Free Daddy Dearest by Paul Southern

misjudged the mood. The judge threw us glances à la Pilate before the Jews. His hands were tied. The tears she shed that day would have done justice to the crucifixion. I stood there with Bart and wondered where it had all gone wrong.
    My little girl was going to be absent from my life for 261 days a year for the next eleven years. For each of those days, I was ordered to pay my ex-wife maintenance. On top of that, I lost the house. The thorns are still pressing into my skull. She gave another command performance that day and I’m still counting the cost. It’s no wonder things turned out the way they did. Eat my shorts, bitch.

12
     
    I had a lot of things to think about that night. I got so agitated, I got up and turned the light switch on five times. Then I moved the living room rug five times till it lay perfectly parallel to the sofa. My nerves were at me. I kept thinking of the basement and the open door and if I had missed anything. You should never revisit the scene of a crime; if you do, you’re either a ghoul or the culprit. In my case, it was both. I was responsible for the disappearance of my daughter, and there was some morbid part of me that needed to retrace her last steps.
    All parents mourn their children; whether it is the premature grief of miscarriage, or abortion, or the bitter sight of them in their prime, thrown through a windscreen, reduced to bone in some isolated hospital ward. The tears start when they’re born and never go away. My daughter is only five and already I’m looking back. I can smell her in her babygrow right now, looking at me through the bars of her cot, and I can tell you, it’s making me cry. I can hear her crawling up the stairs to the attic, laughing and gurgling and trying to open the door I locked so I wouldn’t be disturbed. I want to be disturbed now. I want her the way she was then so I can enjoy her more. There are what ifs and what might have beens, naturally, but above them all are the dreadful reminders of what was. There is no controlling what happens to your children; once you give them life, they’re on their own. That’s a tough thing to accept.
    I left the flat about two in the morning. It was eerily quiet: no music, no voices on the stairwell; just the soft hum of the lights and the tapping of wires in the service shaft risers. I passed the middle-aged tart’s door; she would understand. She knew loss like no one else. I put my ear to her door and stroked the wood like it was her skin. I’d done that before, years ago, in a hospital ward, to my wife’s stomach, listening for signs of life. Dimly, I imagined a child breathing and wondered what to expect. You never know till you’re there. I’d never seen so much blood or felt so much pain. No matter how you dress babies up, they’re a messy business; and birth the messiest of all. My wife looked as though she’d been gangbanged ten times over. Not that there was anything sexual about it; quite the opposite. It was just a sense of her being ravaged and abandoned. Her body was being subjected to an ordeal far worse than having me on top of her.
    While she was inside the womb, my daughter and I had quite a thing going. I would talk to her every evening and sometimes, to my ex-wife’s embarrassment, during the day, in waiting rooms or on station platforms, whenever we had a moment. I would put my head on her belly and tell her what was going on in the world. I wanted to keep her up to date.
    ‘Are you asleep or awake?’
    ‘She’s asleep.’
    ‘You can tell?’
    ‘She’s hasn’t kicked me for a bit.’
    I lowered my head.
    ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’
    ‘I need to have a word.’
    ‘You’ll have plenty of time to do that when you’re cleaning nappies.’
    I looked up at the clouds, at the high bank of altocumulus, and tried to imagine the distance between us.
    ‘It’s a beautiful day today, darling. The sky is a deep blue. When you come out, you’ll be able to see if for yourself. There