1Beckham Noble
The city was charcoal gray. Rain clattered down the window as I looked out at the passing buildings. The regal Croydon Clocktower whizzed by in a raindrop-streaked blur. The Ashcroft Theatre looked different than the last time I’d seen it, with an entirely new modern facade, all white edges and square boxes.
It all felt like home, and yet nothing could seem stranger to me.
Of course, things had changed. I hadn’t been back in London since I’d moved to the States. After my father and I threw fists at each other. After he kicked me out of the house and I never looked back.
I moved to America… damn, seventeen years ago. I had been twenty-three, a young man just figuring himself out, when I felt like my past in London was too much for me to bear. I packed up my shit and made a life for myself across the world.
Now I had just turned forty and no longer needed to figure myself out or explain myself to anyone. Least of all my father. And even if I wanted to talk to him, that wasn’t a possibility.
The reason I had come back to London was to put our past to rest with him. Once and for all.
It was my mother who’d talked me into it. When I was kicked out, she did everything she could to get me back into the house. She was ready to divorce my father and sleep on the streets with me until we found a place to stay. I didn’t want that, and I knew my relationship with my father was irreparable. So I cut all ties with both of my parents. I made it solely on my own, surviving day by day until I started working at a pub. That was where I met a private eye who would talk to me every day about his job, his cases. They weren’t all riveting cases, but he talked about each one with a contagious excitement.
Years later, I spoke to my mum again. We had a tear-filled reunion, my heart feeling like it had been mended from an age-old wound, scabbed over with time. She told me that she’d divorced my father. Losing everything she loved in life, she had thrown herself into her sewing and dressmaking. Her passion bled into her pieces, and she soon found huge success, changing her life around.
Sometime in the last couple of years, my parents had a rekindling of sorts. They spoke over tea and found some common ground. Over those years, things slowly got better, until my mum was telling me that my father was a changed man. She said there was something different about him. A happiness that changed even the way he smiled. She wanted me to speak to him, to try and build a bridge of the whitewater of trauma we had rushing underneath us, but I felt like there would be no way. I couldn’t speak to him. I couldn’t face him.
And then I got a call about his death. It was my mother, and she had sounded pretty shaken up. She asked me to promise that I’d be at the funeral, at least to provide some strength to her.
I didn’t want her going through that day alone. I imagined her dressed in black, holding herself and surrounded by no one she could reach out for. I couldn’t have that. I booked my flight and made it to London in time for the burial.
The funeral went by in a blur. I didn’t speak, but my mother did. She gave a beautiful eulogy for the man she had known before the alcohol took over. She talked about how, in those last few years, he had seemed to have turned his life around. Positivity had bred in a place where negativity held dominance for his entire life. Too little, too late for me, but as my mother wiped away tears, I could see it was just enough for her. She looked frail in her older age, but her shoulders never slumped, no matter how much pain she was enduring. Even at the burial, she stayed strong, holding my hand in hers, her bones poking at my palm, her body giving small shudders.
It was at the end of the burial, when I thought all was done, when a sense of permanence had fallen on the five of us standing there, it was then that a woman walked over to me and caught me by the elbow. She looked to be my mother’s age, with soft brown eyes moist at the corners from fresh tears.
“You’re his son, right?” she asked.
“’Scuse me?”
“Robert’s son. You’re Beckham?”
I nodded. She opened her black jacket and pulled something out from an inside pocket. “This is for you. He wanted you to have it.”
I narrowed my eyes. The envelope had my name written across the front. It was big and bent at the edges, and I could already tell I wanted nothing to do with it. I had come to this funeral because my mother asked me to. This wasn’t about closure for myself. I’d already got my closure when I was homeless on the grimy London streets. That was when my father died to me, back when I was a sixteen-year-old kid, lost in this world and just looking for a little guidance.
Surprise, surprise.
Closure was a damn fuckin’ lie. Because that envelope held a letter from my father, and as I took it into my hand, I could feel the weight of it like a fifty-pound dumbbell.
“Who are you?” I asked the woman, not recognizing her.
“I’m… well, I should let you read the letter. It’ll explain it all.” She took my hands in hers and shook them. “I’m so sorry.” In her eyes was a deep sorrow, the same kind of sadness reflected in the few people that had attended the funeral. Somehow, though, hers seemed to run deeper.
She left, getting into a dark town car and driving off down the shaded road of the cemetery, leaving me behind with a hundred different questions.
I got into the back of the cab. I held the envelope in my hand, wondering what would happen if I just slid the window down and tossed the damn thing out onto the grungy street.
That’s what I wanted to do. I should have never come. I let my mother convince me this was a good idea. I should have stuck to my gut. This was a mistake, and the burning envelope in my hand proved that.
I told the driver the address to the flat I was staying in. He tapped it into the navigation system, and we were off. I had asked my mum if she wanted to spend some time together, but she said she felt like sleep was the only thing she wanted. I wondered if she knew who that woman was. I didn’t even get a name, but the way she was looking into my eyes, the way the sadness washed over her, I felt like she had to have some kind of strong connection with my father.
The driver turned onto a faintly familiar street. A lot of this part of South London was coming back to me. I had left Kingston when I was nineteen, so there were plenty of memories built up in the narrow streets and brown-bricked buildings, their windowsills painted white, their walls practically touching their neighbors. Not all memories were good, but most were. Most were really good.
“Turn here, please.”
“Sure thing, mate.”