From: [email protected]

Hi,

Just wondered if you’d noticed this place has an 88% ‘Terrible’ rating on TripAdvisor? Is it the worst restaurant in the city?

Someone should write it up! I don’t know if your critic has been.

Best,

Another Unsatisfied Customer

13

I remember once asking: ‘Am I in a very very slow motion tailspin?’ to Esther, after my quitting the Kilner jar hipster hellmouth, and her saying: You’re more like a Roomba, Gog – bumping into walls, pinging back and carrying on.

I think she and Mum ceased trying to understand me when I announced that university wasn’t for me, and in my vehemence, made it clear this was not for discussion. They suspected Dad’s death had caused a confidence prolapse, of course, but I built a wall around that conversation and put armed guards on the perimeter.

We went out for a French meal for my thirtieth birthday and the air of concern and disappointment over the rillettes and boeuf bourguignon was tangible. My rootless, directionless twenties were up, and none of us could pretend this wasn’t me any more.

I’m not the greatest at facing things. I’m certainly not the kind of constructive-minded, pragmatic person to think: Oh I’m psychically disintegrating like wet bog roll draped round a tree for a student prank, I should see a counsellor. Let’s investigate what the accredited options are within a two-mile radius and book an appointment. And then turn up for it.

That’s not how I ended up in Fay’s office.

Eight years after what a consultant called my dad’s ‘sudden and terminal cardiac event causing severe neurological insult’ (‘His heart went bang and so his brain cut out?’ ‘Yes, pretty much’), I was telling my then-new friend Rav about him.

The night we met, Rav wore a slim-fit, acid green shirt that looked wonderful against dark espresso brown skin, and had a slender face and beady eyes like a watchful bird. I found Clem’s all-back-to-mine soirees a bit too full of poseurs at the time, but I knew fairly quickly that Rav – they met when he was another dandy-ish customer at Clem’s boutique – was a keeper. He’s flip and humorous and light and then he’ll slide in some articulate, devastating insight that you find yourself turning over when you’re lying in bed trying to sleep at night.

At the time, I was working at a nightclub called Rogues where I got pawed at by drunks and I had painkiller injections in my feet so I could stand for hours in four-inch heels. That might be my worst job to date, and it’s up against stiff competition.

Without intending to, I mentioned in passing how I still dream about my dad every night. (Georgina Horspool in full party mode.)

‘Every night?’ Rav said, hunched forward on the saffron-velvet sofa at Clem’s, effortfully making himself heard over Goldfrapp. ‘Every one?’

I belatedly remembered I was talking to a professional shrink.

‘Well, a lot,’ I said. ‘I don’t keep a notepad by the bed and keep a tally. Dad, dad, dad. Naked, late for a bus, my teeth rotted away. Caught stealing a leg of lamb from Morrisons. While naked. Dad again.’

‘You could benefit from counselling. However, if I hear “naked with my dad” next you move into a much more expensive client category, be warned.’

I laughed. Rav always takes risks like this yet they’re finely calculated. I love this about him. You’d think with his expertise he’d be super-cautious and worthy but it’s the opposite. He goes there. But he packs the right shoes.

I explained the contradiction that although Dad was always in my thoughts (another posthumous platitude that had come to life for me, if that’s not the wrong term), I couldn’t bring myself to visit the grave.

As I spoke, Rav’s forehead became ever more creased until he said: OK I’m not treating you because it’s not ethical and it’d make you feel awkward, but you’re going to see my colleague, Fay, and I’m going to book you in. Rav was obviously very good at his speciality: he’d sussed otherwise I’d take her details and never do anything about it.

‘I’m not sure I want to wank on about myself. What do my problems matter? Plenty of people have lost a parent,’ I said, as Rav keyed my number into his phone.

‘Don’t be so bloody British,’ he said. ‘This country. We’d rather quietly kill ourselves over something than be any bother. Not that I’m suggesting you’re suicidal.’

I went to Fay for a year and she helped a lot. Enough that I lay flowers at Dad’s headstone now on his birthday. I have a quiet chat with him – if there’s no one around in hearing range – and pat the cold curve of the laser-engraved graphite. I gaze at those implacable start and finish dates, that I wish I’d been warned about.

It’d be very useful if everyone in your life could supply those. You could pace yourself.

