Aphrodite’s Hat. Salley Vickers

in the summer, ice cream and confectionery and hot dogs were sold. He leaned his back against the shuttered little structure and lit a cigarette, waiting.

      He had smoked two cigarettes and was lighting a third before a car came to a stop in the road beside the hut. The car door banged to and then the heavy crunching tread of a dark shape of a man came towards him.

      For a moment, Charlie thought the man was aiming a gun at him, then he realised it was a hand. He took the hand warily and shook it.

      ‘Charles?’

      ‘Charlie. Charles if you like.’

      ‘Charlie then. I found you.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Shall we walk, Charlie?’

      They walked along the pebbled shore while the waves made audible little flirtatious sallies and withdrawals at their feet.

      ‘You like the sea?’ The voice was deep but awkwardness made it rise unnaturally.

      ‘It’s OK. You get tired of it, growing up beside it.’

      ‘I never did.’ There was a tint of reproach in the voice now.

      ‘You live beside the sea, then?’

      ‘I live by it. Your mum not tell you I was a fisherman?’

      ‘She never told me anything about you.’

      ‘Can’t say I blame her. She was all right, your mum. A firebrand.’ It wasn’t easy, Charlie thought, talking to a man you’d never met whose face you couldn’t even see. ‘How did you find me then, if your mum told you nothing?’

      ‘My gran kept an address.’

      ‘Ah, she liked me, your gran. I sent you presents, birthday and Christmas.’

      ‘When’s my birthday, then?’ Charlie said, hoping to catch him out.

      ‘May twelfth, five fifteen in the morning, just in time to meet the morning catch.’

      ‘I never got any presents.’

      ‘I did wonder.’

      Behind them, along the promenade, a car hooted and the harsh voices of some youths rang out, ‘Fuck you!’ ‘Fuckin’ madman! Fuck it!’ ‘Fuck off!’

      ‘Language,’ said the man walking beside Charlie. It was hard to tell whether the comment was a reproof or merely an observation.

      ‘Mum never let me swear.’

      It wasn’t true. But he felt a weird obligation to assert a spurious vigilance on his mother’s part, to distance her from this discovered act of treachery. For more years than he could bear to calculate, he had longed for some token from his father. The news that this had been denied him, deliberately withheld, prompted a general defensiveness.

      ‘She was all right, your mum.’

      Charlie detected that this was the man’s mantra against some cause for bitterness and tact made him draw back for a moment before lobbing the question: ‘Why’d you leave her then?’

      ‘That what she told you?’

      In a moment of unspoken agreement, they had stopped and were looking out over the sea. The slate surface shimmered provocatively under the beam of the lamps on the long posts and the diffused lights of the windows of the bungalows, way up on Fulborough Heights.

      ‘She say I left her, then?’ the man asked again. There was an undertow of something in his voice Charlie recognised.

      ‘Didn’t you?’ Any notion that there could be doubt over this was fantastic. He had been raised in the sure and certain knowledge that he had an absconding father. And yet there was that pleading animal tone.

      ‘She chucked me out.’

      ‘What for?’ Relief that there might be another explanation for his father’s dereliction struggled with the stronger fear that he was going to be asked to accommodate worse news.

      ‘Didn’t rate me, I guess.’

      They had reached the farthest point of the beach’s curve and, with the same accord with which they had stood surveying the dappled waves, the two men turned to walk back the way they had come. Charlie dug his hands in his pockets against the wind, conscious as he did so that he was adopting a pose he had absorbed from films. The gesture was a feeble understudy for the words needed to voice what he was feeling.

      ‘Your dad was a right bastard,’ he had heard his mother declare time and again. ‘Walked out and left me with a bawling kid to cope with. Mind you,’ she had added, when the black mood was on her, ‘the way you go on, you’d have driven him out even if he hadn’t gone before.’

      ‘Your mum’s mum, your gran, wanted me to stay,’ the man who was his father resumed. ‘Maybe I should’ve. I’ve often wondered what was right.’

      ‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Maybe you should.’ As he said it he was aware of a dreadful gratitude emanating from the presence beside him. It seemed bizarre to make someone glad to learn that they had not done what you ardently wished they had done.

      ‘You missed me, then?’ The voice was now unquestionably wistful.

      ‘Yeah, I missed you,’ Charlie consented. He felt sick at his own words.

      ‘Missed’ wasn’t the size of it. He had mourned his absent father, fiercely, inconsolably, endlessly, desperately. Since he could remember thinking his own thoughts, missing his father had taken the lion’s share of his inner life. It was, he suddenly recognised, to seek his father that he had made his way to London, for the only way to bear the loss had been to conjure that impossibly glamorous figure, whose flight it was possible to condone on grounds of innate superiority. He could never have envisaged this hesitant man with the unsettling squeak and tremor in his voice. Sharply, fervently, he wished this newly recovered parent to the bottom of the sea.

      ‘And you are a fisherman?’ he said aloud in response to a solicitude he had come, over the years, to resent but had never had the heart to forswear.

      ‘Was is the operative word. I don’t do anything now. No work for us fisher folk these days, what with the EEC.’

      The note of whimsy was terrible. An unemployed, down-at-heel, shabby fisherman was no substitute for an insouciant profligate high-hearted deserter. Charlie, acute to personal danger, braced himself for further unwanted revelation.

      ‘I live with a decent woman. Pat. She sees me right. Works up at the local pub and helps out with the B and B there. I do odd jobs for them too. We get by. What do you do?’

      ‘I’m an actor.’ Pause. ‘Well, trying to be. But …’

      ‘It’s hard, I know. You’ve got the voice.’

      ‘Have I?’ Charlie felt a shot of excitement at this unexpected encouragement.

      ‘A good voice, you’ve got. I heard it straight away. I had a voice once. Someone put me in a film. Said I was a natural. Offered to take me to Hollywood.’

      ‘Really?’ Suspicion of this hint of redeeming enterprise in his lost parent hovered over relief.

      ‘I’m not a liar,’ Charlie’s father said placidly. They had reached the beach hut again and he stopped and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Untipped, they are. Got the habit on the boats.’

      ‘Hard to get, aren’t they now?’

      ‘I’m not a liar,’ his father repeated, cradling the match with which he lit Charlie’s cigarette with a big hand. Red lobster hands. ‘I didn’t leave your mum. She didn’t want me. Don’t blame her. But I shouldn’t have left you.’

      Charlie stood, looking out at the glimmer of the receding tide, pulling on his father’s cigarette. A strand of tobacco had stuck to his lip. The words he had longed to hear,