In Chapter 1 of this exciting first novel, we were introduced to the main character, Harv, a 24-year-old English girl who has never known who her biological father was. She is now financially independent, with a rather indifferent job, renting one floor of a lovely house from a gay friend. Her mother married her stepfather when she was a mere year old and he, the only father she has ever known, adopted her.
This week, we present Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 2

Home for now was York where I rented what should have been an unaffordable flat from Philip Sanderson, who owned the big Georgian house in which I had lived for the past twelve months. Handsome red brick houses perfect but blank in their symmetry, ran the tree-lined length of the street down to a small, dark, grassy square surrounded by railings and tall, stone terraces.
Philip lived on the two top floors, I had half of the second and on the ground floor lived Part Time Pete, who worked and lived lavishly in York through the week and went home to his wife and kids in London at weekends.
“Hi,” was about the extent of my conversation with Pete.  Occasionally I would bump into him either coming home late or leaving early with the kind of women whose attributes could undoubtedly offer warm and hearty solace to a man away from home and missing his wife and children. I would act like they were invisible.
It was a Monday morning and I was basking in great shafts of dazzling light in Philip’s flat; there was a sublime sense of cheating to be still in a dressing gown at ten a.m. when the rest of the working world was be-suited, be-frocked and behind a desk.
“So. Where have you been?”  Philip slumped down on the sofa next to me and plumped a cushion over his stomach, holding it tight like a security blanket.
“Scarborough.”
He waited. “And?”
“Saw some old friends on Saturday night, which was slightly less than O.K.  Fell out with Angie, sorry, I’ll rephrase that, really fell out with Angie, came back, did my shift at the Bar. That’s about it.  Oh, I bought you a crab. It’s in the fridge downstairs.”
Philip worked in the arts, mainly in London, connecting people and organising events. Our mutual passion for painting had begun and then lubricated our friendship.  We made each other laugh, I looked after his cats, Kipper and Morris, and his flat when he was away and went with him to show previews and openings; we were comfortable with each other.
“So what did you really fall out about?“
“Oh, just about which one of us is the real bastard,” I said cryptically, “but I don’t want to talk about it.”  I never talked about it.
“Fair enough,” He looked toward the window and mumbled “but I think I know the answer.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
He was laughing and cringing away, holding the cushion in front of him to deflect my blows. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.” We sat back, both smiling.
“Harv, when are you going to get a proper job?” He knew that this would irritate me.
“The Arts Bar is a proper job, I just never meant to be there this long, but I like it, it gives me free time to do other things, like paint.  Besides which, I like Johnny and I like living here and if I did something else, I might have to move on. Then who’d look after your extras?”
I had met Philip at the Arts bar where I had, at the time, hung a small exhibition of my work. He had admired one of my canvasses and Johnny, Philip’s friend and the owner of the bar, had introduced us, leading me in a fluster of embarrassment from the kitchen. Later, Philip bought the picture.
He had asked where I lived and about my studio space and when I explained that I was flat sharing with a girl I barely knew, our conflicting shifts giving neither of us space or privacy, Philip had said that he had a flat to rent in his house and I had laughed, safe in the knowledge that I could never afford the kind of flat that he would have on offer.
“Would two hundred quid a month mean that Johnny would need to give you a pay rise?” Johnny told him to go to hell and I went along with the joke. Then he had said, “Seriously. Two hundred quid plus extras.” And he had winked.
I had already guessed he was gay, so I was certain they weren’t the kind of extras that I would have to dress up or lie down for, so with half an idea that I was wasting my time but reassured by Johnny that I should go and see, I agreed to have a look.
I had wandered, excited and bemused through a big white sitting room, two big white bedrooms all with wooden floors, a stark, sexy bathroom and a steely kitchen with huge sash windows in every room, certain that, if the rent for this was only two hundred quid, the extras must come expensive.
The extras, as it turned out, were to look after his flat when he was away – which was often, feeding his cats, watering his rooftop conservatory plants, sorting his mail and making sure that there was milk and bread for him when he got home, none of which were in the least onerous as far as I was concerned.  Spending time with the cats meant spending time in Philip’s flat, which covered two floors and was an architectural ballet in white and sunshine with a splash of gin and tonic colonial
cool.
The huge sitting room, where we now sat, had been created from roof space, a whole wall turned over to glass. We gazed out across the early haze of the already hot city and over the clutter of red tiled Georgian rooftops toward the golden stone pinnacles and spires of The Minster.
