A Home Coming

Alec’s not driving. Not at the moment. Not since he forgot the way to the supermarket. Left at the end of the street, right along the road that turns into the back road to Teesside and left into the plaza that wasn’t there thirty years ago when I left the town for good. We’re not driving to the supermarket today, I should add. Alec’s my dad. Or he used to be. He’s sitting with mum in the back of the ten-year-old Escort he hasn’t driven since – well, you can guess when.

We’re heading out of town in the opposite direction to where that supermarket is. It’s not the first trip of this kind we’ve made. I keep saying to Mum, it’s just to see, that’s all. We’ve seen too many already. They’re all out of town. Some have even been in other towns. We’re hanging on, hoping a space becomes available in the place a hundred yards from Mum’s house before it’s too late.

Mum will cry sometime today. Maybe before we go into yet another place with a twee name and the canned music of Vera Lynn and Jimmy Young and Lord-knows-who-else failing to counter the atmosphere of defeat. Maybe when she asks Alec ‘Will it be alright do you think?’ and he looks blank before he works out that the safest thing is to answer yes, even though you didn’t understand the question. Or maybe – and I admit this is always the worst – afterwards in the car, when Mum says ‘I always promised Alec I wouldn’t.’

So we’ll put it off to another day. A day I might or might not see, as Spain is so very far away now. My parents visited once. About five years ago. My dad – he was still my dad then, just – kept getting lost on the way back from the toilet. It was on the ground and only floor of the villa.

Later, back home, my mum will ask him if he enjoyed the trip out. And Alec will say ‘yes’, because somewhere in there, even now, is the man who loves my mum.