Page 92 of Don't You Forget About Me

The emotion is blunted by Lagavulin and yet I still have to pace myself.

‘I was very close to my dad …’ I’ll have to deliver a sentence at a time and sort myself out in the pauses.

‘You don’t have to talk about this, you know,’ Lucas says.

‘No, no. I want to. I visited from university after a month. You know, huge bag of washing, you feel like a character who’s been on some epic journey, forever changed by their travels.’

Lucas laughs, softly.

‘Ah yes. You think you’re Frodo. Or is it Bilbo.’

‘I told my mum I was coming home that weekend, and my dad hadn’t been informed. My mum and my dad not communicating was kind of a hallmark of their relationship. If my dad had known, he’d have been fired up to see me, chippy tea, he’d have bought a bottle of wine. Instead I get home, travel weary from the far-off land of Newcastle and expecting this fanfare and no one’s home. But that’s OK. I threw all my washing in the machine, made myself a five-slices-of-bread-tall sandwich, head upstairs to scarf it.’

Lucas smiles and I think I see genuine affection towards me.

‘Then, thanks to being an underslept fresher, I fall asleep. When I woke up, I could hear my dad’s voice. I sneak downstairs quietly, all ready to shout “SURPRISE, it’s me!” and I twig that he’s not talking to someone in the house, he’s on the landline in the hallway.’

Time hasn’t dulled this impact. Even now, twelve years later, I feel almost as shocked as I did when it happened. I also feel like I’m betraying Dad by recounting it. I’d never known until now that’s why I’ve kept it to myself. To protect him.

‘And … he’s saying things, obviously to a woman. Not things you ever, ever want to hear your dad say. Things he’s going to do to her. Things he’d like her to do to him. Oh God, Lucas, porny stuff. I’ve actually managed to block a lot of it out. The C word featured.’

‘Ah, no,’ Lucas puts a hand to his forehead. ‘That’s … that’s so rough.’

‘Yeah. So I’m halfway down the stairs, I can’t move without him hearing or seeing me and I’m coming to terms with the fact I now know he’s having an affair.’

I catch my breath. ‘He hangs up. He sees me. He absolutely loses his shit about me earwigging on him, as a way of dealing with what he knows I heard. I’m scared, I lose my shit at him. I say how awful it is to Mum, to me, to my sister. What a terrible dad and husband he is.’

Deep breaths, Georgina, I tell myself. Like Fay said.

‘He stood and took it all. He couldn’t do anything else. I avoided him for the rest of the weekend, and went back to Newcastle. In pieces.’

Another deep breath.

‘He calls me, a day later, conciliatory, and offered to drive up to Newcastle to see me. I told him to piss off.’

Just as I think I’ve got through this, I break. I break completely on the wordspiss off. I put my face in my hands and my shoulders shake as I weep. This is kept in a safely locked box most of the time, and I try to mislay the key. Sometimes when I open it, the contents feel like they could consume me.

Moments later, I feel Lucas crouching next to me. He puts his arm around me, and without thinking I turn and sob into his shoulder. The fabric smells of him, in a nice way. He is bigger and broader than the boy I was heavy petting with in the park. I wish I could lose myself into this embrace, and not only because of who he is and what he was to me. It feels so good to have someone hold me. It eases this immovable pain in my chest.

‘Sorry,’ I say, voice gone up three octaves due to crying at same time. ‘Sorry. You were talking about your wife and now I’m booing …’

‘Hey hey hey. It’s fine, it’s alright to cry,’ Lucas shushes me and rubs my back. Keith lets out a confused whimper and it makes us both laugh. Lucas fetches tissues and I accept one. Much as I didn’t want to cry in front of Lucas, I feel better for having done it.

Lucas sits down in his seat again. I crumple the tissue in both hands.

‘And he—’ I breathe, deeply, ‘—he died, a few weeks later. Giant heart attack. We’d never made up. That was it. “Piss off” was the last time we spoke.’

I sniff and gasp.

Lucas gasps too, in a different way. ‘Oh.No.’

‘I never told Mum or my sister about our fight, how could I? We’re burying Dad twenty-five years before we expected to, oh and by the way he was playing away, not sure with who, good luck processing this information.’ I shrug: ‘And Dad wasn’t there to defend himself. So when you couldn’t tell everyone you and Niamh weren’t together, or you felt let down by her? I get that. I couldn’t tell everyone I was the apple of my dad’s eye and he mine but my last memory is us at daggers drawn, or me hanging up on him.’

Tears crawl down my face and I wipe them with my sleeve.

‘Ah,’ Lucas looks down, and brushes a tear away himself.

‘There’s a post-credits sequence too,’ I say, picking up my whisky. ‘I was so traumatised, I had a panic attack in my end of first year exams and never went back to university. It was Dad who really wanted me to get that degree. Even now I flinch when I see photos of people in their mortar boards, Mum and Dad either side. I had been so sure that was something I’d have. Wrong again.’

---