He took another swipe. “Come on, you ought to get a proper job? You’ve got a degree.” Philip was needling me, but gently. Sometimes I wondered whether this line of questioning was his way of checking, without asking directly, that I wasn’t thinking of leaving,
“Yes, I’ve got a degree, so, that’s a job in a call centre then or another load of studying to become an English teacher. A bloody English teacher. I’d rather drink bleach.”
“Well what else would you like to do? There must be loads of things.”  He riffled his fingers through a silky tassel on the corner of the cushion.
“My problem Philipo, isn’t that I don’t know what I want to do, it’s that I want to do everything. However, I’m a brilliant starter and a very poor finisher.” I smiled sardonically.
I had toyed with all kinds of ideas after university, all of them seeming so absolutely achievable in my head. I had made tangible stabs at some of them with huge energy, loving the freshness of the new and the super propelled, self infecting tide which swept me to heights of giddy enthusiasm only to find my euphoria fizzling back to zero just as quickly, with me always thinking about the end result rather than learning to enjoy the process.  The only thing for which I had maintained enthusiasm was painting and I wasn’t sure that it would ever keep me.
As if he’d read my thoughts Philip slapped my thigh and sat up, “Well, what about the painting? You could develop that you know. You’ve got the talent; you just need to apply yourself. I could give you a leg up.”
“You can give me a leg up when I feel ready.  I haven’t got the confidence to show my pants and call myself an artist yet. I wouldn’t know how to put enough good stuff together to make an exhibition. Especially one that you’d be prepared to put your name to.”  I knew I was good; I just didn’t know if I was good enough.
“Well, let me know when you’re ready. Do you want some coffee?” He disappeared into the kitchen.
Despite the low level guilt I sometimes felt at the lack of achievement in a career, I genuinely enjoyed my un-loaded lifestyle. I liked the bar and largely the customers and, because of my shifts, I got blocks of time where I was free to paint; all the time I was getting better and I was selling, not the stuff that I really wanted to paint, but I was still selling.
I had always liked watercolours and the fine detail of still life but had, more recently, swapped paper for canvas, loving the invitation and challenge of the stretched expanse of white, the hefty brushes and the satisfying, greedy slarps of thick, forgiving, plasticy paint.  Mainly though, because it made me extra money, I painted pale York scenes for two local galleries, the Minster and the city walls keeping me busy for much of the summer and for a while at Christmas.
Letters which I wrote to Sarah, my closest friend from university, in which I saw a months worth of my news committed to paper, confirmed and crystallised my lack of achievement. In my own handwriting, laid out like an admission of guilt or idleness, I was forced to acknowledge the absence of anything exciting, exotic or dynamic in my life.  I could have almost sent the same letter month after month, just changing the date at the top.  At the age of twenty-four, it didn’t yet feel like an unsalvageable slide into the pit of a squandered life and an intellect wasted but I did see my friends from university in the heady ascent of career success, with me increasingly unable, or unwilling, to talk the talk or walk the walk.
Sarah was working for a multi-national, something to do with marketing, flying between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur with the kind of casual ease that I travelled on the bus between home and work. James, my very ex boyfriend from university was working for the foreign office in London and I was working in a bar in York, twenty miles from where I was raised and twenty miles from where I had gone to university; forty miles – for a Thursday’s child, I hadn’t come far.
Philip came back with two mugs of coffee and two sturdy cakes; great slabs of scone with crystallised fruit and nuts and slumped down heavily next to me.
“Don’t you get bored?” He asked. ”I mean, you work, you see me, you see that Eva girl who incidentally, I‘ve never been introduced to and you lock yourself up and paint. What about rumpy pumpy?  Here, have half of this: I don’t know why I bought us one each, they could choke a goat.”  I took the half cake, brushing crumbs from the front of my dressing gown.
“Well, it’s not always easy when you work in a bar. It’s not that I don’t get hit on but you have to remember Johnny’s hard and fast rule.”
“What’s that then?” Philip took a slug of coffee.
“Don’t poke the payroll.”  We both laughed a flurry of crumbs, Phillip nearly choking, and then we fell quiet for a moment, both smiling.
“Look at you, all curvy and sunny, most blokes will have you down as some sort of sexual athlete.”
“Oh yeah.” I felt embarrassed at the suggestion. I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since university, despite a whole series of hugely embarrassing attempted interventions by Angie. She had once asked me if I’d ‘turned’.
