Sports day.
A big blue sky and the sweet feeling that another school year was done and dusted and the long summer holiday was coming soon. But Scout looked solemn as she shouldered her kit bag.
‘Just try your best,’ Mrs Murphy urged. ‘That’s all anyone can ever do.’
Scout nodded grimly. But what if trying your best was never quite good enough? What if trying your very best – really trying very hard – never got you among the gold, silver and bronze stickers that they handed out even for the heats – even for the heats! – so that children who did not have a sporty bone in their family tree came away with some sort of prize. What then?
We walked to school, the one day of the year that Stan did not accompany us, and I felt that we marched in the terrified silence of condemned men.
Because sports day was always a struggle for a summer baby.
With her birthday in late July, Scout was younger and smaller than all of her classmates. This only ever mattered on sports day, the one day of the year when I couldn’t say to myself – ah yes, but Scout can read better than anyone else, and she is smarter, prettier and nicer than everyone else. None of that mattered a damn when the sun was beating down on the fifty-metre dash. On sports day Scout was expected to compete against giants and she always came home – my dry-eyed, uncomplaining, brave Scout – without a sticker.
But this year sports day was different. This sports day was special. This year – for the first time ever – I would not be cheering her on alone. Her mother was coming.
By the time Anne parked her car on a double-yellow line outside the school gates, the games had begun. You could hear the birdsong of the children, the bossy instructions from the tannoy, the cheers of the parents.
My ex-wife wore a little black dress, those serious high heels with the red soles and big round dark glasses. She looked as though she was going to a dinner party in Monaco rather than a primary school sports day in a quiet corner of North London.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.
I felt like hugging her. I felt like jumping for joy. I felt that Anne’s presence would make a difference to this sun-drenched dark day. I honestly believed it might even inspire Scout to get among the stickers – not in the finals, but maybe a bronze sticker for coming third (out of four) in one of the heats? Was that too much to hope for?
‘No problem,’ said my glamorous ex-wife, frowning at my dopey grin. ‘How are you, Max?’
There was a large phone in her right hand and she clutched it to her breast, as if to ward off evil spirits. We did not touch, of course, not even when she stepped on to the playing field and her spike heels sank into the soil.
I reached for her but held back when I saw her flinch.
‘Will parents please refrain from entering the sports field,’ ordered the voice on the tannoy. ‘The year four 50-metre heats will begin at nine forty-five precisely.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Anne said, hobbling uncertainly, her long legs lifting like a baby giraffe as she sought to remove her spiked heels from the ground.
Her phone began to trill importantly.
‘I’ll call you in five minutes,’ she told it.
She managed to work out a way of walking that involved stepping mostly on the balls of her Louboutin-shod feet.
It seemed to work, more or less.
‘I know it will mean a lot to Scout that you’re here,’ I said.
She almost nodded.
We made our way to the track, Anne still trying to walk on the balls of her feet to prevent her heels from impaling her to the grass.
Several of the fathers had turned to look at her. And even more of the mothers. The fathers had been taught not to look at women and they had learned their lesson well, but the mothers gawped openly at this long-limbed vision in black.
It was nothing, I knew, to do with me arriving with her.
It was nothing to do with the single dad having a hot date. It was simpler than that. Anne turned heads. And even though I sometimes thought, Well, you should have seen her ten years ago – I knew that people – men, boys, women, all the women – would stare at her for decades to come yet. People looked, and they could not stop looking, as if she belonged to some newly discovered species. The life of Jessica Lyle would be the same. The people who are rated tens have this in common.
The kids were stacked up in ragged lines behind the starting line, moving up four at a time as their race was called. Scout was going through an elaborate series of warm-up exercises. Stretching her calves, touching her toes, running on the spot. She looked tiny next to her opponents. A tall girl. A fat girl. A girl who was both tall and large. They talked languidly among themselves as Scout prepared herself.
‘Scout!’ I called.
She waved excitedly when she saw us.
Anne waved back, smiling for the first time.
‘Good luck!’ she shouted, and I felt my throat choke with feeling.
Yes, I thought. Good luck, brave Scout.
A starting pistol fired. Four children began to hare down the straight, cheered on by their parents. Scout’s race moved closer to the starting line. I gave her a thumb’s-up as she ran on the spot, a big grin on her perfect face.
‘I can’t stay for all of it,’ Anne said. ‘I told you that, right?’
Children flew past us. We stood at the side of the track’s freshly painted straight and now that she had stopped moving, Anne’s heels began to sink into the playing field. She cursed like a sailor on shore leave, snapping around the heads of some disapproving mothers, and lightly placed a hand on my arm to steady herself.
