The Weekend Dad

by Alison Walsh

Genres: Family Life; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

As children, Emmett and Daisy were inseparable. Until Daisy announced that she'd seen her mum kissing Emmett's dad. They haven't seen each other since, but Emmett often thinks about her -- where she is, what she's doing, and if she ever thinks about him. Now almost thirty, Emmett has just begun a fresh chapter in London so he can spend weekends with his seven-year-old daughter, whose existence he only recently discovered. Things are off to a bumpy start -- he's not quite sure he's the father Misty expected -- but they're finding their way. And then, one day, in a dusty local bookshop, he sees her -- Daisy -- and the spark that never died brightens. But it's not long before the situation becomes very complex indeed and Emmett is torn between telling the truth and risking a blossoming new relationship -- or two... The Weekend Dad is a heartwarming story of friendship, parenthood, love and what it is to be good enough.

Release date: January 4, 2018

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 352

Sample

Wexford, Easter 1975

It’s dusty under the bed and it smells like the back of Nana’s wardrobe. There are little balls of dust, like mini moons, across the carpet and there’s a broken flip-flop, too. The bit that goes in between your toes is sticking up in the air. I know that flip-flop, because it has a big, red flower on it and I’ve seen it before. I don’t know what it’s doing in here though.

We are lying on the floor, side by side, and my nose feels itchy. I’m trying not to sneeze and I screw up my face with the effort. You start to laugh and I feel it then, a giggle rising in my tummy and bubbling up and out through my mouth. I press my hand over it, but a little bit of it escapes. Now you are laughing, really hard, and your face is squeezed up and bright red and I am finding it very hard not to copy you, to laugh and sneeze at the same time. We do that a lot – we laugh and read and play cards under the bed. It’s our hiding place in the house, like the den is our hiding place on the beach.

Then your face goes really still and you poke me in the side with your elbow. ‘Ow—’ I begin, but you put your finger to your lips.

You are lying in front of me and over your head, I see the bedroom door open. A pair of legs appears in the doorway, red and hairy, attached to brown leather sandals and green socks, which have been pulled halfway up, to the calf muscle. The legs come closer, followed now by another pair of legs, these hidden in a big yellow maxi dress. The feet are bare and brown, the toenails painted red. It’s only April, too early in the year for bare feet and I feel a shiver as I think of it. The sandals come closer as we lie under the bed. I can feel you tense, holding your breath. I stop breathing too. Then there’s a squeak as someone sits down on the bed, a big bump appearing in the wire mesh of the bed base. The bump is just above your head and you lift your eyes to it, before glancing over at me. I want to laugh, but I think it’s a scared laugh, not a real one.

Then the red-painted toes come close and there’s another squeak, and another bump appears, this one just above my head, the wires of the base almost touching my hair. I want to itch and scratch and push it away, but I don’t dare.

There’s a long silence then, followed by a squeak, and the bump above my head moves closer to the bump above yours. There’s a kind of silence then, but it feels full, as if something is happening, and I can hear a kind of squelching sound, then a small ‘pop’, like the sound you make when you put your finger into your cheek and pull hard. You look at me and make a face. I feel it again, that bubble of laughter rising inside of me. I know that I have to keep it down, but the effort is making me want to laugh even more. I think I might wet my pants. Then I see your face, as we both hear a low moan. You look as if you’re going to be sick.

‘Stop,’ a voice says from above our heads, a woman’s voice, low and husky. A smoker’s voice. ‘Someone could come in at any minute.’

‘That makes it all the more exciting,’ a man’s voice replies. ‘Don’t you like it, the thought that we could be caught. Doesn’t that make you all hot and bothered? C’mere and let me get my hands on you …’

There’s more squelching and moaning and then a rustling sound. ‘I mean it. Stop.’

‘I can’t help myself. You’re driving me wild, Bridget. I’ve never felt like this before. Nuala doesn’t …’

‘Shush. No names. I told you that.’

I want to grab your hand and jump out from under the bed, to run screaming out of the room, but I can’t move. I don’t even want to turn my head to look at you because I don’t want to see your face.

‘What are we going to do?’ the man says.