For me, meeting people wasn’t that easy and some sweaty and uncomplicated fun would have been a bonus, but when you worked in a bar, the last place you wanted to spend time when you weren’t working was in another bar.  I did get asked out, quite often, but Johnny frowned on anything more than what he called professional flirting, so we, his staff, became masters of the gentle knock back, aware that rejection and alcohol made a nasty cocktail, so we played by Johnny’s rules or didn’t last long.  Beer generated compliments and offers were what we laughed about after hours, cackling and squirming over the worst and most clichéd chat-up lines of the evening.
“Does that gallery on Gillygate take anything?”  Philip was now picking the cherries out of his cake and sticking them onto mine.  “Give me that almond.”
”Get lost, the nuts are my favourite bit.  Yes, they do, but they’re only interested in the York scenes which I could do with my eyes closed. I’m so bored of them but they’re bread and butter so I have to keep on churning them out.  I ought to find another couple of shops, offer them something different. There’s plenty to go at, I’m just lazy.”
“So you’re not thinking of leaving me then?” His voice was small and he tugged at a length of my hair without looking at me as we sat shoulder to shoulder on the big white sofa.  In a photo, we would have looked like lovers.
“Are you feeling insecure?” I turned to face him, my eyes mocking but fretful, liking that he cared that I was there.
“Like Hell, I just need you to feed the cats next week, that’s all.” He beamed.
“Bastard.” I thumped his shoulder. “I’ll never leave you? We’re like parasites you and me.”
“Go on.” Philip at forty five was still boyish and well set with thick dark hair and a friendly, handsome face.
“Well,” I sucked in my cheeks and counted off on my fingers “You’re wealthy, gay, handsome and pretty cheap for a slum landlord.  You have a valuable and eclectic collection of art which I might stand a chance of inheriting and you don’t want fiddling with or polishing by a nosy cleaner or unknown cat sitter.  I don’t steam open your letters and if I do, I make sure you don’t find out. I muse correctly over your art and if I don’t get it, I don’t pretend that I do. I’m not a star fucker when you take me to openings; I act smiley, yet cool and I never kiss ass.”
“That’s true.”
“And, because I’m gorgeous in that long tall arty kind of way, it always leaves people wondering which end of the ballroom you really dance at.”
“Bitch.” He threw the remains of his cake at me. I caught it and ate it.
“So where have you been? What’s happening?”  I asked.  Philip always had the inside track on new exhibitions; those who were seeking funding and the, as yet, unknown artists who were up and coming. I loved his stories of how the London art scene worked and the people and politics that made it so mad.  He knew about paintings which were coming up for auction, the crazy amounts they would sell for, and the people who would be bidding.
He took a breath. “Well, I’ve been in London, I’ve been to two parties, three openings, four, no, five meetings and spent a day with my mother, some of it astonishing, some of it moribund and little of it interesting.  I met a Scandinavian who is hoping to get money for, what I would consider, an offensive installation involving animals and sweets; ‘The Confectionary of Life’ or ‘Living Confectionary’ or something like that.  I met a nice woman who produces these huge pastels of fruit and oriental rugs and I put up with a day of my mother’s extravagant smoking and swearing”.  He looked at me in a ‘how’s that for starters‘ way and poured himself another cup of coffee, proffering the pot at me. I shook my head and put my hand over my mug, too much of Philip’s strong coffee could leave me jangly for hours
“So how is your mother?” I lit the touch paper and waited.
“What do you want to know about, the pole dancing lessons or how she’s scared off the gardener it took me six months to find because she, and I quote, ‘was sexually harassing me’. I don’t want to talk about her.”
Philip’s mother, Stella, was loud, effected, over embellished and grand.  She dressed like a wedding marquee; all swags and swathes in hot North African colours. She smoked heavily and dirtily, pastel Sobranis through a ridiculous and extravagantly long holder and coughed like a consumptive.
Stella was a woman of huge impatience who, I suspected, spent a lot of time bellowing at, and breaking, inanimate objects and she never remembered my name.
She was both hideous and hilarious and Philip kept her downstairs because she made him want to kill her and he couldn’t stand the ashtrays, or the stink of her cigarettes and strident perfume.
“Never mind, she’ll die soon”, I comforted. “What about work?”
“It’s all a bit quiet at the moment but I had a meeting with Jonjo Porter from The Carling Porter Gallery, who’s interested in organising a sort of North and South divide exhibition. He wants industrial paintings and sculpture by southern and northern artists to make comparisons of how where they come from effects how and what they paint, that kind of stuff. They want to intersperse it with photographs of different kinds of factories and people working in them.  Might be interesting, so I need to start gathering some images and ideas, I feel a trip to some northern archives and museums coming on if you fancy it?”
“My dad had some old photographs like that in the attic at home. I haven’t looked at them for years, but I think there’s a box full of them and some albums which belonged to my granddad.  I could ask if I could borrow them. They might be O.K.”
“Yeah, bring them next time you go, it might fire my imagination and, you never know, they might be the very thing”

