The girls had scattered, and he’d taken me by both arms. ‘Are you all right, Evie?’
I put down my knitting and looked at Miss Dawson. ‘I suppose we were close,’ I said. ‘We didn’t see much of each other at school. But, when I needed him, he was always there.’
I laid my lightest clothes—a couple of cotton shirts—across the top of my suitcase, then sat on the bed, pushing myself back against the pillows. My wine glass was almost empty and I upended it now, making a full mouthful of the final dregs. It was late and my body ached for bed, but my mind was buzzing. The phone call with Mum replayed in my head. My dad was dead! Still the news, half a day on and having been repeated ad nauseam on the phone to the airline, to my boss, was too big to take in; it was like it had happened to someone else. It was the plot of a book I’d read, or a movie I’d seen. It was not my life. I knew sleep wouldn’t come.
Instead, I grabbed the house keys and stepped outside. The night-time air was fragrant with the scent of hot vegetation; of plants still cooling down from the warmth of the day. I inhaled frangipani, my favourite scent, with a top note of jasmine from the bush next door. Breathing deeply, I got a waft, too, of chlorine from the neighbours’ pool.
Slipping quietly through the gate, I waited for a gap in the beach road traffic. Cars swept past me, a blur of lights and noise after the silence of my room. Taxis carried tourists to and from their late-night dinners, bars and entertainments. Eager, sunburned faces peered out at the sights; others went past with their occupants slumped, dozing, in the back. It seemed rude, disrespectful for life to continue when my father was dead.
‘My dad’s dead,’ I said into the night air, to the road, the cars, the tourists and the taxis. ‘Have a lovely evening.’
It sounded weaker than I’d imagined. I said it again, louder, to the next car: ‘Have a great evening. My dad’s dead.’
A taxi beeped, its brakes screeching as the driver slowed, keen for another fare. I saw a gap in the traffic and ran across to the island of the central reservation and stood there, sheltered by the traffic light. Sensing I was a little unhinged, I didn’t trust myself to find another gap in the traffic and waited, instead, for the green man.
On the other side, I ducked down a side street between a beauty salon and a dental clinic and picked my way down through the lanes of fishermen’s houses to the beach. The sounds of the main road receded and soon all I could hear was the scrunch of my flip-flops on the dusty street, the sound of my own breathing and the thrum of my pulse in my head. ‘Dad is dead. Dad is dead. Dad is dead.’ I broke into a run to try to make it stop, and, not too soon, there was the beach opening out in front of me: an expanse of moonlit sand, bookended on the left by the Burj Al Arab and contained in front by a low wall. Tonight the hotel had its diamonds on: a twinkling display of lights that shot up and down its spine and belly. I stopped short, realising with a jolt that Dad would now never see this sight; that there were so many things he’d now never see. I watched through one full set of the light show then I climbed over the wall and walked towards the ocean, kicking off my flip-flops and seeking out the cold under-layer of sand with my toes.
The sight of the sea, as always, calmed me. Sitting on the last edge of warm, dry sand, I stared at the water and breathed in time with the hypnotic oohs and aahs of the waves swishing in and out. The tide was receding and each wave seemed to take the sea farther away from me, a fringe of seashells marking its highest point. I looked up at the sky and wondered what happens when you die. Could Dad see me? Was he up there somewhere now, looking down on me? Had he known he was dying? Did he think about me before he died? When his life flashed before his eyes—did it even really do that?—what did he see? What was his last thought about me?
Did he even have a last thought about me?
You should have come to Dubai, I said silently to the heavens. I wanted you to come so badly. My hands formed a steeple as if I was praying and my eyes searched for the constellations Dad had shown me how to find back in the summer evenings when we were still happy: the Plough, the Little Bear and Polaris, Orion. Tonight, as usual, all I could make out above the glow of Dubai’s neon skyline was the Big Dipper and the North Star. I needed Dad there to show me the more subtle connections between the other stars. Where are you? I asked the sky.
Would Mum be all right?
She’d sounded all right on the phone but … I shifted as a shiver rippled through me. I hadn’t spoken to Miss Dawson for years now but I still remembered the last conversation we’d had about Mum.
‘She’s like an iceberg,’ the counsellor had told me. ‘She lets you see only the top layers, the top ten per cent. If that. There’s an awful lot that goes on beneath and you’ll never see that.’ She’d noticed, then, the sadness I couldn’t hide. ‘It’s not just you, pet,’ Miss Dawson had added. ‘She’s like that with everyone. Since the accident, she won’t let anyone get close.’
And now what, I wondered. My mother was all I had left, and she was the mistress—the guardian—of The Gap. It was as if she held everyone at a distance; she didn’t want to let anyone get close to her again. We wrote each other a daily email but Mum’s emails were reports of golf scores, of choir practice and of what she was cooking for supper; they could have been written by anyone. They were information bulletins, memorandums that revealed nothing of the woman underneath. They weren’t designed to keep me close. My mum hid emotion. She didn’t reach out. She skated the surface of our relationship with prim and proper etiquette but no depth whatsoever. Mind The Gap.
In my replies, I echoed Mum’s style. We exchanged huge quantities of useless information in a literary ballet that meant little. I wrote about work achievements and new restaurants, trips to the beach and what my friends were up to. I’d tried in the past to talk about more real things; about how being with James made my blood fizz; how he looked at me like he wanted to devour me. Is this love? I’d asked Mum. Did you feel this way about Dad? How do I know if he’s The One? But the replies came back as dull as the church newsletter. ‘Your friend sounds nice, dear. Did I tell you that I’m playing a new course next week?’
By the time I was starting to sense trouble with James, I’d learned that, beyond platitudes, I wouldn’t be getting emotional support from my mum: I’d be getting a new lamb recipe and what her choir was singing for the forthcoming summer concert. In our warped relationship, it was I who took care of her.
Miss Dawson had said it was a defence mechanism. ‘Your mother’s “gap” has become a part of her,’ she’d said. ‘It helps her define who she is. She doesn’t know how to fill it.’ Then she’d smiled sadly at me. ‘You’ll get closeness one day, Evie,’ she’d said. ‘From a partner; a husband; children.’
I still felt protective of Mum, though. As an adult, I felt it was my job to look after her and the question that bothered me now, sitting on the beach, was of what lay below Mum’s gap. Had she really managed to freeze her emotions, or were they still bubbling beneath? I pushed my toes into the cold sand below the surface and wondered if, as far as Mum was concerned, Dad’s death would be the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.
Just over twenty-four hours after I first spoke to Mum, at what was quite likely the highest point of the bleak afternoon, my taxi pulled up outside
