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gone? I have been left behind. Maybe Martin
was
my One, and what I experienced when I gazed at my reflection in the bridal shop wasn’t horror, it was nothing more than pre-wedding jitters. It’s a reasonable assumption, as I’ve certainly never met anyone I’ve liked more since. Well, at least not anyone I’ve liked more who has been available and suitable and has liked me back.
    As I sit in the cosy restaurant with my big sister, sipping wine and eating tiramisu, the alcohol sweeps around my brain and shimmers through my limbs, and it strikes me that I’ve blown my best chance,
ever
.
    I’ve urinated on my happily ever after.

Thursday 21 April 2005

5
Dean
    â€˜D o I hate you?’ Dean murmured the question, his lips close to the sleeping old man’s ear. He’d always thought he’d known the answer to this one. For as long as he’d been aware of the question, he’d been sure. Yes, he hated Edward Taylor, known as Eddie. Yes, he hated his father.
    But now?
    Now, when the old man was dying, his breath rasping and lumbering through his heaving chest, his skin grey and waxy like sweating cheese, his eyes closed, Dean was surprised to find that it was impossible to summon up the necessary passion to hate. The wizened old man who slept in the hospital bed looked nothing like the father of Dean’s memories. That man had been virile and healthy. And cruel. The father he remembered had had long raven-coloured hair, almost blue black. This Edward Taylor was practically bald, and the bit of hair that remained was as white as the hospital sheets. Whiter. His head was blotched with age spots; it looked vulnerable.
    Dean seemed to remember that Edward Taylor had always been vain about his hair. He
thought
he could remember that his father had a habit of checking his reflection whenever the opportunity arose: in the hallway mirror, the wing mirrors in the car, shop windows and shiny teaspoons. He was almost sure he could
actually
remember this, but it might have been something his mother or his great-aunt had told him a very long time ago and he’d allowed it to morph into a make-do memory.
    It might have been something he’d made up.
    In the absence of any sort of a reality – a presence, or even letters or phone calls – Dean had resorted to filling in the blanks. He’d done so for many years, and over time, the wishful thinking, the fantasies, the false memories had all solidified and now had a hardness to them that suggested fact. It was tricky to know anything for certain. Edward Taylor wasn’t a presence at all, just an absence. Dean always thought it was ironic that he’d been tortured with feelings of missing an absence. How was that possible? Or fair? He had grown up with no idea whether his father smelt of cigarettes or aftershave. He’d not known if his voice was gravelly, stern or soft. He had only been able to guess which football team he supported. As a boy, he had decided it was Fulham, because all of his mates’ dads supported Fulham. He went through a stage – it lasted two, two and a half years – where he used to avidly watch the Fulham games on TV, scanning the crowds for a glimpse of someone who might, just might, be his dad. He strained his eyes, expecting to see a mop of dark hair, stubble and tight designer cords, even though fashions had moved on and his father, by then, was probably wearing ratty oversized jumpers and ripped jeans in a grungy homage to Nirvana.
    Eddie Taylor had once been so big, broad and strong. Not dependable, never that, but massive. One of the few memories Dean was certain was real was the one where his father’s broad shoulders practically touched both sides of the door frame as he walked out of it for the final time. When he’d opened the door, the orange glow from the street light had flooded into the hallway, splattering across the floor, but then his bulk had blocked out the light