Father Figure

by Emma Forrest

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Literary, thrilling, hugely funny, with a massive heart' SARA PASCOE
'So wild and gripping' DAVID NICHOLLS
'I tore through it' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS
'A ferocious coming-of-age story' EMMA JANE UNSWORTH
'A truly beautiful story about longing and London' DAISY BUCHANAN

Gail is in trouble at school. Saint Saviours, the exclusive private girls school that she attends on a scholarship, cannot contain her. Impulsive, bored and looking for someone to adore, she is at that dangerous age when you want to be picked up by men and then driven home by your mother.

Ezra is rich, powerful and at the top of his game. His comfortable middle age is tainted only by the knowledge that, in his heady youth, he'd loved new wave music and had people killed - and by his crushing anxieties about his teenage daughter, Agata.

When Agata starts at Saint Saviour's, Gail and Ezra's paths cross, and with an unstoppable momentum, their lives intertwine in ways more dangerous than either could ever predict.

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘I fellated a Cypriot fruiterer at the apex of Parliament Hill …’

As the headmistress read Gail’s story to the sixteen-year-old’s mother, Gail pre-empted her reaction, explaining, ‘I think the flow of words really work for an opening line of a novel. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”’

The women both shifted in their metal chairs, as Gail repeated, clear and pleased with herself, in tones of Judi Dench: “‘I fellated a Cypriot fruiterer at the apex of Parliament Hill.” It wouldn’t have the same rhythm if I had written “a Cypriot haberdasher”. So you see what I was going for?’

Gail could, in her vivid imagination, already picture her as-yet unwritten novel launched at a literary festival, and knew that – though her readers really wanted to hear her work read in her own voice – this event was a kindness to Dame Judi who, in her head, was a fan. Maybe one of Gail’s books had helped her navigate a bereavement, so it made sense to ask her to perform the reading.

But only moments after the daydream formed, Gail felt herself becoming resentful at how much Dame Judi had come to lean on her for support. Where once the legendary thespian’s name on her imaginary caller ID had thrilled her, it now began to fill her with irritation, especially when the first thing Dame Judi always said in this fantasy when Gail picked up was ‘It’s only me!’ Because who else would it fucking be? This festival reading was going to have to be their last hurrah together. She had huge respect for the woman, but Gail deserved a life too.

Deep in her daydream, Gail now had a look of thunder on her face so fearsome the headmistress and her mother – sat as far apart as the room would allow – could not help but look at each other for guidance. Coming back into her body, Gail was surprised to find herself sitting across from them, in the dark-wood office of an all-girls’ school, the echo of slapped hockey pucks beyond the window.

The headmistress was so worried about mispronouncing Gail’s mother’s name that, though it was only three letters – Dar – she endeavoured never to say it out loud, her attempt at politeness rude. Dar noticed the headmistress was wearing a vintage Cartier Tank watch, slender and elegant. She thought it was the nicest thing about her. The worst was her voice, which was cheap gold plate: the class it was meant to indicate could easily be peeled off.

‘Gail. Your English teacher brought me this essay. She found it, frankly, quite disturbing, especially on the first day of the new half-term.’

‘Yes.’ The girl nodded. ‘I think it went over her head.’

Gail turned the offending pages on the desk to face her, and continued reading aloud: ‘It was a very different fingering from days of youth, but then I am in my forties.’

Now Dar and the headmistress both looked at Gail but not at each other. She knew her mother had her at the semi-miraculous age of forty-three, was now fifty-nine, but she calculated her headmistress was probably in her mid-forties. Still, she forged ahead with her oratory: ‘I had been divorced five years. I had gone on a few dates since then, but they were with appropriate people.’

Here Gail offered a footnote: ‘It’s obviously not my mother I’m writing about, as she doesn’t date.’

Dar looked pleadingly at her to stop but did not have the nerve to speak out loud. This was notable as, in every context but Gail, Dar spoke with confidence and volume, the first to put up her hand (at work, in coffee shops, at any sign of an airport fracas). But Gail was her magic child and could do no wrong. Gail had filled a hole for her, but then kept digging. Dar knew in her heart of hearts they were now in a tunnel together and she prayed they would emerge onto a beautiful island at the other side. Only Gail had to be the one to dig the tunnel as Dar herself was very tired from being a single mother at such a late age. When she’d had the message to come in today, Dar was both weary because her workload at the hospital was too great and excited because she always liked talking about Gail.

Some of Dar’s exhaustion was a result of her own choices, she freely admitted that. But there were other things freely her choice that she did not admit to, especially to herself. She’d been trying her best at life for a very long time, but the knowledge was encroaching that her best was not good enough – judging by the essay, her best wasn’t even safe.

What wasn’t clear was why the headmistress – who seemed in a trance – allowed Gail to keep reading. Gail projected her voice so it was louder than the din of the hockey game:

‘I fellated him with the efficiency of a Sunday vacuuming, his beaming face the smooth carpet: a visible achievement, a small task whose completion makes you feel better about the day. They say, for mental health, you need to keep setting these small tasks …’

The headmistress leaned in to hear the payoff. She couldn’t help it.

