Don't Expect Love

A boy's relationship with his father is tested and then revealed after a disastrous trip reflects the demise of their family.

Don’t expect love

My Dad once went on holiday to a beautiful place but his pillow was bad and he couldn’t sleep so he never went away with us again. That was the kind of guy he was. He always only gave you one chance. When my grief for him is at its most miserable, like the fiercest jetlag, I see him waving us goodbye from the front door �" he wouldn’t even take us to the airport �" his dressing gown whipped around him by the wind, one hand waving, a strange smile on his face, a happy regret, and I cry until I wake my own children.

We were never sure what it was he actually did when he was on his own. We only knew we came back and the place had been mercilessly cleaned but this could have meant he had enjoyed the wildest party or been so bored he had been left with nothing else to do. I took the lead from my Mother and accepted this arrangement without question. A few minutes after we had got ourselves settled he asked us what we did and how was the weather and that was that - he returned to the central glow of the TV or walked into the kitchen to make another drink. Our guess, my brother’s and mine, years later, was that he woke up and drank vodka tonics until he fell asleep and then woke up and drank vodka tonics until he fell asleep and then he got hungry and ate some cheese on toast and then fell asleep again. My Dad would always fill up everyone’s half drunk glass so he could fill up his empty one.

Our father was an electrician. The company he worked for demanded that he arrive at their office in the capital city each morning to receive his assignment for that day, even if the job was miles away from us or on the other side of our small, satellite town. He left the house before we woke and returned after we had finished dinner. This was, I think, how we all preferred it: time when we could relax, time when we could not. The security of unspoken rituals. As soon as we heard that scratch of the door, we knew we could get out of bed and breathe.

Our Mother, who was determined to find her own independence during these uneasy years, took us all away every July without fail, the same July that it began, at long last, to get hot in our speck of the world. We went to Portugal, to a little seaside town on the south of the country called San Sebastian. We always arrived, for financial reasons, a month before the holiday season began, so we were greeted each day with a gamble of weather, sometimes painful sun, other times dull rain, normally warm light behind a shield of thin cloud. No matter, for the first two days the increase in heat would be met with unashamed joy by our Mother, only to be cursed and blamed during our final days. She was, in fairness, a terrible traveler, sitting with her hands on our knees and her eyes fixed on the airport TV screens for any updates on our departure gate; starting every conversation with a native by saying in Portuguese, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Portuguese.”; and insisting on ignoring any attempt by anybody to help us due to her belief that all they wanted was “to rob me blind.”

Why Portugal? Well, because it was almost free �" our most hated Aunt, my father’s oldest sister, had inherited a two bedroom flat in a faded beach resort and, in hindsight, knew that it was easier to let us go there and sit by the pool and try to trap tiny crabs in our sand buckets and let my Mum clean the apartment from top to bottom than to pay for someone else to clean it. We all dreaded that last day; days later we still smelt of lemon detergent. Did we enjoy it? My brother, older than me, would say yes because it gave him ample opportunity to impress his school mates with daring tales of erotic adventure which were, of course, utterly fictitious. There was no way he could tell his friends at home that he had got laid with a girl they knew. So instead he would lay on the sun lounger wearing sunglasses that were too big for his face staring almost brutally at any girl in the suitable and achievable age bracket, biding his time for when they went to the vending machine to buy a chilled can of extortionate Coca-Cola and then he would approach from the side, desperate for divine intervention to make it almost impossible for them not to start a conversation. Destiny never did arrive and he would return to the pool, his steps a little faster, and throw to me the can of drink, not looking back to see if I had caught it. But when he returned rumours would immediately begin to spread that Nelson had done it with a foreign girl, rumours that I was on occasion forced to validate with my own, casual, blackmailed testimony, His next wife will be his forth. I don’t think I’ll go.

The rest of my memory of those times away revolves around very little: the bash of heat that we felt as we exited the airport, the motorway signs covered with a foreign script, the carvery we went on our last day �" it’s cold waiters and sad wooden chairs that were never the right height for us, and floating in the pool when the sun was strong, looking at the jokes of cloud that brushed the sky and wondering when I was going to grow up and be able to grow a beard and get served in the local pub and things would make sense. If we thought about our father when we were away, we didn’t say: he was not a dinner table topic considered suitable. I don’t believe we were happier without him, although we certainly felt freer. But because he wasn’t there, and we knew we were going to go back, our entire stay felt like a series of activities whose only function was to waste time, like an easy crossword on a train. Without him it didn’t seem so real, any emotion or experience felt without him as a first hand witness was, at best, fraudulent and, at worse, duplicitous. He screened our lives: he judged what verdict we should receive from the normal trials of every day life.

One day we arrived back from the airport and the house was as clean as ever but our father was gone. You know when you lose something �" your keys, your wallet �" you begin to look in the most impossible places, places that your wallet or keys have never been, could never have gone to, would never be able to fit. Well, that is what we did with our Dad. We looked in the garden, in the car; we asked our neighbours (who we never spoke to before or again), we went to the local pub and the local snooker hall and the local hospital and the local supermarket and then we came back, all of us expecting him to be in his dressing gown on the sofa arguing with the TV and when we entered the house all we found were those strangely strong noises an empty house can make, the crack of pipes, the stretch of windows. We were sent to bed: my Mum, with nothing to clean, unpacked immediately and then sat in my father’s place on the sofa and watched the dead screen until the sky went dark and then light.