We dreaded touching each other. We – this man and this woman who had once slept a deep contented sleep with our limbs entwined so that you could not tell where one began and the other ended – acted as if something catastrophic would happen if we dared physical contact. But Anne took my arm and it was no big deal. The sky did not fall down. We touched each other and it was nothing much. The days – years – when touching had meant anything were long dead.
‘I have some news,’ she said. ‘Oliver and I are getting back together.’
Oliver? Her husband. The one after you, I thought. Do try to keep up, Max.
She grimaced.
‘For the sake of the children,’ she said, ‘as the old cliché has it.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
She shrugged.
‘Oliver has had a job offer,’ Anne said. ‘We have a chance if he’s working again.’
‘Parents MUST refrain from entering the track area,’ said the bossy voice of the tannoy, as if wiping the snotty nose of some sobbing five-year-old after their calamitous egg-and-spoon race was the worst crime in the world.
‘I was in one of those clinics,’ I said, my mind veering away from it all – the sports day, Anne giving it another go with her husband for the sake of the children. Perhaps it was because she had taken my arm. Perhaps it was because we had dared to touch.
‘The place you go for the twelve-week scan,’ I said. ‘You remember that day, Anne?’
She looked bored.
‘Max,’ she said. ‘Don’t get sentimental on me.’
Was it sentimental? I was just remembering something precious, something that was worth getting sentimental about. And trying to hold on to it before it slipped away forever.
She was talking on the phone again.
‘Look, I’ll be at the fucking restaurant on time, all right, Oliver? Now stop calling me.’
She hung up, glanced at her watch and then at me. My stomach fell away, because I knew what was coming, and I knew it had been a mistake to ask her here, and I knew I had been stupid to think it would mean something if she came.
She was dead right. Too sentimental, Max. And nothing good will come of it.
‘Why are you here, Anne?’
She bridled. ‘Because you asked me.’
‘Because I just wanted us to be a normal divorced couple,’ I told her.
‘God, you and bloody normal, Max. Give me a break, will you?’
I was reaching for the words, but I was not sure I could even really explain it to myself.
‘For you and me to get along,’ I tried. ‘For you and Scout to see each other in some kind of regular routine. Not all this other stuff getting in the way – as if we’re planning the Normandy landings.’ I stared at her. One of the 50-metre heats dashed by. ‘That’s all,’ I said.
She snorted with derision.
‘Listen, you never wanted normal, Max. You wanted wild. You wanted the woman that everyone else wanted.’
Even with the 50-metre heats in progress, there were still one or two fathers who were running their eyes up and down the view of Anne from behind. Her legs, her butt, her back. Even her back! I saw a mother elbow a father in the ribs and he looked no more upon the rear view of my ex-wife.
‘You wanted different, Max. So don’t complain that it worked out different from everybody else.’
‘I just want Scout to be …’
But, no, I could not find the words. They stuck in my heart and my throat. I wanted my daughter – our daughter – to be noticed and to count and to be loved. That’s all. I wanted her to be more important than anything else. To both of us. And it was not like that, I saw now, no matter how much I wanted it. But that was the feeling that I could not put into words.
‘I’ll see Scout more often as soon as things settle down,’ Anne said, one of those vague promises delivered in a tone that managed to be both defensive and resentful. ‘Just get off my back about it, will you?’
And she sighed, an elaborate sigh, her punchline to all difficulties.
‘On your marks!’
And I looked in my heart and I could find no love for this woman. I could not even find the memory of love. We were going to be one of those banal couples that could not find a way to raise their child together after we came apart. That was the real cliché.
Whatever she said, there was nothing special about us, there was nothing different about us. There were millions of useless parents who brought a child into the world and then did not have the wit to raise it. And I saw with a sinking feeling in my gut that what was really special about today was that we were probably meeting for the last time.
Because it happens.
And most of those parents at that sports day – married or divorced or somewhere in between, and they covered the spectrum – would never have understood that you can bring a child into the world and then just wander away, and become too busy, and too preoccupied, and always have other demands on your time more important than the beautiful child that got left behind.
But I knew it was true. There are millions of children who never get the time they deserve. And that’s what it is about – time. It is nothing as ephemeral as love. Children – all children – just want some of your time. Is that too much to ask? Yes, that’s way too much, I thought.
And as the July sun hammered down on another sports day, my heart ached with envy for all those sheltered, civilised lives who would not have believed it possible.
I wished I was that innocent, and I wished I knew so little.
Anne’s phone warbled again. She spoke urgently into it.
‘Look, sorry and all that, but I have to go, Max,’ she told me. ‘Oliver has this very important lunch with his new boss …’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘You go, Anne. It’s OK. Really. It’s fine. I’ve got it here.’
‘Get set!’
