Fate

"Dad?" I say softly. I can feel the heat of him at my side, the large, concrete thing of his body, the size of at least four of me. He is tall and strong and still sort of stuck in that awkward, lanky teenage boy-phase, but he is more muscled than any teenage boy will ever be. Dad used to do a lot of wrestling, when he was younger. His wiry build threw people off, but he's always been strong.

"Yes?" he says, his voice calm and soft in his usual dad-way.

I listen to our breaths, and imagine all of my hopes and dreams fluttering from between my lips to hover at the ceiling, their wings beating ineffectually, trapped in this room along with me. Stuck here, in this place, when I am gone.

"How did you know you loved mum?" I ask him. My question is floating in the air, and I am afraid, and it is beginning to fade with his silence. But then he takes a breath, and it is being answered, and the words strengthen in the air and I am no longer afraid.

"I first saw your mother on my twentieth birthday," he says. His voice is soft, and I wonder why he is whispering, but then, I did, too. Perhaps it is something about the dark, and the time, and the quiet, and the fact that whispering is easier to bear inside of the silence, as the night is fragile, like me, and loud voices will shatter it.

"I was out with a few of my friends, at a bar. They were being obnoxious and loud, and I was pretending to be obnoxious and loud, because it was expected of me."

I make a soft, incredulous sound. "You were being obnoxious and loud all on your own, dad. Don't blame society."

I can hear the smile in his voice. "Fine, we were all being obnoxious and loud. We were singing a song, but I don't remember what it was. It doesn't matter. It was loud and annoying, but we were in a bar, and everyone was being loud and annoying. And there was this waitress." He pauses, takes a breath. I smile into the darkness at the thought of my dad, breathless at the thought of mum, because it is lovely and sweet and what they have is what everyone wants. Except me. I am the tragedy in their Greek play. I am the largest part, and I am the saddest part, and I am the untimely end.

"She was this tiny thing, up to my shoulder, and she had these massive heels on, as well." I can imagine his hand, fingers spreading to show the height of the heel, because dad always makes gestures like that. "Absolutely massive. I don't know how she was walking in them. One of my friends put a coin in the jukebox." I snort, and dad laughs softly. "It was a retro bar. They weren't the most common thing in my era, either. Where was I?"

"Friend. Coin. Jukebox," I remind him.

"Ok. So, my friend put a coin in, and chose some music. And it was this old fashioned jazz music. Smooth and a little scratchy; it was a record, I think. And he dared me to ask her to dance. And I remember looking at her, and she was so beautiful, and also a little scary looking. And I watched her elbow someone out of the way, and when another guy tried to grab her wrist she stepped on his foot with her heel and smiled. And I remember thinking she was scary as hell."

"Did you ask her to dance?" I ask him, stifling a yawn.

"No," he says, startling me a little. "She scared me. I didn't want to get stepped on. The hospital, on my twentieth birthday, was not a place I wanted to be."

"So how did you fall in love with her, if you didn't even talk to her?" I ask, indignant. It is strange that I have never heard this story, but then, I've never really asked. And now it seems all the more important for me to hear it.

Dad laughs. "Slow down. We're not there yet."

"So what happened next?"

"Well, I ordered another round of drinks, and we got really, really drunk, and then we walked to my parents' house and collapsed on the ground til morning." It makes me feel strange, to think of my dad getting really, really drunk. And with friends. My father, passing out on the floor and sleeping til morning. I push away the thought and listen closely. "And then, the next afternoon, I went back. It was closed, of course, but they were setting up for the night. And I walked past that bar every day for a year, looking for a glimpse of that girl. Every night she wore an impressively tall pair of heels, and yelled at anyone who did anything indecent. She was so strong and pretty and positively frightening."

I close my eyes, and open them, but it is just as dark either way, that sort of complete blackness where you feel totally alone. Except I am not alone. I am here, with my dad, and the memory of him and my mother when they were younger is floating between us; it is intangible, just out of reach. But he brings it closer to me, with the smile in his voice and his fondness of the memory.

"And then, one night, I came later than usual: I'd been out, because it was my birthday again. I was twenty one, and I'd been walking past that bar for a whole year, and I thought that, finally, I'd do something about it, whatever it was. And I was rushing because I was late, and I was scared that she'd be gone.

