3.

Children ran unrestrained, young lovers swam in each other’s eyes, almost every person bumped into my chair as they passed. The restaurant had the ambience of a cafeteria … or a zoo.

I twirled spaghetti around a fork and watched it slide back into the bowl over and over. My mother finished another glass of wine and told me I didn’t eat enough. I said I’d try harder.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked, already seeing the answer on my face.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m glad you took tonight off. So, anything noteworthy today? Besides the obvious.’

‘Was like any given Wednesday, really. A sleep-in had, coffee drunk … McCartney knighted.’

‘How good, and each well-deserved!’

‘I was confident one of them was, then they played “Silly Love Songs” and suddenly wasn’t so sure.’

Her mouth shaped into a familiar, guilty sort of smile. I’d watched the creases that formed around it grow a little deeper over the years – the attempts only ever made to rouse me from whatever downhearted bullshit was going on in my head in those moments. The response I was able to muster seldom varied.

‘Sorry. You, just, you know I don’t like birthdays. Especially not when they’re my own.’

‘I understand, but today’s is a milestone, Mark; your quarter of a century. It mightn’t seem like it now, but you’re doing well.’

‘Oh yeah, it’s a milestone alright … You know, I was thinking earlier,’ I said, shifting in my seat. ‘You know it’s been almost twenty years?’

‘Since what? Your last thought?’

‘Ha, very good.’

‘Then what? Twenty years since I was proud of you on your fifth birthday?’

‘Twenty years since he left.’

Chanting waiters brought out a birthday cake for a nearby table, filling the little remaining space with noise and sparks.

‘Oh, Mark, I don’t want to talk about that. Tonight is about the future, not the past,’ she said, turning her head with a thin smile, pretending to be distracted by the apathetic performance.

‘But I want to talk about it.’

‘You know all there is to know. I’ve told you everything.’

She wouldn’t look at me. The ensemble’s vigour dipped as it reached the recipient’s name. I wasn’t getting any answers. The kid blew out his candles and everyone applauded him for it.

‘You haven’t. You know you haven’t,’ I said. A child clipped my chair as she ran past and began crying. ‘Can we please get out of here?’

We headed to the nearest pub. I placed a drink in front of my mother, dropped my weight into the bench seat across from her and waited.

‘For fuck’s sake. Why now?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette with jittery hands. ‘Years without mentioning him, letting me believe you’d moved on, then you go and bring this up – and tonight of all nights.’

‘I’m sorry. I guess today being some sort of twisted anniversary brought it out. I spent most of this morning looking through that photo album – the one I took when I moved.’

‘Nothing worth keeping is already behind you.’

‘This will be the last time I ask, I promise.’

She drew on the cigarette and stared at the exit. ‘You’ve obsessed over this and broken that promise before.’

‘I just need to know what …’ my voice trailed off, diluting in the hum of after-work-drinkers.

Looking into my eyes, her resolve broke. She exhaled and ushered me on with a swift nod.

‘I need to know what was so wrong with me that he had to leave.’

‘There isn’t, and never was, anything wrong with you; it was always … I’m sure he had his reasons for leaving, but don’t you ever think it was because of you,’ she said with a calm anger.

Another of her rehearsed platitudes – the same I’d heard scattered throughout my entire life whenever I’d asked these questions. Though, still, her eyes became glossy, which made my chest hurt. I readied myself yet again for the defeat of accepting that not upsetting her meant more to me than the answers did.

‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I was much, much older than him … He was still a boy in many ways,’ she continued after a moment, unprompted, much to my surprise. ‘And he went searching for something that wasn’t there – as boys tend to.’

My belt let out a long, awkward squeal against the bench seat as I leant forward in awe, the only sound in our silent corner of the loud pub. I’d never heard this reflection before. Glancing at her drink, I tried to count backwards the number she’d had, but found no real deviation from any other dinner. Something in her seemed different.

‘Okay,’ I said, snapping myself back into the present, desperate to maintain whatever momentum I’d stumbled onto in this unknown territory of the conversation. ‘And what was he looking for?’

‘Oh, god, who knows? Adventure? Enlightenment? Some great frontier that existed only in his mind? The bloody American Dream?

