65. Before

After enduring another term at Port Emblyn School, David Beaufort-Bradley turned up at Trevethan and told me he'd decided I was going to leave and never come back, and could I please inform my father. As an afterthought he picked up a shovel leaning against the wall and smashed the window next to the door with its heavy brass head.

When my dad came home, he looked at the broken glass and asked if I liked the sound of London. I suspect David had also talked to the head at PES, because apparently Dad had had a call pointing out that as my mother was no longer a teacher there, he would have to start paying fees.

The bullying had stopped, but by then it was unnecessary. Everyone in sixth form had been interviewed by the police, and while I think the Beaufort-Bradleys had done their best to sweep everything under the carpet, the line of questioning had made quite an impression.

I couldn't understand why my dad had sent me back there, or why we were still in Port Emblyn. When he asked about London I was so filled with rage that I thought I might burst into flames. But I simply looked him in the eye and gave him a flat, ‘Yes.'

I enrolled in a normal state school, where I was bullied for being posh and smart, and my dad's career blossomed. He wrote the music for a wildly popular stage adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that seemed to miss the point that it already was a satire.

Then there was the whole John Lewis thing and a string of gigs through the National Theatre and then he could walk into just about any bar in Soho and get his drinks for free.

I'm not saying I never saw him grieving. I heard him crying sometimes when he thought I was asleep. But once we got to London, it was like he'd neatly put the whole thing behind him.

He liked to have parties at our new flat, another loan from some other patron, all white columns and filigree ironwork and chequerboard tiles on a curved street in Little Venice.

‘Blackbird! Come sing!' he called to me once, as I hurried away from all the laughter and music and glittery women. He was strumming his guitar and I wanted so much to join him that tears sprang up immediately.

But I would happily cut off my nose to spite my face when it came to my dad, so instead I snuck into his music room and found one of his favourite records and scratched a nail across it, wondering when this little gift would be discovered.

I attempted suicide three times. The first two I had my stomach pumped and my dad told me off for partying too hard, so the third time I used a razor and they had to harvest veins from my legs to fix me.

Dad asked if I needed to take a gap year before uni to ‘level out' and I asked him what he thought, and he looked at me like I was a fly. I moved out the moment I got my university offer, and between then and the call from the hospital that brought me back to Port Emblyn, I spoke to him five times.

Boo hoo.

But yes, boo hoo. Maybe you know someone who had it harder. Maybe you had it harder. But still, my dad let me down at an unforgivable time and it's 10,000 per cent valid for me to be angry about all of it. I was a child.

Whatever your situation, seventeen is still a child. If you don't agree, you're in denial. Or you're seventeen.

It took me a long time to recognise that my dad was only human, that he'd been struggling with my mother's death too, however it seemed, and that he'd not known what to do with me. He'd barely been a parent up till that point, spent half the year away and then only got involved with the fun bits – picnics, parties, performances. Then suddenly he had full responsibility for a grieving teenager.

I'm not excusing it. He should've tried harder. But how he reacted wasn't so unusual, or unpredictable. He wasn't evil. Useless, but still, not evil.

And on my forty-fifth birthday I finally googled how to find a real boyfriend one lonely night and somehow got sucked down a wormhole that farted me out on a planet where the only way forward was to forgive my father.

People are so obsessed with forgiveness. As though there's nothing so bad that you can't hug it out and move on. As if what's really wrong with the world is not all the people fucking things up but the people who can't get over it.

And when you're lonely, because you simply cannot forgive and you simply cannot get close to anyone, it's nice to think all you have to do is knuckle down to the hard work of rewiring yourself completely. If the problem is you, then you can fix it, right?

And Dad was all I had left. And time was running out. And I started to allow myself to think about sitting on his lap at Trevethan House, his chest warm on my back, as his fingers ran across the piano keys and his music held us close and still.

He taught me how to sing like that. When his mood seemed right, I would sneak into his annexe and he'd run through scales with me, grinning as I pushed myself to reach the high notes and giggling with me as I pulled faces to go down low. We would sing doing the washing up after breakfast, in the car on the way to the beach.

I remembered one morning, creeping into his bed and him looking at me through one eye, half-awake, fully hungover. ‘Sing little blackbird,' he'd said, holding onto my foot as if it were a lucky charm. I'd snuggled close into his warmth and sung in my softest voice ‘Blackbird' by The Beatles and he'd joined in, low and gravelly, and the perfection of our mingled sounds seemed like a fairy tale. I closed my eyes and saw a tiny bird tweeting in the branches above a rushing stream.

‘My darling girl,' he'd said.

He had made me, and only he would ever be able to truly see me.

When he wasn't home, I would fill the house with song and still feel close to him. He had to go to London, to Dublin, Edinburgh, because that's where his work was.

Why hadn't we lived in any of those places? I asked Mum once and she told me that she wanted me to grow up by the sea, and we were very lucky to be able to live in Trevethan House, such a grand home, which was owned by one of Dad's friends.

I think I understood even then that the real reason was because my dad needed to escape; that this was the compromise, if my mum and dad were to stay together. We could have him, so long as he could have his freedom.

And as I drove back to Port Emblyn, I asked myself if that was really so bad. My parents had been best friends since they were three years old. They had never been together, not officially, and when my mum had found herself pregnant at twenty-eight with his baby, he had convinced my mum that he had always, always loved her.

