Hollin Clough

By Susan Day

Jen admires her father and Frank believes that his daughters are happy, but no one in any family knows the whole story.
This family has fractured before, and been patched up by secrets and evasions.
Now things are about to change.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leaping Boy Publications
• Release date: Oct 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781999840105

Susan Day

Susan is an author, canine behaviourist, and a storyteller. She lives with her family and dogs, in particular, Rocky the Border collie and Stella, the blind dog. She spends her time blogging, writing and illustrating; training and counselling dogs and being bossed around by the family cat, Speed Bump Charlie and his sidekick, Furball (see Dogs in Space). Susan travelled around the world twice before she was seven years old. It seemed only fitting that the wonderful events she experienced and the places she visited on these journeys be recorded for history. Thus, her story telling skills began. Firstly, to Rupert Bear, her lifelong companion, and then to a host of imaginary friends and finally to her pet dog once the family finally set down roots in Australia. Susan is passionate about children's literature and wants to inspire children to be better people and encourage them to follow their dreams. She runs workshops for children teaching them how to form the wonders of their imaginations into stories. Susan lives in a small country town where there are more kangaroos than people. She shares her country property with four dogs, three cats, three rescue guinea pigs and a very large fish and her patient husband. More about her adventures are reflected in Clarence the Snake from Dunolly.

Book preview

1

Jen: Excuses

‘No excuses,’ says my father over the phone.

‘OK,’ I say, because there have been excuses.

‘Everyone,’ he says.

‘Even –?’

‘Even –,’ he says. ‘Fingers crossed.’

‘Fingers crossed,’ I agree, knowing that you cross your fingers to hope that nothing goes wrong, and also to cancel out a lie.

Next thing, he’s passed the phone to my sister. I didn’t even know she was there.

‘The thing is, Jen,’ she says, and I just know she’s going to be telling me something I’ve done wrong, or something I have to change about my life, and I’m nearly right, there’s something she wants me to do. ‘The thing is, God knows why, but Grampy Sid wants all the family there –’

‘I’m coming,’ I say. ‘I never said I wouldn’t.’

‘– including –’ she pauses longer than most people would for dramatic effect.

‘Yes, partners, children, Her, the whole lot,’ I say.

‘Troy,’ she says.

There’s another long pause. I sense my father waiting in the background, half in and half out of the door.

‘It’s OK,’ I say at last. ‘He won’t come. We’re not even sure where he lives these days.’

‘We have an address,’ she says. ‘We’re pretty sure it’s the latest one. But you’re right, if we just send him an invitation he could just tear it up. It needs a personal approach.’ Pause. I say nothing. ‘Grampy can’t do it, obviously, or NanaDot, they can’t travel that far, and –’

‘You want me to go round and see him,’ I say, to stop her running through the excuses of the entire family down to the new baby (‘and of course Xander would go if I asked him, but he’s still being fed on demand and I don’t think –’)

‘What about Honey?’

‘Unreliable.’

‘What about Nev?’

‘You’re nearer.’

‘I'm the other side of London. Assuming he’s still in Clapham.’

‘Catford. I’m not sure where that is, but you know Jen, the Underground will get you there in no time.’

‘Not to bloody Catford it won’t.’

‘Don’t phone first, just go and see him. Element of surprise.’

‘And when he’s not in?’

‘Wait. Or go back another day. It’s not till June. Stake it out, like a PI.’

‘A what?’

‘Don’t be thick Jen. Just do it. It’s for Sid and Dot after all. I’ll text you the address.’

‘OK then.’

‘And Skype me, why don’t you. You haven’t seen Xander yet.’

‘OK,’ I say, though I know it will not happen. I press the button to end the call and I wish things were as they should be with my sister. She’s a bossy cow and I hate her; and I hate myself for hating her when I used to love her, bossy cow or not. It never used to be like this. But things have changed and I haven’t seen her for months. I saw her some time in May last year, when she told me she was pregnant. After that, work and holidays – hers not mine – got in the way and by the time September came things were different and I had no wish to see her, no wish at all.

