid-air.

“Do you think I could maybe have ten, please, Daddy?” She asked, smiling. She saw I was about to protest and so quickly said “I haven’t had my pocket money for this week yet.” I replaced the five and pulled out a ten. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said taking the money from my hand and jumping out the car. She was about to walk away, but I said,

“Gemma.” She stopped, a little rigidly, and turned around.

“Yes, Dad?”

“Just, stay out of trouble, okay?” She looked blankly back at me, leaning on the open door, “I mean, just be careful,” I continued, “being out at night on your own as a young girl.”

Marisa was walking over to Gemma now. Gemma had noticed her and so quickly said, “kay, Dad, see you later. Bye, Lucy.”

“Bye, Gem,” Lucy said from the back seat of the car.

“Bye,” I said, as Gemma closed the door. I stayed and watched for a few moments as she walked off with Marisa, then Gemma turned back and looked at me, indicating clearly that I was no longer wanted here. I reversed out of the parking space and pulled back out onto the road.

I thought about what I had just said as I pulled up at a set of traffic lights. I was trying to sound fatherly and caring and give advice to my daughter, but it had just sounded awkward. Thinking of Gemma reminded me that the radio was still on. I pushed my cassette back in and the pop music was replaced by Pulp’s ‘Do you remember the first time?’.

In the rear view mirror I saw Lucy turn her attention from the passing scenery to the radio as I pushed in the tape. She stared at it for a moment, and then she stared back out the window, at the sun, and began idly moving her shiny shoes to the music. I smiled.

Gemma came home at ten minutes before ten. I was watching television when she came in. I heard her kick off her shoes and thought she was going to come in and say that she was back and maybe watch something with me, but then I heard her go up the stairs. After a few minutes I followed her. I knocked on her door once and then went in.

She was sat at her computer, listening to music. The computer monitor was again the only source of light in the room.

“Dad,” she said turning round, surprised because she had apparently not heard me come in.

“I thought I said be home at half nine,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but I’m only twenty minutes late.”

“Which is quite late.” I pointed out. I noticed the smell of cigarette smoke on her clothes.

“Sorry,” she said. I took a step towards her, almost tripping over some clothes on the floor in the darkness.

“Two things,” I said, “Firstly, put a light on, you’ll damage your eyes with nothing but the monitor on, and secondly, tidy your room tomorrow; it’s a tip.”

“It’s my room,” she said a slight defiance creeping into her voice.

“And who pays for this room? And who pays your pocket money and give you lifts.” I was not sure, but in the low light she seemed to be looking at me as if I was some strange intruder that had trespassed into her territory.

“Okay, I’ll tidy it tomorrow,” she said. I noticed that she was chewing gum.

“Have you been smoking, or drinking?” I asked

“No, Dad,” she said. I could not see her face well enough to tell whether she was lying, silhouetted as she was against the dim light. She saw me looking at her intently, so added “A few of the guys in the year above me were smoking near me and that’s why it’s on me. But I hate the smell.”

“Good,” I said, giving her the benefit of the doubt, “I wouldn’t want my little girl taking up bad habits.” I put my arm out a little way, about to make some gesture of affection, ruffling her hair perhaps, as I had done when she was young, but drew my hand back, the action incomplete, and realised how stupid what I had just said must have sounded.

“I’m going to watch Lord of the Rings in a bit,” I said, filling the pause I had created.

“Um, okay,” Gemma said.

“Well, do you want to watch it with me?”

“Um, well, actually I was just going to stay on the computer for a bit then go to bed. Maybe another night.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. She turned back to the screen. Before I left I said, “turn a light on.” She did not respond for a moment, then when she realised I was waiting, she got up and turned her bedside light on. It suddenly illuminated her unmade bed, the clothes discarded over it, and the jewellery and various other small items she kept on the table around the lamp. It also set a warm amber contrast to the cold white glow that lit her face as it coloured her from behind.

“Don’t stay up too late,” I said, about to close the door.

“I won’t,” she said, not turning away from the screen. I closed the door and went downstairs.

As I watched the film I again thought about the amount of time Gemma spent on her computer, and the distance that seemed to have grown between us over the last few months. Before going to bed I checked on Lucy. She was sleeping peacefully as she always did. I also listened at Gemma’s door as I went past. Through the wooden door I could faintly hear the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard.