‘… So I went back to the Heath the next day and did it again, but with a woman this time.’

This was finally too much for the headmistress, her sexuality a closely guarded secret, even from herself. She smacked her hands on her desk, hissing ‘Stop!’ – a sound that said her secret self had sprung a leak.

Gail looked at the headmistress slowly, as she imagined Dame Judi might were she to be interrupted on stage by the sound of a mobile phone. ‘I did get in to this school on account of my creative writing, did I not?’

Did I not? The headmistress could see her parroting the words of the adults around her, saw her storing adult mannerisms in her pockets – one day they might get heavy and drown her. She wasn’t sure if she’d be sad were this particular student to sink, never to be heard from again.

‘Gail, this is … it’s too creative. We’d like you to think just a little more inside the box.’

‘I don’t know if I’m able to. I don’t know if I have that in me.’

The headmistress sat up straight. Dar finally tried to make eye contact with her but the headmistress would not meet her gaze, addressing only Gail:

‘Then I don’t know if St Saviour’s is the right place for you. I think we shall have to keep this under review. It’s May. We will allow you to complete the calendar year. But then we will make a decision before the Christmas break as to whether you’d be best off moving on in January.’

Dar finally spoke:

‘Right. You’re giving my daughter six months to prove what to you? And why? So the school can get one step closer to being completely homogenous?’

‘You know that we embrace all cultures here!’ The gold-plated voice of the headmistress was peeling, held under the cold tap of Dar’s advocacy.

Dar squinted. ‘I know the only Black student is the daughter of the Ghanaian Ambassador.’

The room was silenced by the mention of Faith. Even Gail herself went quiet.

The headmistress tucked a lock of dirty-blonde hair behind her reddening ear.

‘I simply do not know that we are meant for each other. And if we are not, then it is best for both of us that we move on.’ The implementation of school policy carried the weight of an ultimatum she’d never given nor would get to give to a lover. ‘The school will come to a decision before we break for Christmas.’

‘Well,’ said Dar. ‘Well, well.’ As if she had been stewarding the conversation rather than dragged along by it, and was now guiding them to bring it to a genial close.

As they exited, Gail slamming the door behind her when she could just as easily have turned the doorknob to close it, the headmistress realised that the Susa women shared a scent. She imagined a flat with one bathroom, and a bottle of Dar’s perfume whose use by Gail was sanctioned or prohibited. It was a metallic honey. She’d never smelled it before Gail arrived at the school. It was quite pretty when it was just one of them. But the two of them together in one small space made it hard to breathe.

All the girls in her year were at the age when they wanted to be picked up by men and then driven home by their mothers. When a girl was sent to the headmistress’s office to discuss her behaviour, that was generally the subtext. None of them had expressed it as explicitly as Gail Susa.

Mother and daughter took the bus home, sitting on the top deck, at the very front, vying for the sacred spot with small children who wanted to pretend they were driving. They fought off the kids and settled in, averting their eyes from Parliament Hill as they passed it.

Though they found solace on the upper deck, they were soon exiled downstairs because a pungent man was rambling noisily about Jews. Gail found the two often went together in London: unpleasant odour and public racism. She thought it uncommon to encounter a fragrant racist and unsettling since most of the notes in a pleasing scent come from foreign climes: Bulgarian rose, Persian saffron, Arabian oud.

Dar’s Judaism was nothing she felt any shame about – her ethnicity was just something that grew from her without her consent and the way she saw it, the best thing she could do was attempt to style it like hair so it didn’t obstruct her vision, pulling her Judaism coquettishly to the side, or parted centre to reveal more, or tied all the way back, no-nonsense, get things done.

Ever since university, she’d experienced Israel as a KICK ME sticker placed on her back. She’d shown up outside the embassy to protest the country every month, standing with ‘The Jewish bloc’. This was her social life and where, last year, she’d befriended a Palestinian grad student who, like her, had green eyes and the benefit of ‘passing’.

Her dad had done OK in England. He knew other Sephardim who fled Iraq, Morocco or Syria when he did who went on to become millionaires – he’d even met a half-billionaire. He himself rebuilt his life, working his way up until he owned a one-screen cinema. It gave Dar something that the other girls wanted and that helped her fit in at school, especially after her mother died.

Once he was gone, the only thing Dar wished she had was his watch, which had meant so much to him once upon a time. She wanted it on her bedside table at night, protecting her like an evil eye. She wanted to reach for it every morning and feel its cool weight on her wrist before she buckled the strap. Because, for reasons she’d yet to tell Gail, she didn’t inherit it, and she noticed everyone else’s. She didn’t trust this generation because nobody wore watches and so she could not project onto them by dint of their accessories who they might be, and what they might want from her.

