Holly Challenger read English at Cambridge University. She is a Civil Servant and lives in London. Her short stories have been published in The London Magazine and Popshot. She is currently working on her first novel about a woman investigating why her troubled mother fled Northern Ireland in the 1970s. 

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Hook and loop

The train to Scarborough is packed. In every carriage, people stand in the aisles swigging cans of beer and balancing laptops over the heads of seated passengers. Jack and I are sitting on our bags in the vestibule, a dirty black ligament dislocated from the rest of the train, lurching around a mind of its own. 

We’re going to see my father. It’s been over a year since my last visit. Usually I dread seeing him, scratch for any excuse not to come. But since we started trying for a baby something’s shifted. I’ve found myself thinking about his face, the lines on his hands, and felt an urge to come home. I booked the train tickets the first day I realised my period was late. That was two weeks ago. I’ve been scanning my body for signs ever since, not daring to find out for sure. I finally bought a pregnancy test in the Boots at the station, hiding it up my sleeve as I walked out the door. 

As the black floor beneath me bends and contracts, I try to hold myself as still as possible, propping one hand on the toilet door to keep myself steady. I’m trying to protect what might be growing inside me, my leg muscles tensed like a surfer waiting for a wave. 

I never thought I would actually get pregnant. It felt prewritten in my body, in my narrow hips and irregular cycles. Now that I am, or might be, I’m not sure how I feel. I find myself thinking about the potato fields that surround my father’s house. How at this time of year the tubers lie loose on the freshly churned ground, bone-pale against the black soil. 

I glance at Jack on the floor next to me. He’s playing one of those gambling games on his phone, his knee jiggling wildly. He looks up and catches my eye. I give him a weak smile. Usually I rely on him to untangle my thoughts, but I haven’t told him about the pregnancy yet. I know as soon as I do this cold muddy feeling will be taken away from me. He’ll replace it with something clear and simple like happiness. (He’s so good at happiness). And this moment will no longer be mine. 

I stand to stretch my legs. The sight of the Humber out the window tells me we’re close. 

***

There’s no sign of my father at the station. After twenty minutes, I call the house.

‘You never said you needed a lift.’

‘Sorry, I thought it was implied.’

‘Can’t you get the bus?’

‘They discontinued it, didn’t they? Didn’t you tell me that last year?’

The conversation makes me worry about what kind of state we’ll find him in. I’m reminded of my trips home from university, how I’d find him slumped in his reclining chair, hair unwashed, staring at the blank television. 

We wait under a large oak tree by the side of the road. A formation of migrating geese passes above us. 

‘Where have you gone to in that head of yours?’ Jack says, rubbing my lower back, ‘you seem so far away.’ 

I bury my face in his down jacket and think about how I’d like to be inside the lining, encased next to his chest, cushioned by tiny white feathers.

***

At the house, my father shuffles around in a pair of dirty Ugg boots, making tea in the dark. I turn on the lights in the living room and notice the lop-sided sag in the sofa cushions and a large brown stain on the carpet.

‘Turn that light off!’ he calls from the kitchen. 

Jack looks at me, bemused. 

I shrug and do as I’m told. 

‘That could be one less coal power station switched on,’ he says as he comes in with the tray. 

We sit in the dark nursing our cups of tea. 

‘It’s good to see you again, Paul,’ Jack says. ‘You keeping well?’

My father grunts. 

‘Suzie mentioned you’re doing an OU course?’

‘Gave that up ages ago.’ 

This is probably the longest conversation Jack and my father have ever had. They met two Christmasses ago when my father came down to London. But he claimed to have a cold and spent most of the time in bed. When he did emerge from his room, he seemed not to notice Jack at all. He kept stepping out for a smoke every time either of us tried to engage him in conversation.  

‘Everything alright with the house?’ I ask. 

‘Fine,’ he says, necking his scalding hot tea in three mouthfuls. 