She is puzzled by my distance, I can tell, but she won’t ask me to explain. Just, on the rare occasions when we speak on the phone she is brisk with me, as if it doesn’t matter, and I am irritated. We miss each other, I think, but it is some previous version of each other that we miss.

Anyway. I have things to do this evening, before I head back tomorrow morning into the bedlam that is Year Four. And after I’ve finished planning my week, and cutting out display cards, and going over the online remedial reading programme for Yellow Group and making a set of written instructions for the Teaching Assistant (which she won’t even look at, so sure is she that she knows what to do) and I should write a referral for that little Domenika who seems to me to have multiple difficulties, so far unnoticed by any agency outside school – but did I bring her file home? Damn – so I have to do it tomorrow evening, when I was hoping I could get to the gym for an hour. Still when I’ve done all that, then and only then will I think about Troy, and my mission.

Midge: Family

Yes, I was hovering in the doorway as my daughter Beth spoke on the phone to my daughter Jenny. On this day, the day of the phone call, Beth had brought the baby, our new grandson, our first grandchild, down for the day and naturally I took them to see my wife’s parents. It was the first time they had seen him, and Sid especially was thrilled. Dot, though she held the baby and acquiesced in having her photograph taken with him, gave him back to Beth almost without looking at him. I had expected her to be more effusive, knowing how fond she always was of all her grandchildren.

When Sid and I went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea I asked if Dot was all right.

‘A bit quiet do you think?’ said Sid.

‘Just wondered,’ I said.

‘It gets her down,’ he said. ‘You know, pills for this and pills for that, and the pills make her feel sick, so there are pills for that, and then she gets constipated – don’t tell her I told you – and there’s pills for that, and of course –’ He tried and failed to rip open a packet of biscuits. I took them from him. – ‘of course, by the time you’re our age you know you’re not going to get better, you know what the end of it is going to be.’

‘Well, but –’ I said.

‘She misses the grandchildren,’ he said. ‘Every day, she wonders when she’s going to see them again.’

‘Beth’s here,’ I said. I too thought it was a long time since we had seen the others. ‘And the baby.’

‘I’d lay any money,’ he said, ‘if you was to be able to get it out of her, what she’s feeling right now, it would be, she’s never going to see this baby grow up, never even see him start school, learn to walk even. That’s what it will be.’

‘Surely –’ I began to protest and thought better of it when I reflected that he could be right.

‘But,’ he said. He straightened up. He could still stand straight as long as he didn’t try to move his legs. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘A party. In the summer. Dot’s birthday. Something to look forward to, like a promise. Get us through the winter.’ We both looked through the kitchen window at the colourless garden under a low colourless sky. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

I could not tell him what I thought. What I thought was that it was a terrible idea. I thought the prospect of it would probably cause Dot nothing but worry, the organisation of it would cause bad feeling between various members of the family each of whom would believe they were doing all the work and no one else was pulling their weight. I have to be honest here and say that I thought as well that it would probably be me that picked up much of the burden, and I felt I had, as always, enough to contend with.

We took the tea in and the phone rang. It was my wife – Glenys I suppose I should call her – wondering how soon we would be home. When I went back into the room Sid, unable to contain his idea, was telling Beth all about it. The baby was lying on the rug, concentrating hard on the light bulb. Dot was listening but saying nothing. I thought that maybe she would be able to talk him out of it when we had gone.

‘We should invite everyone,’ he said, ‘the whole family, no one left out. Can you organise that Beth my love?’

She had her phone out already and was tapping in a list.

‘Midge and my mother,’ she said. ‘Elaine and Keith. Nev. Me and Dan. Jen, and her boyfriend. Baby of course. Tricky and James and their plus ones. That makes – fourteen. Plus baby, plus you two. For NanaDot’s birthday.’ She was nearly as excited as Sid was.

‘Honey and Ashley, don’t forget,’ said Sid. ‘We’ll have it at the campsite. Like old times.’

‘Troy,’ said Dot.

Beth looked at me. I imagine she had the same feeling as I did. Alarm, a slightly baffled alarm. Why now?

‘No need to look like that,’ said Dot. ‘I loved that boy. He was a grandchild to us, for the time he was here, and even after. I would love to see him again.’ She does not add, Before I die, but she doesn’t need to.

