Mum laughs. ‘I see the exact same thing with my Year Elevens, groaning their way through Chaucer. You just know you’re putting them off reading for a good ten years. I almost want to slip a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into their bags to try and restore their faith. I mean, reading is supposed to be fun, for goodness’ sake.’
Daff nods. ‘I’ve started sneaking Patricia Highsmith books into lectures, just to keep myself awake.’
Mum’s eyes light up at this. ‘Oh God, Patricia Highsmith! She’s brilliant, isn’t she? Mad as anything, but still: brilliant. Have you read Deep Water?’
Daff shakes her head, and Mum leaps up from her seat and darts into the living room, sending her voice back through in her absence. ‘It’s my absolute favourite, this one. There’s a chap whose wife is sleeping around on him, and so he starts … Well, no, I won’t spoil it. You’ll have to read it yourself.’
She comes back in, waggling a tattered copy of Deep Water.
‘Here, Daphne, take it with you now. I insist. Early Christmas present.’
Daff laughs. ‘Are you sure? That’s so nice of you.’
‘Yes, yes! I can buy another copy.’ This is typical my-mum behaviour. Most mothers force clumps of foil-wrapped food on their guests; she forces paperbacks.
She sits back down and smiles at me fondly. ‘Ben steadfastly refuses to read anything I give him. He’s far more keen on his mardy books.’
This comment has the effect of making me want to simultaneously laugh and cry, and I have to stuff another salmon square into my mouth to ensure I don’t do either. ‘Mardy books’ was a running joke between Mum and me: the books being the gloomy novels by Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre that began to line my shelves around this time, and the ‘mardy’ being a hangover from her childhood. Mum was born and raised in Sheffield, and when she was in particularly high – or low – spirits, the Yorkshire slang would come tumbling out.
‘Mardy books,’ Daff repeats, grinning at me. ‘I love it. That is Benjamin’s taste exactly.’
Secretly, of course, I preferred non-mardy books. I still do. Adrian Mole and P. G. Wodehouse and Hitchhiker’s Guide and all the other funny, silly novels I fell in love with as a fourteen-year-old. But as a posturing, insecure twenty-year-old, I was tirelessly working to rebrand myself from ‘funny and silly’ to ‘moody and interesting’. And the best way to do that, I reasoned, was to have a mardy book poking out of my jacket at all times as I swanned around campus. Who exactly this was supposed to impress, I have no idea. Possibly Marek and Alice (who, to be fair, did seem quite impressed). Definitely not Daphne (who on one occasion removed a Kierkegaard paperback from my pocket and whacked me over the head with it).
Mum and Daphne are both smiling at me fondly now, giggling at my purported mardiness. I imagine that when this moment happened first time round, I probably found it slightly patronising – like I was a dog that had just performed a trick for them or something. But right now, it fills me with a happiness so intense that I almost feel drunk on it.
The two of them always got on well, right from the start. They spoke on the phone more and more regularly over the years, chatting away about books and telly and things. Now, as I return Daphne’s smile, I suddenly find myself wondering how Mum’s death must have affected her. She loved Mum too, I know she did. And yet after she died, I don’t think I ever even asked Daphne how she was coping or if she was OK. I didn’t once try to go through the grief with her; I just let it push us further and further apart.
Mum turns to Daphne and asks: ‘Has Ben let you read any of his own stuff?’
‘Not yet, no,’ Daff says. ‘I’m always on at him to.’ She shoots me a mock-pissed-off glare, and I’m not quite sure how to respond to it. I was always a bit shy about people reading my stuff, even in the early days. Probably because, deep down, I was worried they would compare it – unfavourably – to my father’s.
Mum’s giving me the mock-annoyed look now too, her mouth set squarely in a pouty frown. ‘Oh, well you must read some of it at some point,’ she tells Daphne firmly. ‘He’s brilliant, just brilliant.’
Even through the insane joy of seeing her again, I feel a familiar prickle of irritation. Firstly, I’m not brilliant, and secondly, Mum hasn’t read a single thing I’ve written since about Year 10 at school.
This was something that really got to me over the years: Mum’s pig-headed insistence that I was something more than mediocre. I always wondered what on earth she based it on. The fact that I’d won a couple of creative writing competitions at school? Maybe it’s just a trait all parents have; you can’t accept that your kid is no good, because that would mean there’s something wrong with you too. Even after all the rejection letters I received, and my so-called career spiralling down the toilet, she would still tell me again and again how brilliant I was. It used to infuriate me.
In fact, it’s what led me to say those terrible things to her before she died. She was just being supportive and kind, and I threw it all back in her face. I feel the guilt of it churning in my chest again, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop the tears coming back. I took it completely for granted that she would always be there: my mum, fighting in my corner. And then one day she wasn’t, and everything seemed to collapse as a result.
I guess at this point, though – 2006 – I didn’t need anyone fighting in my corner. I was still pretty confident that I was some kind of genius-in-waiting. If I remember rightly, I was spending all my non-seminar hours writing a long, sprawling, entirely plot-free novel that was so meticulously ripped off Samuel Beckett it might as well have been labelled ‘fan fiction’.
Not that I realised it at the time. The future still seemed bright and full of possibility, and I knew that even if this book didn’t make things happen for me, sooner or later something else would. Back then, I assumed I had enough of my father in me to be sure of that.
I watch Daphne smiling as she flicks idly through the Highsmith novel. I can’t remember how much I’d told her about my dad at this stage. Not that much, I don’t think. She’d asked me about him, of course, and she knew he wasn’t around. What more was there to say? He’d left when I was ten, and the number of times I’d seen him since could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. I guess I didn’t talk to Daphne about him because I didn’t want to seem wimpy and pathetic: a twenty-year-old man who still hadn’t got over his dad leaving. I didn’t want Daff to pity me.
Obviously, though, she knew all about his work. Pretty much every student on our course did. While he wasn’t quite established enough to be an actual part of our modules (that would’ve been too awful to imagine), he was still regarded as one of the coolest modern British playwrights around. In Sunday supplements, his name was thrown about regularly as a potential successor to Pinter and Tom Stoppard, so any reference to him in a lecture or seminar would send every head turning my way.
They weren’t to know, I suppose, that I had no sort of relationship with him at all.
Looking back now, I can see that that’s what all the mardy books nonsense was really about. Throughout this whole period – late teens, early twenties – my idea of him was in constant flux. One minute I hated him for leaving; the next I desperately wanted his approval. Just before I left for uni, I’d come across an interview with him in a newspaper in which he cited his five favourite books – every one of them unmistakably mardy. Without even thinking about it, I’d ordered the lot. I still can’t explain why. Did I really expect to bump into him randomly in the street, with one of them poking out of my pocket? Probably not. But it was always a possibility.