First Meeting

My whole life, I had waited for that day to happen. And how beautiful the day itself was, now that I’m looking back at it. 

Of course, that morning my head was full of other things. Worry and excitement, and emotions I couldn’t name yet, so I wasn’t focusing on the world outside the car. But even though I didn’t watch it, there was thick growth on the hedges we passed. Sunlight landed golden on the leaves. A rare cloud sat in a wide sky. My memory stored it away for years and I can look at it now.

I was going to meet my dad. I was five years old.

In the car with me were Ralph, Granny and Mom. The car was red and cream, solid and slow. The doors shut with a deep thud and I needed to give a kick to open them. Other cars drove round us on the highway and disappeared ahead.

There was a wall of pale leather in front of me; the back of the driver’s seat. I saw my mother’s hair above, shiny black below the headrest. The same leather was hot under my legs and squeaked at Ralph’s fidgeting. I shot him a look that said, Not today.

Ralph stilled. The road turned, and the sunlight spread over us both as he said, “Will he be wearing prison clothes? Black and white ones with stripes?” 

I frowned. “It wasn’t prison.” 

“But he was locked up, you said?”

“Yes, but not prison. That’s just for prisoners.” 

Ralph shrugged. “OK, but then who got him clothes? …Or meals?”

I’d explained it to him before. He was silly to keep worrying about the same thing. So I simply said, “He’ll tell us who, when we see him. It’s soon now.”

My mother glanced at me in the rear-view mirror just as I started chewing on my lip. 

“What was that, love?” She held the steering wheel wearing her yellow driving gloves.

 “Ralph thinks Dad doesn’t have any proper clothes, or food,” I said. “Because he couldn’t go to the shops.” Ralph worried too much.

It’s not that Mom was deaf; she and Granny didn’t see Ralph. They didn’t mind it when I relayed messages, though. They weren’t like my teacher, who didn’t like me doing that at all.

Mom said, “It’s very sweet of him to worry.”

Ralph smiled on the wide seat, his head resting back in the light. Watching him sidelong, I said to the front of the car, “Shouldn’t… Shouldn’t we get him some? Just in case.”

Ralph smirked and stuck his tongue out at me. I tried not to glare, in case Mom saw. 

“Tell Ralph the army will have given him clothes. He’s probably very comfortable in them. Of course they’ll do that for a soldier.”

Her grip on the wheel tightened. I saw creases in her gloves. 

Outside, the light had lifted – from its low and shiny morning angle – to a glow. The tree greens were deep and bright and heavy. The road had curved again, off the highway and onto streets that turned and crossed over each other.

“Mark, stop that fidgeting, please.”

“It’s Ralph doing that.” I shook my head at him; he’d started at it again.

“Well, then ask him if he can sit still. Granny and I would like some quiet now.” Mom held my gaze in the rear-view mirror for a long time. “All of us are a bit nervous. And that’s OK. All right?”

*

Guards standing at a wide gate spoke to Mom when we stopped the car; tipped hats and warm grins.

Across the road from the entrance to the base, there was a dog-rose bush as tall as a grown man. Ralph stared at it – a shield of green with flat, white flowers spread across it like glowing disks.

A guard with wide shoulders waved us onto the base, and up to the next man in uniform. This one had very white teeth and a loud voice. He ruffled my hair – Ralph pulled a face but I wasn’t allowed to – and led us down long corridors that smelt of nothing but clean.

“He’s in here, Mrs Richards. I’ll leave you guys to it – you’d like some privacy, I’m sure.”

It was a room with couches and a table. There were flowers in a vase, a TV that was off, a record player with its lid down, water glasses, and a man in a chair. The sunshine made it down here even though the room was at the end of so many corridors.

The man was small. I remember that. He looked wrong. He wasn’t like his picture; he was thin and sucked in, which made him so much smaller than the clothes he wore. 

He had my eyes but darker, crinkled – they fixed on my mother. After a moment of nothing showing on this face, he smiled. That split his forehead and eyes and cheeks into a hundred folded lines.

Mom started to cry. Noisy, long bursts of tears. She hugged my grandmother, which muffled the crying against a cardigan at first. Then she went to my father and caught him in her arms gently like she didn’t want to break him. But she shook against his shoulder and the sound of her sobbing was muffled again. His hands gripped her back. 

I wanted to ask who he was. My dad was in the photos at home; broad and tanned and sure, with thick, dark hair. This man looked like he’d been pegged up inside his suit. Half his hair was grey, and it was shaved too short. I could see his scalp shine in the window light. 

Mom pulled away from him. “Mark, come meet your father.” Her face was wet and she smiled. “He’s home.”

I looked from her to Granny, making sure. Both of them nodded to encourage me. Ralph frowned deeply from behind Granny’s legs.

The man spoke in a voice I didn’t know, saying, “Hey, my boy.” 

He had a smile for me too, an uncertain one. I was afraid he’d try to pick me up or scrunch up my hair like the other soldier had; I was ready to step back to Granny. But he stayed where he was and held his hand out, like men I’d seen, for me to shake. 

Not that day, but much later I would hug him. He did grow back to something closer to the man in the photographs, but by then that didn’t matter anymore; the person who was back and living with us was real. And fun and strong and good. And my father.