Most of Kite’s friends had taken off on their gap years: picking fruit in Australia; taking South-East Asia on a Shoestring around Thailand and Indonesia; others burnishing CVs with teaching jobs at primary schools in Uganda and Tibet. Xavier was in Paris with his family, dealing with the aftermath of the summer. Strawson had asked Kite to stay put in London: BOX 88 wanted to put him through advanced training before he went to university the following year.
‘Tell me about your dad,’ said Martha. ‘You’ve never said much about him.’
She was in bed rolling a joint, Kite sitting in a chair by the window watching people come and go in the winter street below. Ten days later, in that same house, he would be in the living room with Martha’s parents watching the Berlin Wall being torn down on the Nine O’Clock News. Had anyone else asked the same question, Kite would have shut them down. He had been avoiding the subject of his father for half his life. But Martha was different. He wanted to tell her everything.
‘Dad was called Paddy,’ he said. ‘Pierce Patrick Kite, but everyone knew him as Paddy. He wasn’t born in Ireland. My grandparents lived in London during the war and only moved back to Dublin in the 1950s. Dad must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time. He had a sister who died in the Blitz as a baby – Aunt Catherine – so like me he was a kind of only child by default.’
‘You had a sibling who died?’ Martha asked. She looked concerned, as if Kite had suffered a terrible loss about which she had known nothing.
‘No, no.’ He poked her leg with his foot. ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It was just me and Mum and Dad.’
Martha nodded, relieved, going back to rolling the joint. They had bought a packet of Rizlas and some cigarettes at a mini-supermarket on Regents Park Road. Martha had insisted on going to a place where her face wasn’t known in case the man who ran the corner shop at the end of the street told her parents she was smoking pot.
‘What did he look like?’ she asked.
From his wallet Kite took out two colour photographs: the first showed his father proudly standing at the bar of the hotel in Scotland, arms folded, grinning from ear to ear; the second was a picture of his parents sitting on a picnic rug at the Wigtown Show on a bright summer day in 1978.
‘Wow, your mum is beautiful,’ she said. ‘They look happy.’
‘They were.’
‘Your dad’s got such a glint in his eye. Looks very kind, but naughty. Bit like you.’
Kite turned from the window and watched as Martha lit a small lump of treacle-brown hash with her Zippo and crumbled it onto the Rizla.
‘Whenever people talk about Dad they say he was a typical hard-drinking Irishman who seduced the girls and flew down the wing for the first XV and liked to quote Keats and Bob Dylan when he was pissed. I don’t know how much of that is true. There are a lot of myths around Dad. I know he preferred Scottish whisky to Irish, Tennant’s to Guinness. His Dublin friends would come over on the boat from Larne and tease him about that. I grew up around bottles of Laphroaig and Lagavulin, six-packs of Kestrel lager and McEwan’s Export. There was alcohol everywhere. My father would hide half-bottles in the pockets of his suits and hang them in the cupboard. Whenever I smell booze on someone’s breath, I instantly think of him and kind of hate them for it. Even at school on weekends when we were getting pissed, it was enough to make me stop drinking if I smelled it on someone. One time, Xav drank a bottle of sherry from an off-licence in Windsor in the space of fifteen minutes and threw up in his room. A friend and I had to clear up the mess, get him out of his clothes and into bed before Lionel, our housemaster, found him. Would have been expelled if he’d got caught – he was on final warning. It was like parenting him. I’d parented my dad when he was drunk, so what was the difference? He’d be out of his head at three in the afternoon and say: “Don’t tell your mother, it’ll only upset her.” He’d pass out in different places. I remember Mum crying in their bedroom as she tried to wake him up for work. He was never violent or aggressive, but I can’t think of a single moment when he wasn’t drinking. At breakfast once, when I was about eight, I picked up his glass of orange juice by mistake, took a sip and it was full of vodka. He screamed at me to put it down, but it was too late. I spat it out and started crying.’
‘Jesus.’ Martha was holding the rolled joint, as if it would be disrespectful to light it while Kite was speaking so candidly. ‘Was he drinking when your mum met him in Ireland?’
‘Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. Are you going to light that?’ Martha clicked the lighter, the paper burning fast so that the end of the joint briefly flamed, sending up a plume of smoke. ‘When he was a young man he was quite political apparently. Not IRA, but definitely on the side of the Catholic Irish, the Republicans. Then he married Mum, an English Protestant girl, which is basically why they decided to leave Dublin and come to Scotland. Dad had been running a pub in Temple Bar so he knew the hospitality business, how to change a keg, find waiters, chefs, that kind of thing. Somebody told me a pub is perfect cover for an alcoholic. Everything you need is right at your fingertips. So they bought a
