The Generation Game (36 page)

Helena’s words float before me and I wonder if my mind is playing tricks. Did I really just read that? Bob has sunk into the third deckchair, his head back, his eyes
closed so I can almost believe he is sleeping.

Helena is my sister.

I take a closer look at the photograph, at my real mother, Elizabeth. I can see her hair that has been brushed back into a bun but what I didn’t spot before was the frizzy tendrils that
had escaped. I see her big, wide shoulders and, even though she is sitting down, I know her legs are long. I see the ring on one of her fingers. It is hard to make it out but I know it is the one I
wear on my own finger. The one Bob gave to me on my sixteenth birthday, left behind by Helena.

Helena is my sister.

Why did she want to take me on? She was too young. She couldn’t cope. She should’ve let me go. And why did my real mother agree to it? She must’ve known exactly what Helena was
like. Shoes, lipstick, handbags. Who would she turn to for help?

“Why didn’t Elizabeth just sign those papers?” I ask Bob whose eyes are open now, fixed on the blue sky. A vapour trail. Anywhere but me. “I could’ve had a proper
family.”

“She was your family.” Bob swings his eyes to his knees, rubs his chin so I can hear the scratchiness of the whiskers he has yet to shave. “And what is a proper family
exactly?” he asks, a little philosophically for my liking.

“I don’t know.” I have to think about this. There must be someone I know who has a proper family. “Cheryl’s!” I say triumphantly, like I’ve banged the
buzzer on a television quiz. “Cheryl grew up in a proper family. And look at her. She’s a doctor. I could’ve been a doctor with a family like that.”

“No, you couldn’t,” he says, gently. “You were hopeless at science.”

I remember Nathan and me in the back of Doug’s mini. How he’d lose me with his talk of molecules and genetics. Maybe I should have listened more carefully.

“Can you think of anyone else?”

I couldn’t think of anyone else.

“That’s not the point,” I say, my argument somewhat defeated. “Helena should’ve told me all along. Why pretend?”

“She wanted a new life. She didn’t want anyone to know who you were in case your grandfather came looking. He was a judge. He knew people. He could’ve made her come back to
London. Got rid of you. She loved you.”

“Why did you go along with it? You’ve known for years.”

I can see Sheila biting her lip, clutching you – in your own innocent world, unaware of the drama in the yard, eyes closed, fingers twitching. Sheila grips Bob with an expression that says
quite clearly and simply:
Tell her.

That is when Bob starts crying, right there in the deckchair in the backyard, proper tears, runny nose, the whole works, causing a great big hammer to swoop down from the sky and whack me on the
head… Of course! Oh, God… why have I never seen it?

“It’s you,” I say. “You’re the waiter. The man in the dapper suit. You’re the one.”

“Yes,” he says, rummaging for his handkerchief. “I’m sorry.”

“But how… ”

He doesn’t answer my question directly. Instead, in his own roundabout Bob way, he tells me the story he should’ve told me long ago.

“Helena found me,” he says, as if he were a stray cat, a misplaced pair of white gloves. “Your first day of school, do you remember? She’d got a new job as an admin
assistant at the Palace. Her first day and it hadn’t gone too well. In fact it was awful – she’d had a nasty encounter with one of the managers. But she did have a moment to make
some enquiries, of a woman in the office who’d been there since before time began. She asked about the waiter who’d befriended them all those years before. Elizabeth had told her what
had happened in London and Helena could remember me quite clearly, all that extra ice cream. The woman remembered me too. She came in the shop from time to time and told Helena where to find me. So
she collected you from school and came on down. The moment that shop bell rang and she appeared, I knew there was something special about her. I offered her a job and she accepted.”

“Did you know who she was?”

“I hadn’t a clue. I never guessed in all the years she lived and worked here. Not for one second.”

“So when did you find out? When you buried Andy?”

“No. Actually it was before then. In Canada.”

“Canada?”

“That day I was in bed sick. She called by while you were out shopping. She told me everything. That I was… you know… I was your father. That she was Elizabeth’s
daughter. She said she was sorry she’d never told me. She couldn’t explain why. Who can explain that?”

There was a silence while we both think about this.

“And then, I’m afraid, I made a bit of a fool of myself,” he goes on.

“Oh?”

