Page 70 of Things We Never Said
By the time he hangs up, he knows the price of the apartment. Six hundred and thirty thousand for a one-bedroom flat! And by the time he folds his laptop away and heads to the bathroom for his shower, he knows the estimated price of three-bedroom houses in his street: five hundred and fifty thousand. Which leaves a gap of eighty, at least.
Snapshot #22
120 format, colour. A teenage girl poses reluctantly for a school photo against a painted backdrop depicting clouds. She is rolling her eyes and wearing a school uniform. Her school tie is knotted in such a way that it hangs halfway down her chest and has a total length of about three inches.
April’s moods had come and gone. For certain periods, sometimes for an entire year or so, she would become angelic. And then something inexplicable would change somewhere in the cosmos and she could shift from angel to devil in about half an hour, a state which, once again, could last for an hour or a year.
As a general rule, both Sean and Catherine shared the brunt of whatever was going on in April’s psyche, but sometimes one parent would be favoured while the other was detested; you could never really tell which way the lines would fall, nor why. One such period had begun on April’s twelfth birthday, and had lasted, almost precisely, until her thirteenth. For one year, exact to the day, April had become so utterly refractory to anything that Sean might suggest, or think, or do, that he had truly struggled to like his own daughter. It had been a learning experience for him, though, because he had discovered that loving and liking were very different things. For, yes, it was entirely possible to continue to love his daughter even as he actively disliked everything about their relationship.
Catherine, Sean deduced, had attributed at least part of the blame for this breakdown to him, which he had thought, and still thinks, was unfair.
Catherine, he knew, believed that he had been thrown into a crisis about April’s lineage by a throwaway comment from a work colleague they had bumped into in the street. His wife believed that he was troubled that April might not be his when, in fact, the problem had been far more complex and, in a way, quite the opposite.
For that one, fractious year, it seemed as if April had distilled every single thing that Sean disliked about himself, every single character trait he had worked so hard to suppress: his sarcasm, his cynicism, his intolerance for stupidity ... Yes, it seemed for a while as if his eye-rolling, huffing, puffing daughter had become some kind of dark mirror.You can pretend all you like, Dad, she seemed to be saying,but I can see exactly who you are, because that’s exactly who I am.
It was at this time that Sean had finally allowed doubts about April’s paternity to surface into consciousness. Catherine’s constant comments as to all the ways that he and April were similar had made the subject impossible to ignore. But her comments had only made the situation worse, really, because Sean hadn’t wanted, right then, to accept the fact that April’s cynical sneering came from his DNA, any more than he wanted to be constantly reminded that they might not be anything to do with him at all. The whole subject was something of a lose–lose situation, no matter how he tried to look at it.
Cassette #22
Hello beautiful.
It’s Saturday morning, and you and April have just left. You were both so beautiful today, and I tried to tell you that, but you both just rolled your eyes and looked embarrassed. Neither of you ever could take a compliment. But you were sitting holding my hand and at one point the sun came out and it looked as if you had a halo. So, know that I wasn’t joking. You both really did look quite stunning.
It hardly seems fair on a day when I love you so much to drag you back to 1995, your horrible year with April, but I’m afraid that’s the next photo I picked out, and if I don’t do them in order I’m worried I’ll end up in a right old mess.
So here goes: things got so bad between you two that I used to daydream that I’d have to leave you, just to keep you and April from each other’s throats. Sometimes I used to come home and worry that one of you might have stabbed the other.
It didn’t last, thank God, and by the time she hit thirteen you’d both got over yourselves (and each other), and everything was peaceful and lovely again. But for a while, back then, it felt a bit like a war zone. It really did.
I knew what it was about, of course. It was all to do with you worrying about who April’s father was, and that all started because that stupid secretary from your workplace bumped into us and commented that April didn’t look anything like you. It was just a couple of days before her twelfth birthday and, from that point on, you just never stopped sniping at each other.
I did my best to placate everyone, but I don’t think I was very good at playing go-between. Because, while I could understand April behaving like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, I really did think that you should know better and I really did just want to shout at you to grow up.
I tried to talk to you about it all – I must have asked you what was wrong a hundred times. I wanted you to name it, you see, so that we could get it out in the open, so that we could finally discuss the whole thing. But, until you did, I dared not mention it myself, because I was never quite one hundred per cent sure that you knew. And as far as bringing things out into the open was concerned, you were never any help at all. All you ever did was insist that nothing was wrong, that everything was fine. You always reverted to being such a blokey bloke whenever the subject was our daughter.
About four years ago, a woman at work mentioned a friend of hers who’d had a paternity test done, and I realised that putting the whole subject to bed had become not only possible, but relatively inexpensive. So I paid a few hundred pounds and got one done. You may remember being quite surprised when I suddenly attacked your feet with the toenail clippers one morning ...
I cried when the results came back. Because April is yours, after all. And as soon as I saw those results, I knew that it had been obvious all along, even though I had wasted years and years worrying about it.
Had it not been the case, had Phil been the father, I’m pretty sure I would have never mentioned the subject again. But it’s done, honey, and it’s all OK. Nature or nurture, everything that April ever becomes is directly down to us! In fact, if you ever unearth that second box of photos, you’ll probably find the test results stuffed down the bottom.
Now, I know that you’ve probably thought about it a thousand times and I know that you’ve decided, or convinced yourself, that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. You love each other so much, why should it matter, right?
But I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, all the same, for being so goddamned classy about the whole thing, for never mentioning it once. Because there were plenty of times when I was being unreasonable and when you needed ammunition to get your own back; there were lots of times when you could easily have thrown that back in my face. So thank you, honey, for not doing that.
God! I just realised that with you listening to these over such a long period, you’ll have to worry about this whole DNA thing for weeks on end. So now I’m going to have to go back through the tapes and find the Phil one and erase it or record an addendum or something. Note to self: do not forget!
Emily, the estate agent – young, professional, pretty, albeit with somewhat severe features – talks constantly as they make their way from the car park to the third floor.
She tells Sean random facts about Cantabrigian Rise, most of which he’s already aware of and others he knows to be patently untrue.
He had fully intended to come clean about his relationship to the building, but quickly realises that it’s much more fun to say nothing, effectively giving her enough rope to hang herself.
‘The roof is completely covered in photovoltaic panels,’ she is saying as they reach the top floor, ‘which means that the electricity bills are almost zero for these units.’
‘Photovoltaic, huh?’ Sean says, doing his best to suppress a wry smile. ‘Not just a solar hot-water system then?’
He sees Emily’s confidence stutter momentarily; he sees the shadow sweep across her features. ‘Um?’ she says, then, ‘No, no, the proper, um, photovoltaic ones. Which heat the water too, so that’s one less thing to worry about, obviously.’