"I got there, and the bar was closed. The windows were dark, the door locked. I stood in the street for a while and just stared at the door. I really couldn't believe that, after all this time, when I had finally decided to speak to her, I was too late. So I started to walk home and called it fate. We weren't meant to be, I thought. And then I heard a sound." He goes quiet for a moment, and I know he is reliving the moment.

"There was an alley, beside the bar. And I walked down it. And at the end was the girl, and she was sitting on the ground, crying. I couldn't believe it. I called it fate, just like I called the bar being closed the same thing, seconds ago. When she heard me, she stood up. And she took off her shoe and held it out like she was going to hit me. I told her that I wasn't going to hurt her, and I asked her what was wrong. She told me to get the hell away from her, or she'd stab me with her shoe." My lips twitch into a smile: I cannot connect the image of this young woman with my mother, the quiet, reasonable person I have known my whole life. Then again, she can't always have been this way. She must have been different, at some point.

"I remembered taking a course, a psychology course, when I didn't know what I wanted to do at school. Our textbooks had little facts on the side, and I always read them when the teacher was preaching at us. And I remembered that, if someone was going to kill you, you should tell them about yourself, because they were less likely to murder you if they knew that you liked to eat Cornflakes in the morning while watching cartoons and that you walked your dog on alternate Sundays and had lunch with your grandmother every third day. And I knew that she wasn't going to kill me, but she was scared and she might hurt me. So I started to talk.

"I told her about myself. I told her that my name was Michael, and that I lived with my parents who always went on about me moving out, but didn't actually want me to go, and I knew because I heard them talking about it. I told her how I loved wrestling, because it made me feel in control, and that I didn't really know what I was doing with my life. That my friends were assholes but I loved them like the brothers I didn't have and that Thai food was my favourite take-away food and that sleeping was my favourite thing to do, because it was the one thing I never failed at, and that I was hopeless with jokes but I would try if it would mean she'd laugh, and I wouldn't even care that she was laughing because I was horrible, not because my jokes were funny." His voice becomes softer as he speaks, and I hold my breath, because I want to hear the end of this story and I can feel that it is near and I don't want to miss a word.

"And then I told her that, for the past year, I had walked past the bar so that I could see her every night. And then I told her that it was my birthday. Sometime during my very long speech, she had dropped her shoe. I knelt down and picked it up, and put it back onto her foot. 'You never know what's on the ground here,' I told her. And she just looked at me, and I waited for her to say something, and it was so quiet, and I was so nervous that I could hear my heart racing in my ears and feel my pulse in my fingertips, on her ankle, because I was still holding her shoe on her foot. And then she asked me to walk her to her car, and I did. And she asked me where I lived, and she drove me home and left me there."

"What?" I burst in. Dad's hand grips mine in the darkness, careful and warm.

"She left me there," he repeats, the slight pressure of his fingers asking me for silence, and I give it to him. "I went to sleep, thinking that was it, it was over. And the next morning, I woke up to my dad yelling like a mad man. And I went into the lounge to see him looking out the front window, his face bright red as he glared outside and screamed obscenities about something involving his grass. I asked what was wrong, and he started yelling something about shoes. I asked mum, and she shrugged and rolled her eyes. So I went out the front to see what it was. And on the front lawn, my dad's pristine, manicured lawn, were a pair of bright orange stilettos, dug into the ground. And standing inside them was a very small girl with a very big personality. And she looked at me, and she told me to get dressed."

He winds his fingers through mine, and his hand is warm and large and comforting, like his voice. "It took me a while, but I figured her out. That first time, she brought me to a cafe on the corner. Afterwards, she told me to find her next time. So I went back to the cafe, where a girl in turquoise heels was sitting, drinking a hot chocolate with a book propped in one hand, a pen in the other.

"On that second day, I fell a little in love with her. With that little part of her that took notes in her book, and chewed on her pen, and then had a small heart attack when she realised she was chewing on the wrong end." He takes a deep breath, yawns, and continues. "You don't fall in love all at once, Syl. It happens over time, and you hardly realise it til it has already happened. Just like that. And it keeps happening, because there will always be something new to love about a person. People are always changing."

I yawn and smile into the darkness. "Do you still find things to fall in love with mum for?" I ask him, my voice muffled by sleep.

"I fall in love with your mother every time I see her," he says. And I drift to sleep with that thought in my mind, wonderful and lovely and warming my soul so that it glows inside of me, bigger than I will ever be.