Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

– every room, every floor, every inch – exhausted by the time we were dropped home. They weren’t the memories you would cradle and keep safe.

I recall sitting on top of the sofa, my head stuck through the blinds, waiting, as he never arrived to take me to see Santa at the Co-op as promised. The hours ticked by. One of his – so I suppose by extension our – close relatives was getting married. It was my eleventh birthday. I remember turning up at the door of the fancy hotel in town, and being told that we couldn’t come in. That there had been a mistake. That we were not allowed into the ‘day do’. That there was no seat for us, no food for us. I tried to look around the big immovable man in the doorway, tried to see Dad so that he could come and save us. But I remember not being able to find him and us being sent away, back out into the street and being told to wait there for a few hours, until we were allowed in.

I was wearing a new dress, my perm tight and rigid. The temperature dropped as the sun dipped and my new, already much-loved Tammy Girl frock offered little warmth. As we sat on a bench by the roundabout in the shadow of the hotel, the sky turned black and I started to cry. My defiantly dry-faced brother – who was already my eternal protector at just thirteen – comforted me. After more time passed and we still weren’t allowed inside, I remember walking to a phone box and reversing the charges to ring Mum and that Dad later claimed it had been a ‘mix-up’. My cheeks burned at the thought of him sitting inside – scraping his plate clean, while his children were exiled – in the belief that he didn’t really want us, never had.

Until then, I’d always fantasised about being a daddy’s girl. It was a dream that I tangled in between my fingers and tried to make real in my fists. It had first bloomed in my brain at around six or seven years old: the age I first understood that my life and that of kids around me didn’t line up. Through the smudged lenses of my thick NHS glasses, I hungrily watched my friends with their fathers, devoured their casual interactions. The light way they laughed, how their fingers entwined easily, the gentle care of a jacket being zipped all the way up to the chin. It always amazed me to see the dads waiting nervously as we clambered off the bus from the school trip or when they poked their heads gingerly around the door as we wrapped up at Brownies. It all just served to make me ask: I had a dad out there, so why wasn’t I good enough to be his girl?

But now, as disappointments piled up and my desperation to be a daughter waned, I resigned myself to being without a dad. Just as well: contact petered out altogether before I began secondary school. His position appeared to be that we knew where he was if we wanted to see him. We did, and I for one didn’t in the face of his ambivalence. Until I turned seventeen. Then I became suffocated by the need to find out who this man was. To find out who I really was. It was teatime on Boxing Day when I knocked on his door.

‘Hello, duck,’ he said, seemingly only moderately surprised, vaguely pleased to see me. I went in, had a cup of tea, we made polite conversation, I left. Hopes of a restorative process, leading to a real father–daughter relationship proved, to me, overly optimistic, impossible. In the preceding years I’d watched Surprise Surprise avidly, imagining our reunion: the tears, the joy, the feeling of coming home. But looking into his eyes – so much like mine – I felt no rush of love, no sense that I was inextricably his. I was sure he felt the same. We kept up sporadic visits nonetheless. His wife would take us walking through graveyards at midnight, on the hunt for ghosts. Other than that, we sat in uncomfortable silence in front of the TV as horse racing and the bloated voices of those who narrated it roared out.

It finally ended not unlike it began. I was nineteen and leaving for a summer abroad. It was also my birthday. He was coming round to ‘say goodbye’ after he’d turned me away from his door earlier in the day, when I’d arrived unexpectedly with a Father’s Day gift. ‘I’ll be there by seven p.m.,’ he promised, buying time, time he’d pocket, never intending to use.

I sat by the window and waited, each set of passing headlights a fresh disappointment. As I started to cry, I remembered the almost identical scene when I’d been waiting to see Santa. When I’d sat and waited, refused to come out of the window. When I’d allowed myself to be strung up in misery. He hadn’t come then, and he wasn’t going to come now. He would never come, never realise his responsibilities. At four a.m., I closed the blinds and wiped my face. As I walked up the stairs I thought: the question really was not where was he but who was he? I didn’t know him. He wasn’t a dad. At least, he wasn’t my dad.

Some five or so years later, a brief rapprochement. My phone rang. It was my brother, telling me that Dad was in hospital. His wife had recently died and he’d driven out into the dark countryside lanes and had an accident. He was in intensive care and we were advised to see him while there was time. I took the train and arrived at his bedside, thick, tied tubes lodged in his throat, mouth, machines beep-beeping, pulsating. I felt like a charlatan at his bedside.

Against the odds, he survived; he