She wasn’t even supposed to be driving that day, and the fact that she had had caused a rift between Danny and Roger, his father-in-law, which had never been resolved. It wasn’t so much a new rift as a widening of an old one that had been expanding ever since Liz had first brought Danny home and introduced him as the man she was going to marry one day, a pronouncement that took her parents by surprise, not least because she was only sixteen and they didn’t even know she had a boyfriend until then. Danny hadn’t wanted to go, certain her parents would hate him, particularly her father, who happened to be a policeman and was therefore suspicious of everybody, especially teenage boys, and especially a teenage boy from Newham with a father who’d been so absent that nobody even noticed when he walked out on his son’s fourteenth birthday, and a mother who kicked him out when her new boyfriend decided that the flat wasn’t big enough for the three of them.
Still, Liz insisted it would all be fine, so Danny had reluctantly complied. After meeting her mother, Carol, who gave him a warmer hug than his own mother ever had, he started to believe her. Only when he met Roger did he realize Liz had either flat-out lied or grossly underestimated her father’s temperament, because although the man shook Danny’s hand in a feigned display of cordiality, the bone-crunching pressure he applied to that handshake told Danny everything he needed to know about the man’s feelings towards him. It wasn’t a handshake to assert authority. Nor was it a test of masculinity. It was a handshake that told him, in no uncertain terms, that Roger would rather be squeezing his neck than his hand and would do just that if he ever got the chance.
Danny knew that the man believed he was leading his daughter astray, something he always found slightly unjust considering that Liz, perhaps in defiance of her law-abiding upbringing, was often the more rebellious of the two. But Roger never saw that side of her, being hardwired, like most fathers, to see nothing but the good in his daughter, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His instinct was to blame Danny for anything that chipped away at the innocent and infallible image of the daughter that he carried in his wallet. He blamed him when Liz gave up the ballet lessons she’d been attending since she was six, even though Danny had actively encouraged her to continue with them. He blamed him when Liz became pregnant, which Danny couldn’t exactly dispute but nevertheless found a little unfair given that Liz had been the primary instigator that fateful night on the Downs (he kindly spared Roger this information). And most crushingly of all, he blamed Danny for the death of his only child, something Danny knew not because of some wild inkling or nagging suspicion but because the man had said precisely that at Liz’s funeral. To the eternal embarrassment of Carol, who had always been good to Danny, and to the shock of everybody else at the reception, Roger had told him that his daughter would still be alive if only he’d been the one in the driver’s seat that day. It wasn’t a backhanded compliment about Danny’s driving abilities (the man never gave him compliments, backhanded or otherwise) but a reference to how Liz didn’t really like driving, even though Roger was the one who had bought her a car in the first place. If Danny had been behind the wheel, he might have taken that icy corner at a slightly different speed, or at a slightly different time, or at a slightly different angle. Even if all of those alternative scenarios had still resulted in the same twisted wreckage by the roadside, at least they might have buried Danny and not Roger’s beloved Elizabeth.
As painful as it was to hear, and as poorly timed as Roger’s outburst was, Danny knew that the man had a point. Not a day had passed since the accident that he hadn’t thought about how different things might have been if he’d called in sick that day, or if he’d only held on to her for a few more seconds before letting her get into the car, or if he’d left his work boots in the hallway again, forcing Liz to delay her trip while she wearily reminded him of the house rules in that voice he used to find so annoying but would now gladly trade his right arm to hear again.
Danny might even have forgiven Roger had he chosen to end things there, accepting his monologue as nothing more than the desperate words of a grieving father who was simply trying to make sense of something that could never be understood, but Danny couldn’t forgive the hate with which the man had spat his concluding words.
“And now he’s stuck without a mother,” Roger had said, pointing at Will, who had only recently been discharged from the hospital and still wore a bandage around his head that shone like a beacon amidst the black shirts and dresses. “Now he’s stuck with you.”
Danny had stayed quiet until then, determined not to make even more of a scene, but unable to bite his tongue any harder without the risk of losing it, he reminded Roger, as calmly as he could, which wasn’t very calm at all by that point, that the only reason Liz had been driving in the first place was that Roger, who was supposed to be visiting them that day, had changed his mind at the very last minute and asked Liz to make the journey herself. Before Roger could protest, Danny went on to remind him of how he had consistently refused to come and see them over the years, with a repertoire of half-arsed excuses ranging from car trouble and common colds to random bouts of unspecified fatigue, when the real reason he never wanted to visit, at least as far as Danny was concerned, was that he was ashamed: ashamed to see his daughter married to a man like Danny, ashamed to see her living in a cramped apartment in Tower Hamlets instead of some leafy suburb in Hampstead, and ashamed by just how far she’d strayed from the perfect future he’d imagined for her.
The two of them didn’t speak to each other for the next six months, although Carol called every now and again for an awkward chat about the weather and to talk to Will (always a one-way conversation). Each time she called she gave a different excuse as to why Roger couldn’t come to the phone, as if she still felt the need to pretend that everything was fine despite being present when the two men were publicly expressing their dislike for each other while blocking everybody’s access to the canapés.
Then a few months ago, Danny had received a text message from Carol asking if he and Will would meet her and Roger for a chat. He’d told her they were more than welcome to come to the flat, but she politely deflected the invitation and suggested they meet at a Pret A Manger near Old Street Tube station instead, presumably because it was neutral territory.
Danny had no idea what they wanted to talk about. He wasn’t about to apologize to Roger and he knew that Roger felt the same way. A part of him feared they’d try to convince him that Will would be better off with them, which did little to put him at ease as he hugged Carol, nodded at Roger, and watched Will embrace them both, but his suspicions couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Roger had family in Melbourne, something he was quick to remind people of whenever the sky was anything but blue, and he and Carol had been talking about moving to Australia for as long as Danny had known them. He never thought they’d actually go—neither did Liz, for that matter—but Carol had called the meeting to let them know that they were doing just that. Danny wasn’t particularly saddened by the news—their presence in his and Will’s life had always been minimal—but the announcement reminded him of just how alone he was. His wife was gone, his father was gone, his mother was as good as gone, and now his wife’s parents were going. All he had left was Will, and it often felt like he was gone too. He hadn’t spoken a single word since emerging from a coma after three of the most agonizing days of Danny’s life, and nobody knew why. Pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and speech-language pathologists all had different opinions about his condition. Some thought the head injury he’d sustained in the crash had permanently impaired his ability to form coherent sentences. Others suggested that while his capacity for speech remained intact, Will actively chose not to talk due to the trauma he’d experienced as a result of the accident and the subsequent loss of his mother. Nobody could agree on the cause, but everybody seemed to have an opinion on the matter, much of which came from outside the medical sphere. Reg, his landlord, believed a hefty backhand would get him talking; one of the plasterers at work swore by the powers of hypnotherapy; and once, while Danny was rummaging through the reduced bin at the supermarket, a woman with a long gray ponytail whom he’d never met before suddenly appeared beside him and casually asked whether Will was taking enough ginkgo biloba. Whatever the solution, if there even was a solution, Danny had long since given up any hope of finding it. He’d given up hoping for anything except the day when he would wake up and feel something other than a desire to close his eyes again and never reopen them.