Father Unnamed

Has anyone else noticed that the titles of my posts make this blog sound like a child raising guide? I'll have to rethink how these come across. Although writing this thing does feel a little like giving birth. What an overused cliché that is.

I've talked a little about Dasha's mother, though she really deserves her own post, but her father is one of the first supporting characters mentioned. Despite this, I'll never name him. He is a fleeting influence in Dasha's life; a figure not forgotten but no longer a constant. This doesn't make him any less important in her recollections of her youth. One reads like this:

In truth, Dasha needed her father in absence. Without him she dreamed the hundred kind things he would say to her. During the occasional hours he spent in his office, her lurking at the door or by his feet with a blue-eyed doll, his fingers reached for her. Caressed the flash of her hair. She listened to him mutter aloud from his journals. Learnt the water table levels under Dorset and the injurious properties of rabbit manure. Replaced the word 'bulb' with 'you' and thus received low, crooning sentences of love that carried her through his research trips when her only company was Lilia and a steel-handled spoon. A spoon that smarted her knuckles each time she reached for a nugget of dried apricot or banana before her breakfast was finished.
Her first taste of a fresh crab apple was taken at the age of seven, under the safety of her father's desk. Its crisp centre was massed with raw hatching maggots. Dasha spat into her hand, pulling on her father's pant leg with the other. He ducked his head to see and she showed him the half devoured bruising.

-What do you have here?- he asked in a voice she took into adulthood.

-It's gone bad.-

-So? Waste not, want not.- He took the rest of the fruit, picked up his ivory letter-opener and cut free two small squares. Dasha wanted to eat them but the maggots and their sweet skins sent her scuttling to the kitchen bin. She would never again enjoy the smooth glass-crunch of apple between her front teeth. It was a thoughtful type of fear and for the first time, Dasha realised that life was made up of moments just like biting into a rotten apple. No experience was judged on its entirety but on bracketed seconds bringing the scenario to open and close. Her father's cutting of the rot was a moment of pleasure before the remembering of her taste buds. Not even the mush of putrid apple on her tongue could fade the smell of his cologne or feel of callouses running from palm to fingertip.

There's a dangerous belief that a girl with father issues will grow up to develop relationship issues. I don't know how Dasha will end up yet – she's barely turned ten – but she certainly won't be a shining beacon of healthy human interaction. Whether this is due to her father or to Lilia's unaffectionate nature is still unclear. I do know he is a good man. A botanist, an atheist, a country-town Brit. But why did he marry Lilia? And what happened to him? You may as well ask what the last line will be. Anyway, I don't want to ruin one of Dasha's most important familial memories. Although I will show you who would play him in the movie.

Lara S.