Welcome Home (Kissing Fish)

Dad offered to bring the car to the train station to pick us up, and although it was only a ten minute walk and neither of us had heavy or awkward bags, I said yes. I admit it—I wanted to see my daddy. I loved my mother, but Dad and I had always got on rather better. Probably because he didn’t try to interfere in my life and usually had something nice to say when life looked like shit. And, consequently, unlike my mother, who was probably going to throw a conniption fit, Daddy was unlikely to be distressed by my newly single status. I imagined he’d probably be more upset over the fact that if I moved to Scotland I’d no longer be able to pop home on the weekend to watch the footy with him. Bless.

When Alex and I walked out of the Oxford station, Dad was standing next to the car with his hand shielding his eyes, chatting with the cabbie parked in front of him. When he spotted us, he broke off the conversation and waved. If Mum had been with him, she’d have smacked his arm down and whispered, embarrassed, that people would see. Mum had spent the better part of three decades working out the best way to get ahead without ever having to resort to being common. She’d perfected her accent until no one would ever have known she was from a small village in the north, which was stupid because no one cared. But you couldn’t tell her that. She’d just fuss and go off on a lecture about how the way one presented oneself was everything… And then there was Dad. Dad didn’t care much about what other people thought. He’d have gone for coffee in his dressing gown if he thought he could get away with it.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, hugging him.

“Hello, muffin,” he said. “Let me look at you.” He studied my face for a moment, and then said, “You wouldn’t tip a scale. You getting enough to eat?”

“That’s what I keep asking,” Alex said. “Maybe you can convince her that she doesn’t need to lose weight.” Dad looked up and Alex offered his hand. “Nice to see you again, Mr Plaice.”

“Told you last time,” Dad said, shaking the proffered hand, “it’s Martin. Mr Plaice was my old man and I don’t like thinking I’ve got as old as him.” He frowned. “What are you doing here then, Alex? Not that you’re not welcome, of course.” He glanced at me. “Thought your mum invited you and Nate down. Nate busy again?”

“No, not exactly,” I said, and decided I’d rather Dad knew so at least he might be able to help protect me from Mum’s onslaught when we reached the house. He’d always been pretty useless when it came to relationships, but the one thing he did have going for him was that I was always right and the boy, whoever he was, was wrong. Because I was his daughter. I loved my dad. “We split up.”

Immediately Dad looked worried. “Do I need to threaten him?” he asked anxiously. “I’ve got a bit out of practice the last few years—Mark’s exes don’t need tend to need threatening, seeing as he’s usually the one who breaks things off. Are you hurt? Here…” He patted his pockets and pulled a half-eaten bar of Galaxy chocolate from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. “To make you feel better.”

I laughed and took the chocolate. “Thanks for the offer, but I think it was for the best. I’m not sure Nate would know what to do if you tried to threaten him. Does Mum know you’ve been eating chocolate?”

“No, and you’re not to tell her,” he said sternly. “She’ll tut and walk around for a week giving me disapproving looks and disturbing the football. I can do without.” He turned serious and said, “Muffin, are you okay? You look a bit peaky. Your mum said something about a few weeks ago about a diet—”

“Nate’s been telling her she’s fat,” Alex said, sounding annoyed. “She’s been dieting.”

I glared at him. “Thanks,” I said. “Because my dad really needs to know that.”

He shrugged. “You don’t need to lose weight. Nate, on the other hand, could stand to drop about a stone.”

Dad took my bag from my shoulder and chucked it in the boot, saying, “That man didn’t know a good thing standing in front of him. I might be biased, but I reckon he’s pretty daft to let you go.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” I said.

“Now,” he continued, “your mum will feed you while you’re here, and I’ll sneak you contraband from my super-secret chocolate stash, and we’ll soon have you looking right as rain, yeah?”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, sliding into the back seat and letting Alex have the front; only fair, considering his legs were that much longer than mine. “What’s for dinner?”

“Lamb, I think,” he said, rocketing out of the station and turning left up Botley Road. Progress rapidly slowed, to the extent I reckoned we probably could have walked it faster. Finally he turned left up towards Walton Street and Jericho.

I’d grown up in a three-bedroom house on Hart Street, just the other side of the Oxford University Press and only a few minutes’ walk from the hairdresser’s, a movie hire shop, several restaurants of various ethnic cuisines, and probably half a dozen pubs and wine bars. You know, the important things. Also, it only took Mum ten to twenty minutes to walk (or cycle, if she was feeling particularly Oxfordian) to wherever it was she was meant to be teaching on a particular day. She’d started at Oxford as a junior lecturer about twenty years earlier, when I was still in primary school (before that we were in Leeds and before that Aberdeen, neither of which I remember very well at all and both of which Mum hated), and worked her way up in the following two decades until, at 54, she was a professor of semiotics and one of the leading researchers in her field. No pressure on me, then, as the child following in her academic footsteps—lucky Mark, he still had no idea what he wanted to do and was perfectly happy faffing about from job to job and acquiring useless skills. Dad, unlike Mum, was still working the same job he’d been doing for the last twenty years; longer, actually, since he and Mum had first met when Mum had gone on his show back when they were both at uni.