‘What do you mean, what are we going to do? We are going to do nothing. There’s nothing to do.’

‘Some day we’ll be together,’ he says hopefully.

The woman just laughs, that tinkling laugh she makes when she finds something funny, even if it’s not. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, now, is it?’ The red-painted toenails wiggle in front of my eyes. ‘I mean, this is just a thing, a holiday fling, if you like. It doesn’t mean anything.’

There’s a long silence then, and then the hairy legs move, very slightly. ‘A holiday fling? Is that all I am to you?’

‘Francis, don’t be silly—’

‘I thought what we had was real. I thought that you felt about me the way I feel about you.’

‘I do, Francis. Look, I think you’re really sweet, but you know that this can’t go any further.’

‘What? You mean because of Michael and Nuala?’

I reach out and take your hand and squeeze it as hard as I can. You screw up your face in pain, but then I feel you move closer to me, so that I can feel the denim of your brand new jeans against my leg. You turn your head to me then, even though it’s really awkward in the small space and you smile at me and I can see that you are trying to make me feel better, to focus on your face, so that we don’t really hear my mother and your father talking above our heads.

‘You should have thought about them before you got into bed with me,’ the woman’s voice says then.

There’s another silence, then the word ‘Bitch’. The word is like a gunshot in the room, big and loud and ugly. The bump disappears suddenly from above your head, and the hairy legs move towards the door, which opens quietly. The sound of laughter and chat echoes down the corridor, then fades as the door is closed quietly again.

‘For God’s sake,’ my mother’s voice says tiredly. The bump above my head moves slightly on the bed and then we can smell cigarette smoke, can hear the slight swish as she inhales and exhales, the ‘hiss’ as the cigarette is put out in the ashtray beside the bed. My mother always puts cigarettes out really well, crushing them and pressing them really hard into the ashtray, because she’s terrified of dying in a fire. Then she, too, gets up. She goes to the door and, when she opens it, you make a small sound. I put my hand over your mouth and your breath is warm on my palm. She hesitates for a second. We both hold our breath, and then she is gone.

Later that day, we play on the beach under the tarpaulin that Dad gave us, its navy blue stretched above us as we lie on the cold, damp sand. I wonder if I should talk to you about what we heard – if it would make any difference. And then I think that maybe I didn’t hear it at all – maybe there was something about Mum and Francis that I didn’t understand properly.

I look at you and you are staring into the darkness of the tarpaulin, at the tiny pinpricks of light that shine through the material. I’m about to say something when you turn to me and say, ‘Do you know that the Milky Way is made up of between a hundred and four hundred billion stars?’

‘Oh, really?’ I try not to say anything else, because I’d only encourage you to go on and on about the Milky Way when we have other things to be talking about. ‘Emmett?’

You are silent for a moment before saying, ‘Yes?’

‘Will we always be friends, do you think?’ I think about adding ‘after tonight’, but I know that you will understand anyway.

You are quiet for a very long time, but I know that you’re just thinking. ‘I hope so,’ you say eventually. So I know that you do understand.

The previous summer, we’d lain under the same tarpaulin and said that we’d be friends for ever and ever, as long as there were stars in the sky, even though you’d started on again about how many stars in the galaxy were disappearing ‘due to supernovae’. ‘But it’s OK,’ you’d said, ‘because there are new stars being made every year.’ Now, I wonder if we’ll ever lie here again. I don’t really think so. That makes where we are now, right this minute, seem all the more important. I want time to stretch, the way you say it can in black holes, to keep expanding on and on into outer space, light years away. Maybe if I concentrate hard enough, I can make it happen. I can make time stand still.

We hear the voices then, over the crashing of the waves. At first, they are faint, as if they are being carried off on the wind, but then they grow louder. I know that time isn’t going to stretch after all – it’s going to speed towards us, like a really fast car, so I sit up and take your hand in mine. ‘Promise me that we’ll always be together, even just in our thoughts.’