I woke up late the next morning, having gone to bed late, after the film finished. For a while I stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting thoughts drift in and out of my head. I would probably have lain there longer if my bladder had not forced me to leave the comfort and warmth of my bed. So I got up and walked across the landing to the bathroom and opened the door. Doing so revealed Gemma stood there, completely naked in front of the tall bathroom mirror. It was in the mirror that I saw her face reflected (for her back was to me), a troubled expression darkening it as she held a hand on her ribcage and scrutinised her chest in the mirror. Then the expression turned to shock and then, a moment later, to a surprised, embarrassed anger that reddened her cheeks.

I too was shocked, not expecting anyone to be in here at all, let alone standing unclothed. For just a second too, an image of Rachel flashed into my mind, and fixed me, paralysed and incomprehensible to the spot where I stood, staring blankly. Gemma was quick to react though and shouted

“What the fuck, Dad? Don’t you ever knock?” at me while reaching for the nearest towel to wrap around herself. I snapped out of my paralysis at these words, realising again that I staring at my daughter. I said

“Sorry,” quickly turning away and closing the door behind me, then, by way of explanation, “I didn’t think anyone was in there.” She did not answer and so I just stood there, embarrassed, wondering what to do or say next. And then I realised what she had just said. “Hey, don’t use that kind of language in my house.” I called through the door.

From the other side came the angry, indignant reply “No, I will,” Gemma’s voice a little higher than usual with emotion. “You should knock,” she continued, “and why isn’t there a lock on this door? How can we have a bathroom without a lock?” It was true that our bathroom had not had a lock when we had bought the house, and it was one of the many things that I ought to sort out but was not a desperate issue and so could wait a little longer, until I got around to it.

A few seconds later she pulled open the door and I realised I had been leaning against it a little as she did so because the action made me take a step towards it to regain my balance. Gemma pushed past me wearing her pyjamas and saying “there’s no privacy in this house. I’m sick of it.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll put a lock on this weekend. It’s just never been a problem.” I said following her the short walk across the landing, seeking her forgiveness, but she closed the door before I had finished speaking.

Again I now stood on the other side of a door to her, indecisive and wondering whether to go after her and apologise again or to just leave it. I stood there for maybe thirty seconds before I sighed and decided I had better just leave her alone for a while, rather than aggravate her further, and besides, I still needed the toilet. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.

As I stood over the toilet, I thought about Gemma, stood a few feet away from where I now was stood, moments before. I had never noticed before how much she had grown up; I realised now how much more she was beginning to look like Rachel. She had always had a fairly strong resemblance to my wife, having similarly wavy hair of about the same length, though a different style and light tone, but now she was beginning to develop the figure Rachel had had.

The images of Gemma suddenly evoked images of Rachel in my mind. I saw her now stood before me, naked and beautiful, as she used to do. I felt a pang of desire mixed with a sharp, nostalgic sadness. I stepped away from the toilet, washed my hands and face, then stood before the mirror and looked into it. I wondered if Gemma was coping alright with the way her body was changing, without a mother in her life to guide her through the process of becoming a woman. I wished I could supply that absence, but our ordinary conversations felt awkward enough, without talking about such delicate issues.

Read Part Five

Read Part One

Read Part Two

3

“What did you do at school today?” I asked Lucy, trying to drive through the obstacle course of primary school children with a loose grasp of road safety and parents in oversized SUVs with an even looser grasp of road courtesy.

“We did maths in the morning and we learned about cubes and cubic centimetres.”

“Oh, that sounds difficult,” I said, pulling into a gap to let a car with no intention of stopping for me go past, “could you do it alright?”

“Yes, daddy, I got a gold star. See” I glanced quickly at the little sticker on her red jumper.

“Well done, sweetie” I said.

When we got in the house, Lucy went straight into the front room and started watching the children’s television programmes that she always watched. I went to fetch her some biscuits and orange juice and then went back upstairs to do some more work. Since lunchtime I had started coding a Flash slideshow of pictures the garden maintenance company had sent me, and I would have it finished in another hour, if I did not get distracted, and that would be my work done for the day.

I managed to avoid getting distracted, and after finishing it, passed the rest of the evening in front of the television, eating dinner and then watching a film with Lucy. I had asked Gemma if she wanted to watch with us too before it started, but she said she had some stuff to do on her computer. The evening just seemed to drift by and soon I was tucking Lucy into bed.