‘Fine,’ said Beth, and tapped briefly on her phone.

Then she and I and baby Xander went back to Glenys and I phoned Jenny and spoke to her until Beth took over.

They are impressive young women, my daughters. Look at Jenny, down there in the badlands of the East End, even-handedly showering enlightenment and literacy on her clamouring, multi-faith, multi-lingual crew of eight-year-olds; Jenny with her boyfriend – nice enough chap, as far as I know – her new flat, her gym membership, her weekends away, her troops of friends; her busy life, so busy that she has not been to see us since early last summer.

Look at Beth, eight days after giving birth and still high on adrenalin, driving by herself all the way from Leeds. Listen to her telling me how she is going to train this baby to play by himself while she does some of her work from home.

‘Is that possible?’ I said.

‘Just until he’s old enough for daycare,’ she said. ‘With internet and email there’s practically no part of conveyancing I can’t do from home.’

‘I meant, is it possible to train a baby?’

‘We’re all trained aren’t we. It’s just a matter of being aware of our objectives and our methods.’ Her brown eyes – brown like mine – shone with purpose and confidence. She had given birth, hadn’t she, and could therefore meet any challenge. She was a woman, wasn’t she, and hers was the world and everything that’s in it.

‘But –’ I said. What did I know?

Look at her quickly and competently changing his nappy, cleaning his little bottom with tidy swift strokes, snapping the poppers back together without once going wrong. She has no need (which is just as well) of a mother to show her how to do it.

‘Before I go back,’ she said, ‘and while he’s awake and clean, I’ll just walk round to Elaine’s. She’d like to see him.’

‘She’d love it,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

2

Jen: Him

Three weeks later, on a windy day, nearly spring supposedly, but more litter than snowdrops, here I am outside Troy’s place. It’s one of those big houses that have been divided into flats. His name is written – with an italic pen I notice – beside the bell for the top flat. Troy Coldwell. He is no relation of mine. I haven’t seen him, none of us have, for more than twenty years, I don’t even want to calculate how long. We have not seen his face ever, since he left. Not a wedding, not a birthday has called to him to show up. Will I recognise him? Will he recognise me? Will he even remember that I exist?

I think I will just tidy my hair while I think through – again – what I am going to say to him, and it is while I have both arms in the air and both hands twisting my hair – which is long – back into its knot that the door opens and Troy comes out. I haven’t even touched the bell, only looked at it. How does he know I am here?

How do I know it’s him? Well, I just do. It’s him, not as he was as a teenager, but unmistakably him, skin light brown like milky tea, bright blue eyes, curly hair, darker than it used to be, escaping boyishly from a cap. Him.

I spring forward and my hair falls down on one side of my face making me look, presumably, demented.

‘Troy,’ I say, and it comes out too loud and startling. He is off down the road. Running away from me? Did he even see me? Did he recognise who I am? Who I was?

I watch him go. Then, as he is near the corner of the road he stops, looks back, waves, shouts something. Turns and goes on. What did he say? One word. Was it, Hurry? Or, Sorry?

Now what? Leave a note? Stand here on his doorstep like some sort of stalker? Might he come back? Might he have gone for ever, knowing that we’re on to him? I wander off and sit moodily in a café, thinking I might try again later, but it starts to rain and I make a decision to go home. I have things to do after all.

I’m on the bus, idly watching what I think at first is an orange balloon but turns out to be a Sainsbury’s bag blowing from doorway to doorway down one of those London high streets that are indistinguishable from each other, full of nail bars and kebab shops, and wondering why a balloon would make me happy but a Sainsbury’s bag makes me feel the world is a careless and inhuman place. My phone beeps, and it’s the text from Beth, the one she has been sending every two days. ‘Have U seen him yet?’ This time I text back. ‘Been to the house. Not in.’ Which is even sort of true.

There are more balloons – real ones this time, pink – tied to a gate post. A new baby? A little girl’s party? The bus pushes on and I will never know. And an idea comes to me, so simple that I should have thought of it three weeks ago. Facebook.