You give me that look, the one that says you feel sorry for me. ‘But that’s not possible, Daisy. Unless you believe in psychic communication—’

‘For God’s sake, Emmett, now is not the time to be a clever clogs.’ I’m yelling at you and I know that’s wrong, but I also know that time is nearly up. Tomorrow, I’ll be gone and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be coming back.

You look hurt. ‘Sorry. Excuse me if I don’t want to be ignorant for my whole life …’

‘It’s not that,’ I say more quietly. ‘It’s just … I want you always to think about me. Even if you never see me again. And I’ll always think about you. And then one day …’

‘Yes?’ You look hopeful, as the voices grow closer now.

‘Then one day we’ll be together. All we have to do is wait.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know. A long time. But you have to wait and so do I.’

You nod then and offer me your hand. ‘We’ll shake on it.’

But I don’t take your hand. I lean forward and I kiss you instead, on your cheek, which smells of Fruit Salad chews and something else, like the smell of under the bed. You go bright red, but I know that you’re pleased. ‘As long as it takes,’ you say.

‘As long as it takes.’

Then the tarpaulin is lifted and a bright light shines in. We have to cover our eyes. A hand reaches in and takes mine. ‘There you are, Daisy. Mum’s been looking for you everywhere. She’s frantic.’

I get up and let Dad lift me out of the den and into the evening air, telling me that I really shouldn’t worry Mum like that, but I don’t care. I look behind me then, because I think it might be the last time I see you, but you’re not there. I turn back to look up the beach towards the house, but the sand is completely empty. You have already gone.

London, winter 1995–1996

I’m not a grown-up, I think miserably to myself as I sit hunched over the kitchen table of a tiny flat in north London. I’m really not. I don’t have a job, or a bank account, or savings, or a pension. I don’t have a wife, or a dog, a car, or a house. But I do have a daughter. And because I have a daughter, I have leapfrogged every one of the staging posts along the way to adulthood to become a fully fledged grown-up overnight, and it’s terrifying.

And because it’s terrifying, I’m doing what comes naturally – hiding.

I’m due to meet my new daughter in an hour, as I do every Sunday for a few hours, and I’m trying to write her a poem to tell her how I feel. I’m a poet, so it’s not exactly a huge deal. Before, it would only have taken a bit of looking out the window of my office in the Department of Fisheries onto the rainy pavements of Molesworth Street or walking around Merrion Square pretending to be Patrick Kavanagh, but, of course, I’m not in Molesworth Street any more, with the view of a tiny corner of the verdant playing fields in Trinity College. I’m in London, in my brother’s flat in a grubby street off the Holloway Road, with a water heater hissing noisily in the corner and the rumble of the Tube in the distance.

‘Misty,’ I begin, ‘with your nut-brown hair …’

Oh, Christ. I cross that out. ‘Misty …’ I stop, pen poised over the page, because I can’t think what might come next. I want to say something profound to her, something dad-like, something about how every time I look at her I understand the meaning of fatherhood, but I can’t, because I don’t. Fatherhood is alien to me and, even though I might say otherwise, I know in my heart that I would really like to keep it that way.

I close my eyes and I see her, her dark-brown hair pulled into bunches on either side of her head, tied up with red bobbins, her little bee backpack on her back, looking at me, with eyes the same hazel as my own. She’s taking me in, this new arrival in her life, and she’s wondering what on earth to make of me, this person she’s told is her dad, whom she’d never heard of until a few weeks ago.

‘Hello, Emmett.’ Those were her first words to me when we met in front of the penguin enclosure at London Zoo four days after Christmas. I’d never thought my name could sound so sad. Amanda thought it was better to meet somewhere ‘neutral’, as if we were dogs that might attack each other instead of father and daughter. Then, my first thought was: not ‘Dad’, just ‘Emmett’, and I tried to suppress that mixture of relief and disappointment that bubbled up inside me. Relief, because I wouldn’t have known what to do if she had called me ‘Dad’, and disappointment, because she hadn’t.

I wonder if this makes me more like my own dad.

My aunty Maeve used to call me a chip off the old block and it used to make me seethe. The last person on earth I wanted to be was him, I thought. A liar. A cheat. Mum knew, of course, because she’d lean over to Aunty Maeve and say, ‘Do you know, Maeve, I think he’s more like my side of the family.’ And she’d put an arm around my shoulders and squeeze.