I always wondered �" alone, my brother soon went to University in the other side of the country and we became more and more distant �" why he had left. There were no obvious signs of displeasure or despair; there were, to be honest, no signs of anything: that’s what I thought marriages were - two people living together with their family: eating and shopping and watching TV and talking to each other when they wanted or sitting in our own rooms with our own thoughts when we preferred that instead. I didn’t know you were meant to live in a constant state of natural happiness, which is what we are told now, which is what I had been told to wait for, what I am yet to find. I don’t believe for one moment that was what my father wanted either. He wouldn’t have believed in anything so dreamy, so fun. I would struggle to name you one thing he felt strongly about, believed in with his whole heart. I don’t think he actually felt anything. Perhaps routine. Maybe coming home and finding everything ready, everything done, so that he could just sit, still, patient, and wait for the next tomorrow. People �" friends and lovers and acquaintances I have related this to �" confidently construe that he had a lover, that he was gay, that all he wanted was to be on his own, that he killed himself, that he didn’t have the courage to divorce my mother and was now sitting on the edge of a dirty bed in a cheap hotel, drinking himself into oblivion. Me? I guess the last one is the only hypothesis I would voluntarily support. I like to believe that he has found a new family, a new life, like I have; I want to imagine him saying I love you to someone every night. But these are cheap dreams and they are all I now have.

Our town, if you could call it that, if it wasn’t actually an overweight village, was so close to the capital that we could talk about it with confidence and inherited knowledge but so far away that we never went. I was only able to go by lying to my parents: I was staying at a friend’s house for his birthday party: there was no birthday party and, if I’m honest, no friend: all I wanted was to go where my Dad went but without him, just to see what happened to him �" wonderful or despairing �" that made him what we was.

I and this friend stood on the train platform as if we had been accidentally chosen for real participation in a minor war. We had spoken about it for weeks, our escape together, and then when that train arrived �" with its dry croaks and violent bells �" we stayed silent. I, from the supposedly better family, boarded first, my mouth dry and my heart shaking. The supposedly harder, more streetwise friend needed encouragement which I gave in the dismissive downward wave my mother gave us when my brother and I were talking too loud while she was on the phone. He got on and as we sped towards the city and as our tickets were checked and as we began to relax, I could feel adulthood overtake me, creep up my legs and spine and down my front. This was, after all, what adults do, everyday; this was, after all, what my Dad had done for years, our only glimpse of it had been his tired steps from the train to the platform to the family car, my mother hurrying out and across to let him drive. I was now fourteen but looked older: my brother would leave next year.

The train arrived at the central station, an area I would later learn to be if not dangerous than certainly edgy. As most are. The smell was thick with diesel and fastfood, the sheer amount of people dizzying us into submission: I believe we stood and stared for a good five minutes until we finally walked towards the ticket gates and the entrance to the city. We had made no plans as to what to do after we arrived. I think we both believed that the city would simply take us, pick us up and carry us, a wave of people and life that would accept us too, take us where we were meant to go. I remember vividly, thirty years later practicing what to say in my head to the inspector, to be polite and ask him where the centre of the city was and how we could get there. I repeated this over and over to the beat of my steps. I cannot recall my mouth even opening; the ticket was taken and torn, and I was pushed through by the current, over to the other side of fearful freedom.

What did we do? I think we walked around the station, bought an ice cream, sat on a bench, looked at some girls, talked about school, our part-time jobs, our common friends and common foes, neither of us having the bravery to mention what we were doing, as if sitting on a bench outside a station had been our original plan and it had been carried out successfully. Perhaps twenty minutes later we stood up in silence, looked into the city, the sad skyscrapers and dirty clouds, and then walked back into the station and got the first train home. I had to stay at his house to uphold my lie but they had cats and I hadn’t until then realized I was allergic to them. They had a lot and the majority did not have names. My neck became red and inflamed and my nose ran and my chest scratched with effort so I had no choice but to call my Mum to pick me up and take me home.

But Dad answered �" who should have been asleep hours before but had somehow known that something would happen and that still breaks my heart - and listened and grunted and said he would be there soon. This was a bad thing. With us he was morose and rude, but with strangers he was amiable and, on occasion, funny, something that would never happen at home. This meant he would come in and speak to the family and ask questions and apologise and take the other father up on the offer or a drink and I would be left, dumb, a special and simple child waiting for an adult to take them to a place where they could be safe. He would also find out my lie and I would be punished. I think, even now, if the cat was in another room and I didn’t have to see it, and all I had to do was push a button, pull a switch, and it would perish peacefully, I would have done it in an instant and not felt a thing.

