Black Flowers Read online

Despite not being a part of the carnival, I knew there were a million worse places to work. Not only was it relaxed enough for me to wear jeans and trainers to the office, there were also lots of times like today when I could sneak some writing in. Technically speaking, I was even being paid for it. But there’s nothing like working at a university to remind you how old you’re getting, even when, at twenty-five, you actually aren’t. It got worse every September, with the arrival of a new and even more fresh-faced cohort. You feel like a bunch of old flowers, maybe not quite past your sell-by date yet, but already beginning to wilt in the corner, and nobody’s choice.

  All I’d ever wanted to do was write. My father made only the vaguest of livings from it – his books skipped across too many genres, the publication dates a few too many years apart – and, growing up, I was dimly aware of our relative poverty in comparison to other kids’ families. That didn’t really matter. I was brought up to love books and stories: we always had plenty of the former, and, with my father around, an infinite number of the latter. There was never anything else I’d wanted to do except be a little bit like him.

  But I wasn’t.

  Since coming to work here, I’d submitted four books to publishers, and all of them had been knocked back with the solid wooden tock of a well-hit baseball. Fine. But as much as you tell yourself you need to learn your craft and serve an apprenticeship, all those bleary early mornings and late nights … they start to get to you. You have to take it seriously, so it’s basically like working two jobs. And for me, trying to fit real life around that was getting hard. Maybe it was starting to get impossible. Maybe I was going to have to start facing facts.

  Ally was supportive, of course, but it still felt like there were too many plates to keep spinning and that pretty soon I was going to have to let something fall. It wouldn’t be my relationship with her. I loved her far too much to let that go. So maybe it was writing that would have to get shelved. It was a depressing thought.

  But I would do that for her. I really would.

  She was already outside the Union Hall, waiting for me on the steps. It was easy to spot her amongst the students – she had dyed-red hair, for a start. But she’d also made an effort for the conference and was wearing a smart black dress and heels. Away from work, she wore baggy jeans, trainers and Tshirts, and normally looked somewhere between a punk and a Bash Street kid; you’d half expect to look down and see her holding a skateboard. A casual observer right now might nod and say she scrubbed up well, but a smart one would realise she was beautiful in anything. Either might wonder what the hell she was doing with me.

  ‘Hey there, you,’ I said.

  ‘Ah. Finally. Keeping me waiting, Dawson?’

  ‘Keeping you on your toes, more like.’

  She went up on them now to give me a kiss, putting her hands on my shoulders. At first glance, Ally looked small and fragile. She was actually slim and muscled, the kind of girl that might surprise you at arm-wrestling, and would certainly try. The first time we’d ended up in bed together, a year ago now, both of us as drunk and surprised as the other, I’d barely have been able to escape if I’d wanted to.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Can’t have that.’

  We went to The Oyster Bar in the Union. It was called that because the bar was down in the centre, glistening with mirrors, then surrounded by rising, circular ridges of white seats and tables. We found a space, and, while we waited for the food to arrive, chatted about our mornings over the mingle of conversation around us.

  As time went on, though, it was obvious that she was distracted: not entirely interested in the small talk. She was asking questions but didn’t seem to be listening to the answers, and answering mine without saying much. But then, it’s difficult to do small talk when the shadow of big talk is looming over you both.

  ‘Okay,’ I said eventually. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re thinking something.’

  ‘All right then, I am. Maybe I’m building up to it.’

  ‘About the baby?’ I guessed.

  But our food arrived, so I leaned back to allow the waitress space to slide the plates onto the table. Ally hooked a strand of hair behind her ear and picked up her knife and fork.

  She said, ‘I’ve made a decision.’

  ‘That you’re keeping it.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded around the bar. ‘I know it’s not wonderful fucking surroundings for this conversation, but I wanted to tell you as soon as I was sure.’

  I did my best to smile.

  ‘I already knew,’ I said.

  ‘I just don’t think I could not go through with it.’

  She looked at me now, and it was like an armed conflict was going on behind her eyes.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too. But it’s going to change everything.’

  ‘It’ll be okay.’

  I did my best to sound convincing. Even though I’d been sure what her decision would be, hearing it out loud still made it feel like the bottom had dropped out of my fucking world. Obviously, I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ I said again. ‘We’ll be okay.’

  ‘Promise?’

  How can you promise anything like that? We’d only found out a week ago, and I’d barely had time to get my head round it.

  The idea still wasn’t real; it was impossible to imagine what everything changing was going to involve for me, for her, for us. Even so, I reached out and rubbed the back of her hand. Around us, the clinks and clatters in the bar seemed to have faded away almost to nothing.

  I promised.

  Back home later, I took a sip of ice-cold white wine, and stared at the screen of my laptop. Below my makeshift desk, the printer chittered. Paper stuttered out of the front, landing face up on the floor. The story I’d written, printing out in reverse order, the end working its way steadily back to the beginning. If only everything in life was so simple to undo.