Mum. She was always on my side. Which is why it hurt so much to see the look on her face when I told her, that time I came home to Galway from Dublin to visit, three days after I got the letter that began, ‘Dear Emmett, I suppose you thought you’d never hear from me again. Well, this may come as a surprise to you …’

Mum had been sitting in her favourite spot: in the Parker Knoll armchair that was a wedding gift from her mother, beside the range, the winter sun streaming in through the living-room window. She had her feet up on the ancient red leather pouffe and Joanna Trollope’s latest novel on her knee, scanning the words eagerly. When she saw me, she beamed and showed me the cover. ‘I’ve finally got my hands on it. That madam Mary O’Brien had it out of the library for six weeks on account of her dyslexia, she says, the fibber, and she was about to get it out again only for Jacinta, who put it under the counter for me.’ She gave a fist-in-the-air gesture of triumph, but, seeing my expression, her face fell. ‘What is it? It’s not your brother, is it? I told him not to go to London—’

‘It’s not Tom,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Mum, I need to tell you something.’

I try to put the memory of her expression out of my mind as I sit here, pen in hand. Her face was rigid with shock and then I could see it change as tears filled her eyes and she tried to hide her disappointment. Then she rallied. ‘Nothing could make me think any less of you, son,’ she said, which quite naturally made it worse. ‘Do you hear me?’ she’d said, clutching me to her cushiony bosom and patting my head. ‘Nothing. We’re all human, love, and we all make mistakes. It’s what we do about them that counts.’ At this, we exchanged a meaningful look, before she said, ‘You know what to do, love – don’t you?’

I’d nodded silently, all the while wanting to wail, ‘But I don’t want to do it!’

‘Good man,’ she’d said, patting me on the shoulder.

She told Dad for me, murmured voices in the kitchen when I was upstairs in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. Of course, he didn’t say anything to me – how could he? He was hardly in any position to lecture. Instead, he and Mum sat silently in the car in front of me as we drove to the travel agent’s in Galway city to buy my ferry ticket, then sitting beside me, nodding, as I requested an open return.

‘Planning a long holiday?’ The girl behind the counter smiled.

‘He’s going for good,’ Dad replied shortly. The girl had looked from him to me to Mum, then nodded and continued filling out the carbon sheets of the ticket.

‘He’s got a job offer,’ Mum added. The fact that she said it out loud made the lie more obvious.

‘Isn’t that great,’ the girl said faintly, stamping one of the sheets with the company logo.

We said our goodbyes at the front door, Mum and me, because Mum can’t drive, so ‘Muggins’, as she calls Dad, was to drive me to the ferry in Dún Laoghaire. Mum was in her candlewick dressing gown that she’d had for twenty years, and she’d squeezed me as tightly as she could, before holding me at arm’s length. ‘Oh, son,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s not the life you’d planned, but you’re doing the right thing by Amanda, I know you are.’

Mum had liked Amanda the moment she’d met her, on that one visit she’d paid to Galway, years before. Every so often, she’d ask me about her and I’d tell her that I hadn’t spoken to her since and she’d look faintly disappointed.

‘I don’t want to do the right thing,’ I’d blurted.

‘No, but you will. And’ – shooting a sharp glare at Dad, who was busy defrosting the windscreen with a kettle of boiling water and a plastic scraper – ‘you’re to stop in Hayden’s in Ballinasloe, do you hear? There’s no need to be rushing all the way to Dublin as if you were being pursued by the hounds of hell.’

‘For God’s sake, Mary, he’s not a child who needs a toilet break,’ Dad muttered as he scraped.

‘I know that, Francis,’ Mum barked. ‘But it might be good to be civilised for once.’ She smiled at me slyly. ‘Keep him on his toes.’

I know that she loves him, in spite of everything, even though, as she told me once, ‘he needs to know that he’s not off the hook – I learned that the hard way.’