Death is on my mind still, a week after Danny’s wake. And I have nothing to do until Devlin does or doesn’t call me (yes I could be proactive and start putting irons in fires elsewhere, but then I’d not be a Roomba), plus the aftershock slump of seeing Lucas McCarthy, and Lucas McCarthy not seeing me, has plunged me into a mule-ish funk.

So I buy a bunch of £4.99 gaudy lilies the colour of Turkish Delight from the supermarket (‘To moulder on a plot of land a mile away? You are odd. That’s the price of two pints you’re wasting. Just swipe some from an accident blackspot,’ – Make Believe Dad) and walk to Tinsley Park cemetery. It’s well populated, if that’s the word, and I have to wander quite a way to find Dad.

I like moody old headstones covered in emerald lichen, with dates from the 1800s and families taken by the scurvy. Modern, gleaming ones make me nervous.

When I reach JOHN HORSPOOL, the monument to the fact it actually happened, I feel the puckering of stomach.

I ponder the hypocrisy of the words engraved on his stone: Beloved Husband, Father And Brother. Two out of the three aren’t true.

After the funeral, Uncle Peter couldn’t have returned to Spain any faster if he’d used Floo Powder. I could hear Dad making some sarcastic aside about how he was a man who lit up a room by leaving it.

His put-downs about the dourness of ex-pat Uncle Pete – ‘He’s as welcome as finding cat shit in your house, when you don’t own a cat’ – always made me shake with laughter. Then as soon as the thought occurred, it was followed by the realisation that I’d never hear his voice or his opinion on anything ever again. Make believe was all I had left forever. Pastiche, weak riffs based on nostalgia, a pale imitation. I was so bereft, it nearly made my knees buckle.

I said to Clem, two years after he was gone, it didn’t feel real. I was constantly waiting for it to fully dawn on me, for the other shoe to drop. She lost her dad when she was fourteen. We’d met in a McDonalds at 1 a.m. when she was being hassled by a dubious man and Jo and I had intervened and invited her back in our taxi. We ended up eating quarter pounders at mine and having more drink we definitely didn’t need.

Clem said: ‘I don’t know what to tell you, George. It never feels real or finally sinks in. That moment never arrives. The world continues, but with a bit always missing. And meanwhile you’re getting on with it, until it’s found.’

This makes sense. Everything feels temporary now. Because it always was, I just didn’t know it.

I clear my throat, glance around: ‘Hi, Dad.’

‘That’s us up to date then,’ I mutter, feeling foolish, despite my evident solitude in the flat landscape, headstones like rows of dominoes into the horizon. I look up, as if a drone might be hovering nearby, picking up any of my banalities.

I mentioned, in low tone, meeting Lucas, how he was someone back in the day I’d hoped to introduce to him. And the departure of Robin. I try to picture whether Robin would’ve been received any better by Dad than he was by Esther and Mum. My gut says: Dad would’ve tried harder, seeing what I was aiming for, but come to the conclusion that I’d missed.

My fingers have gone numb, still holding the crush of cellophane from the now-unwrapped flowers, and I shove them alternately in my pockets. Make Believe Dad: Why are you in that thing the colour of dentist’s mouthwash? It looks like you murdered a Muppet.

‘See you when you don’t turn sixty-five, I guess. I’ve discussed it with Esther and we’re going to bring Milo to that one. So no blue language or downing Rusty Nails.’ His Christmas tipple. Another sharp blade in the stomach. I lurch forward to prop the flowers against his stone, wave with one hand and give a weak smile.

Mum won’t visit the grave. Esther and I have our theories about her reluctance.

I’m stumping towards the exit when, unbidden, a thought rears up and confronts me.

It’s like Oscar the Grouch hidden in the garbage can, flopping two tufted green paws over the edge and shooting up, beetling browed and googly eyed: It’s been a week, you can stop waiting for Devlin to ring you now. You IDIOT.

I pause, stare across the field of gravestones as if they literally contain this unwelcome truth in their earthy depths, then slam onwards.

Rejection on this occasion was always going to cause existential feelings. Yet something makes me sad, aside from the fact that Lucas McCarthy didn’t remember me and/or intervened to block my path, and suggested I was best fitted to serve sticky ribs and wings while wearing a vest and orange shorts.