I wade through the rest of the evening, beginning to regret coming back. My father says little, the occasional one word answer. Jack retreats to the glow of his phone. I keep going, asking about the neighbours, his walking group, but he doesn’t answer; my questions hang in the room and then fade into the shadows of the furniture. My father’s silence is like the sea, it’s been slowly eroding me away my whole life. Over the years it’s collected inside me, like bubbles in a piece of pumice rock. After a couple of hours in his company I feel like I’m barely here at all. 

***

‘I’ve done the bed up for you in the back room,’ my father says. 

We say goodnight and carry our bags up the stairs. The room’s just the same: all of my mother’s paintings on the walls, her desk and easel just as she left it. 

‘Is this by – ?’ Jack stands in front of a drawing of Flamborough lighthouse, the waves crashing onto the rocks below it. The picture, drawn in white pastel on pale blue paper, used to be one of my favourites.

‘They all are,’ I shrug, pretending not to care. 

‘Weird he’s kept it all in here. What’s it been, fifteen years?’

He flicks through a rack of drawings in the corner, then holds out a charcoal portrait of me as a child. ‘Is this you? You haven’t changed.’

I nod and get into bed.

As I lie awake, I think about the day my mother left. Or perhaps it was some days before. What must have been weeks or months has boiled down to this one image. I am in my parents’ bedroom, standing by the window. My mother is somewhere behind me, by the door or sitting on the bed. The curtains are drawn despite the bright sun outside. The fabric is Laura Ashley – navy blue with a gothic floral pattern. Pink English roses. I bury my face in them as she tells me she’s leaving, getting a place of her own. 

‘Are you listening to me, Suzie? Mummy’s going away. We’ve discussed it and think you’re better off staying here.’

I nod, press my face against the fabric and stare at the pinpricks of sunlight poking through it. 

After that, my father withdrew into himself. His sadness lay across my childhood like a weighted blanket, muffling everything beneath it, including me. I left as soon as I could, applying for university as far away as possible, finally able to breathe, to sing at the table, to throw balls inside, to make mistakes. I have rationed my visits ever since, worrying about being pulled down by it again. 

***

I do the pregnancy test while Jack is still sleeping, creeping across the landing and slowly turning the lock in the bathroom door.  I pee on the stick, then climb into the bath and sit, fully clothed, in the dry tub. I place the test on the edge by the tap, not daring to look at it before the full five minutes are up. Around me are the familiar sounds of the house. The cacophony of sparrows that nest in the eaves. The clank of the pipes. The low murmur of the radio in my father’s room. 

In the minutes while I wait for the result, I find myself hoping for it to be negative. I cannot see a picture of myself as a mother. In all our prospective family photographs, Jack is the perfect, ever-patient father and I’m just a black silhouette. 

I glance at the test. The result is positive. There’s still two minutes on the clock, but I’m guessing that line doesn’t just disappear. 

***

My father has us in the garden doing jobs.

‘You might as well be useful while you’re here,’ he says as he rummages for something in the shed. 

He’s looking eccentric this morning in a purple baseball cap and turquoise moth-eaten jumper. He emerges with a stack of small brown envelopes, the kind he used to give me for my school dinner money, and hands us a dozen each. 

‘Right, follow me; we’re harvesting seeds this morning.’ 

The garden is wild, parts of it overrun with brambles and nettles. We follow him down the brick path that snakes down the middle.

‘What’s this?’ Jack asks, pointing to a tall purple flower. 

My father turns around. ‘Verbena,’ he says, looking surprised. 

Jack asks another question, then another. Gradually my father names all the plants around us: Fennel, Calendula, Japanese anemone. They get into a conversation about the benefits of planting with the lunar calendar, how the sap in the plants rises with a waxing moon and falls towards the roots when it wanes. With each question Jack asks, my father’s back straightens slightly, his voice gets louder and more certain.  

‘You must collect your own seeds,’ he says, ‘it’s so so important. Climate adaptation must be our number one priority as gardeners.’ 

