I was so keen to speak to him last night that I barely even stopped to hear Anouk tell me how her class had gone.
“Lots of stretching,” she told me. “Very relaxing.”
I got out my phone before I’d even left the house. The first thing I said when my dad answered was: “I miss you.” I don’t think I’ve ever told him that before.
“Okay, so here’s a couple of magnets,” says Reveka. “As you can see, they’re just ordinary fridge magnets.”
I humour her and take a good look. One has a picture of Prague on it. The other says “Fuck fibromyalgia.”
Reveka turns them over, then places the shiny black sides together. “If you go like this, they move up and down really easily.” She slides them against each other in a vertical motion. “But if you go the other way, like this”—she slides them back and forth horizontally—“they get a bit stuck. Try it.”
I take the magnets and rub them against one another as Reveka did. They keep catching, making a small clicking noise. “Eh?” says my dad. “How about that?”
Reveka takes the magnets back to the fridge and reattaches them. “Fuck fibromyalgia” is upside down. “It’s not really a trick,” she says. “It’s just the way fridge magnets are made.”
“Because of where the poles are,” says my dad, eyeing up Reveka’s behind. “They make ’em in strips. Good, innit?”
My reaction is a noise somewhere between “mmm” and “oh.” “Moh.”
“She’s good with tricks, is Reveka.” Dad gives Reveka a wink, and she rolls her eyes.
I scrape back my chair. “Tea, anyone?”
Reveka’s expression changes from amusement to horror. “Oh no, I forgot. I’ll make the drinks. Why don’t you two go and sit in the living room?”
My dad stands with a groan, and I help him out into the hall. As soon as we’re clear of the doorway, he gives me a conspiratorial smile. “Come this way,” he whispers, opening the door to the garage. “Don’t tell Reveka I brought you in here, eh?”
I shrug. “All right.”
My dad has had to give up welding as a career, but the garage still looks like a haven of industry. In the centre of the room, a coatrack with hooks made of horseshoes is in midconstruction.
“She encourages me to do it,” he says, gesturing towards the kitchen. “But she doesn’t like me coming in here when it’s cold. Given me a new lease of life though, it has, getting back into it.” He runs his fingers along one of the horseshoes on the coatrack. “Gets everywhere, this rust.”
As well as suffering from fibromyalgia and having undergone spine fusion surgery, my dad’s also blind in one eye. The year before I was born, he was cutting a pipe and some slag flew in. You’d think he’d have learnt his lesson and worn goggles after that, but I recall him suffering from arc eye—sunburn of the retina—several times while I was growing up. He had to use artificial tears, which always struck me as ironic, because he used to cry so many real ones.
Dad picks up a pink manila folder off his worktop and waves it in the air. “Anyway, this is why I’ve brought you in here. I was having a clear-out the other day and found this old thing in the filing cabinet. Some stuff I kept from your mum’s desk. Maybe you’d like to keep it? Sentimental value or whatever.”
I take the folder. “Really? This was Mum’s? You don’t mind me keeping it?”
Dad’s mouth contorts into a strange upside-down grin. “Nah. I won’t be around forever. You have it, kiddo. Probably total crap anyway.” I wonder why he always has to do that: cat-astrophise, hyperbolise. Keepsakes are crap. Disappointments are disasters. He’s never ill, he’s utterly fucked.
“Thanks, Dad.” I press the folder to my chest. “I’d love to have it.”
“We’ll go and sit in the warm now, eh?” We trudge back into the house.
Reveka is perched on one end of the sofa with three mugs lined up on the coffee table. She tuts. “You’ve been in the garage.”
“You know, Rev, babe,” my dad says, “I think I’ll go and lie down for a bit.” He gives a melodramatic yawn.
“Oh, right. Sure.” Reveka springs up out of her seat.
“Reveka’s tucking me in, pup,” he explains, in an unfamiliar, childlike voice. “We’ll be out later on, in time for dinner. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”
Before I have the chance to answer, he and Reveka are gone, leaving me with three undrunk cups of tea. I try to push the thought that maybe they’ve gone to have sex out of my mind.
I take my drink upstairs, stopping briefly in the hallway to look at the old oak bookcase. Dad’s had this thing since before I was born. Barely a scratch on it. The books on the shelves aren’t in such good condition, though. Almost all of them were Mum’s. Organised alphabetically: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke. Dad told me that Mum used to read them in the bath. As a girl, I would run my fingertips over the pages. Warped by the steam of my mother’s bathwater, they rippled like waves on the sea. Now that I’m older, I’ve thought about borrowing a couple of them—taking them to read while in saturation, perhaps— but I can’t bring myself to do it. I like them here, on the shelves. Dad’s shrine to Mum.
I go into my room, which I still call my room, even though it’s used for the carers now—well, for the ones that don’t stay in Dad’s room with him, at any rate. I can’t remember which carer it was that redecorated, but it’s the only room in the house that’s completely changed since I lived here. Gone is the toothpaste-green paint I chose for the walls. The Dr. Pepper stain on the carpet in the corner. The Jacques Cousteau poster hanging over the