Stay tuned next Wednesday for Chapter 3. If you missed Chapter 1, go to the Series page and look for the Scarborough Baby series.

Related posts:

1. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 3a In Chapter 3 Harv visits her mother Angie and stepfather...
2. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 4 Seized by a mass of conflicting feelings of loss, resentment,...
3. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 3b In this post we feature the second half of Chapter...

Amanda Ackroyd

Finally we come to the end of the series of author interviews with talented British author Amanda Ackroyd. But this is also a glorious beginning! Starting with this post, I shall be publishing Amanda’s first novel, Scarborough Baby, one chapter a week. With today’s interview is the teaser and first chapter. Enjoy!

As always, you may listen to the entire interview or this segment, and/or download either mp3 file to your computer or mp3 player.

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-iii-12-mins

Ilaria: Well, I have to say that this ability of yours to pare things down is very evident in your novel. So now let’s move on to talk about that. You sent me this wonderful novel, Scarborough Baby, which I read in 24 hours, or 36 hours maybe. I couldn’t put it down, I found it completely enthralling. I really was sucked right in. I loved the beginning. For the readers I will introduce it by saying that it is a little bit of a mystery. The beginning is just lovely, I think. The atmosphere is very pleasant, relaxed, of life just ambling along at its regular, normal pace, nothing out of the ordinary. But the description of the life is very – the description of the way the main characters are conducting their lives brings them to life completely. They come right out of the page and I just feel like I’m sitting in their living room with them and watching them and interacting with them as they go about their business.
And then the protagonist, a young woman of 24, 25 years old, discovers a diary that her mother had written as a teenager, and in the diary she discovers the possible identity of her biological father, whom her mother has never told her about, has always refused to tell her about. So she has always been wondering, she’s spent her life wondering who her father really was. And of course everything begins to unfold from this moment forward.
Amanda, I think you’re very talented as a writer. I think you definitely must be published, and I’m going to endeavor to make that happen. And in the meantime I just would like to ask you, first of all, how you first got the idea for this story.
Amanda: Well, it came about during a conversation with a friend of mine, and she was telling me – Annie is considerably younger than I am – and she was telling me that she never knew who her real father was. And she had asked her mother over the years, just tried to get her to tell her something. And one day, when Annie was about 22, she said to her mother, “Come on,” she sort of tried to do it in a joking way, she said, “Come on, there must be something you can tell me, like the color of his eyes or his hair or something.” And her mother said, “I can’t remember, it was dark.” And when Annie told me this story I was just stunned. I was stunned by the insensitivity of it. It made me laugh but I was shocked. And I came home and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why a woman would deny her child, even a crumb of truth, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. And in an incredibly short space of time, because I think my imagination ran away with me, I started to build a story around the lie. Because it was – I can’t remember, it was dark – it’s a lie, like putting your hand in someone’s face. And one morning, sitting in bed, I penned the whole story from beginning to end. I wrote the reason why and how it unfolded and what happened. And it took me probably three hours of intense note-making. And at the end of it I knew I had to write it as a book, something I had never done before. And that’s where it came from.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful. I love how – this is what they mean when they talk about writers channeling writing, have you ever heard that expression? That the writing is sort of coming from another place and you’re just a channel for it. It’s just coming through you rather than out of you.
Amanda: It felt so much like that. That’s a perfect description of how it felt.
Ilaria: As if you were sort of taking dictation from some plain that’s invisible to the naked eye, but from somewhere, it’s just coming to you and the words are flowing through you and out of your fingers, you know?
Amanda: Yeah, it’s exactly how it felt. And I still have the notebooks where I penned it, and it’s full of arrows that refer back. It was almost like it sort of formed itself, not just in general terms, but actually in – there was sort of chronology in the detail and, you know, and referencing, even in those notes, so that I wouldn’t miss that, or that this would be understood. It was actually quite an astonishing couple of hours.