Jack nods attentively, scribbling it all down in his notebook. 

‘You know,’ he turns to Jack, ‘it’s nice to talk to someone who’s interested in all this.’ 

They both look at me. 

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘She was always holed up in her room. I could never get her out here like this.’

‘Well, I think it’s fascinating,’ Jack says. ‘My parents don’t know any of this stuff.’ 

My father’s face brightens. 

Next, we’re instructed to eat a nasturtium seed, crouching down to find the small green balls on the ground, which resemble miniature brains and burn like wasabi in my mouth.

‘Pickle them and they’re basically capers,’ he says. 

I’m trying to remember a time when I’ve seen him enthuse about something like this before. There were weeks of dark moods, anger that spat and slammed. But never this. 

His lesson continues. Burdock seeds are an excellent example of one type of seed dispersal strategy, he tells us, pressing some into my hand.  I stare at the spiky brown balls and close my fist around them, enjoying the prickle and scratch on my skin. Spittle flies out of his mouth as he talks about the helicopter spin of the sycamore seed, the weightless parachute of the dandelion head. A sadness comes over me as he explains a seed’s main purpose is to get as far away from the parent plant as possible. He and Jack meander back towards the house, stopping to examine a raised bed along the way. I stay behind, staring at the burdock seeds in my hand. They’ve managed to fix themselves to me, their needles burrowed under my skin. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to put distance between myself and my father. Space away from him felt vital for me to survive. Now that space feels a lot like emptiness. 

I find myself wondering what kind of mother I’ll be and whether my child will fight to get away from me the same way I have done him.

***

‘Are you going to tell your dad about the new job?’ Jack asks. 

I make a face. 

‘Why not? He’ll be pleased. Proud of you.’ He takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘I know I am.’ 

‘Nah.’ I retrieve my hand and pull down the sleeves of my old hoodie I found in our room. I feel more comfortable wearing it than any of the clothes I brought with me. In this faded blue jumper with its frayed sleeves, I’m not the person who earns a six figure salary and owns a flat in a leafy London suburb. Who rings her father once a month and forgot his birthday last year. In this jumper, I haven’t left him yet at all.  

‘I don’t get it, why you never share good news with him.’

‘Because it’s just easier. Good stuff is a trigger for his moods, if he feels other people are doing better than he is.’

‘So, remind me, what can we talk about?’

‘Anything you like.’

Jack rolls his eyes. ‘You know, I think he deserves more credit. You’re always saying he’s depressed, but he seems fine to me.’

‘Can we do this later?’ I point to my father, who is slowly making his way towards us, trying not to spill the full pint glasses in his hands. For a moment, I see him the way he used to be, before depression lapped at his feet. All corduroy trousers and tweed jackets. Everyone knew him, had been taught by him at some point. The changes in him since my last visit seem more pronounced here in front of other people. I notice how much smaller he’s become; his clothes are baggier around the shoulders. And when he lifts his glass or rolls a cigarette, there’s a tremor in his left hand. 

***

‘What’s going on?’ Jack yawns.

‘Shhh!’

I’m standing in the middle of the bedroom in my underwear, straining to hear sounds of my father. As I lay in bed, it occured to me the house was oddly quiet; he would normally be up by now, clattering around the kitchen, watching morning television. 

‘You’re weirding me out, Suze.’

‘Something’s wrong. Why isn’t he up yet?’

Jack rubs his face with his hands and lets out a low moan. 

‘What if something’s happened, what if he died in the night?’

‘He’s probably just having a lie in.’ He pulls the duvet around him and turns away, facing the wall. 

I start to shiver, my teeth chattering uncontrollably, and retreat back to bed, wrapping my cold limbs around him like a sea creature on a rock. We lie in silence for a few minutes.  

‘He never has lie ins,’ I whisper.

‘Ugh, I’d just drifted back to sleep.’

