‘I thought I’d find you hereabouts. This is the third place I tried,’ he said, sliding into the booth, awkwardly shunting himself round till he was at right angles to her, close enough to touch if either of them had a mind to.
‘I wasn’t ready to face an empty flat.’
‘No, I can see that. What did they have to say?’ His craggy face screwed up in anxiety. Not, she thought, over the consultant’s verdict. He still believed his precious son was somehow invincible. What made John anxious was her reaction.
She reached for his hand, wanting contact as much as consolation. ‘It’s time. Six months tops without the transplant.’ Her voice sounded cold even to her. But she couldn’t afford warmth. Warmth would melt her frozen state and this wasn’t the place for an outpouring of grief or love.
John clasped her fingers tight inside his. ‘It’s maybe not too late,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll -’
‘Please, John. Not now.’
His shoulders squared inside his suit jacket, his body tensing as he held his dissent close. ‘So,’ he said, an outbreath that was more sigh than anything else. ‘I suppose that means you’re going looking for the bastard?’
Wednesday 27th June 2007; Glenrothes
Karen scratched her head with her pen. Why do I get all the good ones? ‘Why did you leave it so long to try to trace your father?’
She caught a fleeting expression of irritation round Misha’s mouth and eyes. ‘Because I’d been brought up thinking my father was a selfish blackleg bastard. What he did cast my mother adrift from her own community. It got me bullied in the play park and at school. I didn’t think a man who dumped his family in the shit like that would be bothered about his grandson.’
‘He sent money,’ Karen said.
‘A few quid here, a few quid there. Blood money,’ Misha said. ‘Like I said, my mum wouldn’t touch it. She gave it away. I never saw the benefit of it.’
‘Maybe he tried to make it up to your mum. Parents don’t always tell us the uncomfortable truths.’
Misha shook her head. ‘You don’t know my mum. Even with Luke’s life at stake, she wasn’t comfortable with me trying to track down my dad.’
To Karen, it seemed a thin reason for avoiding a man who might provide the key to a boy’s future. But she knew how deep feelings ran in the old mining communities, so she let it lie. ‘You say he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. What happened when you went looking for him?’
Thursday 21st June 2007; Newton of Wemyss
Jenny Prentice pulled a bag of potatoes out of the vegetable rack and set about peeling them, her body bowed over the sink, her back turned to her daughter. Misha’s question hung unanswered between them, reminding them both of the barrier her father’s absence had put between them from the beginning. Misha tried again. ‘I said -’
‘I heard you fine. There’s nothing the matter with my hearing,’ Jenny said. ‘And the answer is, I’ve no bloody idea. How would I know where to start looking for that selfish scabbing sack of shite? We’ve managed fine without him the last twenty-two years. There’s been no cause to go looking for him.’
‘Well, there’s cause now.’ Misha stared at her mother’s rounded shoulders. The weak light that spilled in through the small kitchen window accentuated the silver in her undyed hair. She was barely fifty, but she seemed to have bypassed middle age, heading straight for the vulnerable stoop of the little old lady. It was as if she’d known this attack would arrive one day and had chosen to defend herself by becoming piteous.
‘He’ll not help,’ Jenny scoffed. ‘He showed what he thought of us when he left us to face the music. He was always out for number one.’
‘Maybe so. But I’ve still got to try for Luke’s sake,’ Misha said. ‘Was there never a return address on the envelopes the money came in?’
Jenny cut a peeled potato in half and dropped it in a pan of salted water. ‘No. He couldn’t even be bothered to put a wee letter in the envelope. Just a bundle of dirty notes, that’s all.’
‘What about the guys he went with?’
Jenny cast a quick contemptuous glance at Misha. ‘What about them? They don’t show their faces round here.’
‘But some of them have still got family here or in East Wemyss. Brothers, cousins. They might know something about my dad.’
Jenny shook her head firmly. ‘I’ve never heard tell of him since the day he walked out. Not a whisper, good or bad. The other men he went with, they were no friends of his. The only reason he took a lift with them was he had no money to make his own way south. He’ll have used them like he used us and then he’ll have gone his own sweet way once he got where he wanted to be.’ She dropped another potato in the pan and said without enthusiasm, ‘Are you staying for your dinner?’
‘No, I’ve got things to see to,’ Misha said, impatient at her mother’s refusal to take her quest seriously. ‘There must be somebody he’s kept in touch with. Who would he have talked to? Who would he have told what he was planning?’
Jenny straightened up and put the pan on the old-fashioned gas cooker. Misha and John offered to replace the chipped and battered stove every time they sat down to the production number that was Sunday dinner, but Jenny always refused with the air of frustrating martyrdom she brought to every offer of kindness. ‘You’re out of luck there too.’ She eased herself on to one of the two chairs that flanked the tiny table in the cramped kitchen. ‘He only had one real pal. Andy Kerr. He was a red-hot Commie, was Andy. I tell you, by 1984, there weren’t many still keeping the red flag flying, but Andy was one of them. He’d been a union official well before the strike. Him and your father, they’d been best pals since school.’ Her face softened for a moment and Misha could almost make out the young woman she’d been. ‘They were always up to something, those two.’
‘So where do I find this Andy Kerr?’ Misha sat down opposite her mother, her desire to be gone temporarily abandoned.
Her mother’s face twisted into a wry grimace. ‘Poor soul. If you can find Andy, you’ll be quite the detective.’ She leaned across and patted Misha’s hand. ‘He’s another one of your father’s victims.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Andy adored your father. He thought the sun shone out of his backside. Poor Andy. The strike put him under terrible pressure. He believed in the strike, he believed in the struggle. But it broke his heart to see the hardship his men were going through. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and the local executive forced him to go on the sick not long before your father shot the craw. Nobody saw him after that. He lived out in the middle of nowhere, so nobody noticed he was away.’ She gave a long, weary sigh. ‘He sent a postcard to your dad from some place up north. But of course, he was blacklegging by then, so he never got it. Later, when Andy came back, he left a note for his sister, saying he couldn’t take any more. Killed himself, the poor soul.’
‘What’s that got to do with my dad?’ Misha demanded.
‘I always thought your dad going scabbing was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’ Jenny’s expression was pious shading into smug. ‘That was what drove Andy over the edge.’
‘You can’t know that.’ Misha pulled away in disgust.
‘I’m not the only one around here that thinks the same thing. If your father had confided in anybody, it would have been Andy. And that would have been one burden too many for that fragile wee soul. He took his own life, knowing that his one real friend had betrayed everything he stood for.’ On that melodramatic note, Jenny got to her feet and lifted a bag of carrots from the vegetable