“You see… something happened… just the once… one night not so long before Orville came to Torquay… ”

“You and Helena? I had no idea… well, I knew you’d always fancied her but Helena… ”

Bob tries to hide his blushes in his hands.

“Well, she was adamant nothing more would happen. That she wasn’t in a position to take up with me. But it was only in that motel room that she told me why. Her mother. Elizabeth.
That she was ashamed. It felt all wrong. Because of Elizabeth. And you. All too messy. The generations mixed up. So she grasped the chance that Orville offered her and she thought she was doing the
right thing by you. Leaving you with your father. But she never said. Never told me the truth. That was her biggest failing.”

“But you didn’t make a fool of yourself. She must have gone along with it.”

“No, I mean in the motel room.”

“What did you do exactly?”

“I told her I loved her. That I’d loved her ever since she came in the shop that day, after a job, with you at her side. I loved you both and I wanted us to be a family. I begged her
to come back to Torquay. To bring Wes. But after my grand speech all she could say was: ‘I can’t leave Orville.’ I did what I could: I protested, digging a deeper hole for myself.
‘He’ll find someone to look after him,’ I said. ‘He’s tough.’ But she said, ‘No, I mean I can’t leave Orville because I love him.’ That’s
what she said. And she killed that small hope I had. That me being your father would be enough to bring her back.”

“So the pills… when we got home… that’s why you needed the pills.”

“I loved her so much. I begged her but she was adamant. She said she could never leave Orville. And nor could Wes. And then I made myself think of Wes. How you and I, we’d seen it
for ourselves, that young lad rushing home from school so his dad wouldn’t be alone.”

Yes, I remembered. A boy in a dodgy hat kissing Orville Tupper on the head, making us coffee, sweet and kind.

You begin squealing, insistently, in a way that can’t be ignored.

“I think she wants a feed,” Sheila says.

I get up and relieve her. You quieten enough for me to hear Bob sniffing. Sheila is watching him, concern in her eyes, as he stands up to his full five foot nine, (I think old age has stolen
that extra half inch from him) but he is looking at me and I hear him say the words I’ve always wanted to hear. Words I’ve always wanted to believe. The impossible is true. It has been
true all along.

“You’re my daughter,” he says.

Later we stand together out in the yard, you and I, while I snip, one-handedly, two roses from Andy’s bush.

“Come on, Miss. Let’s go for a walk.”

I put you in the pram – also donated by Grandma Sheila – and push you up the road past Wink’s old house, past the chippy, to the Bone Yard where I buried the silver jubilee
coin and shared a bottle of Pomagne with Christopher Bennett.

Nothing much has changed. The same yews, cedar and pretty stone church. The granite crosses, the carved angels. They have stopped burying the dead here. Lucas was one of the last to have this
peaceful spot as his final resting place. Peaceful when there aren’t kids playing hide and seek. Though he’d like that. He and Albert Morris. They’d like the sound of
children’s voices bouncing round the graves like a game of pinball.

We find the spot – a little overgrown but not as bad as I feared – and I lay one of the roses down by the headstone. No, nothing has changed. Lucas is still dead. Still
seven-years-old. But I’ve come back, bringing you with me.

“Here she is,” I announce. “Lucy.”

Then I tell him that
Doctor Who
has been resurrected. I tell him that there are stickers and cards and all sorts of TV tie-ins. I tell him about
Blue Peter
– that there is a
myriad of young trendy presenters and it is as good as ever. That there are all sorts of channels these days, even ones devoted solely to children’s programmes. Then I tell him about you.
That I am determined you will lead a happy life. I will make sure of that. I tell him about Helena. I tell him that the young pretty woman who was such good friends with his mummy, wasn’t who
we thought she was. She wasn’t a bad mother, after all. She was my sister. And she loved me. Finally, I tell him about Bob. That he was a waiter in a former life. That he was in actual fact
my father. He was never in the jungle. He was here, in a sweet shop in Torquay, all along.

A shadow falls over the grave. I’ve never been scared here, not since that first day when we thought Albert Morris was chasing us through the giant rabbit hole but I spin round quickly
– just in case.

It is Bob.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For giving up on you. I should never have done that. I could blame the pills – they make you do strange things. But I won’t. I blame
myself. I should’ve told you the whole truth. If I’d done that then maybe you wouldn’t have made such a mess with Adrian.”