‘He’s gotten up at 5am every day of my fucking life.’

I’m picturing my father’s body in various painful positions on the bedroom floor, his legs folded under him, his neck snapped back, his mouth slightly open. 

‘Why don’t you go and check on him?’ Jack untangles his legs from mine.

In an attempt to regulate my breathing, I sit up and put my head between my knees. 

‘Can you do it?’

He sighs, throws on a t-shirt and strides out the room. 

 

Minutes later he is beside me again, trying to find me under the sheets and my tangled hair. 

‘I found him sitting up doing crosswords in bed,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to get this sorted, Suzie. Counselling or something.’

We rarely argue, but when we do it usually comes back to this: the issue of ‘working on oneself’. He’s from one of those families where practically everyone’s in therapy. I marvel at how much they each have to say about themselves; their love and hate and anguish flows out of their mouths like coloured ribbon. Whenever Jack asks me to speak to someone, I dig my heels in, claim I’m not built like him. 

‘I got worried for a second; I’ll be fine.’ I say, blood pounding in my ears. 

He shakes his head as he pulls on his jeans.

‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Keeping up with all this.’ He gesticulates towards me. 

I take a deep breath. ‘I didn’t hear anything from his room. He’s getting older… I got worried, that’s all.’

‘One minute you’re complaining you hate it here, saying you find him unbearable, the next you think he’s died in his sleep. I don’t know what’s going on with you.’

‘You didn’t have to come.’

‘You asked me to! Made me take two days off work and all.’

He looks out the window for a moment, then comes and sits down beside me. 

‘You’ve got to see it from my point of view. Having to reassure you and calm you down all the time. I wasn’t prepared for it this morning.’

‘I never asked you to calm me down, you’ve just always done it.’

He stares at me, incredulous. ‘You literally just asked me to go and check if your father was still alive.’

I open my mouth to defend myself, but he is out the door, pulling on his jumper as he goes. 

***

In the kitchen my father is stirring a saucepan of porridge on the stove. Jack sits at the table, tapping at his phone. I take a seat opposite, touching his knee with mine in greeting, but he doesn’t look up. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmur. 

He ignores me. 

My father sprinkles brown sugar onto three bowls of porridge and carries them to the table. We eat in silence and for once I don’t try to fill it. If my father notices something’s wrong he doesn’t let on. After we’ve finished eating, he goes out into the garden and leaves us in the kitchen. 

Jack announces he’s going for a walk.

‘Alone,’ he says, placing his bowl in the sink. ‘I need to clear my head.’ 

He’s already pulling on his boots, tugging tightly at the laces. I try to put my arms around him, but he shrugs me away. 

‘Don’t be mad at me. I said I’m sorry.’

‘You’re hard work, Suze – has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Just the right amount of hard though, right?’

‘Can you not – can I just be pissed off for a bit?’

 

I sit back down, watch him walk out the door. Outside, there is the sound of my father’s spade crunching through gritty soil. I stare at the air in front of me, my hands getting cold. After a while I get up and slice an orange on the chopping board. First, I cut off the top and bottom, then carve away all the pith and skin. The juice seeps into the gashes in the wood and stings the cuts in my hands from the burdock seeds. Taking the bald fleshy ball in my hand, I fling it at the kitchen wall and watch it explode, bits of juice ricocheting satisfyingly onto the window, the fridge, the floor. The mark it leaves looks like an exploding sun. I hoist myself up onto the worktop and sit and stare as it gradually changes shape, bits of it running down the wall and drying into a shiny star-shaped stain. 

I stay like that until my father is standing in the doorway again, eyes flitting between me and the kitchen wall. I start to cry.  

Without saying a word, he wets two sponges and, together, we scrub it all clean. 

***

‘How long are you going to stay?’ Jack leans against the shed door. A morning sea mist has cast the garden in white. From where we stand in the far corner, I can barely make out the house. 

‘I’m not sure. A few days?’

