Page 33 of Fe
Ripley put his hand on Fen’s knee. “Tell me.”
“When I was a boy, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Mum paid for lessons. I adored dancing. I was teased about it, but I didn’t care. I was good enough to be offered a scholarship at the Royal Ballet School.”
“That’s impressive. You must have been talented.”
“I was good. I thought I was going places, that ballet was my future until one day it wasn’t.” He gestured at his crutch. “If I’d have known what was going to happen in my mid-teens, I’d never have let her waste her money and my heart wouldn’t have been broken. But there’s no point being sad about it. Ballet had gone and there was nothing I could do. I had to pick myself up and keep going.”
Ripley met his gaze. “I’m sorry.”
Fen shrugged. “Worse things happen.”
“They do, but…that must have been devastating.”
“I was broken for a while. I couldn’t find a reason to carry on, but I came out of it, sort of put together again. I’m like a piece of kintsugi but not mended with gold.”
“You have something very special running through you. A courage that not many would find in themselves.”
Fen swallowed. “Doesn’t everyone have something that’s marked them, a difficulty they’ve had to deal with? That’s one thing my mum told me when I was sad. To look around and imagine what pain others might be feeling. Not many of us go through life unscathed but we have to keep fighting.”
Something in Ripley’s exhalation told Fen he’d hit a nerve.
“What happened to you?”
“It’s not something I talk about.” Ripley moved his hand from Fen’s knee, and Fen caught hold of it under the table.
“I never talk to anyone about my father. Or about ballet. When you’re getting to know someone, you share things.”
Ripley glanced around.
“Forget where we are,” Fen said. “At least me telling you about ballet here, stopped me crying. I don’t like to make a scene.”
“Definitely not cut out to be a model then.”
“No, and don’t change the subject.”
Ripley sighed. “When I was eight years old, my father died in my arms.”
Fen clutched hard at Ripley’s fingers. “Oh shit.”
“My mother was out for the day and my father and I were upstairs playing in my room. We heard noises downstairs. When he was sure it wasn’t my mother, he rang the police from the phone in the bedroom, and told me to go and hide in the attic. There are little spaces at the side, small doors into the eaves. When we played hide and seek, it was one of my hiding places. I heard a lot of noise, shouting and banging and I was scared but when it all went quiet, I crept downstairs. My father was lying in the hall on his back. There was a pool of blood underneath his head and one of my mother’s bronze sculptures on the floor next to him. The front door was open.
“He opened his eyes and the relief… I thought he was all right. I told him he’d be fine, that he had to hang on, that I loved him, I didn’t want him to die. I could hear sirens. Then…he…left me. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see me anymore.”
Fen gulped. “That’s awful.” He squeezed Ripley’s fingers and Ripley tightened his hold. “What a terrible thing to have happened. Did they catch the person who did it?”
Ripley nodded. “He was a kid. Twenty years old. Drug addict. He’s out of prison now. Not been in trouble since, that I know of. I went to the prison on the day he was released and watched him leave. I’d thought about confronting him. His family were waiting. His parents. A brother. I wanted to be angry and I ended up jealous. You were lucky you had a loving mother. Mine wasn’t then and still isn’t. Her way of dealing with losing him was to ban me from talking about him ever again. She said it would help me get over him faster.” He felt his cheek twitch. “She had an ostrich mentality; except they don’t actually bury their heads in the sand or they’d suffocate.”
“I suppose my mum is a bit like that. She never ever talked about my father. But then I could google and find out whatever I wanted to know. Though I don’t. Well, I have a couple of times but… Tonight is the nearest I’ve ever been to him. Strange thought.”
“He’s famous?”
Fen hesitated, then nodded.
“I wonder if that’s why you look familiar. Who is he?”
“I’d prefer not to tell you. He’s not part of my life.”
“So we’re not sharing everything.”