“Aren’t I allowed to make a mess?”

He can’t find an answer to that. There is no answer.

“I’ve got Lucy,” I say, after a bit. “She’s what matters in all this.”

“Never forget it,” he says.

“I won’t,” I said. “I’m her mother. I love her.”

We visit Wink’s small memorial stone over in a quiet corner by the wall. Her final resting place is flying with the gulls over the harbour but I lay a rose for her too
and remember her sitting with her gammy leg on my lap, coming home from London in the back of Linda’s Maxi, regaling Larry Facts about his childhood… born out of wedlock… put in
a foster home… and then it comes back to me, the other crucial fact that Wink was telling me, the one I’d blocked from my mind or simply forgotten: He’d been brought up by his
foster sister. A sister who he’d thought of and referred to as ‘Mum’.

My Wink.

I show her you, the jackpot, the one that runs rings around Tiger and Captain. The one that will shine above all others.

“Look what I’ve got,” I say. “Didn’t I do well?”

Two weeks later, Someone Else turns up on my doorstep. Terry Siney. For now, as his letter to me suggests, he is plain old Terry again.

“You never escape your roots,” he says, in his best Brummie accent. “However hard you try.”

“I know,” I say. “Look at me. Back behind the counter serving sweets.”

“You’re my roots, Phil,” he says. “In the words of Barry White,” he sniffs, embarrassed, “You are my everything. You and Lucy, that is.”

To celebrate your first birthday, the fact that your little heart is mending all by itself, we are going on holiday. There is no need for anyone to pop down to the travel
agents in Castle Circus because your daddy gets given free flights all the time as a travel writer, especially one as in demand as him. He has managed to wangle four tickets and – with Sheila
safeguarding the shop, Coco, and Captain – Bob is coming with us. We are going to Canada!

You are not keen on the take-off, grabbing your little ears and squealing. But once we are up there, flying, you are happy on your daddy’s lap, yabbering away to Tiger in
your arms. I even manage to sleep for a bit but dreams of our lost baby tell me this is not a good idea. I need to keep those old useful wits about me for in a few hours we will be in Toronto where
I will see my sister, your Auntie Helena.

It is Bob’s turn to hold you on his lap. He sings you a lullaby, if you can call
Goldfinger
a lullaby. I look at Bob’s fingers and imagine them entwined in
Elizabeth’s hands. Their brief, snatched moments together. My parents.

Like Dick Whittington, Bob went to London in search of gold. And he found it, though he never knew it. Perhaps now, flying over Iceland, he will realise the gold is in his fingers. His
granddaughter.

Oh dear. Tears are waiting just around the corner but now I have Terry who reaches into his pocket for a packet of Kleenex. I will marry this man.

As the sun rises over the Great White North, we suck on lollipops and try to distract you from your ears in the moments of our descent. We are the last to get off the plane;
there is no hurry. We have waited long enough.

Not least Helena, a widow now since Orville passed on a few months ago who, when we finally make it through to Arrivals, is waiting in a wheelchair, a tank of oxygen on one side, Wes on the
other. They brighten as they spot our strange little grouping. Wes pushes Helena towards us and we meet halfway. I bend down to kiss her on the cheek, and I whisper: “Nice to see you.”
“To see you, nice,” she whispers back. And we get a glimpse of how we would have lived together as sisters if that is the way Life had taken us. But instead we are here and there is no
point questioning it. It is what it is.

Wes clears his throat and announces: “Welcome to Canada!” Then he gives me a hug and says, “Good to see you, Aunt Philippa,” which makes me feel all sorts of things like
old, happy and excited to be here.

He is a tall man now and, when he bends down to pick up one of our suitcases to put on the trolley, there is the start of a shiny bald patch on top of his head… so, just for a moment, I
wonder… that night of passion in the shop before Helena met Orville Tupper… is there another secret waiting to be told?

Nothing would surprise me. Nothing in this funny old game called Life.

But the one certainty in all of this is that I want to play the game with these people here, making a riotous noise in the deserted Arrivals hall. As I watch them making a fuss of you, kissing
you and cuddling you, I know that I want to play the game as best I can.