Daddy Dearest Read Free Page B

was more concerned about my little girl.
    ‘Darling, what have I said about running?’
    There I was again, snapping at her heels, as if running was the most unnatural activity in the world. My daughter looked back, her finger in her mouth, and looked at the things on the floor: the lipsticks, potions, tampons, tablets: the charivari of a middle-aged woman.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Let me help you.’
    ‘It was an accident,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’
    The smell of her perfume and the sight of her intimate things gave me a gynaecologist’s sense of her. Her strawberry blonde hair was neat and tidy and fell across her ruddy cheeks. I’m not sure if it was the embarrassment or the effort of bending that gave them so much colour, but I was faintly aroused by it. All that stretching and arching revealed the full contours of her anatomy and I was not slow to trace it. Her behind was generous, although not excessive in the way of some women. It had the spring of a firm cushion which was not bad for a woman of her age. I have seen some wretched sights in my life, sights which lesser men would have been daunted by, but none have come close to the spotted, sagging, dimpled cheeks of the women I have been with. Some had barely come out of their twenties when nature dropped her bombshell. The lithe contours of youth, easily within the compass of a man’s hand, were now bulbous projections a hippo would have been embarrassed of, the skin leathery and tough like pterodactyl hide. Not that I’m an oil painting, you understand - far from it - but my skin is still roughly attached to my bones, and not halfway down my knees.
    The shifting cotton of her dress left exposed her pink bra straps and stretched like cellophane across her buttocks. No panty line, I noted. I’d already undressed her from my bed, making tactical guesses of the terrain from laboured conversations with her in the corridor, and the times she popped in to see my daughter, but this clambering round on the floor, and her petty exertions, mapped her out completely. My daughter looked on bemused, torn between the magic button and the Pick’n’Mix in front of her. I should have been looking, too.
    I bent down to pick up an eye-liner which had rolled to the far wall. My back was only turned for a second. It’s a bit of a cliché when people tell you that’s all it takes. You see stories about it all the time: some chav mother leaves her baby buggy outside a newsagent to get herself some fags. The next thing she knows, little Johnnie has gone; some kids have taken him to a railway line to sniff glue. People are always trying to frighten you. They like to tell you there’s another place you’re going to go if you’re not good, or you’re not careful, and you better beware, or your children better beware. There are so many things to be afraid of and they’re all out to get you.
    The second the bell rang, I knew what had happened. I ran to the lift doors and hammered on them, calling out my daughter’s name. Inside, I could hear her giggling.
    ‘Are you the giant?’
    ‘No, darling. Open the door.’
    My fingers pressed the button repeatedly.
    ‘Darling, open the door!’
    ‘Daddy?’
    Her voice seemed more distant now and I knew by the horrible hum through the metal that she’d gone. I banged my fist on the metal doors and let out a scream. They tell you that it’s the things you don’t expect in life that eventually get you but, in my case, it was quite the opposite: I’d seen this coming a long time ago. I was given glimpses of it like Cassandra but failed to believe it. I looked at the strawberry blonde and tears were falling down her face. Women are no good in emergencies; they wither away.
    ‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘Please.’
    I ran down the corridor and turned left into the stairwell. Looking over the banister, the bottom seemed impossibly far. Which floor? Do I check every one? Do I go to the bottom and work my way up? I couldn’t move.