Chapter Six: Thread
I stopped hiding in the car only a few minutes after Dad and I finished our witching hour call. Although I didn’t want to go back inside, I didn’t like the idea of my mother shouting for me and not getting a response. Even after all this, I didn’t want her to be scared or alone.
I needn’t have worried. I walked back in to the stuffy living room to find her chewing on the last of her fruit pastilles.
‘You know what would be lovely,’ she said, oblivious to my distress, ‘a cup of tea.’
‘I can give it a go,’ I said. I’d literally never made my own mother a cup of tea, so this was a bit bizarre on all levels. ‘Milk, sugar?’
‘One sugar, lots of milk. Is the fan heater on?’
‘Yes, the fan heater is on.’
‘I’m bloody freezing.’
‘I’ll do your dinosaur in a minute.’
Her dinosaur is her hot water bottle, with a plush cover in the shape of a dinosaur. There have been many arguments between me and the carers about whether it’s a dinosaur or a rhino. My aunt is adamant it’s a hippo. It is not a hippo it’s a dinosaur.
Mum seemed to take comfort from knowing the dinosaur was there, at the bottom of the bed. In the same way she took comfort from Billy, her little teddy bear, always propped up beside her.
It was clear from how she kept pushing the thick duvet off herself, that mum was again confusing hot for cold. The living room was hotter than Pedro Pascal. But I took the dinosaur and went to fill it all the same, being sure to keep the door wide open to get cool air in there without her noticing.
I flicked the kettle on and put a teabag into a mug. I stared at the worktop, concentrating, forcing myself to see shapes and creatures in the granite. A rat. Threads. Lines across lines. A bunch of flowers. A dinosaur, not a hippo.
Mentally, I was trying to distance myself from the situation. I envisaged stepping away from a wide closet and a skeleton twitching within it; the skeleton’s jaw clipped and called, telling me the man who I’d spent my whole life calling Dad actually wasn’t my dad.
In a dark, dark town there was a dark, dark street
And in the dark, dark street there was a dark, dark house
And in the dark, dark house there were some dark, dark stairs
And down the dark, dark stairs there was a dark, dark cellar
And in the dark dark cellar three skeletons lived!
I smiled grimly to myself. It was odd, poking through memories like that. I didn’t even know I remembered the intro to the 1992 kid’s show Funnybones until that moment.
Need to make tea. Nearly three O’ clock in the morning tea.
I prepared very milky tea in a mug first, and got as far as the foyer before I remembered I wasn’t making tea for Mum – that vibrant, chortling woman who gripped my hand so tightly when I crossed the road as a child – it was for mum, the wraith-like stranger who could not sit up any more, never mind safely hold a mug of hot liquid.
So I put it in a sippy cup, twisted the cap, positioned the straw. It felt macabre, handing it to her. How many times had she done the same for me when I was a baby.
‘That’s lovely,’ she said after a sip. ‘I’ve not had a cup of tea in ages.’
Despite my emotional turmoil, I felt…proud?
She fell asleep with the plastic cup propped up on her bony chest. I carefully took it, put it on the table beside her, and pressed the bed controls so she’d be in more of a lying position.
She made grumpy noises when I did so, but stayed sleeping. Her cold hands grasped for something, so I put Billy between them. Her leathery, sleepy smile was gentle.
I’ll be honest, when I slinked away to the sofa in the dining room, the first thing I did despite my absolute exhaustion was Google the name of my supposed father.
Mum had also mentioned a third man, someone she’d met at a pub, but she “didn’t think it was him”. For the sake of my emotional state, I chose to trust her on that one.
There were a good handful of blokes by his complete name, and even more with his first and last name. Ranging from scrap metal dealer all the way up to professor. Not a single one of them looked like me “around the mouth”, as my mother had put it.
I combed through whatever army enlistment records I could access, around the year of my birth. I did find a soldier with my possible father’s last name, and his first name, but the middle name was different. And then I found a lieutenant with the same name, but his first and second name were in the wrong order.
