He pulled his left arm to his face, far closer than it needed to be, and squinted at his empty wrist. He repeated the same movement with the other arm, discovered there was no watch on that wrist either, and shook his head.
“Where’s your—?” I bit off the question before it reached completion. Because I already knew the answer. Or at least the range of answers. Either he’d lost it while he’d been too drunk to know what was going on, someone had stolen it while he’d been in the same condition, or he’d swapped it for alcohol. “I got you that watch.” I had, figuring there wasn’t a human alive, no matter what state they spent most of their time in, that didn’t deserve to know what time it was. I should probably be grateful it had lasted six months. That was three months longer than the previous one.
“Sorry, son.”
It shouldn’t grate when he called me son. It was, after all, an indisputable fact. And not just because of him calling himself my father, but for the similarities we shared: the dark hair and the similar shaped nose and chin. But it did. It grated a hell of a lot. “It’s four in the morning.”
“They raided the house.”
“The squat, you mean?” I’d tried putting him up in a flat, but it had gone the same way that trying to help him put his life back together always did: it ended in disappointment, and in me taking out loans that took forever to pay back. His shrug said that whether he paid rent was of little to no consequence. “What were they looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some idea. Drugs? Weapons? A sex-trafficking ring?”
“I don’t know.”
Giving in to the inevitability of what was about to happen, I swung away from the door to leave a clear path. “Of course, you don’t know. You don’t care about anything except where your next drink is coming from.”
My father came in and shut the door behind him. He didn’t have a bag with him, so I dreaded to think where his belongings were. Best-case scenario, they were back at the squat and he’d be able to retrieve them once the police had finished with it. Worst-case scenario, they’d gone the same way as the watch. “That’s not true,” he said. “I care about you.”
The words followed me into the bedroom as I grabbed bedding from the closet. Facing away from him gave me valuable seconds to close my eyes against the resultant bolt of pain. I counted down from five slowly before turning back to the living room. I dumped the bedding on the sofa and set about making it into a makeshift bed. “If you cared about me,” I said, “you wouldn’t do this.”
“Do what?”
There was a whole multitude of answers I could give to that. “Turn me into the father. I always thought that one day I might have to look after you, but I figured we had a few decades before we reached that point.”
“Look after me?” My father snorted. “Don’t exaggerate. I’d hardly go that far.”
My fingers curled into my palms and I did my best to breathe through my rising anger. My father wasn’t nearly as drunk as he could be. Probably because of the night’s drinking being cut short by the police. I doubted this was the first place he’d come looking for a bed for the night. It was likely the trouble with the police had happened much earlier and everyone else hadturned him down. Unfortunately, experience had taught me that midway between sober and drunk was when our interactions were most likely to blow up into something ugly.
“I got out of bed in the middle of the night to let you in, didn’t I? I didn’t tell you to fuck off.”
“You wanted to. I could see it in your face.”
“I’m making a bed for you to sleep in, aren’t I?” My father mumbled something, the words too indistinct to make out. I didn’t ask him to repeat them. Experience told me they were probably inflammatory, and I was better off not knowing. “You need to take a shower.”
Looking slightly wounded by my edict, my father lifted his arm and took a long sniff of his armpit. His realization was in the lack of an argument.
“Leave your clothes outside the bathroom door, and I’ll stick them in the machine.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
No, I didn’t, but I would. “Use anything you want in the bathroom. Shampoo, shower gel.” I flicked a glance at his beard growth. “Razor.”
He set off toward the bathroom and I studied him from behind, trying to work out if he was even skinnier than the last time I’d seen him. “What have you eaten today?”
He turned back, his brow creased in concentration. “I don’t remember.”
Which meant he’d eaten nothing substantial, surviving on just a liquid diet. “I’ll make you something while you shower.”
“Thank you, son.”
I gave a silent laugh as he continued to the bathroom. “Yeah, this is me not looking after you,” I said to the closed door.
I put potato and leek soup on to heat, and cut half of a loaf of bread into thick slices, slathering them with butter. By the time I’d added crisps to a bowl and put the kettle on to boil to maketea, my father’s clothes were outside the bathroom door. I picked them up gingerly, praying they contained nothing more sinister than dirt and grime, and shoved them straight into the machine on a wash/dry cycle that would have them ready to go when I kicked him out in the morning. Because I would kick him out. That was an indisputable fact. If his squat was no longer viable, then he’d need to find another one. I’d tried having him live with me once and it hadn’t ended well.
My father looked far better for the shower when he came out of the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around his waist: his cheeks bearing some color, and his hair much less greasy. He smelled better, as well. I regarded him silently from a distance as he consumed all the food I’d put out for him and drank all the tea in what seemed like just a few swallows.
