Page 98 of Merrily Ever After
Eventually, breathless and weak with laughter, we dropped back down into chairs.
‘That was good fun,’ I said, panting. ‘I haven’t danced for ages.’
‘Not even on your hen night?’ Emily gave me a mischievous look.
‘What happens on the hen, stays on the hen,’ I laughed, tapping the side of my nose.
‘Merry is getting married, Dad,’ she said, handing Ray his hot chocolate before it got cold.
‘Sam’s girl?’ Ray’s voice was sharp. He stared at Emily and then at me.
Emily gasped softly and I felt my chest tighten with hope.
‘I’m Merry, Ray,’ I said in a wobbly voice, ‘Sam was my mum.’
‘I loved Sam,’ he mumbled, before swallowing a mouthful of his drink. ‘Hated seeing her living rough. Some of us can hack it, but not Sam. I used to give her money, so she had enough for a hostel. You could have a shower, get a meal and a bed for the night. I wanted us to be together. Properly. But she wouldn’t let me. Said she couldn’t do love. She was wrong though, because when the baby came, she loved her. No doubt about it.’
‘You mean me?’ I seized on his words, wanting to hear him say it.
‘Course I do.’ He set down his mug. There was a brief spark of recognition in his expression and my eyes filled with tears. ‘You’re Merry, aren’t you?’
I nodded, momentarily speechless. I quickly got the photograph out of my bag and pushed it across the table to him. ‘This was me as a baby, with you at Christmas. Thirty-five years ago.’
He picked it up and looked at it. ‘Handsome bugger then.’
‘What was I like, as I baby?’ I probed gently, eager to hear about my childhood, something I’d been deprived of for so long.
He chuckled, his eyes not leaving the picture. ‘Like a little monkey. You had no fear, climbing up onto chairs, sliding down off them again. Your mum said she woke up once and you were sitting in the kitchen sink playing with the cups. You weren’t even two.’
‘I’ve always been a bit of a risk-taker,’ I said to Emily, smiling through my tears.
Each snippet of information was like a drop of water on the lips of someone who’d been lost in the desert forever. I wanted to hear more, I wanted to raid his memory banks and record it all so that one day I could pass stories of my childhood to my own children.
‘You told Emily that Merry is your daughter. Ray?’ I swallowed. ‘Is that true? Are you my father?’
Ray didn’t react, he looked lost in a world of his own.
I held my breath and Emily reached for my hand. I was on the verge of repeating the question in case he hadn’t heard me when he nodded his head slowly.
‘One day I went to meet her at our usual place in the park. She didn’t come. I asked around, but no one had seen her. I looked everywhere. I even went to the hostel she used when she had the cash, and they checked the hospitals for me. She’d just vanished. I kept waiting, but she didn’t come back, not for over a year. Worried to death, I was. By then I was applying for jobs and housing and doing my best to get off the streets. Then she turned up one day pushing a pram.’
‘Sam had had a baby?’ Emily drew in a breath.
Ray nodded sadly. ‘That’s why she disappeared. She told me she had a flat, she’d got her life sorted and she didn’t want to be hanging out with tramps. She meant me; she was right. My hair was long and dirty, my shoes were two sizes too big for me and I probably stank. She lookedbeautiful and her hair was shiny, her fingernails were clean. The baby girl was only a couple of months old, tiny with a little wrinkled face. All wrapped up in blankets. The two of them were perfect. I felt ashamed.’
‘Oh Dad,’ Emily murmured, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Ray looked so downtrodden as he was speaking that I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t dare, not just yet.
‘I asked her if I was the father, but she said no. I didn’t believe her; Sam wouldn’t have been with anyone else, she wasn’t like that. She just said it to keep me away. Her own father had knocked her and her mum about. She didn’t trust men, didn’t want a man near her baby. I could understand that.’
‘Did she have anyone looking after her when she’d had the baby, Ray?’ I asked.
Ray shrugged helplessly. ‘Doubt it.’
I closed my eyes. She’d been eighteen by then and alone in the world except for a newborn, scared to trust other people. My heart broke for her all over again.
‘It was seeing Sam with that baby that made me sort my life out. It took me a few months, but I did it. I cleaned myself up, got a job, got a room in a house-share and went to see her and the baby. Christmastime it was. I’d met Tina by then and she was pregnant with Emily. I didn’t cheat on Tina, I just wanted Sam to see that I wasn’t a dirty tramp anymore.’