  My front room was my bedroom. Outside the window beside me, I could see the familiar neon row of late-night takeaways and off-licences across the road. I lived in a converted house, which had been divided by the landlord into two studio flats. The entire second floor – all three rooms of it – was mine. My neighbour had the first floor: he was an Argentinean student who didn’t seem to do much besides listen to action films very loudly at random times of the day and night. We shared the stairwell and the communal front door, which was squeezed inbetween a newsagent and a hairdressers. As I arrived home after work, I could usually hear the blow dryers through the thin wall and smell, just faintly, scorched hair.

  It wasn’t great. It wasn’t even particularly safe. Round the back of the building, the door to the cellar was half broken. If you were determined enough to push through the rotting litter there, and then the broken furniture in the basement, you could get all the way up to my personal front door without busting a lock. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything worth stealing. There was only my cheap laptop, which normally lived in a drawer beneath a pile of Tshirts – surely beyond the imagination of any thief.

  The printer chittered to a halt, and I was left with the gunshots and explosions from below. They were in full effect tonight – the floor vibrating beneath my feet. It was possible to imagine an actual war was occurring down there. I sipped the wine, then picked up the pages, tapped them into line on the desk, and read them again.

  Pretty weird.

  And pretty harsh too.

  But stories are allowed to be, so long as they’re honest.

  For example, my father’s last book was called Worry Dolls. It was about a small village, and a lonely young boy with a father who beats him and his mother. A doll maker teaches the boy how to make a worry doll – a little figurine fashioned from pegs and coloured cloth. At night, you tell the doll all your fears and place it under your pillow where it looks after them on your behalf, so yo
u can sleep soundly. The boy makes a monster. His doll has used matchsticks poking from its back like burnt wings, and toenail clippings for claws. And that night, when the father is drunk and going to kill the whole family, the creature comes to life and rips him to shreds.

  That story works on its own terms, but the book’s about much more than that. The narrator of Worry Dolls is a very old man who witnessed the events first-hand. His wife was very sick at the time, and the doll maker taught him how to make a worry doll as well. The man created it in the shape of his wife, and told it that he was terrified of dying alone. In his case, the magic didn’t seem to work, because his wife died anyway. And yet, on his deathbed at the end of the book, he realises the ghost of his wife has been sitting beside him the whole time, waiting for him to finish, and when he dies she takes his hand and they leave together.

  Dad began writing Worry Dolls two years ago, when my mother was fighting cancer for the final time. It was the last battle in a long war, and he finished the novel just after she died.

  At one point, the doll maker tells the boy:

  It doesn’t really matter how tatty or incomplete it is. All that matters is that it’s yours.

  And to my father, stories served exactly the same purpose as worry dolls, except he confided his fears and troubles in words on a page. That book contained all the emotions he would never have said to my mother out loud. Rather than breaking down and confessing his own pain – that he was scared of living and dying without her – he had concentrated on looking after her. Being selfish in his writing had allowed him to be the opposite in real life.

  That was what I’d done. My story was a dumping ground for all the miserable, negative shit I was feeling deep down: the stuff I knew wasn’t fair and which I would never say out loud to Ally. Obviously, this was going to be way harder for her, and require at least as many sacrifices and compromises as it did for me. So the guy on the page could seethe with stupid, childish resentment on my behalf, and I could get on with being a supportive partner, a good person. Close as I got to that anyway.

  I finished the wine.

  Even so, it did seem harsh – and I had another idea. I picked up a pen and scribbled at the end of the last page:

  Regret.

  Maybe guy changes his mind and has to fight to get child back?

  A descent into hell?

  I stared at that for a moment, thinking it through.

  Maybe that would end up better. More satisfying.

  More wine. I stood up. The night was young, after all, and fuck it – if you couldn’t get drunk on the day you find out you’re going to be a father, when could you?

  I was heading through to the kitchen to explore that question more thoroughly when my phone rang. It was the landline: chirruping away in the corner by the bed. It surprised me; I’d almost forgotten it was there. Nobody ever called on it. My friends were all texters or emailers.

  I put the empty glass down by the computer and walked over.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. Is that Neil?’

  It was a woman’s voice, but not Ally.

  ‘Yes.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘This is Neil.’

  ‘Oh good. This is Marsha Dixon. I’m your father’s agent.’

  It took me a second, but then I thought: Ah, yes.

  I’d met Marsha a handful of times, and found a mental picture of her now. A woman in her fifties, with grey hair in double plaits, like a schoolgirl. Very bohemian. When I was much younger, my father had explained to me that a lot of the people in publishing were flamboyant, and for a while I’d imagined he meant some weird variety of exotic creature, distantly related to flamingos. The last time we’d met, Marsha air-kissed me to either side, and smelled of strong perfume and wine. All of the book-length manuscripts I’d finished had passed – anonymously – across her desk and been returned. I’d actually held one of them up to my nose, checking for perfume. Nothing.

  ‘Hi Marsha. What can I do for you?’

  She paused, then sounded distraught:

  ‘It’s your father, Neil. I’m afraid he’s missing.’