I always missed home, and driving up in front of the house always made me nostalgic for when I was about 12 and Mum was in her ‘let’s make ethnic food from every country in the world’ phase, meaning you’d never know what was for dinner, and I fancied Tommy Harris from across the street, who at 15 was one of the big boys and who would stop and chat with me when we both got home at the same time, making me feel really special because of course when you were 15 you didn’t have to talk to the 12-year-old neighbour girl. Tommy Harris had probably been my first major crush, one that lasted until I was 15 and he was 18 and he started riding a motorcycle, and I could brag to my friends that I’d actually been on his motorcycle, making everyone jealous of me for about two seconds before Annie Baker revealed she’d lost her virginity to a university boy, which totally trumped anything to do with motorcycles. And then Tommy Harris went away to Sunderland to do International Relations, moved to Malaysia, and I never saw him again. For probably a year every boy I met was compared with dismal results to Tommy Harris, and then Pete Carpenter moved to our school from America and it started all over again.

Dad parked the car in front of the house and opened the door. “Your mum will be pleased to see you,” he said, taking my bag as I passed it to him. I clambered out of the back and stood next to Alex. “She doesn’t like it when you and Mark stay away for so long. You ever want to make her happy, you’ll move right back to Oxford for good.”

I snorted. “Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.”

Dad put on a long-suffering face and added, “And I have no one to chat with about the footy. Your mother never tells me to turn it down when you’re here.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, starting up the steps. “You just want me as a barrier between you and Mum. Hmph.” Laughing, I added, “Stop trying to make me feel guilty, Dad. I shall just ignore you.”

“Cruel, that one is,” Dad said mournfully as he followed me. Alex just smiled.

Mum had never been one to hover by the door awaiting the arrival of family in possession of a key, regardless of how much she purportedly missed us. Instead, she calmly came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, once she heard the door close and the chatter of voices filled the front hall. Classic Mum behaviour. It was like clockwork.

“There you are, then,” she said, holding out her arms and hugging me tightly. She smelled like lavender and onions—the latter, I assumed, from the roast. She gave me a once-over and tutted. “You’re much too thin, darling.”

“Thanks, Dad’s already mentioned.”

“You’re not still on that ridiculous diet?”

“Actually—” I started to say, but she’d already moved on and had spotted Alex.

“Why, Alex,” she said, surprised but putting a delighted smile on her face anyway. “What are you doing here, dear?”

“He’s visiting,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I loved my mother. I really, really did. But sometimes…

Mum looked at me, and then glanced behind us at the door, as though expecting someone else to come sailing through. “But where’s Nate?”

I sighed. “Nate and I broke up a week ago. I’m going to take my bag up to my room, if that’s okay.”

“What?” Mum didn’t quite shriek, but the decibel level was considerably higher than normal. Rats. So much for simple acceptance. I briefly wondered what the odds were of getting biscuits and ice cream and wine out of my mother in commiseration, and decided I’d be better off escaping the initial upset as quickly as possible.

“Alex,” I said, turning to him, “if you want to come upstairs I’ll show you Mark’s room.”

“Emily Rose,” Mum said, her voice rising dangerously as I mounted the stairs with Alex a step behind me, “please explain.”

“I thought I should get Alex settled before we launch into family disputes,” I said. “Do you need help in the kitchen?”

She hesitated, clearly torn between getting the truth out of me at once and taking advantage of my offer of help. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “The carrots and potatoes need peeling.”

“I’ll explain over peeling, then,” I said, and went up the rest of the stairs as quickly as I could, my bag knocking against my knees.

Mark’s room was on the first floor, opposite my parents’ bedroom. When I opened the door it was clear he hadn’t been home in a while; the bed was made and the shelves were dust-free, clear signs that Mum had been in recently. When Mark was home Mum stayed out of his room for a legitimate fear of getting lost in the junk he tended to accumulate.

I stepped aside as Alex came in. “I’ll check that the sheets are clean, but knowing Mum, she probably washed them as soon as Mark was out the door. Sorry about the onslaught.”

“Sorry I didn’t protect you from said onslaught,” Alex said, dropping his bag on the bed and sitting down next to it. “I don’t remember your mother being quite that…er…keen.”

I sighed and flopped down on the bed, dropping my head on Alex’s leg. “You mean intense,” I corrected, staring up at the ceiling, which were still plastered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars from when Mark was 10. “It’s only really when she thinks about the possibility that she could get grandbabies. Or, in the present case, that I might never get married and have kids for her to coddle. Yeah.”

Alex brushed a strand of hair off my forehead. “Why’s she so gung-ho about it? I’d’ve thought that she wouldn’t really care. She’s an academic—surely she of all people would understand the interest in another female academic wanting to pursue a career before starting a family?”

“Hah,” I said, glancing up at him and then looking away. “There’s a couple of problems with that. First of all, Mum’s family is massive. I mean, she’s the second youngest of seven. She grew up surrounded by kids and has spent, I don’t know, the last decade watching her nieces and nephews start to have kids. I think it annoys her, if that’s the right word, that Mark and I have yet to give her small children to spoil.” I folded my hands over my stomach and closed my eyes. “The other problem is that is that she’s always been both an academic and a mother. She married Dad while she was still working on her PhD, and she was still in the middle of it when I was born. And then she got successive research fellowships after she finished her PhD, through the time Mark was born. And then she got the first post at Oxford when I was 7 and Mark was only 2. So I’m not sure she quite understands the whole ‘career first, kids second’ concept. After all, she did both at once and was wildly successful, so why shouldn’t her academic wannabe child be able to follow the same path?”

Alex opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by Mum shouting up the stairs, “What are you doing up there, Emily? Introducing the poor boy to Mark’s rock collection?”

I giggled and whispered, “Remind me to show you. They all have names.”

“Let Alex out of Mark’s room and come help with dinner already!”

“Please, God,” Dad added, “before your mother makes us all deaf with her shouting!”

As the sound of muted bickering drifted up the stairs, I rolled my eyes towards the ceiling and pulled myself into a sitting position. “Time to face the dragon,” I said, and then shouted, “We’re coming!”

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