‘Is this because of yesterday? Because -’

‘It’s not.’ I don’t try to explain that I suddenly can’t bear the thought of leaving my father.

‘You’re definitely coming back though? Cos otherwise, I’ll have to come and drag you out of here’.

‘Definitely.’

I planned on telling him about the pregnancy before he left. This moment of quiet, a black bird perched on the wall behind us, is the perfect opportunity, but I don’t take it. 

***

The path down to the beach is steep and partially disintegrated. The wooden steps that used to be here have broken away and the earth they once held in place has slipped down the cliff. Directly below us is the beach, miles and miles of perfect golden sand. This path has always thrown me. Something about the incline, the drop of the sea right in front of you, gives me vertigo. My father is waiting for me further ahead, looking disappointed in my slow progress. 

After mum left, we did this walk every weekend. I think my father didn’t know what else to do with a nine year old girl. Every Saturday we put our boots on and walked down the lane until we saw the sea. His moods at that time were unbearable; nothing I did was ever right. He was worse in the house. But when he saw the cliffs, something in him loosened and gave way. I used to try to make us stay out for as long as possible, begging to walk all the way out to Filey Brigg, just to postpone the time when we’d have to go home, and the silence of the house would envelop us again. 

He watches me now as I progress slowly towards him, navigating the uneven ground. He holds out his hand to help me down the final bit and, still holding hands, we navigate a patch of boggy ground together, our boots squelching in the mud. 

Finally: beach. 

Endless endless beach. 

We walk for hours, the sand replenishing before us like a conveyor belt. The size of it, the lack of landmarks, erases any sense of scale, of progress. 

It’s odd. Despite all the sadness there is here, all the memories of long walks in the rain, I find myself thinking about wandering along this beach with a baby in a sling. Then a rosy-cheeked toddler holding my hand, scouring the shore for shells together. It’s the only thought about being a mother that I feel sure about, that feels right. 

My father sticks out his elbow: our signal to link arms. As we walk back, he does most of the talking, asking me questions as though I’m a stranger he’s getting to know:

‘Now I can never remember, do you like marmalade? I’ve got a jar of homemade stuff back at the house.’

‘What’s the name of the minister you work for? I don’t suppose he lets you take much of a lunch break.’

 

***

On my last day, my father insists we try to see the Albatross, which has been blown off course and returned to the local cliffs for a second year. ‘Albert Ross,’ he calls it, his moustache twitching. 

‘It’s the only Albatross in the Northern Hemisphere,’ he boasts as we trudge, arm-in-arm, down the road to the cliffs. 

We wait on the viewing platform for over an hour, the wind filling our jackets. He scans the cliffs for the giant bird, but I’m mesmerised by the gannets perched on the high chalky cliffs. I watch one below me as it prepares for flight, pushing out its chest ostentatiously and then letting itself fall, catching the wind and gliding low over the water. 

I turn my attention to my father. He looks relaxed out here. His cheeks are ruddy with the wind and his creamy-white hair is the colour of the gannets circling out at sea. For the first time in a  long time, I am breathing deeply in his company. I think about all the worry I’ve carried for him and wonder if I can finally let it go. 

‘You seem in a good mood today, dad. Happy’.

He turns to me and smiles. ‘Do I? Yes, I suppose I am. I’ve been having more good days of late.’ 

The cloud above us is thinning, moving quickly with the wind. My father returns his gaze to the wobbly line of the cliffs, his eyes disappearing into a squint. With a new lightness in my body, I tell him I’m pregnant. My voice gets thrown about by the wind as I explain that I’ve known all weekend, but have been letting it sink in. He is staring at me open-mouthed and then he is pulling me towards him, wrapping his arms around me. 

‘That is the best news I’ve had all year,’ he whispers in my ear.

We stand like that for a long time, the daring birds swooping around us. And as I bury my head in his jacket, I notice it’s covered with dozens of ladybirds.