fantishu
25
NEW STORY TITLE: LUST AT FIRST SIGHT
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I’d spent my entire life thinking my father had up and left after I was born, not wanting to raise a child at such a young age. I was wrong, or at least my mother was. Ever since I was a little boy my mother had answered any and all questions about my father with a usual string of curses and insults, drilling into me that he was a bastard that left his family. I’d believed her without question, right up until the day she died.
My mother had been battling and suffering through lung cancer for the last decade, beating it multiple times only to have it come back with a vengeance until finally she gave up, deciding to just let it take her instead of wasting more energy on something she saw as futile. I still remember her telling me that if death wanted her so bad, she’d let him have her. But that wasn’t the only thing she’d told me as she lay there in her final moments. She also told me the truth about my father, who he was, and about my family.
My father hadn’t abandoned my mother and I when I was born, for he didn’t even know she was pregnant when she left. She had left him, not the other way around. From what my mother had told me the relationship between my father and her was fleeting, since he was already seeing someone. They’d met at a local alternate rock concert in Sydney Australia and hit it off immediately. The fling lasted a few weeks before my mother found out she was pregnant with me and knowing what they had was only a short-term thing she decided to leave the country and go live with her grandparents in London, where I was born.Content (C) Nôv/elDra/ma.Org.
She cried as she told me the story. Apologizing for the lies she’d fed me my whole life, saying she only wanted to keep me to herself because she loved me so much. She was afraid if I knew the truth, I would go looking for my father and leave her all alone. Whilst it hurt to know I had been lied to my whole life; I understood her fears. I would have wanted to meet my father if I had known he was out there and didn’t leave me. But the news about my father wasn’t the only thing that shocked me, it was that he had died close to a decade earlier.
He’d been killed in a hit and run by a drunk driver on his way home from work one evening. My mother had printed out the newspaper report and kept it in her diary, alongside a photo of him. I’d found the clipping and photo when I cleaned out her belongings before selling the small London apartment that had been my grandparents. The photo was of my mother and father together, looking incredibly happy. I could see where my features and looks had come from just by looking at the man in the photo, he would have been about my age when the photo was taken and it was like looking into a mirror, although he had blonde hair whilst I got my darker hair colour from my mother.
I still had the photo of them in my jacket pocket, the only thing I had of them as a couple. My deceased parents.
But the news didn’t stop there, my mother always said things come in three’s. I had sister’s, four of them. Amanda was the eldest, only a few months younger than myself and was my father’s first child to the woman he’d been seeing when he met my mother. Then there was Erica, at twenty-one she was a couple of years younger than her older sister. Lastly was the youngest, Emily and Mel, twins at eighteen years old. I didn’t know anything about my half siblings except that their ages and that they were all the daughters of the man I thought had abandoned me.
Not for the first time I began to wonder what it would have been like if my mother hadn’t left the country when she fell pregnant with me. Could I have had a simple, loving life that my sister’s had with a functional family? Or would I have turned out the same? Would my sister’s even be alive today if my mother hadn’t left? Surely my father would have stayed with her if she had stayed, and then I could have had that family life. But then they wouldn’t have been born. Even though I didn’t know a thing about them I could never wish, nor hope for a different past if it meant that my siblings would never have been born.
Especially now I was on my way to visit them.
I was standing in the crowded London international airport with my guitar case in one hand and my luggage bag beside me. My backpack held a few personal belongings like my passport, phone charger, headphones, laptop and some books for the long flight. I’d never been on a plane before let alone left the country and I was feeling the mixed emotions of anxiety and excitement as my plane was beginning to board. The long string of people was a mix of businessmen in suits, families with whining children and clusters of young couples and single travellers such as me. Everyone wanted to visit the exotic country of Australia today. But I doubted any of them were making the trip for such a reason as I had.
Once aboard the plane I found my window seat easily enough and settled in for a long twenty-one-hour flight to the city of Melbourne, where my sisters were now living. I’d purchased a second ticket for the seat beside me so I could bring my guitar on board. It wasn’t a super expensive instrument, but it was the only one I had, and I’d heard enough horror stories about airline staff destroying guitars through negligence. I wasn’t exactly sure on the living situation with my siblings since I hadn’t spoken to any of them apart from Amanda, and that was only via email. I wasn’t too tech savvy and an email account was about the only online footprint I had, I didn’t even have a Facebook account. At first, I thought Amanda would think I was some kind of creep on the internet, but to my surprise she had been expecting to hear from me.
It turns out my father did know about me, but he had no idea how to get in contact with me or my mother, since we lived so far off the grid and stayed away from most social media and online platforms. In the few emails we shared she told me that about twelve years ago he heard rumours that my mother was pregnant before she left. Amanda didn’t know how my father found out, but she said when he did he tried his best to find out where she went to see if the child was his, even to the point of causing a rift in his marriage and eventually ending in a divorce.
I expected Amanda to be bitter about my existence causing such harm in her family home, but she didn’t seem to resent me at all and when I asked she said I’d had it worse than her, and me being alive was no excuse for how her mother acted. The girls had lived with their mother when she won the custody battle but none of them were thrilled about it, causing the siblings to move out of home as soon as they were old enough. Now they all lived together and rarely spoke to their mother.