‘Eight Hours’ by Kelly Creighton

In his wallet the father carried a photo of the daughter as a child, laughing. He had taken it on a day out to the North Coast. Beside her the mother’s blue dress levitated, floating at one corner, an Atlantic wind pressing the daughter’s candy floss against some invisible limit, her gingham shirt tied just about the navel and knee socks pulled up. Hair raked into straight pigtails. The father remembered that day like it was yesterday. The songs that played on the tape deck. How the daughter had not sung along with the sister, instead she had been travel-sick on the way home to Belfast.

This was donkeys’ years ago now, when he headed up the family. Before that power bled away. The daughter, being in California, eight hours away from the father, felt awfully distant and had maintained that distance over the years. He kept the photo handy in case anyone doubted he was the father, so he would have evidence to the contrary. People doubted him a lot. They must have thought the daughter had not existed until she showed up on their television screens, tablets and radios.

These days she has made the same unforgettable impression on the music scene that the thumb of a sculptor makes on a lump of clay.

*

Los Angeles.

The father stood outside the airport terminal, his suitcase rocking on its castors.

He looked at the grey pavements, the white buildings. Vibration absorbing. Linear. At LAX people walked almost through him. He could hear their chat, their impatient feet, tiny human gestures from which he could not move quickly enough. He grappled with his mobile phone to let the daughter know he had arrived. He could not remember the area code she had sent him. The father rarely opened his emails.

The driver appeared; a new employee from the ever changing roll-call of hangers-on. He asked if he was the father and lifted his case, directing him into the back of the limo like they were headed to a wedding. Under the air conditioning the father was cold, the leather seats pre-chilled with recycled air, but he daren’t have complained or allowed himself a shiver. Instead he thought what a charade this had become: limos used every day.

The father asked the driver about his day and was answered politely through a speaker, the glass screen between them remaining shut. He watched the view out of the window, the rash of houses on the hill, buttoning his shirt back up to the collar. The father felt awkward and alone until the daughter called, checking in. Her voice, heard over speaker phone, tickled him. She sounded just like the mother, who was a real songbird too. The mother had not been a showy person. When the girls came along she had devoted herself. ‘I want them to have the world,’ the mother had said. She would not sit down. Never lifted a magazine.

But she had been effortlessly charming, he pictured her like a skater on a frozen pond. Making it more frustrating. The shoplifting. The wallpaper paste soup. These signs of the tumour. Well used to them now of course, the father had not expected it. It annoyed the father how little he had expected. When the mother took sick, the other daughter, the elder one, started cooking so the mother would not mistakenly poison them. They ate their supper from trays balanced on their knees, and in silence.

*

‘Come here, Daddy,’ the daughter shouted. She never called him Dad like the sister did. Her dialect came out stronger than anybody’s he knew. He noticed this happening to people who moved away; they were swiftly more Northern Irish than those who stayed. He once wondered if the benefit was for him, but really knew better.

The father was pleasantly surprised to feel her lips against his cheek, then the daughter turned away, smiling. She climbed the five steps back inside. She had moved around a lot, from a joint house in Culver City, to an edgy apartment in Silver Lake, to this house, minutes away from the Beverly Hills Hotel: a mansion the gods of music had bestowed on her, where the father would buzz around the guesthouse windows, ornamental binoculars in his hands.

He stood on the marble slab floor in the hallway where he was greeted by a trip of long-haired Chihuahuas. He looked up at the sculpted staircase, to the new art on the wall: a painted lady, happy and fat. Her breasts small and exposed. Her eyes a startling green and round as chopped leeks. The father cleared his throat.

The daughter wore a long black dress and bright red pumps and was certainly individual. Her eyes were shaded in smoky tones and her hair in a beehive like his mother would have worn in the showband days. He looked the daughter over for signs of wear. She always got a little older, which reminded the father that he did too.

‘Did you get your hair coloured?’ he asked.

The daughter gave a twitchy smile. ‘You must be hungry. What do you want?’

‘I’m not very hungry at all.’

‘You will be by the time we reach the restaurant.’

*

The driver brought them out. The father felt like a real shite; he was sure the man had better things to be doing than be at the daughter’s beck and call. At the traffic lights teenage boys slid through the traffic-swirl, laughing. Nodding at each other when they caught a car such as this one. Another flash automobile to run their soapy sponge over until the driver retaliated with the water jets. The father liked the boys’ work ethic and how they laughed through the windows, but really at themselves. Their smiles luminous, the sun glistening on their brown bellies; he liked these things for being both dissimilar and explicable. As far as he could see, LA was full of the unexplainable. Like how, as dusk fell over the city, the lights blinked out and on like a jazz song. He had no desire to look at this odd dreaminess every day, which is not to say that he detested it.