I found news articles of people with the same last name, reported on for doing nefarious things. I found notes on charity websites thanking the same last name for donations. I found men from Yorkshire, from London, from America, from Australia. I felt myself going insane as I scrolled through any mention, hoping for some tiny fragment that might link back to the part of York mum lived during the years she was…er, being “a bit of a lass”.
The whole time, my younger brother and I exchanged text messages. The poor guy was in a holiday caravan with his daughter and my aunt, struggling with food poisoning. He didn’t seem concerned by the idea I may be his half-sibling, but that may be because he was “absolutely fucked, and in a caravan” as he put it.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I was woken by her yelling.
‘I’m in pain! I’m not right!’
Again, she “didn’t know what she wanted”. Again, she was curled up at the top of the mattress. Again, she’d kicked the duvet away but complained about being cold.
She was distressed, agitated, pissy with me. Every solution I suggested was met with anger. Every time I tried to hook my arms under hers and move her to a more comfortable position, she called out in pain.
So I called the district nurse again.
They arrived half an hour later, as the morning light bathed the lawn outside. It was almost six O’ clock.
I started having a panic attack the moment the pair of them came in. The older nurse sent the younger in to tend to my mother, and bustled me in to the kitchen.
‘What’s going on?’ She asked, with clinical but genuine concern.
The carers and nurses were already aware of my PTSD from my mother’s partner molesting me. That was a thread of information they had efficiently weaved between all the different nurses and carers who visited; each woman had asked if I was okay, if I was coping. Even so, this nurse was a little confused to hear about my recent revelation concerning the mystery of my biological father.
‘Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’ She asked as I struggled to breathe.
‘I don’t know…I don’t know who I am…’ I managed. I felt like a child. I am absolutely not a child. But I was wearing my fluffy hat with the sheep ears and soft horns, so I expect it was a bit surreal for the poor woman.
‘I’m not happy leaving you,’ she said, ‘is there someone we can call?’
‘My dad,’ I grappled at my phone. ‘Well, if he is my dad…my dad…he’s a twenty-minute drive away…’
‘Let’s call him,’ she took my phone from me.
The speaker was set to quite loud, so I heard him when he picked up.
‘Wuuargh?’ His broad Yorkshire tone clipped into the warm air.
‘Hello,’ the nurse said, ‘this is one of the district nurses…’
‘Oh, yeah. Okay.’ He knew exactly what this meant.
Twenty minutes later, Dad bumbled into his ex-wife’s kitchen, eyes still wet from sleep.
The nurses gave mum another painkilling injection, and left. She settled down quickly, falling into a gentle sleep.
Dad didn’t want to go talk to mum. I suggested he not bother – she had no idea he had turned up, and I didn’t want him to see her as she was. It had been a good twenty years since he had clapped eyes on her. That was a thread long broken.
Even so, he sat in that kitchen and listened to me crying.
I think the last time he’d been in there was more than twenty years before; one Christmas he picked me up in the evening when mum was drunk. She kept calling me “little miss arsehole” with such vitriol and hatred, because of how withdrawn and quiet I always was.
Dad didn’t say much at the time, but I remember him looking at me concerned, and how he bustled me out of the house into his car. And I remember the silent drive back to his home while I cried into the window.
As the early sun fell lazily onto the medication-strewn kitchen table, Dad talked and listened. He hugged me. He told me he loved me, and how he would do whatever I needed when I’m ready.
‘You’ll do a DNA test?’ I asked meekly.
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘I’m going to think about it for a bit,’ I said. ‘Maybe until this whole thing with mum is over.’
‘I think that’s a very good idea.’
I told him the full name of my supposed father.
‘Oh, yeah,’ his face lit up in recognition. ‘They were a bunch of gypsies that lived down Walmgate.’
‘You’re joking?’ I asked, not bothering to correct him to “traveller”.
‘Yeah, they lived behind a bunch of shops.’
‘They put their caravans there?’
‘Well, they owned the shops.’
