Dinner at Dad's (No Smoking)

My folks did the splits when I was eighteen and I moved into a rented flat with mum. It wasn’t a united front. As her only girl, it just made instinctive sense. Plus, dad had never gotten used to adding two lots of Always Ultra to the shopping list.
There was no talk of selling the house; I wouldn’t have allowed that. Whenever I stayed over I was reminded of how long they’d been apart. Dad changed their bed sheets, along with the bed. He bought a new stereo with a CD player and the old records disappeared, taking the hint. My old bedroom became part music studio comprising a portable CD player strapped to speakers, plugged into a keyboard with a mini version of the Jamaican flag hanging on the back of the chair. He stopped smoking.
“Will you play a tune for me, dad?” I asked him one Saturday before that woman came into our lives, but before it eventually clicked that my parents would never grow old and desperate and get back together.
“Maybe later, Countess,” he’d said, double checking his betting slip as cautiously as building a model ship. He called me Countess to show that he was listening, or when he wanted me to Come here and ask What’s this?
He didn’t play for me later.
Later was the arrival of the new woman, Dina, and then the house became a tight fit.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was my secret stash of ciggy butts hidden in his old cigar tin box beneath a board in the cupboard that had stored my toys. They’d all run away.

Dina runs a finger over dad’s brand new CDs lined up on the brand new Ikea faux wood pine rack and coos accordingly. She picks one at random and says it’s her favourite.
"Which one is that?" dad asks sitting with his back to her in the armchair he only sat in to listen to music.
"New Horizons, Benji Afaby" she says, leaning over the back of his chair and showing him the one she’d just said. I have front row seats to her rear end. Her kisses echo around the room like a concert hall. I'm glad I've chosen to set the table and rearrange the condiments. Again.
Dina sashays to the CD player, puts it in and presses play. The house fills with music I don't recognise. It’s also new, like the place mats and the sofas and the rug. Only dad’s armchair’s the same. She stands in the middle of the room nodding reverently, wiggles her hips a little. I don’t want to hear this music, and I don’t need to see her impression of a belly dancer. I make my way to the kitchen.
Dina doesn’t eat meat, and now neither does dad. I stir pots that don't need stirring, some veggie concoction. I open the fridge to grab a drink and spy white wine remains. I neck some and put it back without wiping it. I’m not thirsty. I stand in the kitchen for about half an hour at a loss. I’m probably waiting for dad to come and check on me, or the food, or something. And, at the same time, I don’t want him to do squat.
The kitchen still has a whiff of fresh paint, but I could be imaging that. The counter’s had its knick knacks rearranged. But he’s forgotten about mum’s plastic containers. They sit in a dark corner between the bread bin and the fridge, extremely dusty and forgotten. When I was younger I would build them into a pyramid of sorts and dad would find me and help me build. It wouldn’t take long, or grow very tall, but it was fun all the same. I play around with them for old time’s sake, wipe off some of the sad looking dust.
Dad calls for me, but doesn’t come.
I turn the fire up under the pots ever so slightly and go back to my seat at the dining table. Dina’s somehow managed to fall onto dad's lap. Her lips have somehow got stuck to his face.
"You ok, Countess?" dad calls comfortably.
I don't answer.
It doesn't take long for the smell of the food to waddle in.
Dina sprints to the kitchen and dad joins me at the table.
"You sure?" he asks giving the table a once over the way he did when I was learning to how to set it. He asks the way a dad asks when he knows something's up, but you're a girl.
At least he seems bothered. But I don’t feel any better. Maybe he’d asked mum how she was, and then she’d left. I told him I was fine.
"That was a close one," Dina bellows from the kitchen. I get a whiff of slightly over done lentils.

Dad pours himself a half glass of white.
“You’re driving Cleo home, baby,” Dina says.
“I can have one,” Dad replies, slowly.
Go dad.
“What do you think of the wine?” she asks me, chuckling, a sign that she’s just thought of something clever and funny to say and will tell me in t-minus two, one...
“You students – you must know your way around a bottle or two!” She laughs with her eyes. Somewhere in between thinking it and saying it, she changed her mind about how funny it would be. Doubt is the thick age line across her forehead.
“Not studying anymore, Dina,” I say. Her name is so opposite to how I’m used to adding ‘mum’ to the end of sentences. It sounds strange. “Those days are over. Cut up my NUS card the other week.”
Dad chuckles but I know he doesn’t know what the NUS is.
“A graduate, now,” he reminds her. “And still working.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” Dina says, smiling at her hands. I feel atom sized bad, so I say, “But you never forget what they teach you in student bars.” She smiles at me gratefully and I feel like a diseased traitor.
They discovered the wine in Tesco’s Finest section, they tell me, a chateaux something, they mispronounce, so we can pretend we’re eating out, chuckle, chuckle. Any guilt I felt is vaporised.
“So how is work, Countess?” Dina asks.
I look at her and then look at dad, who doesn’t look at me.
“They don’t call me Countess at work if that’s what you mean.”
She nods. “Oh, yes, that’s the trouble with offices nowadays. Everybody likes to get in everybody’s business." No one calls me Countess but dad. I’m about to try again, but she keeps talking.
“I tried not telling them much about my Hannah, but one day I mentioned her over a coffee break. Who’s Hannah? You’re how old? No way! It was easy enough to get out of it, though. I mean all they do during these breaks is smoke, smoke.”
“Didn’t you used to smoke?” I ask, knocking back some wine.
Dad nods proudly, moves the hand that had been treading water under the table (yuck) and puts it on her shoulder. Somewhere in the back of my mind I see mum sitting at home watching Dancing on Ice.
“Twenty years.” She sips carefully at the wine. “You don’t smoke do you, Cleo?”