“Sweet dreams,” I told her, pulling her pink My Little Pony duvet up to her chin and kissing her on the forehead.

“Night night, daddy.” I turned out her bedroom light and went over to the door. For a moment I stood there and looked at her, her hair flowing across the pillow and her stuffed dog held tightly in her arms. She looked beautiful.

I closed the door softly, went to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth, went to the toilet, filled a glass with water. Before going to my bedroom I went to Gemma’s to say good night to her. I knocked on her door. There was no reply for a minute and then she opened a little way, stood there in the door way, almost as if suspicious and then looked at me expectantly.

“Um, I’m going to bed now,” I announced, and then “so, good night.”

“Oh, okay, Dad. Night.” The room behind her was illuminated only by her computer monitor, casting eerie shadows around the room. She seemed about to the close the door, so I said

“You should probably do the same soon, too.”

“Okay, I will.” There was a pause.

“Night,” I said.

“Night.” She closed the door. I stood there for a moment, feeling sort of unfulfilled, as if something was left unsaid, then went to my own room.

I started to undress, and then realised how stuffy the room had become over the day. I went over and opened the window. A cool wind immediately swept in and blew over my chest. For a second it reminded me of childhood, of the seaside, though our house was miles from the sea, and my window did not even face the nearest beaches. Within a few seconds I found the wind too cold though, it being only March at the time, so I closed the window again, brought the Venetian blind down, and continued with changing into my pyjamas.

I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over myself and picked up the Tom Clancy paperback I was reading and finished two chapters before I felt too sleepy to carry on. I slipped the book mark back into the book, put it down and turned the light out, then I stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep to come.

Before sleep though came various thoughts about my day. I thought about my conversation with Gemma. What I had said to her before going to bed was most of the conversation I had had with her all evening. She had been in her room almost continuously since she got in from school. She had come downstairs for tea, but then had not said a great deal, and after tea, when I had asked if she wanted to watch the film with me and Lucy she had refused. And then when I had had a conversation with her, it had been short and stilted and even superfluous.

I exhaled slowly into the darkness. Was it my fault? Did I need to make more of an effort to start conversations? I never knew what to say though, what to talk about with her. It would be a lot easier with her mother around to help, but she was gone, and so I had to work this out on my own. Maybe Gemma just did not want to talk to me. Maybe she had outgrown me and had decided it was uncool to talk to her father. But surely she could not have grown out of talking to me so quickly. But it seemed a little unfair that my daughter should have to grow up at all, that she would ever grow out of seeing her daddy as anything less than all the world, especially when she was all I had.

Maybe it was neither hers nor my fault, maybe it was just the way human society was going as a result of technology that increasingly alienates us. It was true that Gemma spent a lot of time on her PC, and I am certain that she was not doing homework on it all that time. But then, what could I do about that? Computers are wonderful tools; I would be out of work if it was not them, or at least I would find it a lot more difficult to work at home and have time to take Lucy to and from school. And Gemma did need her PC for homework, and computer skills will be valuable for her in later life. So even if technology was to blame for our relationship, perhaps it was a necessary evil.

I concluded that this must be the case, and then tried to push the thoughts of Gemma from my head. I managed this quite easily because, within a few minutes, they were replaced by the images of that road accident I passed earlier. Throughout the day I had not been able to shake off these images, the crying woman, the crumpled car, the blood on the tarmac, and now, in the darkness, they came back clearer than when I had first seen them.

I tried again to clear these from my mind, but with nothing to distract myself with, they refused to disappear. I tried rolling over onto the other side of my large empty bed, and staring out the window, but they were still there. Eventually I got up, pulled up the blind, opened the window and let the cool air blow on me, through the gaps between the buttons of my pyjama top and onto my stomach.

For a little while I focused on nothing but that feeling, and slowly I felt the thoughts fade into nothingness. I took a drink of the water on my bedside table, partially closed the window and climbed back into bed.

The following day I again watched the news while I ate my lunch, having taken Lucy to school, had a shower and done some more work. Nothing particularly significant had happened since yesterday, just a shooting in London, and a possible arson attack on a pub in Nottingham and a story on the latest inadequacies of the NHS. And then, on the local news a story caught my attention.