She turned and hobbled from the field, the spike heels of her Christian Louboutins sinking into the junior school’s playing field, as if it was pleading with her to stay for the prize-giving and sandwiches and sausage rolls. The mothers watched her rear as she left, and the fathers knew enough not to.
And I remembered that I used to say our marriage had not failed because it had produced our daughter.
But I could not lie to myself any more.
In ways that I did not understand – it had something to do with twisted priorities – we had both failed Scout.
I watched Anne walking to her car and the years with no contact, no contact at all, stretched ahead of us.
‘Go!’
Then the starting pistol went and I turned away to watch my daughter run.
The other three girls were already far, far ahead. The tall girl. The fat girl. The girl who was both tall and large. First, second and third places would be divided between them, a nice sticker for all of them for doing well in their heat so they would not feel too bad when they were blown away by the natural-born athletic kids in the final.
Scout Wolfe, lagging way behind but running as if her life depended on it, with her stick-thin limbs and the face of an angel, the youngest in the year and small for her age anyway – she was coming home without a sticker to her name.
But I bent at the waist as she ran past, her head back, and I called her name.
And I laughed out loud, the tears streaming down my face, as she began to close the gap on the fat girl.
Scout sat up in bed, smelling of shampoo, smelling of the day – grass and lemonade, sweat and sugar and dirt and soap, teriyaki crisps and ice cream – and held out her hand for the book I was holding.
There was a bronze sticker on her pyjamas, curling at the edges like a sandwich that had been left too long in the sun.
‘Listen, Scout,’ I said, giving her the book.
‘Dog Songs by Mary Oliver,’ she read. ‘Poems. New York Times bestseller. Winner of the …’ She paused to consider the unfamiliar word. ‘… Pulitzer Prize.’
Damn good reader, my girl. Always. She flipped the book over.
‘Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog,’ she read.
‘We are on our own, Scout,’ I said, and I knew that there was no other way for me to say it.
She stared at the book, but she was listening to me. I could tell.
‘I tried to pretend for a long time that we are not on our own,’ I said. ‘But I think we are, and I think we just have to get on with it. Even though your mum and I are not together, I thought that we might somehow still – I don’t know – be a sort of unit.’
A sort of unit? This was rubbish. I made a failed marriage sound like faulty kitchen furniture. Why don’t you say the word you are afraid to say, Max? The word that you really mean.
‘That we would still be a family,’ I said. ‘But just a family that doesn’t live together. And I see now that it is never going to be like that.’
I watched her face for a while, waiting for some reaction, stunned as always by the overwhelming and unconditional feeling of love that she stirred in me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘Sorry, kiddo.’
‘Oliver’s poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers,’ she read. Scout appreciated a good blurb.
‘Scout,’ I said. ‘Your mum.’
‘She’s busy.’
In the years ahead, the way Scout said those words would change. She would not say those words at sixteen as she said them at eight. The years ahead would gild those words with mockery, and cynicism, and a hard-earned wisdom.
But she was eight years old now and she could still say the words – ‘She’s busy’ – with a childish acceptance that tore up my heart.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s really busy.’ A pause. ‘So – what that means – to you and me – we’re alone, Scout.’
She put down the book.
Dry-eyed and calm.
She studied the sleeping dog on her bed for a moment and then she looked at me.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re not alone. We’re never alone. Because we have each other. And Stan. And all of our friends. And Mrs Murphy. And Lara.’
‘Who’s Lara?’
‘Lara is the slightly chubby girl that I beat in the race. She was crying after she didn’t get a sticker and so I comforted her and told her she would probably do better next sports day and now we’re friends. But mostly, Daddy, we have each other and so we can’t ever be alone. OK?’
‘OK, Scout.’
She waited until she believed that I believed it, too.
Then she handed me the book.
‘It looks good,’ she said. ‘But, Daddy?’
‘Yes, Scout?’
‘It doesn’t always have to be a poem about dogs,’ she said. ‘There are all kinds of poems in the world.’
I stood at the window and I watched the meat market come to life.
Mrs Murphy was still here but going through the last rituals of the day, preparing to go home soon.
I watched a group of meat porters cross from one of the pubs to the market. One of them, a large white man with a shaven head, stopped and turned and looked up at our building, his eyes scanning the windows, as if he was not sure of what he was looking for.
And then we were staring at each other, me and the man in a bloody white coat, looking up at the lofts.
And I saw that it was Derek Bumpus.
‘Mrs Murphy?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘I may need you to stay a bit later,’ I said without turning around.
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Is everything all right?’
Bumpus was looking up.
His mouth was moving.
He was saying something.
He was asking me a question.
It was a question that he had asked me before.
It was the one question he knew would make me go after him.
‘How old is your kid?’ he said.
And I went out into the night.