Ilaria: That’s amazing. I love this story, this is wonderful. Okay, and so at that point you knew that you had to write it as a book. How much time went by between this morning that you spend writing the outline of the novel and when you actually wrote it?
Amanda: Virtually none. And there was a reason for that. And the reason was that just prior to my starting to write this novel I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly my life was completely taken over by the process of surgery and chemotherapy and I had stopped work because I wasn’t tolerating the treatment well at all. And so suddenly I had this huge amount of time on my hands, and it was almost like everything fell into place at the right time, and it wasn’t just that I had the time. I needed the time to write the book, but I needed the book to fill the time. And so it worked absolutely perfectly. And when I couldn’t sleep because I felt sick, I would get up and I would write. And if I was lying awake in the night because I’d slept through the day, my mind would be racing, and I would be thinking about what I wanted to write. And sometimes I would just wake up and be so excited by the next bit that I wanted to write, that I would just have to get up and write it. And it filled my days, and it filled my nights when I couldn’t sleep. And it was just the most wonderful escape and focus during what was a pretty hard time, really.
Ilaria: That’s a wonderful, wonderful story, and the way you tell it is so wonderful.
Amanda: Well, it actually felt very positive, which was great. It made the time feel like a gift, rather than something terrible. It became a gift in a way.
Ilaria: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And tell me, the entire process of writing the first draft of the novel took how long?
Amanda: It took me about seven months.
Ilaria: And when you were finished, were you also finished with your treatments?
Amanda: Yes, just about. Although I did have more reconstructive surgery to come. But I also had a friend, Jake Arnott, who had already successfully published one novel certainly, He Kills Coppers, and Jake was absolutely fantastic. He kind of mentored me through the process and I spent time in London with him, in Soho and learning about the vice squad in London during the period that the events in the book happened. And he was just fantastic in terms of research. And I spent time in Amsterdam researching. So there were all sorts of things going on throughout the process. And when my treatment finished that input remained, because I then started sending drafts to Jake and he would go through it and say, “This is fantastic, this is dreadful. During this bit I was absolutely losing the will to live, there needs to be more of a major dénoument at the end.” And through him and other readers I then started to cut and pare and polish and get rid of. You know, anything that I looked at and I was utterly beguiled by, I just cut it out. I sort of got to realize that anything that I loved too much was written purely for the pleasure of writing, rather than it being relevant to the story. And there was an awful lot that went that was just me being self-indulgent really. So the writing, the first draft was finished at the end of my treatment, but the process went on for long after that.
Ilaria: Well, what you sent me feels very much like a finished book. I find very little fault with it at all. I think it’s tight, I think it’s full of tension from beginning to end. It sucked me in and it never let go until I finished. So, thank you so much for the opportunity of reading it and publishing it. And I really hope that we bring it to the public at large, because everybody should be able to read it.
Amanda: Well, thank you. I’m very excited at the prospect of you publishing it. And I’m very excited by your enthusiasm and positivity. And I really hope that whatever happens, it’s great, the whole process. And I’m just glad that it’s out there and people can read it, and make up their own minds.
Ilaria: Me too. I think it’s just criminal that it’s been sitting in your drawer all this time.
Amanda: I’m sure there are millions of fantastic books sitting in drawers all over the world, so maybe you should make it your life’s endeavor to get them all out and get them published.
Ilaria: Well, that’s precisely what I intend to do, believe me. Obviously I can’t do all of them, but I’ll do as many as I can.
Amanda: Well, I suspect that you could probably do an awful lot, Ilaria. You’re something of a dynamo.
Ilaria: I wish I felt the same way about myself, but thank you very much for the compliment. Okay, so this wraps up our interview, but don’t hang up the phone. Thank you very much for talking to me today, and for telling me about your writing process. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Scarborough Baby – by Amanda Ackroyd