It was a report on an accident on Edgerton way, the dual carriageway I had driven down yesterday. I had not thought about it since last night, but here were all the details of it. Apparently some kid had been playing football in his back garden, next to the road, when he had kicked the ball over his fence. He had then climbed over, run down the small incline and, in an endeavour to get his ball back, straight into the road.

The driver of a white van, a Mr. Fretley, had had no chance of stopping in time when this eleven-year-old boy darted out of nowhere in front of him. He immediately slammed on the breaks, but had been unable to avoid the kid. The kid, something Marshall, had gone flying, landing about twenty feet down the road. He had been killed instantly. Then the green Subaru that had been following the van, “way too close” according to Mr. Fretley, had ploughed into the back of the suddenly stopped vehicle.

There was an interview with Mrs. Marshall after the main outline of the incident. She was not a particularly attractive woman, a little dumpy, and with her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail and her face and eyes blotchy and red from crying, but she was distraught, and her open, abundant grievance almost moved me to tears: I could sympathise with exactly how she felt; Rachel had been killed in a road accident.

For a long time I had blamed myself. After all, I was the one driving, although I do not remember much from either right before or right after the accident.

It had happened about seven years ago now, when we had been driving back from a family holiday in Brighton. Gemma and Lucy were sat in the back, Lucy asleep in her baby seat and Gemma playing ‘I spy’ with Rachel. The last thing I remember before the collision is those two talking and laughing together as I drove us down a long, single lane national speed limit road.

I remember that I was careful not to go above fifty-five because there seemed to be a lot of long blind bends for a road with such a high limit. I was road safety conscious even back then. Unfortunately for us, the driver on the other side of the bend was not. He had decided to overtake the person he was following on that bend just as we were going round it. This I was only told afterwards, because, as I have said, I can not remember the incident itself.

Seeing our Maestro estate suddenly appear round the corner the driver, who was only a year younger than myself, had slammed on his breaks and lost control, skidding right into our path. I too hit my brakes, but was unable to get out of his way and he slammed right into our car, hitting us head on, a little to the left. All I remember was driving with my family, blackness and then waking up five days later in a hospital bed in Crawley.

I turned off the television, stood up, crossed the room to the phone table, picked up the photograph that stood next to the telephone, and sat back down on the sofa with it in my hand. It was a family portrait, minus Lucy because it was taken two years before she was born. Rachel was twenty-six then.

For a long while I just stared at the picture, at the little image of my wife, static, eternally young in the photograph while the world continued to move. I wondered what she would look like now if she was still alive. Still beautiful, I am sure, because she would do no matter how old she lived to be, and still full of energy, but also, somehow I am sure, wiser, more experienced, a calm, gently lapping energy like a lake, rather than an impulsive sweeping energy like the sea.

I felt momentarily, as if the glossy ink would draw a few choking tears from my throat, but there was only a slight tightness in the muscles and then dull ache. When this had passed I replaced the picture frame to its position by the telephone and the lamp on the table and rubbed my face with my hands. I breathed in deeply a couple of times then wiped my hands on my trousers and went to the kitchen to put on the coffee maker.

Read Part Four

I bite my lip. A rabbit crawls from my chest.
Down my arm, it sits on the back of my hand
and looks up at me. Contemptible creature,
I sneer. I try to shake it from my hand. Still
it sits there, staring pathetically up at me
with glassy eyes. I stare back. My features soften.
It looks to my breast. I shake my head, sadly.
Tentatively, the rabbit crawls up my arm
and sits uneasily on my shoulder.
There it stays, nibbling at my ear.
Then she enters the room and the rabbit
darts back into the spaces between my ribs.
At night it lays with me, nuzzling against me.
Contemptible creature.

Read Part Three

2

I dropped my keys into the little dish on the shelf by the side of the door, next to the waist-high rubber plant. Then I slipped off my shoes, pushing them with my toes side-by-side next to Gemma’s battered trainers, and Lucy’s shiny pink-and-white light-up ones next to Gemma’s, and then, on the other side of my shoes, my plain fleece slippers, a present from Lucy last Christmas, which I slipped on now.

