Read by Will Goodhand
Here we are, on a date. Our last date together. What venue have we agreed upon? A gastro-pub? A loosely-ethnic restaurant someone vaguely famous tweeted about?
No, our last date together is at a Little Chef on the A14.
We’ve spiced things up though. We have a double date as we have brought along our respective lawyers. They are arguing over the bill and pushing the saucer with the free lollies from one side to the other. I’d pocket the lollies myself and give them to our kids, but they live with you now, and will just gather dust in the car ashtray.
Sometime soon we will leave this place and climb back into our respective vehicles. I will, no doubt, have an emotional moment when I look in the rear view mirror at the empty child seats. I’ll take down the spy mirror so I can’t see them, the tiny ghosts of what could have been: Holidays in Tiverton, sing-alongs on the M25, petty arguments over which films we will play on the portable DVD player.
Actually, I don’t think I’ll be emotional. I am past that stage now. But I can’t help a bit of nostalgia, like our first date. I had sort of forgotten it, even though you hadn’t. It was winter, possibly December; it felt like it belonged in the fag-end of a passed year. I had tried to trim my hair and ended up cutting it too short. I felt like someone else on that date, but, truth told, we try not to be ourselves on first dates, we try to be our PR agents. You might have worn a skirt. In fact it was a dress. It was florid. I think it was ugly; something an auntie might wear to a wedding. I remember a vivid memory of you either going to the bar or for a piss and I wondered how I would possibly touch you, how I would unpuzzle you. I don’t mean that in a crude sense. I meant I was nervous - your sexuality and youthful vibrancy scared me. I was piloting a small plane that was caught in a downward spiral. I think I wore a black t-shirt; it was always what I felt the safest in, a £10 parachute from M&S.
Now I am lost in hostile land. I am not at the table, but amongst the £1.99 maps. I want to find this spot, this spot on the map where we will legally detach. Where I will only be woken by my daughters every other weekend; how this will be the pick up and drop off point; how they will bring their little carry cases of Peppa Pig figures and talk about people and places beyond my experience. I will suggest going out to Pizza Hut or the cinema. My child filled weekends will be marked by excursions to out of town retail parks with their lurid colours and e-numbers, not the routines I became accustomed to, and that makes me feel heavy, as if something squats upon my chest.
Outside of the window, birds take berries from the central reservation. The road is pockmarked by frost damage, it reminds me of the muffin I pushed numbly round my plate. The scree from the road, the salt gritters and lorry spray has discoloured the windows, and etched into them unreadable runes. Something tells me that they tell it’s not good.
Doug is your new man. You want to marry quickly; I know this as I was married to you. Doug is a dentist. Doug, I imagine, drives a Mercedes or some other status car. It probably has a vast bewilderment of things it can do. My daughters will drop their crumbs and plastic tops from their Ella’s Kitchen into its valeted depths along with the odd toilet accident that will fail to blemish the leather upholstery.
But Doug will never see his dead parents in my children. He will never experience those strange moments, those unnerving times where someone you haven’t seen for twenty years suddenly enters the room, or looks at you strangely when you tell them off. He will not get those moments, the ones that people never tell you about, that remind you of how alive you are, how the blood knocks at the wrist like a bailiff. Doug will not remember the forty-plus hours of labour or how one of the twins had to be resuscitated in the hallway right in front of him. Doug is childless. He has you, my little lights, on loan, not permanent transfer.
I have no Doug to go home to, no significant other. I don’t want my own Doug. I just want to lie in my own bed and listen to the ringing in my ears.
I am pissing in the urinal. In front of me is an advert with some business people looking seriously at a PowerPoint presentation. They are all so sharp. I have never, despite my suits, felt that sharp. I have never been that focused on a PowerPoint presentation. There is a blonde woman with oversized black frames and tightly slicked back hair. She is in a grey suit. One of the men, with suspiciously grey hair for one so youthful, is fist pumping the air with success. They make me feel sad, sad about the motorway, about modern life generally. Is this it? Is this all there is? Business people who don’t exist in a restaurant where people come to divorce? I piss a little on the floor in protest but end up hitting the edge of the urinal and splashing my trouser leg and then having to use the hand drier to hide my shame.
Heading back to the table I can see all is done. ‘We’re done here,’ says your lawyer. Congratulations I think. You are no longer Mrs Wren. The twins will spend their alternate weekends playing I-spy on the English motorway system and trying to figure out what surname to use.
I am a Dad I told myself, over and over, the night I drove away from the hospital leaving you all there in the clinical light. I didn’t feel like one though, you don’t straight away. I tried in that small gap of time to savour the moments of my bachelorhood before you were all discharged. Sometimes I still don’t feel like a Dad. I remember years ago a man on the radio saying he felt nothing, not an ounce of love or hate for his grown up children. He had done his bit and now he was getting on with his own life. The presenter called him brave. Then I read about another, a trawler man who on returning from the sea would weep uncontrollably and hold his family for so long that his wife had to hit him to bring him to his senses and send him to bed. He looked up his condition: Uxoriousness.
What kind of father would I be?
Thing is, we are shown model fathers all the time, playing with their kids and being strong, in adverts and films, everywhere. Would they ride on my shoulders or help me up the stairs when I become infirm? Who were these little people come to bury me? Truth is, I have always felt like I was acting through life, turning up to the rehearsal every day without fail, like a too keen understudy waiting for his moment in the spotlight. As for being a father, I had no idea how to play the part.
Divorce seemed as inevitable as marriage. I could do nothing but conform. Once I realised I was losing you, I let go. Another man might have stood up and fought like mad for his family; said things that made the air electric, displayed an alpha-male ability to solve things with a few simple words.
Not me.
I had no lexicon for this. Even in hindsight there are no words I can find to fight back at moments already past, no great denouement to the final scenes of our marriage. No, the last meaningful words I spoke; the words that would determine the future of my family; the last few utterances that meant something were: ‘How about the Little Chef on the A14?’
Somewhere, someplace, far on the edge of my vision, there is an audience wetting itself.
It’s all done and my lawyer is shaking my hand in the car park. He’s happy, and therefore I should be too. I feign happiness, but really I want to pull his glasses off, throw them into the motorway traffic and repeatedly punch him in the face. I’ve never hit anyone, but right now, I feel this urge to really hurt him.
But he is gone and I am left standing beside Ramage Haulage in the noise of winter traffic, a rising panic in my chest, a lolly in my hand; watching you pull away from me.
(c) Andrew McDonnell, 2015
Andrew McDonnell writes poetry & fiction, having appeared both in print and online in journals such as Litro & Poetry London. He runs Gatehouse Press & is the steering editor of Lighthouse, the 2015 Saboteur Award winner for best magazine. He lives in Norwich.
Will Goodhand is the only man to make multiple-adventurer of kids’ cartoon fame Mr Benn jealous: Internet entrepreneur, radio DJ, Beauty & the Geek star and etiquette coach to Britain'sNext Top Models, Will regularly performs stand-up and story-readings on the London circuit: for details of upcoming gigs, email [email protected]
Our special Parent & Child night was held on Tuesday June 23, 2015 at the Peckham Pelican to raise awareness and cash for The CATS Foundation, a charity funding research into the devastating genetic childhood diseases Tay-Sachs & Sandhoff.
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