  Chapter Two

  Dad still lived in the same house I’d grown up in.

  We’d had one quarter of an old, converted, gothic mansion, set back down a winding, white-tarmac driveway. It was a flat, really, since aside from the staircase up to it, it ran along on a single level, but the building as a whole was enormous and imposing: soot-black, and built from bricks that, when I was younger, seemed bigger than I was. From the outside, it looked grand and desirable, but it wasn’t. During my return visits there as an adult I’d had two separate realisations.

  The first was how genuinely ramshackle my home had been. There was something threadbare about the place; if it had been a jacket, it would have smelled of mothballs and had patches stitched on the elbows. The walls inside were freckled with damp, and the old carpets curled up against the dusty skirting boards, no longer nailed down. In some ways, it reminded me of my own flat – and that brought home to me just how much my father dominated my parents’ marriage. This was the house that he, a struggling, intermittently successful writer, would always have lived in, regardless of my mother’s presence. Rather than them forming a new life together, it seemed she’d been content to be a passenger in his.

  The second realisation cancelled that out. After my mother’s death it struck me just how empty the house felt with her gone, and how diminished my father was in her absence. But I thought I understood. My father had been driven to write, and writers need readers. It’s a partnership, and although it might not seem equal on the surface, it actually is. Just because one person appears content to listen, it doesn’t mean the other – the speaker – doesn’t need and rely on them being there for the whole thing to have meaning. Love can be the same.

  I’d never been worried about him though. Over the last year, I had watched him age before my eyes, as though my mother’s presence had kept an older man at bay, one who was now free to appear. With every passing week, he seemed smaller and more fragile than he had the week before. But after the tears had dried up, and he’d begun to adjust his life to fit around the shape of his loss, my father did what I knew he would, what he always had. He began writing.

  So I’d never been worried.

  And there was no reason to be worried now. Marsha was just being melodramatic. Despite the vague niggling feeling in my chest, I kept telling myself that, as I sat on the bed and listened. My father hadn’t been in touch about a new contract, she said, and he wasn’t answering his phone or returning her calls, and that was so unlike him. Which wasn’t true. In fact, from everything she said, it sounded like Dad had been behaving very much like Dad.

  ‘I’m sure he’s okay, Marsha. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he is too. It’s just with your mother passing last year. And I’m so sorry about that, darling. So sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The niggling feeling began curling slowly into an itch of irrational panic. When was the last time I’d spoken to him? It had been over two weeks ago, I realised – actually, that was longer than normal. And, looking back, he’d seemed even more preoccupied than usual. As though there were far more serious things on his mind …

  But you can think yourself into all kinds of worries.

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I said. ‘He’s not the type to do anything stupid. Obviously, he took Mum’s death hard, but he’ll be channelling it into his writing.’

  It sounded stupid, spoken out loud.

  Marsha wasn’t reassured. ‘Do you think you could check up on him for me, Neil? Honestly, it would set my mind at rest.’

  I rubbed my forehead. There had been no reason to worry before, and there was no reason to now. I could repeat that to myself over and over, and it wasn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  It was a half-hour’s drive across town, but I weighed up my gener
al state of sobriety and found it a little on the light side. After trying my father’s home phone and mobile, the next call I made was for a taxi. Just before eight, it pulled up outside my father’s house. The engine puttered to itself while the driver stuck the light on in front to consult his plastic charge sheet.

  After I’d paid, I walked down the drive, and into the garden. My mother’s old washing line was still strung across, hanging loosely in the middle, as though weighed down by invisible clothes. Old pegs were clipped on by the wall. All my father’s windows faced out this way, apart from the kitchen which was round the corner. Looking up now, the ones I could see were curtained over and dark. Either he was in bed – unheard of at this hour – or he wasn’t here.

  I had my own key.

  ‘Hello?’ I called up the stairs. ‘Dad? It’s just me.’

  I was met by silence. The corridor at the top was dark and quiet, and everything beyond it felt still. The house seemed empty, and there was a musty smell to the place, as though the front door hadn’t been opened in a while.

  I closed it behind me and went up the stairs. Walking around, I clicked all the lights on. However irrational it was, my heart thudded every time I stepped into a room and flicked the switch – each time revealing nothing.

  He wasn’t here.

  I was surprised by how relieved I felt.

  Where is he then?

  The window in the kitchen was old, held shut by a metal arm that hooked over a nub in the base and clenched the frame tight. I opened it, letting in a hush of night air, and peered out. The garages for all four flats were directly below, and my Dad’s car wasn’t there.

  I stayed with my head out of the window for a moment, thinking. My father didn’t go out much on an evening, as far as I knew, and if he’d gone away I thought he would have told me.

  I closed the window and walked halfway back down the corridor. Stepped into his office.

  This had been my bedroom as a child. It still held wisps of memories now, like cobwebs in the corners, but he’d changed so much around that it was barely recognisable; to picture the room I grew up in, I had to rely on the mental equivalent of dents in a carpet that showed where furniture had stood.