Of course, we didn’t stop in Ballinasloe but drove straight through the rainy streets, past the chipper and the town hall, until we were back out on the Dublin road, doing the remaining trudge through the quiet midwinter towns of middle Ireland in complete silence. Finally, without a word, he stopped at a petrol station in Kinnegad, as the cattle trucks and buses whizzed by, taking a cigarette from the packet he always kept in the breast pocket of his jacket and lighting it, letting it hang from his bottom lip while he filled the car up with petrol, cupping it in his hand as he went into the shop to pay, then coming out with a sandwich tray with two white-bread ham sandwiches in it and a bottle of Lucozade. He offered me one sandwich and chomped the other himself, feeding bits of white bread and ham into his mouth ‘like an animal’, as Mum would have said, washing it down with a swig of the fizzy drink.

Then he put the key back into the ignition, started the car and drove on. He said not another word to me, nor I to him, until we were standing at the ferryport in Dún Laoghaire, buffeted by the winter wind.

‘Not a bad day for a sailing,’ he said finally.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I agreed stupidly.

He pulled the packet of Rothmans out of his pocket, removing a cigarette with a swift gesture, lighting it then going to the boot and taking out my duffel bag. He handed it to me, cigarette clamped between his lips, eyes squinting against the cigarette smoke, like a cowboy in one of the Westerns he loved so much.

I nearly didn’t hear what he said because I was saying thanks, so his words stumbled out over mine. ‘I’m disappointed, son.’

‘I know,’ I replied.

‘You need to be a man now, do you hear?’

‘What, like you?’

I’d heard him say it a million times before and had managed to ignore the obvious hypocrisy, but now, the retort came out before I could stop it. The expression on his face changed just a fraction. A crease appeared between his eyes and his mouth pursed slightly. When he reached out, I wondered for a minute if he was going to hit me but, instead, he just placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze, nodding softly to himself. ‘Time to put the dreams away,’ he added. ‘It comes to us all.’ With that crushing statement, he gave me a little shove in the direction of the ferry terminal, the way he used to give me a shove onto the soccer pitch on rainy Sunday afternoons. I stumbled forward, then righted myself and walked up the steps to the terminal door. I didn’t even turn around, but just pushed through the doors and joined the queue of others off on the boat to England.

‘Be a man.’ I used to think that meant throwing a ball further up the rugby pitch, drinking more pints than anyone else in the college bar or finding the most interesting way to smoke weed, but it’s not. It turns out that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Which is why I’m here at half-past seven on a Sunday morning, sitting at a kitchen table, taking up more space than I should in Tom’s flat, the rumble of the Tube outside my window, the clang and rustle of the market stalls being assembled on the little laneway outside. Tom’s out at work – some extra job he does on a Sunday to add to the money he gets on the building site at Canada Square. He’s up every morning at five o’clock, and I wake from my perch on the sofa to see him standing in front of the fridge swigging from a carton of milk. His arms are huge from all the lugging and digging he does, and his hair is permanently covered in a fine coating of cement dust. He likes big fry-ups and outings to the Galtymore or the Swan in Stockwell to see Irish bands, and, as I look at him, scratching his arse with one hand as he sniffs a pack of bacon with another, I wonder how the two of us are brothers.

I stare at my notebook, a blanket draped over my shoulders. The two-bar heater doesn’t do much more than warm a small space at the back of my legs. I’m trying to write that poem, but everything I write is just … bad. Of course, I don’t want to write bad poetry – I’m not doing it deliberately – but the rubbish words just keep pouring out. You’d think that fatherhood would give me something to write about – profound poems that express universal truths about being a parent – but, instead, I find myself writing about the Tube or the Indian corner shop, with its display of phone cards and models of Ganesh, the shops on Holloway Road or the Turkish barbers on Greenlands Avenue, where I had a haircut last week. I write about my pilgrimage to the Coach and Horses pub and waiting for Jeffrey Bernard there one Sunday afternoon, lurking on the horrible red banquette in the hope of a glimpse of my hero, hoping for a bon mot and a bit of bad behaviour. But it’s all trivia, really, when I’m avoiding the one subject that’s in front of my very eyes. I can write about Jeffrey Bernard all I like, but it won’t make any difference to the truth.