Dar’s father never got to meet Gail, but they were connected by more than genetics: Dar’s pregnancy was begat by grief for him. He looked like Gail, which made sense, but Dar spun it in her head as him looking down and protecting her. Gail had, like her grandpa, skin that went nut brown in the sun and then all the colour seeped out so they were pale in British winter. Dar’s chin was pointy. Early on, she’d seen that chin in Gail and bitten it, like the final, best part of an ice-cream cone. But instead of the nub of chocolate you find there, she’d accidentally drawn blood. Maybe being an older mum didn’t make her wiser, she was afraid in those days – what if it made her stupider? So she didn’t try to mother mother. She decided she’d be better off being her best friend.

Both had curly black hair and an aquiline nose that Gail could either choose to make something great out of or ‘fix’, if she hadn’t the moxie. Dar looked at her at eleven as her face started to change, features growing at different paces, and she knew she had the courage to keep it. This marked her out as different from most of her classmates, whatever school she was at – the visual difference and the embrace of the visual difference made her a figure of wariness.

She was the only girl at school who had no qualms about the features reflected back at her in the mirror, who’d sooner notice an issue with the mirror itself. One time, at a flea market, Gail, fresh with the first smattering of acne, stared deep into the mirror that had been set up to look into as you hold vintage clothes against your own outfit. Watching Gail fix on the glass, Dar thought, Oh no, here it comes, as her daughter stared and stared at the mirror, her features creased with criticism. Then she said, ‘Mum?’ And Dar steeled herself to affirm: ‘You are perfect as you are! You are smart and strong and brave! You don’t look like the other girls in class – you look like yourself!’ And just as she was about to say it, Gail said what she’d intended to, which was: ‘Mum, I much prefer rectangular mirrors to oval mirrors.’

Instinctively giving her the bus window seat as she’d instinctively given her the bigger bedroom in any flat they rented, Dar nudged her:

‘I thought you would fight her for it? With all her sanctimony and repression? I was sure you were going to tell her how well you fit St Saviour’s. I thought you really liked that school?’

Gail leaned her head on the glass. ‘I do like it but I’m not going to beg a woman with such pale eyelashes, come on! They’re damn lucky to have me there.’

She spoke as if she were not the only girl in her class on a financial bursary. She spoke as if she were not the only one in her class who lived in a high-rise flat instead of a house (they were not the only single-parent family – there was a woman who divorced well – but they were the only ones without child support). Dar had very much hoped to raise a daughter with high self-esteem, but maybe not as high as this.

Across the aisle from them on the lower deck, a small girl in overalls was sitting pressed against her mother. The girl watched, fascinated, as a young woman – Gail thought maybe aged twenty-three or twenty-four while Dar guessed eighteen – got on the bus carrying a rat. It was white with a long grey tail. It looked more impressive than the young woman who was holding it, her own skin and hair dull.

‘Can I pet it?’ shrieked the little girl, and both the girl’s mother and the rat looked nervous.

Now everyone was interested in the young woman with dull skin and hair, who they’d not noticed, until they realised she was carrying something frightening – Gail stored this information.

‘Please can I pet it?’ the girl squealed. How old are we when we start being scared of things? thought Gail. She wasn’t yet, but she felt right on the edge.

Because the rat was being transported by an owner on public transport, it was intriguing. But if it were in your home, if it were seen unexpectedly from the corner of your eye, you would scream and clutch your face.

Dar’s mind got off at the wrong stop, and she found herself remembering being asked to feel the penis of a grown man when she was ten. He was in his early twenties, managing the music shop where she liked to touch the violins. She tried to be polite to him, as if there had merely been a confusion about what she wanted to touch. This isn’t the texture. This isn’t the feeling. She went home and told her dad, who, Dar following, stormed right out and punched the man in the shop. The shop soon had a new manager. That was the end of it. She wasn’t blamed for anything and it was never mentioned again. The blessing and curse of a single dad instead of a single mother meant that danger was instantly dealt with but never discussed. Her mind came back to the bus, headed the right way, as she heard the young woman confirm:

‘Yes, you can touch it,’ the rodent crawling up her arm.

‘No,’ said the little girl’s mother, sharply.

(Dar remembered the popping sound of her father’s fist as it swung into the young man’s jaw, how she’d checked to see if it was his fist or the man’s cheek that had popped.) ‘Ashkenazi scum,’ her dad had hissed as he ran his bloody knuckles under the kitchen tap. So Dad had been both the one to win and the one to burst. She never saw inside him again. It was so startling, the inner mechanics of her father becoming momentarily visible to her, as startling, really, as the penis had been.

The bus rattled under an overpass. The mother and child got off at the next stop, the girl looking longingly back at the rat.

Dar nudged Gail and whispered, ‘Did you see the kid’s coat? So tacky to put a little girl in leopard print. You know what signal that gives the world about her?’

Gail sighed internally, not knowing what signal it gave the world, but not admitting her ignorance. What she did know was, no matter what she presented her with, her mother never noticed the right part in any picture.

Processing the ultimatum the headmistress had handed her the day before, Gail got out her favourite pen, the one Dar had given her when she began at St Saviour’s. It was a white-and-red checked print, like on a picnic blanket. . . .