There was no mail so I went straight upstairs to my office and sat down into my green-leather office chair. For a moment I sat and did nothing other than cast my eyes lazily around the room and then settle on looking out the window while listening to the sounds of the quiet house. Without Gemma’s music, or Lucy’s cartoons playing, or the myriad other noises of three people living together, I could hear the pipes in the walls as they expanded and contracted, and the dull swoosh of the traffic on the other side of the house, and even a few birds that commuted, chattering to each other through the air, around the area, landing occasionally and temporarily in the few trees in mine and my neighbours’ gardens.

After being, for a minute or more, lost in these muted sounds I realised I had not yet turned on my PC, so I leaned down in my chair, pressed the big button in the centre of the tower, and then switched the monitor on. I idly stared at the loading screens until I felt the need for a drink. I stood up, walked out and padded across the plush cream carpet of the landing, leaving a wake in the dust motes that hovered lazily in the morning sunshine as it shone in through the skylight.

I filled up the coffee machine, switched it on. While waiting for it to boil I rinsed out Lucy’s bowl, put it in the dishwasher, and tipped the remainder of Gemma’s toast into the waste disposal and turned the water on over it. I flicked the switch on the wall and watched as the soggy pale toast sank between the black rubber flaps and disappeared into the whirling blades. I released the switch and the sounds of the coffee machine, of liquid moving through it, of steam coming rising from the top and of its various internal clicks, could again be heard in the kitchen.

It was not done yet though, so I wiped down the kitchen table, toyed idly with a fridge magnet and opened the fridge to get milk for my coffee. Of course there was none left. I sighed, went over to the blackboard by the door and wrote ‘milk’ in white chalk. As an after-thought, I underlined it, and then went back to the coffee maker and picked up my mug of black coffee.

Back in my office the computer had loaded up, and was sat, waiting, expectant; a screen of items waiting to be clicked. I ignored these for a moment though, being again, as I always was, distracted by my desktop background picture. It was a photo taken years ago with a cheap disposable camera, scanned onto my computer one day when I found it in an old photo album.

We were on holiday in Tenerife at the time, all of us together. The photo was taken the day we had gone to a water park. Rachel was stood in the photo, laughing, with Lucy, only a few months old cradled in Rachel’s right arm, and Gemma, who must have been only seven at the time, holding her mother’s free hand. Lucy was looking up at her mother, mimicking her smile as best as she could, and Gemma was looking at something in the middle distance, some giant colourful plastic octopus that was part of an attraction at the park, but Rachel was looking fully at the camera, at me taking the photo, directing the full force of her radiance at me.

She was so beautiful in that photo, in all photos, in life. She was thirty-one then, but barely looked a day over twenty-five, stood there in a plain black one-piece swimming suit, her slightly wavy, dark-brown hair tucked behind one ear, the two children that had left no mark on her figure, next to her, and all her teeth shining in the bright Spanish sun. Often Rachel’s beauty seemed like a dream, something imagined, and sometimes I was scared it was. Sometimes I was afraid that my memories had become distorted, that my mind was playing tricks on me. It was times like these that I was thankful for the photos I had, that I could look at and remember clearly that she really was that lovely. And though it made me sad to recall my loss so sharply, it also filled me with a vague sense of pride that I had once been with the most beautiful woman I had ever met.

I looked at the clock. Five minutes had passed since I had first been drawn into the picture, into my memories. I sighed and pushed away the memories, sweeping them to one side as I focused on a work mentality. I could not afford to spend all day dreaming of the past; I had work to do and a deadline to meet.

I worked now as a freelance website designer, creating pages at a competitive rate for small to medium sized businesses. Currently I was working on a site for a small garden maintenance and landscaping group. I already had the basic designs for the pages down (a lot of greens fading into neutral whites, and various faded-border photographs of brilliantly coloured hyacinths, perfectly shaped lawns and neat little border-hedges) now it was just the coding that I had to finish and checking that all the links work and all the other boring tasks that come at the end of the project. Still, I always felt a strong sense of satisfaction at the end of a successful project.

I worked solidly for a couple of hours, getting quite a way into the project and bringing it only a few more days of finishing touches away from completion. I decided I had earned a break after this, and also, I needed to get the shopping done, so I closed the work, took a final glance at my background, and shut down the computer.

It was nearly half eleven when I walked into Tesco. At this time it was generally old people doing their weekly shopping, stopping in the aisles to talk to each other, and occasionally the professionals on an early lunch, dashing in to grab a ready-made sandwich, or low-calorie salad, and then dashing out again.