Mum insisted that dad and I still got on after they broke up. It wasn’t a divorce because dad had been married before and said it didn’t suit him. Mum never told me if she’d ever wanted to get married or not. So, it wasn’t anything formal, but it still sucked the air out of my lungs.
Dad changed things, slowly, the parts he seemed keen to acknowledge, like the master bedroom and the bathroom (hypoallergenic shower gel and chrome bath taps). Now part studio, my old bedroom still has the same Wuzzle wallpaper that’s scrawled over in parts with a marker pen during my artistic phase. The wardrobe’s small because it’s a child’s wardrobe and I’d not gotten the chance to upgrade.
He finally confessed that he’d emptied the toy cupboard, donated them to charity. I’d like the idea that they’d all packed up and left in protest. “You’re all grown up now,” he’d justified. “Things change.”
He quit smoking and I continued for him. After Dina moved in, I’d hang out of my old window like a useless burglar. I didn’t feel bothered about being found. Then I’d spray like mad, flush the toilet and beat a hasty retreat. My old ciggy butts. I always forgot to check.
I know what you’re thinking. Why smoke in there at all? I guess it was the same reason I resisted Dina, Dina who did nothing but want to try. Parts of my room hadn’t changed, so I guess parts of me hadn’t either.

“No, I don’t smoke,” I tell Dina.
She nods and starts talking about things going on with her, like her new diet or her own kid, Hannah. I really don’t care. Finally, she scoops up a bite of lentils with rice. To my delight her face drops. I have to eat them too, I know, but my God how good this feels.
Dad takes a big bite and chews on them like a drugged cow. He smiles at Dina and she catches it, zaps him a big toothy grin. It hurts, I can tell.
“Did you turn up the fire?” Dad asks.
“No, baby. I can go fix something else.”
Dad claps his mouth together. “I like them this way. Taste as if they should be a little bad for you, but we know they’re really healthy.”
“Thanks, baby.”
Benji Abady’s guitar fills in a silence that should have been heavy with disappointment. Dad watches me for a long minute but doesn’t say anything.
“I’ll go get dessert,” Dina says, her voice having dropped two octaves but dad springs up to get it instead. To me she says: “I’m sorry about the lentils. I must have been distracted.”
Guilt and lentils does not taste nice.

About a year and a few months after mum and I moved out, Dad called me to see if mum wanted any of the things she’d left behind. There wasn’t much: some old blankets and towels, old crockery, a few records. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. But I said I wanted them anyway. I’d fit them in somewhere in our small flat.
When I got there Dina was struggling with her suitcases through the front door. She waved as she saw me walking up. As she had them halfway through the door, I left her to it. Dad had kindly put mum's stuff in an Asda box in the passage. I rustled it as I grabbed it, and saw him helping her with the luggage. I bid them adieu and made sure they saw me throw that box in the green bin, the one for recycling.

It’s hard to refuse a game of Scrabble, particularly when dad didn’t like to play it when it was just us three and it stings a little that he does now. Even dinner has changed. He always said he was rubbish, and he is. Dina helps him by moving his letters to sit on double and triple letter word scores.
“What’s EN, then?” he asks.
She sighs good-naturedly. “The letter ‘n’ sweetheart, for nincompoop.” She chucks me a smile I cannot refuse.
I declined dessert yet she had an Oreo ice-cream drink prepared. It was dee-licious despite the guilty aftertaste.
I win and her praise is genuine. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom and dad squeezes her hand as she leaves. It’s a thing you could miss if you’d blinked, but I see everything there is to see in it. My chest squeezes itself tight.
We hear her start washing up. She’s humming. For some reason, I feel like crying.
“Having a good time, dad?"
"Yeah. I don’t think Dina likes this CD. But she knows I do.” He smiles to himself.
"Well I am, too, thanks," I say.
"Umm." Something's on his mind. It’s spilling onto the table the way he drums it with his fingers.
"She makes me happy you know," he says suddenly.
"Good. Mum's fine by the way."
"I didn't ask."
"Not in front of Dina, no, but I could tell you wanted to."
"Countess..."
He doesn’t say anything for a minute. “Those plastic containers in the corner of the kitchen...”
I say nothing. The lentils are stuck to the sides of my stomach.
“Please take them home for your mum.”
He gives me another one of those looks and then smiles at me. "And stop smoking. I don't like it."

Dad changes the CD, sits in his chair and sighs. It’s the sound a lion makes after eating a huge chunk of zebra.
I sit at the table for a minute, not sure what to do. My head is stamping on itself. I suddenly want mum to be here, and then I don’t. Dina’s still humming. It sounds like a bee doing Dusty Springfield. It isn’t irritating.
I tell the back of dad’s head I’ll go help wash up, and leg it to the kitchen. Dina’s staring at the remains of the lentils with an odd look on her face. I tell her to go, I’ll sort this. She’s cleaned mum’s containers. They look like they’ve been for a run and are pleased with themselves.
“Been meaning to do this for a while,” she says, smiling.
I thank her. I feel like I could murder a cig. Dad turns up the music.