The father tried to talk the daughter into visiting him at home, it did not matter that she had palmed him off a hundred times. She poured them both a drink from the mini-fridge, unscrewing glass-measure wine bottles, sighing. She did not reply until the father mentioned the sister, then she put one finger up, and said, ‘Hold that thought, Daddy. I’ve a call to make.’

It was a one-sided call, he noticed. She said barely a word. As they pulled up to the restaurant she hung up, trying to put the phone back into her bag, hurriedly. Her screensaver was a photo of herself and a woman with long black hair. Both of them locked in a heart-shaped hug. The father polished off his wine, feeling lightheaded.

‘It’s a pity your sister can’t be here,’ the father tried again, ‘but I think the boyfriend has it in mind to propose.’

‘Do you like him?’ the daughter asked, taking a mirror from her bag and retouching her lipstick.

‘He’s not ... I mean, I suppose I must. I’ve given him my blessing.’

‘He asked for your permission, huh?’

‘I’m old-fashioned, aren’t I?’

‘You shouldn’t define yourself like that, Daddy.’

He had become used to the way she spoke. She had so many thoughts to be open with and caught emotion easily, whereas he had grown up in a time and place where you demonstrated only brief slots of passion. You micro-managed grief and love, privately. Ingrown.

They walked into the restaurant. For a moment heads turned. A holy hush fell before conversations resumed and they were brought through the diners to their table. The portions looked dainty and their presentations inventive. The menu was a hieroglyph.

‘How about I order for you?’ the daughter said.

‘Alright. But I’m paying,’ he said.

‘You most certainly are not. You’re my guest.’

‘Your sister says she’ll make it over in a few months,’ the father said.

‘Maybe you two need some time together. Just you girls.’

‘Maybe.’

The daughter looked at his face. She always envisaged his visits going differently to this. As soon as she would clap eyes on him, she would feel unsure. What to say. What to do. It never got any easier. The sister would usually distract; sometimes the daughter’s assistant would take the father to a soccer game. They would go sightseeing, leaving the daughter at work in her studio.

She watched him mush his sorbet gazpacho pyramids. She remembered him best with his head under a sink, on weekend callouts. The daughter would talk and the father would listen, he would ask for a hose clip and she would find one. The sister spending her Saturdays at the community centre. At Song and Dance.

One Saturday, driving to a job in Forthriver, him scratching a stubbled cheek, he turned off the tape deck. It was the tape the mother made before she got sick. She made mixtapes for nearly every occasion. ‘I’m going to ask a favour,’ he said. ‘Take your wee sister to your singing class today, would you?’

‘But we’re doing auditions, Dad,’ the sister gurned.

‘Sure she can audition too.’

‘No she can’t. She can’t sing or dance.’

‘Why do you have to be such a cheeky wee liar,’ the daughter said. What was true was she had lived a wholly artless life, and she had begun to have doubts. Even as a child she found it curious to not be welcome in any house the father was going to. ‘Daddy, are you really going on a job or do you have a girlfriend?’ she asked him.

‘A girlfriend?’ He laughed.

The daughter, nudging the sister, said, ‘She says you do.’

‘Your mother only died last year.’

‘It would be okay if you did.’

‘Okay or not, a girlfriend won’t be happening.’

When the father went to the restroom, the daughter texted her girlfriend who had been waiting in a café two doors away. After all this time she had finally resolved to let them meet. Had planned to make it look like a coincidence: an introduction of the father to the closest friend. He returned from the gents’ looking pale, he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m as weak as water. It’s the long flight and I need my bed.’

*

Years ago, both daughters had moved into their parents’ bed while the parents took a kid’s room each. The father slept in one. The mother in the other. They had lived in Broom Street, off the Woodvale, would wake to the mother burning a pair of shoes on the hob. The old sheepdog whimpering at the bottom of the stairs.

*

They were sitting by the vast infinity pool overlooking the city when it started to rain. Her father commented, like he always did, that you could bathe in the LA rain. On cue the assistant appeared to help them indoors, holding a parasol so they would not need to. They reconvened in the kitchen where the chef was preparing lunch.

‘Who was that out the front?’ the father asked, talking about the cars lined across the gate at the bottom of the long, private drive. He had already mentioned seeing them from the guesthouse window.

‘They’re the paps,’ the daughter said, looking sideways at the chef who seemed disinterested.

‘What do they want?’ the father asked.

‘What they always want. Blood.’

‘Do you mind if I just stay here today?’

The daughter didn’t answer for a while. He never asked her a thing about herself that he could find out, rightly or wrongly, from a Google search. The sister had mentioned he was attending e-learning lessons in the Shankill Library and had bought himself an iPad. He had stopped asking the daughter if she had herself a man yet. She hated to feel hopeful about the evaporation of this line of questioning; she also hated that her sexuality still hung heavily like some long-lingering adolescence. And worse, that the question in question may not have even fizzed on the father.