‘I never believed he was ready to be a husband or a father. There was always this restlessness, right up until the last time I saw him – the type I’m not sure a man ever truly outgrows. I think even he’d realised he would never be the man he’d simply assumed he would become.’

‘So, what?’ I asked with an unexplainable anger building in me. ‘You want me to believe that that meant more to him than the wife and son he left?’

‘We were never technically married.’

‘Then why did I get his surname?’

‘Because he was your father.’

‘Fathers don’t run away.’

‘I don’t know if he ran away, just like I don’t know if he was ever truly here. He lived with one foot always out the door. The grass in both fields was perfectly, equally green to him and he’d have rather torn down fences than be forced to live in one. He was frustrating, but the good in him was so tightly bound and woven with the bad that you couldn’t separate one without risking damage to the other. It made him the easiest and hardest person to love that I ever have,’ she said, sincerity in her voice, a smile forming on her face.

I sucked on my gums and tried to calm myself.

‘Why do you still defend him …? He abandoned us without a trace and never came back. He only ever took from us – he only ever took from you, and you let him. And still, now, you defend him like he was some kind of martyr.’

‘He would’ve come back if he’d had the choice.’

‘Had the choice!? You mean if he hadn’t rolled a car off some Californian freeway and killed himself a few months after my fifth birthday? You’ve got to be kidding me. Had the choice!? He had the fucking choice, and it was made the second he closed our front door with you and me on the other side.’

She fixated on what remained of an ice cube melting in her glass. I took notice of some pub patrons watching on with concern.

‘I’m sorry, I just –’

‘I’d like to go home now.’

‘He never even said goodbye, Mum.’

‘I’d like to go home now.’

We sat in silence in the taxi. She climbed her front steps without poise, as if she’d aged ten years since walking down them earlier that evening.

Pouring herself a nightcap, she stood before me in appeal. ‘Please don’t obsess over this. You’ve already spent enough of your life wondering.’

‘Maybe, but … I still think you should be angrier. He left, and you never allowed yourself to fall in love again or anything; you just switched it all off. Now look at you. You can’t get through a day without poisoning yourself with that piss just to feel something.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Mark. It was no fairy tale, but your father gave more to me than he took. I have you. Also,’ she said, taking a sip, ‘I’ve come to find people drink for one of two reasons – and for some, yes, it’s because they can no longer stand feeling nothing.’

‘And the others?’

‘The others? Well, the others do because they feel absolutely everything all the time, and that can be a kind of agony as well.’

‘So, which are you?’

‘I’m the one that’s just about ready for bed,’ she smiled, brushing hair behind my ear. ‘Please take care of yourself.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight. I love you.’

I got halfway down her street before turning back. As I pushed the gate open, the light glowing through the closed curtain of her bedroom window vanished. I closed the gate and stepped backwards onto the footpath. ‘Love you too,’ I whispered.

Work kept me busy for the following weeks. Our daytime engineer left for a holiday, so I took his shifts. Keeping on with the night slots as well meant fourteen-hour days weren’t uncommon. I became friendly with Claire, a new-hire receptionist tasked with organising studio bookings. I hadn’t spoken to my mother since my birthday.

Arriving at the studio on a Friday afternoon following three long days in a row, I was ready to sleep until Sunday. I kept checking my watch to see if the clock on the wall was slow. It wasn’t. Pushing a taped cable back against the wall, I switched on the recording light and a band began another take.

A minute in, the studio phone rang. I lifted the handset and hung up before anyone noticed. Within a few seconds, more ringing. I raised and slammed it down again. The vocalist saw me and hesitated. A moment later, Claire burst in. The band ground to a halt.

‘What are you doing?’ I demanded, standing and ushering her into the hallway, closing the door behind us. I pointed to the red, illuminated sign above.

‘You know what that means, yeah?’

‘I do –’

‘No calls, no second attempts at calls, definitely no barging into the studio.’

‘I know, but –’

‘Claire, there are no buts. It’s never that important.’

‘Mark,’ she said, drawing her shoulders back and looking at me with sad, slick eyes. ‘There’s a call for you and you really need to take it.’