Page 66 of Pull Me Under

The drip continues. Plink plink plink.

I need to find something to seal that tile. There might be supplies in the back room – the room I’ve been avoiding since I arrived. The room where Grandad stored everything he couldn’t bear to look at but couldn’t throw away.

The room full of our family’s other life. The one that was taken from us.

The door sticks when I push it – swollen wood, warped frame, everything in this cottage resisting entry. I have to shoulder it open, and when I do, dust swirls in the grey light from the single window.

It’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe I’m bigger, and the boxes stacked along the walls have settled into permanence. Grandad’s handwriting on the labels, neat and precise:

TAX RECORDS 1990-2000. BOAT MANUALS. PHOTOGRAPHS. GARETH.

That last one stops me cold.

My father’s name in my grandfather’s handwriting, on a box shoved into the corner as an afterthought. Like a secret.

I should look for the roofing sealant. That’s why I’m here. Practical reasons.

Instead, I’m crossing to the corner, pulling the box out from behind a broken chair and a stack of mildewed books. It’s lighter than I expected – not much inside, then. Which makes sense. My father didn’t leave much behind. Just debts and questions and a daughter who spent her childhood trying to be enough.

I sit on the floor, box in my lap, and lift the lid.

Photographs first. A few of them, curled at the edges. Dad as a young man – younger than I am now, maybe early twenties. He’s handsome in that careless way some men have, dark hair falling across his forehead, half-smile like he knows a secret. He looks happy.

I don’t remember him looking happy.

I remember him staring out of windows. Remember the smell on his breath at breakfast, sour, sharp, what I’d later learn was whisky. I remember the way he’d look at me sometimes, through me. No, not at me, through me.

Dad. Dad, are you even listening to me?

I was maybe twelve, and furious, not knowing why. He was at the kitchen table in the flat in Taunton – the one above the chip shop, the one where the walls sweated grease and Grandad kept the heating off in March because the metre was running down and there was nothing left to feed it.

Why do you look at me like that? I’d demanded, standing in the doorway with my school bag over one shoulder, my uniform two sizes too big because Grandad bought ahead and I hadn’t grown into it yet. Like I’m not even here?

He didn’t answer. Just reached for his glass and turned away.

The next photograph: Dad and Grandad, standing in front of a boat. The Lady Catherine, I think – one of the trawlers Grandad ran before everything fell apart. Before we left Sea Salt Bay and Grandad lost his harbour berth, his contracts, his shed, his name on the wall. A Sea Salt Bay fisherman without Sea Salt Bay is just a man who knows about boats. He took whatever work he could find – warehouse shifts in Taunton, boatyard labour in Bristol, scrubbing other people’s hulls in Southampton for nine quid an hour. A man who’d been his own skipper, reduced to maintenance on vessels he’d have outrun in his prime.

They’re not touching in the photograph, not smiling, but there’s a closeness in the way they’re standing. Solidarity, maybe. The aftermath of a fight they won together.

Under the photographs, papers. Boat registrations, old licences, a sheaf of bills that no longer matter. And underneath those⁠—

Letters.

A bundle of them, tied with kitchen string gone grey. I pull them out carefully, afraid they might crumble.

The envelopes are addressed in my father’s handwriting. But there’s no postmark. No stamp. They were never sent.

And they’re all addressed to H.

H. Not my mum, then. My mother’s name was Paula. Paula Reynolds from Leeds, who met Dad at Plymouth and got more than she bargained for – me, the accident, the surprise nobody planned. She went back to Leeds when it didn’t work out. No hard feelings, or none she ever expressed. Some people are in your life and some aren’t. I have no memories of Plymouth and no real memories of my mother, and that’s not bitterness – it’s just fact. Like the weather or the tide.

So not P.

H.

I should put them back. These are private – my father’s words, meant for someone whose name starts with H. A woman. A piece of whatever happened during one of those long periods when he’d disappear into himself and Grandad would shake his head and pour another cup of tea and say nothing, because what could he say?

I should put them back in the box and close the lid and go find the roofing sealant.