‘I’m only going out for some bread,’ he said, my Uncle Anthony. ‘I won’t be long. It looks like rain. I’ll be back before it starts. I won’t bother with my mac.’
Here, take Tommy with you. He hasn’t been out all day.’
Tommy went reluctantly, holding back as Uncle Anthony put his arm around his shoulder and ushered him out.
And so they went, out of the ramshackle door and down the slippery metal steps of the barely watertight caravan we lived in: my mum, my dad, my baby brother Tommy who was thirteen, me, Lisa, a year older than Tommy, and our cousin Jackie all jammed inside this metal box that held every smell, every groan, every desire fulfilled or not, every moment of hoped for privacy in its thin, tinny clutches.
Even though I knew no better, I knew it was a miserable life. There was nothing to commend it— travelling from place to place, being hounded wherever we stopped, feeling forever dirty and unwashed. I never went to school, my Uncle Anthony took charge of our education. He’d never been to school either, but he could add up in his head and knew how to control dogs. He used to sit the three of us together on the bed we all slept in and drill us in adding up. Tommy was best and quickest and when Uncle Anthony shouted out random numbers to add up he was always the quickest and if there was any dispute about the answer and uncle Anthony had to fetch my mum in to decide, Tommy was almost always right.
That was an age ago—a lifetime, nearly thirty years. It all seems like a dream now—a dreamworld of faces, and voices, enclosed space, and numbers and answers. That day, the day that Uncle Anthony and Tommy went out in the dry to fetch bread was the last time I saw either of them. They never came back. It started to rain—it thundered, there was a terrible storm. We all lay in the bed, shivering as rain oozed through the loosely panelled ceiling of the caravan. I remember gaping up at it, watching the wetness spreading across the plywood sheeting, finding the joints, gathering in sopping, swollen corners before dripping down into the crumpled dirty blankets that lay heaped up in shabby mounds around us. Mum worried about where Uncle Anthony and Tommy had got to and every so often got up, went to the door and opened it against the wild wind that blew in heavy, noisy blasts against the aluminium side panels of our caravan.
‘Anthony! Tommy! Anthony! Tommy! Anthony!’
But there was no reply—no returning figures battling through the rain, striving for the sanctuary of home. I missed them both so much, with only loosely assembled rumour and suspicion providing only feeble answers for their disappearance.
A few days later, taunted as always by locals and this time harassed by the police, we moved on.
And now, all these years later, I find myself living in a small room, my daughter and me sleeping together in the bed that takes up most of it. I try to do things that allow me to think my life has got better, but it’s difficult to feel convinced. I brought up Rose, my daughter, by myself. And she’s not easy. They say she’s got a disease that makes her act compulsively—ordering things, worrying about things being in the right place. It’s a nightmare. How can things be in the right place in this miserable room where there’s hardly enough of a gap around its edges to walk let alone keep things neat and orderly? Sometimes, Rose throws a sort of fit—frustration, her doctor says, but to me, it’s a fit. She shouts and throws things and launches herself across the bed, red faced and in an unstoppable and angry tantrum. When she’s like this, I have to leave her, and come back later when she’s calmed down. I can do nothing else. I don’t know what her future will be? She says she wishes she had a dad. I tell her that maybe one day he will find her.
I always wanted to better myself. I paint when I can, but I can’t get new paper. I collect wallpaper from houses that are being renovated and are left open while building work is going on. The paints I use I collect from tins thrown out by decorators. Some of my paintings I really like. I push them under the bed to store them. They make the room smell until they dry out properly. The smell makes Rose angry. The ones I don’t like, I paint over then use again—some of these are really thick.
A month ago, I managed to get a part time job—ten hours a week, cleaning in a local bed and breakfast.Three days ago I got paid, I went into a fish and chip shop, hoping they might have something I could afford. It was sticky and smelly inside, but I appreciated the warmth. I waited in a slow-moving queue, trying to work out the prices of things—I was mumbling the calculations aloud.
‘Six and two is…’
All of a sudden, I hesitated for the answer. It was as if I’d been frozen in time. I remembered being tutored by Uncle Anthony all those years ago. ‘Six and two is…’
‘Eight,’ chimed a man’s voice behind me in the queue.
‘Eight,’ he said again.’Eight!’
I turned. Straightaway, I knew who it was.
‘It’s, it’s…It’s Uncle Anthony!’
There was a pause. A rent in time. I was flung back to that day he and Tommy disappeared into the night.
‘It can’t be…You can’t be…’
He stared at me. He obviously knew me. And I obviously knew him. But, for me, recognition wasn’t enough for understanding.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lisa, it’s me, Uncle Anthony.’
I fell against the counter. For a few seconds, everything was spinning. I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it.
He put his hand on my shoulder, in the same way he’d put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder the night they’d walked out of that dilapidated caravan.
‘Where have you? Where is Tommy? Where—?’
‘Lisa. I can hardly believe we’re meeting like this. And at such a sad time.’
‘What do you mean?’ I stuttered. ‘Sad time?’
‘Lisa, I’ve just come from a funeral. Tommy’s funeral. He died hardly two weeks ago.’
I fell against the counter again. I couldn’t speak. I tried to picture Tommy’s face in my mind, his presence, his closeness. But it had gone—there was nothing there to find.
I pulled myself away from the counter, pushing Uncle Anthony’s hand from my shoulder, filled with anger, and questions I didn’t even want to ask, knowing that now I had to go back to Rose to tell her that I’d just found out that my darling baby brother, Tommy had died, and that now she would never know her father—that now, he would never be able to find her.