‘I have something planned if you’d prefer,’ she said, finally.

The father shook his head. His jowls shook too. Jowls he had given her. The ones she had been steered by the photographer for Rolling Stone to conceal with a white shirt collar. The rest of that face: ferny lashed, pouting like a fish, had been played to the hilt. All the places where she was less obviously the father’s daughter.

*

The driver brought the daughter to Malibu. She resented having to duck out of her own life when enough of it was already like this. The rain had tattooed the sandy ground. She kept her head down, watched her pumps spitting darts, sending a shiver of spray across the puddles. She let herself into the apartment where the girlfriend was showering after a yoga class and had set her clothes out on her bed: lacy white underwear, the Miro print shift dress her tiny Italian mother had given her at thanksgiving. The rest of their family, big, Catholic, loud, had welcomed the couple into their Chicago home. Treated the daughter like their own.

‘I needed to get out of there,’ the daughter said, standing back from the window.

A car sat outside. The same one that had been out there for weeks, waiting for the money shot. The daughter looked out of the terrace at the gulls singing their complicated song no one has to know the words of to appreciate.

‘Do you want me to come back with you?’ the girlfriend asked as she dried. She smelled like sandalwood and ginger.

‘Yes. Come back home with me.’

‘To Northern Ireland?’

The daughter thought she detected enthusiasm in the crumble of the girlfriend’s voice, possibly at being asked something she thought she never would. She nodded.

‘Won’t your father be pleased?’ the girlfriend asked.

‘You could meet my sister.’

‘I bet you two have a lot to talk about.’

‘We don’t have the big conversations,’ the daughter said, recalling the sister’s last visit, how she had relayed that the father had found a review of the daughter’s new album in the inflight magazine and boasted about it to the passenger in the window seat.

‘‘That’s my daughter,’ he said, taking that old photo of you from his wallet.’ The sister had laughed, then sighed. ‘It was funny stuff!’

When they had gone out for the day, the daughter found herself in the sky-lit guesthouse. She located the magazine in the sister’s hold-all, and there was the review, those kind-but-commonplace words replaced by a brutal critique in her sister’s handwriting. The daughter’s photograph defaced by deadened iris-less eyes and a ballpoint-penned beard. This, the daughter realised, was not funny. Nor was it fair.

She had confided in the girlfriend. Had been bent out of shape over it.

Two cars joined the first. Paparazzi’s lenses craning out of their cars like periscopes, directed at their shaded, glassy huddle. The daughter buried her face in the damp river of the girlfriend’s dark hair. Then, taking her wrists, guided her out onto the terrace and kissed her.

*

When the daughter was young, her mother had planted a weeping willow in the front yard. The father had bought it as a mother’s day gift, long, long ago. He had planted many other trees around it, so over time it could barely be seen. The daughter just about sees it. It breezes gently, like the halting wave of an old friend. Is that really you, it says. God, look at you now!

The daughter smiles. Beyond that door is the home she once left. Beyond this street is the life she has known. Only, inside that pint-sized lounge, is the same furniture the mother once polished like a demon. She has been dead an awfully long time.

‘Great to see the both of you,’ the father says, getting up.

‘Great to be seen,’ the girlfriend replies.

He puts his arms out to embrace her first. They hold each other in a sincere way and next he kisses the daughter on the cheek. She thumbs the cool dry material of his shirted back, looking at everything behind him. She thinks, he has lived this nice little modest life, he has refused any help from her. That either of them owed each other a thing was the myth she had let shrink her life.

The father refuses a driver. He will not rent a car either. He will drive, he says, taking great pains to act as tour guide. So they go on the motorway which is easier, and not how she remembered home. They meet the sister and her man at the Arcadia. They have afternoon tea. Talk weddings, rehearsal dinners, plans for later in the day. People ask for selfies with the daughter which she graciously obliges.

The five of them walk along the strand toward Barry’s Amusements. She hears the tide of screams, smells the momentary scent of burning sugar. The salty wind coming in off the ocean. The daughter turns to face it. Knocks back the view. There is the weaving sound that is only made by water and seamless arguments.

She tries to recall which life she had planned to choose, before this one chose her. One audition all these years. That’s about where it began and indeed where it ended.

‘Let me get a picture of you all,’ the father says, holding his iPad squarely in his hands.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Kelly Creighton is the author of the critically acclaimed DI Harriet Sloane series set in East Belfast, the short story collection Bank Holiday Hurricane (Doire Press), and the novel The Bones of It (Liberties Press). Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Honest Ulsterman, Litro, and Best British Short Stories. Kelly is the founding editor of The Incubator literary journal.