A conversation with Jake

I met Jake on a Sunday afternoon in a pub where we sometimes drank when there was a football match on Sky we wanted to watch. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks, so it was good to catch a sight of his lanky youthfulness when he came through the door a few minutes after I’d arrived.
We bantered with the usual convivial stuff, checking up on what we were up to, how college courses were going, where I’d been travelling too recently. Then he said he’d been upset with me during the week, and coming back to this place, near to the old flat in Hackney, had brought it back to him.
“You’re so unreliable. You don’t even know you’re letting people down. You’re just oblivious to it, man.”
This was a bolt from the blue. I must have been looking hard at him, to see if this wasn’t some sort of a joke, of a kind we’d never really done before, but it wasn’t that. After that he didn’t say anymore. He was upset. I felt myself becoming upset.
“So what do you mean, I’m unreliable?”
“You hadn’t even told me you’d got rid of the flat man. I mean I grew up there. I’ve still got a key to the place. There’s a room in there that I thought was my bedroom. And now someone else is living there. Why didn’t you tell me?”
This was a surprise. For the past seven years I’d been involved with a woman who lived in south London. Jake knew her well, had visited her home and had even babysat on a couple of occasions for her ten year old daughter, another kid who sometimes called me dad. When he went to spend his three years at university in Nottingham I’d had less reason to hang around this place on my own, and my move to Alicia’s had become pretty well permanent. But too unmotivated to do anything about the Hackney flat, it had remained empty for a long time, until last year when I finally got round to raising a loan to get in a new kitchen and bathroom, and a pretty amateurish redecoration job. Three months before a tenant had moved in: a woman with two children.
“Jesus, Jake, man – I’m sorry. I thought you knew I’d given up living there and was living with Alicia fulltime.”
“How would I know if you didn’t tell me?”
He was right. I knew I’d never actually said to him, as a matter of fact, that I no longer lived there and someone else was using it.
“So, how did you find out?”
“Last week – Tuesday, I think. I’d been out round the Angel way with friends. It was a funny night. I was tired after a day of teaching, and the evening wasn’t really working for me. I’d drunk a couple of pints and the beer was mixing up with being tired, so round ten I called it a night and caught a bus intending to get back to Jackie’s as normal. But the first bus that came a long was one that took me past that flat, and I thought, yeah, I’d swing round and see my dad.
“So I did. And I got off at this bus stop I’d got off a million times before, walked to the street door, let myself in, and walked up to the first floor expecting to open the door with my key and to see you. But the key wouldn’t open the door. I thought, strange, he’s changed the lock. So I knocked, and there was no reply. I knocked again, and a man opened the door from the flat across the hall and asked who I was. I said, ‘I live here’. He said ‘No you don’t’. I said ‘My dad lives here’, and he said ‘Who’s your dad then?’ I said ‘Dave, Dave Cherry’, and he said, you’d moved out, months ago – months ago. He said I shouldn’t knock on the door anymore because I’d upset the children. When he said that I realised I was upset, and probably a bit drunk. I suddenly felt I’d been really let down by something, or someone.”
“Christ man... we talk... we talk all the time on the phone. You couldn’t have thought I’d gone off and left you. You must have known I was just a few miles away, living with Alicia.”
“Yeah, I knew all that. But at that moment I felt that something had been taken away from me, without anyone asking my permission. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt sad and disappointed... more than I’d ever felt before.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, half stretched out his arms, obviously composing himself, after getting all this off his chest. Above us, on the TV screen high up on the wall the football match we’d come to see was just about to kick-off. We both looked at it for a few minutes, saying nothing.
“Here’s something really funny”, he said. When I came out the place, and walked back to the bus stop, I was phoning you, leaving a message, which I suppose must have been pretty angry with you.” My mobile phone had been left uncharged on my desk at work for nearly a week. Responding to voicemail has never been a priority for me.
“This girl, about my age, was standing at the stop and she heard me leaving this message. She said, ‘God, your dad must be a real bastard.’ I said, no, he’d a good guy. We’ve got a good relationship. He never lets me down. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
“’Oh yeah’, she says, ‘A misunderstanding. He’s not at the place you thought he lived at, and you can’t get him on the phone. Some misunderstanding.’”
I told her, it’s not like that – I knew where you where, and I’d get all this sorted out in 24 hours. She said, “You’ve got to forget him. He’s a bastard. All fathers are unreliable – they always let you down.”
“We got on the same bus together and she told me that her father had walked out on her without saying a word four years before. It had cut her up, a girl, probably about 16 or 17 when it happened. She’s spent weeks, longer maybe, trying to find out where he was, but he’d just left without a word or a clue about what he was doing.”
Above us a footballer beat two defenders on the wing and made a rush towards the penalty box, looking as though he was sure to score. A tackle came in from the side, and a beautiful moment never got to be born. Because we were who we were this was a cue to return to a normal life, and for two hours we drank beer and urged our team onward.
Later, after we parted, it came to me what I’d actually done that night, and had been doing to Jake in all the days that had passed since I left his mother when he was five years old, to set up in that flat, only ten minutes walk away, where I could continue the relationship I’d started with this kid. Jake had always taken this separation in his stride, showing no strong emotion about the fact that his mum and dad weren’t living together with him anymore. He moved easily between the two worlds of his different homes, assuming that arrangements had been made to provide him with the conditions in which his naturally amiable outlook on life could be maintained.
But how much of that had been possible because of that space, those couple of rooms above a row of shops, which I’d taken for granted for so long, thinking only of my life and relationships, rather than the places where it was all taking place. It seems I’d given that up so easily, not even thinking whether the person I was closest to had any stake in the way I’d ordered anything around me.
My indifference seemed even to have implicated me in the crime of another, who’d walked away with even more thoughtlessness from the ordered life which others, besides himself, had invested in. Jake had said she’d had refused to believe there was anything I’d done which differed in any way from the father who’d made her so unhappy.
For a few seconds I could evoke the sense of a child, walking into a place which contained a bedroom, cupboards were clothes and toys were kept, a room where meals were eaten, and where a life was lived with an adult person who seemed to offer love and care for a whole lifetime. Rooms that shaped the interior reaches of the heart and all the emotions it would ever feel, across all the years of existence.
Who would ever pull the door shut and allow strangers to change the locks on a place like that?