Once upon a time Ed and I were fit. Ed lifted weights and drank protein shakes. I ran the grimness of my past away in twenty-six-mile increments, all over the world. The Chicago Marathon, the Paris Marathon, the Berlin Marathon and in between as many half-marathons and 10ks or stints on the treadmill at the gym as I could. If I could have run a marathon every day, I would have. I’m a person of extremes; always have been.
Now, of course, we’re made of Americanos and blueberry muffins and sausages stolen from a toddler’s plastic plate. We’ve abandoned tending to our own bodies for a while, as we help to grow somebody else’s.
Ed is already packing his rucksack, grabbing the opportunity to work out and the even better opportunity to get away from this.
And I’m relieved.
As I wait for Dad to arrive, I try to steel myself but I’m made of materials that are the opposite in form to steel. Plasticine maybe. A big lump of Play-Doh.
And when my dad arrives, I lose my shape fast.
It’s thirty seconds since he walked through the door and we are standing in the hall with my head bowed on his shoulder as I weep.
He is holding me tightly, and the sobs are coming violently now. It’s a release.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say when I come up for air. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ he reiterates, rage all over his face.
‘It’s that piece of shit who posted this who’s to blame. You were young. We all do daft things when we’re young. We’ll have a pint one day and I’ll tell you some of the stuff I did in the Sixties.’
I try to smile. Manchester born and bred, utterly working class, my dad. I can believe him. There would be a plethora of stories.
We move into the living room and sit on the sofa. Normality goes out of the window. I don’t offer drinks; I haven’t tidied up. I wear leggings that once were black. Sport hair that once was washed. Mascara that once was on my eyelashes. I’m a bleak homage to what once was.
This is an emergency summit. The gloss of life – manners, politeness, routine, ceremony – is gone.
‘The problem is,’ I say to my dad, ‘that piece of shit is currently unidentified.’
‘But it’s him obviously?’ he says, brow furrowed. ‘That ex of yours?’
I sigh. ‘He says it isn’t,’ I mutter, knowing how naive I sound but believing it, fully.
But also, I can’t accept that somebody who used to whisper all the things he liked best about me into my ear until I slept when I had insomnia, could go for me like this.
Ollie and I were together from when I was twenty to twenty-three. We discovered Eighties teen films together and shared a deep love for dance music. We drank one-euro red wine from plastic bottles on European campsites at festivals. I loved the dollop of freckles on his thigh. He loved that birthmark on my ear. But we loved each other beneath our skin too. We were young and obsessed.
My dad would know this, surely?
But then, I think back to the time Ollie and I were together and it was when my dad and I were furthest apart. I had dived into the world to drink and get high and be hedonistic and dance until I was ready to come up for air in whatever part of the grown-up universe I had figured out was for me.
Meanwhile he was at home in the world that he’d rebuilt.
A few years after my mum died, Dad went to French classes to keep himself busy and met his new wife, Faye, over irregular verbs and extra-curricular Cremant. Tentatively I was introduced to Faye and the three of us spent summer holidays in Brittany and Bordeaux. In between, I peered down the stairs when I was supposed to be in bed, watching them get to know each other, only seven years old and my tummy nervous about what their closeness meant for the future.
Faye started leaving her toothbrush and her blender and eventually her nightie and we were polite but not close and eventually she moved in and they got married and people got weepy at my flower girl dress and it seemed impossible after all of that that we still weren’t that close but we weren’t, even though she tried, and sometimes I wasn’t even polite.
It affected my dad and me too and until I had a family of my own, we weren’t as close either.
And so when I was with Ollie in my twenties, my dad wasn’t in my day-to-day life enough for me to go to him with scan pictures when I got pregnant or, later, howling grief.
Dad was excited for me, and then sad for me, but from a distance and I did most of my crying away from him, then I went travelling and arrived back to him in a different form. Ta-da. Good as new. Mended. I’ve always been more comfortable presenting a polished version of me. I hate exposing my pain.
But here we are. Consider it exposed, Dad, I’m out of polish. I look at him then, sitting on my sofa, face red like the socks that he is wearing beneath the jeans that have sneaked up his crossed leg. Red like an emergency.
‘I believe him, Dad,’ I say, sighing back into a cushion and pulling Ed’s hoodie sleeves over my bitten nails. The hoodie smells of Ed and I am nostalgic for us before Poppy. For us before the kind of shame that sends you to opposite corners of the house. ‘And he did love me.’
My dad raises an eyebrow.
‘He did,’ I say firmly. ‘I don’t know many things as fact, but that I do.’
He nods, grimly.
Then he goes to put the kettle on. God, I think, there’s no sign that you are in the middle of a catastrophe as clear as someone else
