Page 47 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
I mean, I hadn’t thought it’d be like I’d mention it, and he’d say, Oh, yeah, that one: see, your great-great-great-squared-grandad married a gypsy girl and ever since then every firstborn son in our family is shit-hot at finding stuff and makes a killing as a plumber. And then launch into a funny story about him as a nipper finding all the presents three days before Christmas.
Okay, maybe I’d thought that a bit.
But what’d happened was, I’d mumbled out a question about supernatural family gifts, which he’d interpreted as me thinking he’d come from Transylvania because all those Eastern European countries are basically the same to us ignorant Brits, which led to a geography lesson I really hadn’t needed (okay, maybe I’d needed it a bit). By the time we actually got round to my gift, we’d been talking at cross-purposes so bloody long, it all came out sounding even more unconvincing than it usually does. Which, by the way, is another reason why I don’t tell people about it, not if I can help it.
Mike—he’d told me to call him Mike, which was weird but also a relief, seeing as how I wasn’t sure I could call him Dad without feeling guilty about, well, Dad—had given Phil this look. I was fairly sure it meant something along the lines of Oi, you might have mentioned my long-lost son is in urgent need of care in the community. Phil gazed back stonily, which probably translated as No dissing the mental health of my intended, mate.
Me? I’d changed the subject, pronto. Well, at least when you first meet the bloke who provided half your DNA, the one thing you’re not short of is topics to ask about. (And topics to avoid at all costs, come to that.) I’d found out he’d gone back to Poland and got married to a lass from his hometown after having his fling with my mum. Was that normal? For Europeans, I mean? I knew one or two blokes who’d spent a summer visiting family in India or Pakistan and come back hitched, but I’d always thought that was like a religious or cultural thing.
I didn’t like to ask if she’d been his girlfriend all along. Patiently waiting for him to make his fortune in England and come back to marry her, while he played away with my mum.
They’d moved to Bristol, him and the missus, and had a son. Just the one, which surprised me somehow, but I didn’t like to ask. “Daniel, he is twenty-five now. He works in construction. Doing very well.” Mike had showed me a picture of a fair-haired bloke who must take after his mum, looks-wise. Either that, or what was sauce for the gander . . . Nope. Not going there.
Mike snapped a picture of me on his phone. I wondered if he was planning to show it to Daniel, and what he’d think about me looking more like his dad than he did. I mean, he was my dad too, obviously . . . but it still seemed weird.
And the whole being Polish bit . . . See, as you probably already know, Novak isn’t the way you spell, well, Novak in Polish. I mean, you say it the same, but it’s usually spelled with a w. Nowak. I s’pose, if I thought at all about it, I just assumed he’d changed it to make life easier for himself, like changing Patschke to Paretski back around World War I when having a German name was a bit of a no-no. I mean, these days everyone and his dog knows Polish w’s are v’s, but way back in the mists of time around when I was conceived, it was probably either spend your life explaining spelling and/or pronunciation to ignorant Brits, or change the name.
Uh, no. Apparently that great-great-great-squared-grandad I’d been thinking about earlier had, according to family legend, actually moved to Poland from Austria-Hungary sometime around the Prussian War. (Or maybe a Prussian war. All this education was seriously doing my head in.) Mike even made a joke about it, said he’d had to come to this country to get his name spelled right. Then he pointed out that Novak was a name traditionally given to a bloke who’d moved into the area from somewhere else, so basically, no one had a bloody clue where my forebears had originally come from.
I could be anything. From anywhere. Christ. I’d thought I’d come away from meeting Mike Novak with more answers as to who I was, where I’d come from, and maybe even why I had this weird psychic so-called gift.
If anything, I had less of the bastards than before.
I’d made the mistake of trying to talk it over with Phil, after.
He’d given me a look. Seeing as we were in bed at the time, that involved turning over and pushing himself up on his elbow, which made me feel even more on the spot than I had done already.
“What?”
“You’re just like my sister, you are.”
“You what?” I was fairly sure the number of things me and Leanne had in common, apart from a moderate fondness for one Phil Morrison (which, if he didn’t watch out, was liable to be getting more moderate by the minute), could be counted on the fingers of one fish.
“Leanne. Don’t you remember her, back when we were at school?” He got that pinched look on his face he always did when talking of our mutual school days.
Course, I couldn’t see a mirror from here. Chances were I’d got the same expression plastered all over my mug. “Not a lot, to be honest. She was a couple of years below us, wasn’t she?” And yeah, some of the younger girls had had older boyfriends, but by the time she’d have been looking for one, it was pretty much common knowledge it wasn’t girls I was after. Mostly, it had to be said, thanks to her big brother Phil spreading that juicy bit of gossip far and wide.
Yeah, I definitely had a pinched look on my face. I could feel the tightness of it.
Luckily Phil was back to staring at the ceiling now. “Used to be fat, didn’t she? Got a lot of shit for it at school.”
Oh. Now I remembered her. A vague picture of a mousey-haired girl bursting out of her school uniform who spent a lot of her time crying. I hadn’t connected her with Phil, probably because I couldn’t remember ever seeing them together. Still, how many teenage boys want to hang around with their not-so-little sister where their mates can see them? Yeah, kids can be bastards.
Case in point: you might have thought me and her would have a bit of fellow-feeling, seeing as we were the butt of most of the nasty jokes going around. Far as I could remember, we’d avoided each other like the plague, thinking (probably correctly) that if there’s anything more fun to rip the shit out of than a podge or a poof, it’s a podge and a poof who’ve chummed up together.
Phil carried on before I could sort out how to say yeah, I remembered her when he put it like that. “She used to reckon, Leanne did, if only she could lose weight, her whole bloody life’d be sorted. She’d get a boyfriend, all the girls would want to be her friend, and no one would laugh at her anymore. ’Cept then she did it, and you know what? She’s still the same person with the same life. Just wearing smaller clothes. And yeah, a lot more boys fancied her. Trouble was, they were still the ones she could remember being pricks to her when she was fat.”
“Yeah, but she’s not in school now, is she?” I said, putting an arm around him and snuggling in closer. “I mean, she must meet all sorts now. People who never knew her back then.”
He didn’t respond. Not physically, I mean. “Yeah, and now if they don’t fancy her, she’s got nothing to blame it on, has she? And even if they do, she’s gotta be asking herself, would they have been seen dead with her in the old days?”
There was an elephant in the room all right, and it wasn’t bloody well Leanne. I pulled Phil and his guilt trip for the shit he’d put me through in high school a bit closer and gave them both a cuddle. “Oi. Water under the bridge, remember? Anyway, I thought we were talking about my dad. How’d we even get onto this?”
“Because what you were hoping for from meeting your real dad is exactly what Leanne was hoping for from losing weight.”
“What, for more blokes to fancy me?”
Phil huffed a laugh. “No, and you know it. For doing one thing to somehow give you the answer to life, the universe, and sodding everything, all right?”
