Page 15 of After the Accident
Mum was sitting at his side and she’d taken his arm out from under the covers. She was talking to him, saying she was there and that she loved him. She was holding his hand, squeezing his fingers and I felt so out of place. I shouldn’t have been there. I had no idea what I could say to him, whether he was awake or not.
Yes, he’s my dad, but I broke a part of him when I broke a part of me. How do you take that back?
I felt out of the moment, distant and detached, almost out of my body.
It’s funny how things like that happen. How you can sit and stare at a problem that never goes anywhere and then, the moment you step away, the answer slips into your mind.
I think that’s probably why I saw what wasn’t there, instead of what was.
Dad’s ring was missing.
Chapter Eight
THE WRONG THING TO SAY
Emma:Mum stared at Dad’s hand and then looked back up to me. She goes: ‘He never takes it off,’ which I already knew. That emerald signet ring was almost the thing for which Dad was best known. If he had to knock on someone’s front door, he’d do it with that ring instead of his knuckles. He sometimes used it to flick the cap off bottles. It was like he’d made it a part of himself.
He had definitely been wearing it the night before because he’d dinged his glass and made that speech.
Mum checked his other hand and then spoke to a couple of people at the hospital to see if Dad had been brought in alongside any other possessions. They said he hadn’t.
I know he’d fallen, but it seems unlikely gravity would be enough to remove a ring from someone’s fingers, which left us both thinking he might have been robbed. That made a lot more sense than him simply falling.
I still had Jin’s card on me, so tried calling the number he’d given. I wanted to tell him about Dad’s missing ring – but there was no answer. I probably tried three or four times, before leaving a message to ask if we could speak.
Jin:I had things to do. There was another big thing happening at that time.
Emma:I left Mum alone with Dad for a bit – but visiting hours were almost over, so it wasn’t long before we got a taxi back to the hotel. Dinner had started, but Mum had asked if everyone could wait for us, because she wanted another group meal.
Julius:The girls were hungry and trying to make them wait for Mum to get back from the hospital wasn’t going down well. It’s partly my own fault for letting them have so much ice cream on the first night.
Emma:Dinner on night two was a lot quieter than night one. Not a surprise after what happened to Dad.
Julius:It helped that Daniel and Emma were at opposite ends of the table.
Emma:Everything was quiet and pleasant. Liz asked something about the possibility of visiting Dad in hospital, but Mum said there were limited slots, so they might as well continue to enjoy the holiday. If it had been anyone except Mum saying it, I would’ve thought it was a little dig about them spending all day at the pool. I don’t think she meant it like that, though.
Liz:Daniel was really worried about Geoff – we both were. We’d have done anything to help.
Emma:Things were winding down when Daniel got up to leave. He held a cigar up in the air as if that explained everything. It was one of those giant Bratwurst-like things, the sort of expensive one you only ever see fat, rich men puffing away. They act like massive dicks, so they might as well practise sucking on one, I guess.
He disappeared out of the restaurant and I didn’t think much of it. That’s when Mum told me I should eat more.
Julius:I heard that. Definitely the wrong thing to say.
Emma:I ignored her at first, pretending I hadn’t heard – then she spoke louder. She said: ‘You got so thin when you went away. You can eat anything you want here.’
Julius:Mum would never say Emma had been to prison. She’d always talk around it, saying she’d ‘gone away’, or ‘had things to do’. That was probably the weirdest. Simone and I were trying to be honest with the girls, but then Mum would say Emma had ‘things to do’ and it would confuse them even more.
Emma:I had a bit of rice on my plate, perhaps some fish. I wasn’t hungry but also didn’t want to argue for a second night in a row, especially in the circumstances. I said I’d had a large lunch, which was a lie, though Mum didn’t know that. There was an irony in that I had been telling her to look after herself, but there she was saying the same to me.
Julius:The girls were excited because Auntie Emma was going to look after them that night. After Simone and I split, I always tried to create events for them to look forward to. When it was my weekend with them, I’d let them know in advance where we were going so they’d want to see me. That holiday was all about setting little goals. They could swim in the morning, go to the beach in the afternoon, or have ice cream in the evening. That sort of thing.
I’d not told them properly about what happened with Dad, only that he’d had a fall and was poorly in hospital. They didn’t know about the coma, or how serious it was. I wanted to keep their minds off it, so that whole day was about the build-up to their evening with Emma.
Emma:The girls were getting more and more excited as we had dinner. One of them would say: ‘Are you going to let us stay up until nine?’ If I said I would, the other would ask if it could be nine-thirty. It probably didn’t help that Julius let them go back for a third bowl of ice cream each.
Julius:When they were two or three, Emma bought the twins a squeaky hippo each for their birthday. Those hippos were so loud, you could hear them through walls. You could hear them in the garden when they were inside a locked house. Emma might have forgotten, but I hadn’t. If the girls wanted three bowls of ice cream, then three bowls it was.