I grabbed a trolley and pulled the crumpled shopping-list I had written on the back of an envelope from my pocket. “Something for tea (wed-fri)” was the first thing I had written, then “something for lunch” immediately after. “Milk” was scrawled under that, then underlined, then with two exclamation marks. The rest were items such as “yoghurts for Lucy”, “Toilet roll” and “cheese”.

I wandered around, picking up the items on the list as I passed them, and deliberating for a while over the more ambiguous “somethings” at the start of my list. For my lunch I eventually chose a microwave cannelloni ready-meal pot, because it was on offer. For tea for the three remaining nights of the week I picked up some pizzas (because Lucy likes them), some pasta (because Gemma likes it) and, for Friday, I eventually decided we would have fish and chips, as a small treat.

I went to the checkout, declined the offer of help with my packing robotically offered by the cashier and walked to the car, carrying the two bags of shopping. I loaded them into the back of my light blue, slightly rusty, Ford Sierra, got in and started the engine. The radio turned on with the car, an old Pulp cassette was in the deck and halfway through ‘Lipgloss’ I tapped my hands in time to the music on the steering wheel as I pulled out of the car park.

Driving home I have to go down a busy dual carriage way. It seemed busier than usual that day, with all the traffic in front of me just crawling along. I thought it was strange, but ignored it and drove on with the lethargic traffic. After a while all the vehicles went into a single lane, separated from the other lane by a row of orange cones. A few hundred metres further down the road I saw why: an accident.

It must have happened while I was in Tesco; otherwise I would have noticed it on my way there. As I passed by, barely above ten miles an hour, I saw policemen in bright yellow jackets stood around, and an ambulance with its lights flashing. There was a white van as well, tyre marks trailing behind it and, in the wake of the tyre marks, a Subaru with a crumpled front, which had evidently ran into the back of the van. There was a man, maybe my age, stood with the van, and a couple, maybe ten years younger than me near the Subaru, with a police officer talking to them. The woman was crying.

It looked as if the van had stopped suddenly and the Subaru had run into the back of it. But why had the van stopped? As my car crept further forward I searched for a reason and then, for a moment, thought I saw the black tarmac glistening in the spring sunshine.

I looked away quickly, out of the windscreen. I had slowed down more than I realised and the cars in front of me were now moving much faster than I was. After I had put the accident scene a few hundred yards behind me, I suddenly noticed the music from the car’s old speakers again, as if it had been turned down when I had been focusing on the accident and had suddenly been returned to full volume. It even seemed suddenly louder than before. In fact it felt quite oppressive in that tiny space, so I reached to turn it down, and then to open the window a little. It was only when I took my hand of the steering wheel that I realised how tightly I had been gripping it; my knuckles had turned completely white.

When I got in I swapped my shoes for my slippers, walked into the kitchen and put the shopping down on the table. Then I sought for the microwave pasta pot amidst the other groceries, pulled off the packaging, stabbed the film lid a few times with a fork and pushed it into the microwave. While that was cooking I put away all the shopping and stuffed the bags into a space under the sink. The microwave still had a couple of minutes more before the meal would be ready, so I laid out a knife and fork on the table, either side of a place mat with a picture of a box of herbs on it.

The microwave pinged and I took the hot plastic container out of it, holding the container by the corners so as not to burn myself. Then I sat down with it, ripped off the plastic film and began eating. I put down my knife and fork after only a couple of bites though. With nothing in the room to distract me, my mind kept returning to the accident I had passed earlier, to the blood I am certain I saw on the tarmac. It made me sick to think about it and I just sat there for a few minutes, staring at the warm cannelloni in front of me. I had lost my appetite suddenly, but I could not let the food go to waste, not when I knew I was hungry.

After another minute I stood up and grabbed a tray from the sideboard. I put the pasta on to the tray, filled a glass with water, and carried it through to the front room, where I turned on the television and watched BBC news because it was the only thing on worth watching at that time of day, even though I had over two hundred Sky TVchannels to choose from. It was not particularly good news that day, it never is, but at least it helped push thoughts of car accidents to the back of my mind until after I had eaten, and then I had work to distract me until I had to go pick up Lucy.

Read Part Three