‘Thank you,’ she said, tucking it neatly under her arm, and as the man stuttered another apology, we walked out of the shop.
We had lunch – an all-day breakfast – silently in a café. Feeling the day’s mood leach away from us, I began to talk. I told Lily what I knew of Will’s romantic history, about his career, that he was the kind of man who made you long for his approval, whether just by doing something that impressed him or making him laugh with some stupid joke. I told her how he was when I met him, and how he had changed, softened, starting to find joy in small things, even if many of those small things seemed to involve making fun of me. ‘Like I wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food. My mum basically has ten set meals which she’s rotated for the past twenty-five years. And none of them involves quinoa. Or lemongrass. Or guacamole. Your dad would eat anything.’
‘And now you do too?’
‘Actually, I still try guacamole every couple of months or so. For him, really.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘It tastes okay, I suppose. I just can’t get past the fact that it looks like something you blow out of your nose.’
I told her about his previous girlfriend, and how we had gatecrashed her wedding dance, me sitting on Will’s lap as we turned his motorized wheelchair in circles on the dance floor, and she had snorted her drink through her nose. ‘Seriously? Her wedding?’ In the overheated confines of the little café, I conjured her father for her as best I could, and perhaps it was because we were away from all the complications of home, or because her parents were in a different country, or because, just for once, someone was telling her stories about him that were uncomplicated and funny, she laughed, and asked questions, nodding often as if my answers had confirmed something she already believed. Yes, yes, he was like this. Yes, maybe I’m like that too.
And as we talked well into the afternoon, letting our cups of tea cool in front of us, and the weary waitress offered yet again to remove the last of the toast we had taken two hours to eat, I grasped something else: for the first time, I was recalling Will without sadness.
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’ I put the last crust into my mouth, eyeing the waitress, who looked as if this was her trigger to come back again.
‘What happened to you after Dad died? I mean, you seem to have done a lot more stuff when you were with him – even with him being stuck in a wheelchair – than you do now.’
The bread had turned claggy in my mouth. I struggled to swallow. Eventually, when the mouthful had gone down, I said, ‘I do things. I’ve just been busy. Working. I mean, when you’re on shifts, it’s hard to make plans.’
She raised her eyebrows a fraction, but she didn’t say anything.
‘And my hip is still quite painful. I’m not really up to mountain-climbing yet.’
Lily stirred her tea idly.
‘My life is eventful. I mean, falling off a roof isn’t exactly humdrum. That’s quite a lot of excitement for one year!’
‘But it’s hardly doing something, is it?’
We were silent for a moment. I took a breath, trying to quell the sudden buzzing in my ears. The waitress, arriving between us, swept up our empty plates, with a faint air of triumph, and took them to the kitchen.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Did I tell you about the time I took your dad to the races?’
With immaculate timing, my car overheated on the motorway, forty miles from London. Lily was surprisingly sanguine about it. In fact, she was curious. ‘I’ve never been in a car that broke down. I didn’t know they even did that any more.’
At this statement my jaw dropped (my dad would regularly pray loudly to his old van, promising premium petrol, regular tyre-pressure checks, endless love, if she would make it back home again). Then she told me her parents traded up their Mercedes every year. Mostly, she added, because of the level of damage done to the leather interior by her half-brothers.
We sat by the side of the motorway, waiting for the breakdown truck to arrive, and feeling the little car judder sporadically as the lorries rumbled past. Eventually, deciding it would be safer for us to be out of the car, we scrambled up the embankment at the side of the motorway and sat on the grass, watching as the afternoon sun lost its heat and slid down the other side of the motorway bridge.
‘So who is Martin?’ I said, when we had exhausted all breakdown-related conversation.
Lily plucked at the grass beside her. ‘Martin Steele? He’s the man I grew up with.’
‘I thought that was Francis.’
‘No. Fuckface only came into the picture when I was seven.’
‘You know, Lily, you might want to stop calling him that.’
She gave me a sideways look. ‘Okay. You’re probably right.’ She lay back on the grass, and smiled sweetly. ‘I’ll call him Penisfeatures instead.’
‘Let’s stick with Fuckface then. So how come you still visit him?’
‘Martin? He’s the only dad I really remember. Mum got together with him while I was small. He’s a musician. Very creative. He used to read stories and stuff and make up songs about me, that kind of thing. I just …’ She trailed off.
‘What happened? Between him and your mum?’
Lily reached into her bag, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. She inhaled and let out a long flute of smoke, almost dislocating her jawbone in the process. ‘I came home from school one day with the au pair and Mum just announced that he’d gone. She said they’d agreed he had to go because they weren’t getting on any more.’ She inhaled again. ‘Apparently he wasn’t interested in her personal growth or he didn’t share her vision of the future. Some bullshit. I think she just met Francis and knew Martin was never going to give her what she wanted.’
‘Which was?’
‘Money. And a big house. And the chance to spend her day shopping and bitching to her friends and aligning her chakras or whatever. Francis earns a fortune doing private bank things in his private bank with all the other private bankers.’ She turned to me. ‘So, basically, one day Martin was my dad – I mean, I called him Daddy right up until the day he left – and the next he wasn’t. He used to take me to nursery and primary school and everything – and then she decides she’s had enough of him, and I get home and he’s just … gone. It’s her house, so he’s gone. Just like that. And I’m not allowed to see him and I’m not even allowed to talk about him because I’m just dredging things up and being difficult. And obviously she is in so much pain and emotional distress.’ Here Lily did a scarily good impression of Tanya’s voice. ‘And when I really did get mad at her, she told me there was no point in getting so upset because he wasn’t even my real dad. So that was a nice way to find out.’