“Joe, NOW. The keys. Where are they?” I was shaking with fear, reaching and turning in an uncontrollable dervish.
Still he gazed, as if he had momentarily short circuited, then suddenly my fear touched him and he sprang from the chair and began frantically rifling his empty pockets then running his hands pointlessly across the table, his face twisted, white with wide-eyed alarm. I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Still Joe flailed around, panicking for the keys.
A woman’s voice, “Which service do you require?”
“Police, now. People are coming. I think they’re going to kill us. Please hurry. NOW.” I was screaming.

CHAPTER 1.
I was once asked to leave a cinema when the man in the seat behind me complained about my persistent glancing.  I have, many times, changed direction in the street, barging my way down busy pavements so I could turn and examine a man who had just passed me by.  I once approached a complete stranger and asked if he had ever known Angela Pollard. I have spent a large part of my life looking into the faces of men who shared my sweep of cheek or tilt of green eye and wondering if it might be him. I never knew who my real father was.

I am twenty four, it’s a summer Sunday in Scarborough and I’m having breakfast with my mother, Angie, in her conservatory. At the bottom of the garden, I can see my stepfather, Ken, tending his pigeons.  I am pretending to read the papers, but my eyes are focussed somewhere above the page.
Emboldened because of the companionable hour she and I have spent together, I am searching for the words to begin. Hot little jets of nasty anticipation are needling in my stomach like slivers of glass. I steel myself for the excruciating tip-toe into our mostly silent conflict.
Angie and I have been doing this dance for as long as I can remember; me disgusted by my apologetic whine and vile obsequiousness, the corners of her mouth tightening and twitching as soon as she knows what I’m up to and, if I push too far, she will lose her temper and I might cry.
I take a deep breath, words flitter in my mouth like dry butterflies, my heart feels squeezed, I cringe, “So, come on, my dad, there must be something you can tell me, the colour of his eyes, or hair or something.”  I try to adopt a conspiratorial air, leaning in toward her, making my eyes sparkle, wanting her to look at me.
She inflates, sighs and looks up but not at me, just somewhere into middle distance, her face bored and irritated. Then she turns, looks right into my face, lip curled, sneering, and says with a sing-song, sarcasm, “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
She gets up, casting me a look of hateful contempt, that I should force her to behave this way, and leaves the room.
***
Like two positives we repel. We collide with jerky joy and quickly clash, bouncing away like we’ve been burnt. Our spats don’t last long, we’re just different.
To look at, there can be no mistaking that we belong to each other. Whoever my father was, I have no doubt that I’ve inherited more of my mother than of him, but in spirit, I’m more watchful, more careful with people’s emotions.
Angie is sexy and compelling in a rough around the edges way.  She has a vanity gene like a barn side which is why, at her instruction, I call her Angie and not Mum – she likes to think people might mistake us for sisters.  Men like the flash of her green eyes and the thickness of her shoulder length dark hair. She’s coltish, strong, curvy and slender, a Peter Pan woman of dizzy tangents who is not quite joined up. She kind of pushes and pulls you, she’s warm and cold, funny and sharp, forty two but sixteen; a compassionate bitch.
I was conceived in Angie’s seventeenth year, in Scarborough I have always assumed. The reality I had designed for myself in the absence of any information was that the identity of the man I sought had been lost to her in the sheer volume. If I had lined up the men of the town, of a certain age, and asked my owner to stand up, how many, I wondered, would have risen sheepishly to their feet.
I was born on the 6th of March in Scarborough Hospital, unplanned but wanted. I was to have been called Deborah, but was named instead for the Welsh midwife who delivered me; Haf; that was her name and that was how it should have been spelt; pronounced with a long, curling welsh A and a soft Welsh F. Angie never thought to ask and by the time it was pointed out, Harv was on all my papers. So Harv I was, Harv Pollard, but not for long. I was a one year old in a pink Crotchet dress and white sandals when Angie married Ken Marvin, who she had known for just six months, changing me into Harv Marvin; a name that could only happen when things weren’t joined up.