I sigh and chew my pen a bit more. ‘Misty …’ I try again, but the words won’t come. I end up throwing my pen onto the ground in frustration and then put my head in my hands and contemplate having a little cry to myself. I tell myself to get a grip. I sigh and reach for the book that I found in a second-hand shop on Holloway Road one Saturday afternoon when I was just walking around. I do that a lot here, just walk around. I think that if I do, I might somehow get a grip on this vast place, begin to understand more about the jumble of streets and parks and libraries and bridges and football stadiums, the long red-brick terraces that seem to stretch for miles, the shops that sell everything from wigs to jars of olive oil, the greasy-spoon cafés next to the curry houses. It just seems to go on and on for ever, until you reach that grim bit of motorway at the end, the great big slab of concrete that heads north.

The bookshop advertised itself as a ‘Fantasy Emporium’, which I took to mean a certain kind of fantasy, until I noticed the big stack of Lord of the Rings inside the doorway. In the shop was a large model dragon made out of plastic, resting on top of a big novel by Raymond E. Feist and, beside it, on a narrow shelf, a few tatty paperbacks. ‘Men’s Interest’ read the little sign, in biro, taped to the shelf. I flicked through The Crisis of Masculinity – God, no – then Iron John, which I opened and read for a bit, wondering if I needed to dig deep into my psyche and find my inner Wild Man. Maybe that’s the problem, I told myself – I don’t have a Wild Man inside me. I’m one of those Soft Men that the author talks about, in touch with my feminine side, unable to reach the hairy man that lurks within because a half-century of pampering has ensured that I no longer know where he is.

I closed the book and sighed. I didn’t need to find my inner hairy man – I just needed a few pointers on how to be a dad in a book that didn’t feature a smiling man in a pair of dungarees.

I picked up another book with a stern man on the front, arms folded, clad in army fatigues – SAS Dad: The Military Approach to Parenting. I looked at him for a long time, wondering if I could ever see myself in combats, urging Misty to polish her shoes and put knife-edge creases in her bedsheets. God, I thought, is it any wonder masculinity is in crisis. I turned to a book on parenting that had one whole chapter for dads, which told me that I needed to tune in to my baby’s needs and balance playful activity with nurturing. That sounds a bit more like it, I thought, reading that I needed to send ‘Mum’ out of the house so that I could be Dad for the day and carry my daughter around in a sling to bond with her. A picture of Misty’s legs dangling out of an oversized sling popped into my head, which almost made me smile, before I slammed the book shut. For God’s sake, why weren’t there any instructions on what to do when you’ve missed the first seven years of your child’s life? I don’t suppose it’s been written, I thought gloomily, ignoring the guy with the beard behind the till, who was ostentatiously clearing his throat.

‘We’re closing,’ he said eventually.

In a panic, I picked up the smallest and therefore least intimidating book on the shelf, brought it to the till and proffered the requested 20p. I didn’t even look at it until I got outside. It was one of those American paperbacks, with red block lettering – Be a Dad: How to Ignore the Advice and Trust Your Instincts. That sounded about right, I thought, looking at the smiling man on the front, with his bald, egg-shaped head – Dr Jasper Johnsson. He looked warmly sensible and kind and not too intimidating. In the absence of anyone else, he would have to do.

I begin to read, now, from chapter two – ‘You Are Good Enough!’ Yes, I am Good Enough! I think, turning the pages. Apparently, I have to keep repeating the mantra to myself, but I find that I can’t because I don’t feel it’s true. How can I be good enough if I haven’t even done anything? My eyes are burning and my head feels heavy because of the extra pint I drank in front of Match of the Day last night, feeling sorry for myself. I don’t even like Match of the Day, but the north-London derby was on and I thought it would bring me closer to my new home. I’d opened the window earlier to hear the match live, the roar of the crowd at the Highbury ground a half-mile away as their team scored another goal. Then I woke up this morning at half-past five, my mind filled with random and unhelpful thoughts.

I decide that I’ll rest for a second, just so I’m fresh for Misty later. I lie my head on my arms and feel my eyelids grow heavy.

When I wake, the so. . .