This will pass, they said. Trust us. But Sarah called out for her mummy in her sleep and in her waking, and she ran downstairs still befuddled from the tossing, turning night, shouting: ‘Mummy? Mummy? Where are you?’ There was only her father, a shadow in the doorway, bending down to pick her up. Sarah never cried, not even when he held her hard and pressed his face into her shoulder and her Little Princess jim-jams grew wet there, where his eyes were. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’
She learned fast. She learned that some things hurt more than others; that the photographs of her mother, and her mother’s clothes, and the books that had once been read aloud – ‘all the better to eat you with’ – and the mug Mummy liked to drink from were like bits of broken glass scattered around the house that cut her when she was not looking. She learned to find other things to do when Daddy had pictures and papers spread all over the kitchen table and he was sorting them, flicking them, working through them fast as though he had lost something among them, or when the music in his bedroom was loud. She kept away.
‘Do you remember the monkeys at the zoo?’ he asked her one bedtime. ‘They were gibbons, I think – a yellow one and a black one and they had a little baby. They were swinging around and bouncing off the branches and Mummy said they were us – the two of us swinging, with you in her arms – do you remember that?’ He was talking and talking, sitting on the edge of the mattress. He had stopped stroking her hair as he thought of it, but his hand was on her forehead, just there. Warm. ‘You used to say the same thing all the time after that. “Mummy, Daddy, Baby!” Do you remember?’
She said nothing. She felt a bounce in her chest.
‘You’re tired. I’ve gone on too long. Mummy loved you, Sarah, she still does. Never forget.’
He left a warm space in the bedclothes, and she thrust her legs into it.
‘Goodnight, my angel.’
‘Night, Daddy.’
That was all. It took her ages and ages to get to sleep.
She loved Saturdays when his sermon had been written, her homework done and there were no weddings, so they could go for long walks in the forest with the curate’s dog, that smelly, disobedient hound called Tutu. Then to the pictures. Her father grinned stupidly and squeezed her hand and ate popcorn (and let his eyelids close sometimes, she saw him) through Toy Story and others that blurred into primary colours over time, until she became a teenager and toons were no longer really her thing at all.
‘Do you like this?’ he asked once in the dark, their faces reflecting the action as some prince or other flashed his sword at a dragon.
‘Not really.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that.’
They got up, laughing, shuffled past a lot of grumbly people with awkward knees, and went for pizza. ‘Next time,’ said Sarah firmly, ‘I will choose the film.’
She chose badly. A tale of pirates and romance, with not much blood, no swearing and only a bit of kissing, so that was okay, but all she could think of in the lovey-dovey bits was a boy from her class called Stevo, who flicked pellets of chewed paper into her hair with his ruler and would look dead cool with a cutlass in his hand. She burned up in the dark like a Ready-Brek kid, glowing with embarrassment at sitting there thinking and feeling those things while her dad was there, shoulder to shoulder.
Luckily, he had fallen asleep in his seat.
He will want to talk later, she thought, but she did not mind. They talked a lot, more than other girls and dads. They liked a natter, when there was time between the church and meetings, swimming and drama group, piano lessons, tennis and laying on the floor listening to soppy songs. Oh, and reading, she did tons of that: increasingly grown-up things like the Edna O’Brien novel a woman in the congregation called Suzy put her way. The words in the books were like a code – they had structure and meaning deep within them but Sarah could not quite grasp the whole, only catch fragments. Vivid, intense, adult fragments that thrilled and frightened her. She could not ask her father about it; that would be embarrassing. And he would try to make it lead on to talking about her mother, which she would not do. Under no circumstances. That was a given. There were things Sarah and her father did not talk about, for fear of spoiling what they had. Boys, for one. And two and three. But also, mainly, Mum.