Now I do not do Facebook. I am so busy and so unsociable and so tired that I can barely keep up with being an occasional friend to my real friends, never mind being a virtual friend to almost total strangers. And anyway, why would I want to find out what my ex-boyfriend is doing, and who with? But Honey, she could do it. Whatever Beth says.

I ran into Honey, who is a cousin of mine, at the end of a hot yoga session. She was coming out, wringing wet and with her hair wrapped in a towel as I was going in. She had to speak to me before I recognised her.

‘Jen.’

‘Oh hi. I didn’t know you lived round here.’

‘No, not really. But it’s near my work. What about you?’

And I told her that I was sharing a house a couple of streets away, and we updated our phone numbers. I know that she temps in an office and I bet she checks Facebook and replies to a message in between every real work-related procedure she carries out. We should have let her do it in the first place. She will have Troy at her fingertips.

Three days later I am able to call Beth. She answers the phone in a whisper. ‘Don’t talk too loud, I’ve only just got him to sleep.’

‘I thought he was a good baby. That’s what Midge said.’

‘Not any more. He’ll be awake again by ten o’clock, wanting to be entertained.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘Anyway, be quick.’ she says. ‘I was just going to have a little nap myself.’

‘Troy,’ I say. ‘He says he’ll come if he can.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘Bye then. Going to sleep now.’

Ha, I think. Not so smug now.

I think I will phone my dad then to show him that I do sometimes do things for other people, but he’s out (of course, it’s Wednesday, stupid me) and I get my mother.

‘How are you?’

‘Oh,’ she says, coughing, laughing, ‘creaky as usual. Haven’t slept for weeks. Looking like an old witch. Nev’s old dog looks better than me.’

‘Been out?’

‘Oh no. Sight of me would frighten people. But Elaine came and brought a cake. Sick as a cat afterwards. Threw up on the garden path when I was saying goodbye to her. I expect it’s still there.’ And again she laughs cheerily.

And there you have it. Ill, with a variety of changeable and indefinite symptoms, which she seems to relish. Cheerful, sometimes, in a chilling kind of way. And too lazy to get a bucket of water to sluice away a pile of vomit. My father has to be a hero.

I look up ‘hero’ on my thesaurus app – this is something I like doing. ‘Good man,’ I find, ‘demigod, seraph, angel, saint.’ They are not words that call to mind my father’s outward appearance – if he was a piece of furniture he would be a saggy old sofa, brown probably. But they are words that point in his direction. ‘One of the best.’

I wonder, now that we have done the deed, how other people will take the appearance of Troy at our big celebration. How will my other cousins like to see him back, apparently, in the family? How will Nev feel? And me, how do I feel? I wish I was able to have a good long chat about it with Beth. She must have been thinking about all this too, surely. I decide that, come half-term, I will go and see her. I can cope. We can talk about Troy and I can keep the other things quiet.

Midge: Complicated

I had not felt altogether sympathetic to my younger daughter when she complained about Beth bullying her to see Troy, and I thought to myself that she could surely try a bit harder. I felt that she was getting off quite lightly, down there in London, compared to us up here in the north. Dealing with Troy might be difficult but it was only one job after all. We – by which I mean myself and Elaine, who is my sister-in-law – we had it all to do. Sid was on the phone every day, coming up with something new. We should have a band. There needs to be a vegetarian option. Make sure Nev knows that there are no bookings for the campsite that weekend. Elaine will need to clean the house, just in case it isn’t up to Dot’s standards, with Nev living on his own in it. About the band, maybe not after all.

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ said Elaine to me. ‘I only want them to be happy. But if only he could leave it to me to do it my way. It’s the daily changes I could really do without.’

‘But about Jenny,’ I said, ‘I really do think she gave up too soon. For her, what could be so uncomfortable about seeing him?’

‘It’s difficult for all of them,’ said Elaine, ‘in their different ways.’ We rarely, if ever, have to explain what we are talking about.

We were in bed, as we often are on Keith’s Samaritan shift evenings. She sat up to look at the clock. One of the endearing things about her is that she, a most intelligent woman, can’t tell the time sideways. After some occasions of blind panic when she has misread nine o’clock for five past ten, and vice versa, I convinced her that she must always sit up.

