“He was full of excuses, pathetic excuses. He’s a fucking loser. I don’t even look like the cunt. He can’t be my father.”
“Shelley, stop swearing or I am not having this conversation with you.” Aunt Elsie sipped her tea as they sat having breakfast outside The Coffee Cup.
“Why did Mum tell me I had a different dad? It doesn’t make sense.” Shelley was trying to keep her voice low. There were other customers seated at the tables nearby and although it was early, an endless stream of shoppers and workers were walking along Hampstead High Street, a few feet from their table.
“You mustn’t judge your mother. Things were different back then. She did what she thought was right.” Aunt Elsie patted Shelley’s hand.
Shelley wondered if she’d done the right thing telling Aunt Elsie what William’s father had told her, or even that she’d met him. Her to-do and to-worry lists had grown exponentially in the three days that had passed since they’d dumped the body. She’d yet to visit the library to establish the depth of the canal. She had to research the stickiness of parcel tape. She had to make enquiries to ascertain if there was CCTV at The Lanesborough. She barely had enough crack for another couple of hits. Her friends were hassling her to get clean. Her checking had become overwhelming. And to top it off, she was having breakfast with her aunt at nine o’clock in the morning – a time when she should have been asleep.
“I don’t understand. Why did she lie to me?”
“You know you mustn’t discuss this with her. She’s just started taking steps in the right direction, but she’s still so fragile. This will really set her back. Promise me you won’t tell her you met Jim. You won’t tell her anything about it. For a while at least, keep it between us.”
“I won’t. I wasn’t going to. That’s why I called you,” Shelley whispered. “Do you know why she lied to me?”
“It wasn’t so much a lie. She didn’t know the truth. Back then you were stigmatised for being a single mother. If you didn’t know who your child’s father was... well, you can imagine.”
“You mean she doesn’t know who my father is?”
Elsie nodded.
“So what she told me about him being married, that’s a lie?”
“Not exactly. Things aren’t always black and white; there’s shades of grey.” Elsie took a bite of her raisin toast. She chewed for nearly a minute before carrying on. “There was a man and at the time, he wasn’t married, not when they were together. Will was a baby – he was going to take him on as his own. He proposed to Mum, but it wasn’t long after they were engaged she caught him cheating. Mum left and she got back with Jim. That’s when she found out she was pregnant with you, but she didn’t know which one of them was your dad. Jim and her didn’t last, they never did. She didn’t tell you, she didn’t want Will to know anything bad about his father but...” Elsie paused.
“What? What did he do?”
“He was a drinker, and he’d take it out on Mum when he was drunk,” Elsie said. “Look, it wasn’t that bad. He shouted mostly. He only hit her a few times.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No, I’m just saying, people change. I’ve been told he’s been sober for quite some time.”
“He’s not.”
“You could give him a chance. It was the best thing he could have done for you, leaving when Mum was carrying you. It wasn’t right for Will to live like that and thank God you never had to see it.”
“What happened to the other man?”
“Vincent... By the time you were born, he was married. Mum told him about you but— She had to say it was one of them. She had to choose. We all knew Jim was long gone and probably for the best. She thought, we all thought, in time Vincent would—” Elsie’s eyes welled with tears. Shelley shuffled her chair closer and leant over to hug her aunt.
Shelley interrupted the board meeting in her head. She didn’t look like Jim, she told them. She hadn’t inherited his mannerisms like Will had. But how had her beautiful brother, the gentlest spirit, come from such a callous man? And now she knew that she either came from that same coldness, or another equally as harsh.
Once her aunt released her, Shelley pushed her emotions down, temporarily and not deep enough, with a cigarette. She survived the next hour with the certainty that she’d be having the later billed, blockbusting, solo, intravenous, feeling-killing extravaganza.