Dad’s illness hadn’t only polluted Mum’s life, of course.
When I was five, he’d left my sister and me alone in the Dorchester Arms. He’d told us he was nipping to the cashpoint, but never returned. At closing time the barman had phoned Mum so that she could come and pick us up in a taxi. She’d been incandescently angry, and she and Dad had screamed at each other until the sun came up the next day.
When I was seven, Mrs Wilson had caused a scandal by refusing to hand us over at the school gates because Dad couldn’t walk without zigzagging, and by age eighteen, I was repeatedly picking him up from the police station after he’d spent a night in the cells, or settling his debts at various pubs to avoid them calling the police in the first place. And these, my friends, are just highlights – simply the first awful memories that come to mind, to give you a taste, so to speak. Because the drama, the trauma, was incessant. Dad’s alcoholism had been the dominant, most reliable constant of our day-to-day lives for as long as any of us could remember.
It will sound awful to anyone who hasn’t lived through that kind of chaos, but as frequently as I have thought of Dad and missed him, I’ve remembered the fact that he’s dead and sensed the fear I’d got used to slipping blissfully from my shoulders, like a well-worn cloak. Until he died, we’d lived in constant dread of answering the phone, you see. We never knew quite what form the next episode of drama would take, nor when it would occur. And to realise that was over was a source of sadness but also great relief.
By 2009 Dad had been gone for three years, so I too was in full flow, finally enjoying my all-new drama-free life. I was nursing at Canterbury Hospital, and had moved to a cute flat above a trendy record shop in Castle Street.
I believed, back then, that the bad times were over. I thought that all the anguish and misery in our lives had vanished the moment Dad downed his final half-bottle of vodka. But his shadow – or, more precisely, the shadow of our upbringing – was just snoozing, as it turned out. It was just having a kip beneath a tree while it dreamed up new ways to ruin my life.
I first laid eyes on Anthony in a DIY superstore, of all places. I’d been living in Castle Street for almost a year and had finally decided to install a toilet roll holder. Though leaving the roll on the floor hadn’t much bothered me, my sister had given me a kitten – Dandy – for Christmas. Because Dandy’s main joy in life seemed to be ripping the toilet paper to shreds, getting it out of his reach had become essential.
In B&Q’s bathroom aisle there were a surprising – some would say unreasonable – number of different options to choose from, running from a £1.49 pink plastic affair to a ‘deluxe’ chrome-plated model at £14.99. Disappointingly, none of them was reduced in the January sale.
The problem I faced was that they all required screwing to the wall, and as drilling into tiles, using Rawlplugs and all the other kerfuffle that went with it had been Dad’s exclusive domain, I was at a bit of a loss to know how to proceed. As I studied the instructions on the back of each blister pack, I began to think about how much I missed him. After what I said previously, that may sound contradictory, but my feelings about Dad would come and go in waves: relief that he was gone, then sadness at his absence, and occasionally a specific kind of overwhelming grief, not so much for who he had been, or for what our relationship had held, but for who he might have been, the kind of relationship we could have had, if only things had been different. By things being different, I suppose I mean if Dad had been an entirely different person.
Anyway, amid these conflicting thoughts and feelings actual tears were welling up, there in the bathroom fittings section of B&Q, prompting the man beside me to ask if I was all right.
‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, turning, only to realise that my vision was too blurry to actually see.
‘You just look a bit . . .’ he said, sounding hesitant, ‘. . . overwrought . . . maybe?’
I wiped away the tears with my sleeve and studied the man. He was tall, athletic, red-headed and elegantly dressed. He smiled at me kindly, confusedly, and the skin around his blue eyes wrinkled a little. He was five or six years older than me, I guessed, and he had a hint of what sounded like a Liverpudlian accent.
I forced a smile. ‘Oh! My eyes . . . ?’ I asked, embarrassedly faking a laugh. ‘It’s just an allergy. I’m fine. Really.’
‘What are you allergic to?’ he asked. ‘Toilet roll holders?’
‘Oh . . . no . . .’ I spluttered, before realising that this had been a joke. I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake, joke-wise. ‘Allergic to the idea of fixing one to the wall, maybe?’ I offered, attempting a joke of my own.
The man smiled more broadly and held out a big hand with long fingers and manicured fingernails. I remember thinking that his nails were in a better state than my own. ‘Anthony,’ he said, ‘but everyone calls me Ant.’
‘Heather,’ I replied, shaking his hand loosely and blushing.
‘Some of them just stick on,’ he explained, nodding towards the wall of toilet roll dispensers. ‘They come with double-sided tape. So you could avoid the whole drilling thing that way if you want.’
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘I haven’t found a stick-on