Miraculously �" I think I had even made a pact with God and was at that moment considering a life of good deeds and sincere worship �" he didn’t even get out of the car. He just honked the horn twice, reversed and waited. I don’t think my then friend and I ever really spoke again, we certainly never went to the city again. I turned round and looked at his poor house, its cold, bare walls; the sparse living room, the enormous television with a tiny screen and thought, I think I’d prefer to stay here, where no one wants me to be anything, where I can sit and wait and let the days slide. With my Dad outside waiting for me forever, beeping the horn occasionally, shouting my name when he thought it would help.

“So?” He started the engine.

“Hey Dad,” I closed the door, careful not to slam it, wary of another lecture, “Guess I’m allergic to cats.”

“Who’d have thought?”

“Are you?” I don’t think either of us wanted us to talk. I think we would have both chosen safe silence. But it was impossible, the situation demanded some words, or I don’t think we would have ever spoken again.

“No, but I can’t stand them any how. Selfish little things. All take, no give.” That was cats done forever. Roads swayed towards us as we accelerated home. “Not many people for a party, boy, you sure you weren’t seeing a girl and she didn’t like you as much as you liked her?” He kept looking straight. Girls, sex, future, family, this had never been said before. I was in such new found territory I might as well have been on the moon.

“No, Dad. Not at all. It was Alex. Some guys didn’t come. I don’t know why.”

“Because his house is a s**t hole and it’s full of stray cats, that’s why, son.”

“No, Dad, that’s not….” But he was right, even if he was wrong. I had no reply. But something in me wanted this to continue, something to happen between us, as we drove through the blank roads we both knew by heart. “Any anyway, there’s no girl at school who has fallen in love with me.”

“No? Probably for the best. Your studies and all.” Safe silence now.

I could see our house. The lights were off. Even my brother had gone to sleep or was reading his only copy of Penthouse under the duvet with a mini-torch for company. I had expected my mum to be waiting, with a bottle of cough medicine and some chest rub but there was nothing and no one. He would do the work. I was suddenly very afraid, or maybe not, maybe simply very aware, as if I thought this was one of those moments you remember forever and not one of those moments you think you will remember forever but instead soon forget that you’ve already forgotten it.

“Well.” He said. The engine died. It was just us. We both looked ahead: I was waiting for punishment and I thought, then, that he was waiting for the right words, the right moment to yell at me for lying about the party.

“Well,” he said, again, “No girls at school love you, eh? That will change. You ain’t a bad kid. But don’t hang around with that boy anymore, or boys like that, they won’t help you be what you should be.” His hands were still on the steering wheel. My hands could have been anywhere.

“Ok, Dad. I promise.” I wanted to get out. My hand was on the door latch, ready to escape.

“You know I sometimes wonder if life would be better if no girls ever fell in love with no boys. That maybe this whole world would be better.” He looked at me for the first time in what felt like years. His skin was loose and dotted. But his eyes had this mad shine and I remember realising that his name was George. “Don’t expect love, kid, and you’d be happy for the rest of your life.” And with that he got out of the car and slammed the door and entered the house and I followed behind him, careful not to make a sound. I watched his feet take off his shoes and his legs take him into the kitchen and the fridge light on his face as I climbed the stairs and walked into my bedroom and woke up in a different day.

I think that my travels �" each continent more than once and I now live in Tokyo �" were an act of revenge upon my Father. He didn’t travel so I would. A weak vengence because we would still never travel together. He would never witness my tiny triumphs. Still, I don’t think I would, or could, have done anything different. At least he made me do that. And I can change the fuse in a plug without looking. Worthy, if not exactly valiant, achievements. Must we all stick to false signs, follow wrong footsteps? I guess my father had the answer.

My mother eventually moved in with our Aunt in Portugal until her health went and she remains to this day in care. I wish I had more reason to see her. Our family couldn’t fix itself: in reality, there was little to fix. We left her alone, alone to her own dead day daydreams. So it was my brother who phoned me to notify me of my Father’s death, phoned me with no consideration to the time difference, or my still young heart.

“Nelson, is that you, what’s up, what’s wrong, do you know what time it is?”

“No, sorry, I just rang. Hey, listen up, the old man’s dead.”

“What?”

“Yeah, the old man, I got a call. From his sister. Game over.”

“Really, how? What, I mean, what f*****g happened, where is he?”

“You won’t believe this.”

“Just f*****g tell me!”

“He was on holiday, Greece, one of those travel groups for the old. The bus crashed during a storm, turned over. But they said it was late at night and that they had been drinking and they were probably all sleeping and they guess he didn’t feel a thing.”

© 2013 Andrew James Talbot

Author's Note

Be gentle! One of a finished - I hope - collection. Any feedback at all would be greatly appreciated.

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Featured Review

Pryde Foltz

It is very well-developed. I truly feel and understand your two main characters--the boy and the father. I feel empathy for both, even the father. And on the whole, I think it is well-written and there is more than a few witty moments, which is essential when dealing with the sad. I wanted to read to the end. My only suggestion is one that every writer needs reminding of--in my humble opinion, lol--the power of brevity. There should be not one extra word on the page. I'd go through and cut just a little more, sentence by sentence kind of thing. I don't mean the writing is bad, but some ruthless cutting will may it a little more impactful. It's all there, but there might be just a little too much. I enjoyed it.