‘They ran businesses from there?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They’re running a recycling business now. I’ve seen the signs for it.’
It’s never been unusual to see travellers set up camp in parts of York. I often saw the horses grazing on roadsides when I was growing up. The thought that my biological father could have been living in a caravan (absolutely fucked, and in a caravan) while I slept in my own bedroom was…sobering, to say the least.
I made Dad a cup of tea. As is customary for him, he drank about 1/4th of it and left the rest.
I smiled wryly as I poured the cup down the sink. This man will always be Dad. It doesn’t matter what happens. Any wanker can be a father. It takes much more than that to be a Dad.
Dad and I went for a walk, since mum was passed out. We stopped by a café and he bought me a latte and a weird sausage roll thing made to look like a steak bake with cranberries. My younger brother, still “absolutely fucked, and in a caravan” texted Dad concerned, so Dad took a photo of me and sent it with no caption. He showed me the photo afterwards; it was clear I had not slept properly in days.
“Rough,” my brother replied. He wasn’t wrong.
I let Dad go back home to sleep about 9am. Mum was still sleeping, so I went upstairs to rifle through some things.
My teenage bedroom had been emptied out, and was where The Man Who Is Not My Father had been sleeping up until he was moved into a care home. Mine and my younger brother’s things were shoved into the smaller bedroom. In the spare bedroom was The Man Who Is Not My Father’s office.
I’d already been in there a few times, as had my younger brother, trying to find some document or folder or scribbled password on mum’s behest. The man had a lot of stuff about boats. Boats he had sailed on, shipping details, a couple of diaries filled with numbers and charts I didn’t understand.
I crept into the main bedroom. Mum had previously been sleeping in there alone for a while, with lots of teddies wearing RNLI jumpers and years of dust.
I was surprised to see two shelves up over the bed, full of gifts and creations by my younger brother and I from our childhood.
A tacky model of a dolphin we had brought back from a holiday with Dad in France. Two little wooden totem poles we made in Design Technology at school. A little clay bowl I’d made as a seven-year-old, emblazoned with “I love you” in yellow paint, that for a while she used as an ash tray. A couple of tiny porcelain dolls I’d given her for some birthday long passed, and – oddly – a small model rocking horse Dad bought her soon after she left him.
Relics, coated in dust and cobwebs. Untouched for at least twenty years.
I pulled open drawers, sifted through boxes, desparate for some clue about my paternity. I don’t know what I was looking for – a photo? A love letter? I remember a big box full of photographs she had drunkenly gone through with me when I was in my early teens. I think I was looking for that. I was looking for Jack.
Instead, I found years of notes, shopping lists, scribbles about some puzzle in some strategy game; and a box that contained every single mention of me in the local paper, every flyer of every show I’d been in, every photo of me in every single stage role I ever played and every concert I sang at until she cut contact with me. The oldest example was from when I was ten years old; a poem published in a collection.
What happened, I thought. How did she go from being…obsessed with me…to not wanting to hear from me? Why did she suddenly want to protect The Man Who Is Not My Father so much?
My aunt, briefed by my brother, got an early bus to relieve me of caring duties, and I bumbled downstairs to let her in. She looked so concerned for me as I gave her the rundown on the last few days.
I handed her a packet of Minstrels.
‘Mum was going on about wanting Revels and Minstrels last night, so I got these for her. She’s asleep right now but might ask for them later.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Not really. I’m going home now.’
‘Are you okay to drive?’
‘I just have to get away from here.’
‘I understand. You know,’ she added, ‘I didn’t even know she was still talking to him when she says she…’
My aunt was talking about the bloke who is supposedly my father.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. This kind, funny woman had already tried to apologise for not knowing what had gone on with my mother’s now-husband, I didn’t want her feeling bad for mum being “a bit of a lass”.
I had to stop for a nap on my drive home outside a Burger King. I woke up twice, thinking mum was calling for me. I stared at the stitching on the steering wheel for the longest time.
Threads. Lines across a line.
19/04/2026
Thank you for reading. Louis x