‘Time,’ she said, and I kissed her bare shoulder and we began to get dressed. ‘How’s the baby doing?’

‘Honeymoon’s over,’ I said. ‘Poor Beth, she thought it was going to be easy, it started off so well, but she’s found he’s got a mind of his own, and a poor sense of night and day.’

‘Poor Beth,’ she agreed. Then, ‘Patrick sent me a message today. His girlfriend’s pregnant.’

‘You didn’t forward it straight to me.’ I was hurt.

‘Suppose Glenys saw it?’

‘How could she? Do you think I leave my phone lying around?’

‘Keith might see it on my phone.’

‘Don’t let him. Keep it with you. Delete your messages.’

She shrugged. She was never as careful about Keith finding out as I wanted her to be. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I knew I was seeing you tonight.’

‘And you still didn’t tell me till I'm on my way out of the door.’ I was cross. There is a reason for my particular interest in Patrick – Tricky as the rest of the family calls him.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t.’ She never brushes off a complaint or criticism, but always listens seriously and thinks about her reply. Not that I have ever had many complaints about her. ‘It felt complicated.’

‘Complicated how?’

‘How many reasons do you need? I'm just not sure how I feel about the whole thing. They haven’t known each other that long, we’ve never even met her. And I'm not sure how Keith will cope with them having a baby so soon. He does like people to be properly married.’

‘Does Keith know?’

‘Not yet. I'll tell him when he comes home.’

‘What else?’

‘They don’t even live together. You know how uncertain his income is.’

‘What does she do?’

‘I'm not sure. Something more reliable than acting though, I understand. But with a baby – and how much support will he be?’

‘It might be the making of him,’ I said, though that was clutching at quite a frail straw.

She was chewing the inside of her bottom lip, as she does when she is anxious. ‘I'll let Glenys know tomorrow and then she’ll tell you.’

‘She won’t tell me,’ I said. ‘It won’t be important enough to her.’

‘She will,’ said Elaine. ‘I'll tell her to.’

I left by the back door, went through the garden gate into the jennel and out into a parallel street. On my way home I called into the White Lion so that I would be smelling appropriately of beer. But it was unnecessary; my wife was already in bed and asleep. I never knew a woman who could sleep so much.

3

Jen: Family

Midge meets me off the National Express bus. As the bus pulls in I can see him standing under the light, short, round-shouldered, hands in pockets. He lifts his head as I come down the steps and smiles. Tired. Well of course he is, he’s had it too, the worst half term of the year, dark in the morning, dark on the way home, the smell of wet children and, for him, teenagers hurling fistfuls of compacted ice down corridors.

He is like a little bear, my dad, quite cuddly – and yet we don’t hug, just touch briefly on each other’s shoulder, and I never call him dad. Ten-thirty in the evening and he smells, not unexpectedly, of beer. We are quiet in the car. This always happens when I come home during a school holiday. He is my favourite person in the world, now, even more than NanaDot, and yet we are strangers, and we don’t know what to say.

When we get to the house the front room light is still on. ‘Has She waited up for me?’ Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. I prefer it when she doesn’t.

‘Looks like it,’ he says.

Yes, she’s still up and even dressed, after a fashion. Obviously in quite a lively mood. She sends Midge to the kitchen to make hot chocolate and toast, she starts to ask questions. My journey? My term? My class? My boyfriend? How were they all? The weather in London, my friends, my home, she’s covered them all before he comes back with the tray. And she’s asking questions like a quiz show and not waiting for answers, and he’s sitting there looking like some old orang-utan with his big sad eyes, and I'm sitting there in front of the gas fire in the same old armchair with its worn out cushions covered in the same old crocheted blanket.

This is the room I grew up in, just the same as it always was. Dust on every surface, a plate encrusted with baked bean sauce pushed under a chair, Midge’s desk in the corner the tidiest thing in the room, three cardboard folders neatly piled with his laptop weighing them down. And my rusty, crusty old parents. I feel simultaneously, I've come home, and, Oh god, how soon can I get away.

Next morning I sleep late but I'm still up before she is. Waiting up for me will have taken it