The lucky marriage was captured in now yellowing 1970’s Polaroid’s, with everyone looking older than they did now, and Angie’s parents Brian and Della looking relieved. This wedding made them respectable again, made a successful coup out of a teenage disaster and positioned their slut of a daughter in the aspiring middle classes, with a husband who had just taken over his small, but flourishing, family business, a home in a larger than average semi and a Ford Capri gleaming in the drive.
Everyone suspected that she would prove too fast for the steady Ken, but hoped that he would calm her down; settle her. It made him sound like a remedy for indigestion. Twenty three years later, they are still in the same house in Scarborough, still in love and still, I’m sure, having sex more often that I do, with Angie settled, but not calmed down.
Ken’s passion are his pigeons or ‘filthy flying rats’ as Angie refers to them. The fancier’s magazines which strew every room in the house, offend her in a way that a pile of XXXX Hustlers never would. He loves his birds. He wins no more races now than he ever has, but with his passion undiminished by his disappointments, he continues to strive for the perfect specimen and tends and encourages them like children.
Angie views pigeon racing as a working class habit.  Ken defends his position by pointing out that these aren’t pigeons in the Town Hall sense. “Listen, during past times, it was contrary to law for a common man to own pigeons, they were the birds of kings, little warriors of the airways, the ultimate communication tool,” he told us indignantly as we sniggered behind our hands. “If it hadn’t been for pigeons, Rothschild would never have made his fortune.”
“Rothschild?” Angie had roared. “It’s a long way from a shed in Scarborough. Where’s the bloody fortune Rothschild?” She had laughed tartily, her palm outstretched.
“It’s not a bloody shed, it’s a loft.”  We infuriated him.
***
Angie returns, tossing her hair, defiant and injured and begins flicking through a magazine as if I am invisible. It is only eight thirty, but already the voile morning sunshine has made the air in the conservatory heavy and treacly.
I get up and open windows a little too aggressively then stand, my arms crossed, staring tight lipped out toward the eastern edge of the garden where the sun has not yet lifted over the limes and where, in the dappled shade, Ken tends his pigeons, sloshing sparkles of fresh water and filtering golden grain. I watch him turn a bird in his hands, see his intense gaze as his mouth forms the gentle pout of a shhhh.
Outside I contract, my arms tightening across my chest, whilst inside my anger and frustration swells until I feel I might explode. ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’, is probably her worst and most insensitive dismissal ever. This from the woman who wears her every emotion, idea, or thought, like a gaping wound; she’s an open book pushed right in your face, what goes through Angie’s head, comes straight out of her mouth, but ask her a question about my biological father and she clangs shut like a cell. She has, through the years, blocked me, humiliated me, slapped my face, and denied me any corner of truth until I seethed to know.
The bird flashes mauve, silver and green, like a spiv’s shot satin suit as he rolls it gently over and over, its little bead eyes, unperturbed, flicking like tiny camera shutters, head cracking back to eyes front like a pirouetting dancer as it slowly spins. I know the corky feel of a bird contained between firm hands, the silky sprung ness of quill and feather and the extreme musculature of the wing and breast. When you handle them, you are struck by the sense of power, yet the muscle is not hard, but soft and elastic.
Angie is still ignoring me despite my glances in her direction.  I can’t leave it alone and I don’t care now if I wreck the day and storm back home. “So, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” I trample in again.
She doesn’t even look up. “Make another cup of tea Harv love.” It’s like I haven’t spoken.
“So that’s it? All you’ve got to say? ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’.” I am aware of spit of my words and the hurt that is thrumming nastily in my solar plexus, but this time I won’t cry. She still doesn’t look up, just continues flicking through the magazine, except now she’s humming as she scans the pages, a way of putting your fingers in your ears without putting your fingers in your ears. It fills me with the petulant emotions of my six year old self and makes me want to scream and smack her blank, stupid face.
This time I leave the room, childishly sweeping the papers and magazines from the table as I go. I pack my things, slamming doors behind me and drive away, determined that however desperately I want to know, I will never ask her again.
I wish it had been that simple.

Look for Chapter 2 in next week’s installment. And please comment on what you’ve read so far. I find this story irresistible. Thank you, Amanda!

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