But he hadn't. I think he was just trying to do the right thing.

Not evil. Just useless.

‘Forgive me, Gee. Please forgive me,' he said when I arrived, his eyes meek, uncertain.

I kissed his lined forehead and wiped the dried spit from around his mouth and held his tumbler of water to his lips.

I hadn't sung since the day my mum died, but that night I held his hand and let my voice drift from lyric to lyric of half-remembered songs, a nineties RB Songs of Praise mash-up, and I felt all of my anger starting to seep away.

Without it I felt like a deflated balloon, limp and empty.

What had I made of my life?

Every day after teaching at Port Emblyn school I would go to visit him in his new home, a gated estate of serviced bungalows with nurse visits three times a day, activities in a community centre, a church and, no joke, a pub.

I would do my marking, writing elaborately kind comments in the margins of Jenna's essays, while he watched old films and documentaries about musicians.

On Wednesdays I would walk him down to bingo and help him mark his card, and we'd talk about musicals with Gladys, the woman who lived next door to him and kept her hair dyed a deep red.

On Fridays I would take him to the pub and he would play the piano, his fingers remembering the tunes even if his lips didn't always remember the words. Sometimes, I even sang and watched the eyes of all of those sad, dying people light up, as if they were young again. It's one of my special powers.

Every now and then my dad would start to tell me a story about him and my mum, getting lost at a zoo on a school trip, revising together at uni, dancing in a London club, but he would always falter, meandering away from the punchline, giving way to coughing fits and misty-eyed, middle-distance staring.

It was four months after our reunion that I came into his house to find him on his mobile phone. I hadn't known he even owned one, and he was speaking as if he hadn't had a stroke, hadn't lost half his mind to dementia, didn't live in a soft cloud of nice memories and swelling music.

‘Now why would you want to do that?' He nodded as he plucked some dry leaves from a peace lily on the windowsill. ‘No need, no need. And you'll be done by when? Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Good man. Yes. Perfect. Thank you.'

He hung up and smiled at me as I stood in the doorway.

‘Gee Gee,' he said, holding open his arms so I could walk into them.

‘Who was that?' I asked.

‘The electricians.'

‘What electricians?'

‘Coming to fix the electrics.'

I frowned. Oakridge was kept in immaculate condition. ‘Dad, I think someone else handles these things.'

‘Not this place,' he said, like I was mad. ‘Home – Trevethan.'

I held myself back. ‘Oh, Dad,' I said. ‘Trevethan hasn't been our home for thirty years.'

‘Well, it bloody has since I paid two point five mill for it.'

‘You what?'

‘Why do you think I came back here? A weekend visit?'

I stared at him. I'd only asked him twenty separate times what he was doing back in Port Emblyn, how long he'd been here, where he'd been staying.

‘You bought Trevethan?' Surely, this was fantasy.

He started picking at the yellowing leaves again. ‘Sometimes I wished we could just shut the doors and never leave.'

I watched him, wondering if that were really true.

‘But when did you buy it?'

He shakes his head. ‘After the Moondance money came through.' It was a musical that had been made into a Hollywood film.

‘What, three… four years ago?'

He shrugged. I'm sure I saw the moment he stepped from this world back into his cloud again.

I took his phone and called back the last number and they confirmed they'd been booked for a job at Trevethan. I started explaining about my father's illness, that I didn't think he even owned the house in question. But the man on the other end said he'd been there to do an assessment, that my dad had let him in, that they'd had a lovely chat about the Buffy musical episode his daughter had made him watch many years ago.

I know I should have been thinking about the shock of him owning the house, of the possibility of seeing it and going in again. But what I was really thinking was: two point five million? So that's how well he's been doing.

Still, after saying goodnight, I drove straight there. It was so strange to think my dad actually owned it now. I'd never lived anywhere that wasn't borrowed or rented.

The old harp sculpture was mottled orange with rust, and long grass tangled its strings. Some windows showed spider cracks and the brick looked dark and tired, and I could see the slates were sagging in the middle. One of the old green gutters was dangling off the roof, over the porch.

Someone had clearly been doing work in the garden. An enormous bucket sat under the old beech tree. Inside it lay what must once have been a mound of weeds but was now a dense, shrivelled mat. A shovel and a rake stood by the back door. On the picnic table sat a trowel, a rag and a yellow mug I recognised from my childhood.

I started to piece together the day I got that call from the hospital. They'd said he'd had a stroke in BQ. Dad must've been sorting out the garden, sipping tea while cutting back roses and pulling up nettles. He must've realised he needed something – twine, bamboo – and left his mug here on the table because he wasn't going to be long, and then he must've driven to the shop and there the world had seemed to slip and he had fallen to the floor.

I walked all the way round the house, my heart aching at the thought of him floundering in the aisle between fertiliser and novelty gnomes. He had been all alone. All these years, I had never pictured him alone.

I stood in the front drive, studying the reflection of the sky in the house windows. I didn't need to go in.

Then I saw in a flash my mother setting down armfuls of Sainsbury's bags, their orange plastic shining in the summer sun, patting herself down – pockets, handbag, pockets again – then sighing and standing on her tiptoes to reach into the lantern by the door.

And I stepped up and reached in myself, and dragged out the spare key.