Precious by Stephen Bridger, Sauvignon Blanc,

He is as sure as any father can be that his daughter must have stolen it.

‘No, Daddy, I didn’t take it.’

Zia is nine. She doesn’t fidget or look away. Her hazel eyes are wide open, urging him to believe. And he wants to, but there’s a weird complicity here. A game she’s playing as much as he is because it has to be her. If it isn’t then he’s lost. Up until now this possession has always been a permanent fixture.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jeffrey, you’re obsessed!’ His wife spits the last word back at him.

He knows what kind of day she has had by the way she unpeels her work shoes from her sweaty feet, or the manner in which she hugs, kisses and lifts Zia into her tired arms, or the moment she lets go and sinks, deflated into her armchair.

He boils the kettle, places the decaffeinated teabag into her favourite mug, the one with the two smiling foxes on either side.

‘I expect it’s where you left it.’ There’s a time when she would have invested more energy into her assessment of his failings. ‘Men can never find anything,’ she adds.

The Six O’clock News is about to start. When he sets her mug of tea on the trestle table beside her, she barely glances up at him.

Zia has had her dinner – two fish fingers, peas, and reheated white rice – and now sits at the kitchen table, her left leg swings like the beat of a metronome, while she chews the top of her pencil and focuses on the next sum in her arithmetic exercise book. ‘Do you need help?’ he asks.

‘No, Daddy, I don’t.’

He has already searched her school bag, the side pockets of her grey uniform, the drawers of her bedside table, under her bed, under her mattress, in her odds and bobs jars on the windowsill, in her two piggy banks and in her wardrobe with the jumble of boxes containing soft toys, dolls, miniature tea sets, spirographs, a telescope, a selection of My Little Ponys and even a pink Light Sabre which had once been her favourite thing but now sits neglected next to all the other stuff she’s outgrown.

‘They grow up fast, don’t they?’ It is one of his wife’s favourite expressions. He nods his agreement. ‘One moment they’re this high, and the next…’

Zia is their only child. He doesn’t know why his wife invokes the plural to make her point. They will never be capable of having another. One cycle of IVF paid for by the NHS and the other three are not. When Zia arrives on a frosty morning in January, they both decide she’s worth more than the sum of their disappointments. By then he can no longer work. Instead he has to battle through various assessments and appeals to claim his Personal Independence Payments. The princely sum of seventy-two pounds and sixty-five pence. Not much more than his hourly rate as a plumber, but spinal stenosis has put paid to fiddling with downpipes and u-bends.

He refuses to believe they are poor. They just have to make do with a little less. He stays at home. His wife works.

 

His father gave him the silver coin a week before he died. His voice little more than a hoarse whisper, his face emaciated, his eyes dull and lifeless. Withered fingers pressed the silver into the palm of his hand. ‘Keep it,’ his father said. ‘It’s yours now, like it was my fathers before me.’

He knows the story. They all do. Passchendaele. The third battle of Ypres. August 1917. In the trenches or some muddy hell hole, a sniper’s bullet hit his grandfather full square on the chest. He would have died save for the silver shilling within his breast pocket. The coin still bears the marks of where the bullet struck. Two millimetres – the thickness of the tarnished metal - the difference between life and death. A memento handed down from grandfather to father to son.

He wouldn’t be alive today without its protection - nor Zia - her life as much tied to her great grandfather’s coin as it is to him.

 But his wife is right. When last checked he could buy a 1916 silver shilling for barely more than the cost of a franchise latte. It shouldn’t mean anything, and yet it’s the last thing he touches when he leaves the house, and the first thing when he returns, a habit so ingrained that the next morning his fingers linger on the hallway shelf where it normally sits, and he pauses for its absence, filled with a strange foreboding.

‘Wait, Zia. Wait!’

Her hand turns the front door handle.

‘What is it, Daddy?’

‘Let’s have a mufti day,’ he says.

‘What’s that?’ Zia stands there, front door open, her tiny eyebrows squished together, frowning.

He’s as confused as she is. Maybe his mother said this once, or his grandmother. ‘It means a day where we can wear what we want, Zia. A day of….possibility.’

‘But I want to go to school.’

‘Not today. School is off. How about we watch TV, make pancakes…’

‘But I won’t see Ginni!’

‘You’ll see Ginni tomorrow.’ But he remembers tomorrow is a Saturday and she won’t and his face crumples, unsure why he is lying and why it is so important she doesn’t leave the house when it’s not raining, not even that cold. It’s the week before half-term, eight days before Halloween and all that nonsense which comes around with wearying predictability every year. It seems so fake and yet Zia loves it.

 ‘Promise?’

‘Yes, I promise,’ he replies.

While she is changing out of her uniform, he phones the school.

‘I hope she’s better soon,’ the school secretary says.

‘I’m sure she’ll be back by Monday,’ he replies.

He makes Zia a hot chocolate, and then lets her watch cartoons on the TV while he carries out another search of their house. He goes through every pocket in every trousers, even those he hasn’t worn in years. And when she tires of television, they play a game of treasure hunt – he has secreted half a dozen mini chocolate bars from a variety bag bought for the Trick Or Treaters. Zia greets each new discovery with a shriek of joy, but the only thing of importance remains unclaimed.

There’s the occasional muffled sound of sirens but no more than usual, and when he checks the local news reports there are no reported accidents. No acts of violence. Just the usual Friday morning in South London.

He is being an idiot. He has overreacted. But when Zia asks to go to the park, he says no.

‘You said we could do anything!’ Chocolate smears her lips, her left cheek, her fingers.

He wipes her protesting face with a Jay Cloth. ‘You know what, why don’t we try out your Halloween costume? We’ll surprise Mummy when  she comes home. How about that?’

This endless negotiation exhausts him, and he’s not good at it. Is he a bad father? But his doubts run deeper than making Zia stay at home when she should be at school. He loves her – of course, he does – but is that enough? He has always compared himself to others – other parents, other relatives - who laugh and chat as if this were the most natural thing in the world, but it isn’t. For him. He’s older. He walks with a stick. The spinal stenosis and surgeries have reaped their toll on his failing body. Getting anywhere takes effort, energy and will, and the supply of each is dwindling.

Sometimes he wonders whether the tension between the three of them is a product of the way Zia arrived in this world. An unnatural occurrence when nature and the natural order decreed otherwise. It’s a stupid thought, made stupider by the fact he wouldn’t have it any other way but his bond with Zia is fragile. He witnesses this fragility in a thousand ways -  and the older she gets, the more he considers that one day their connection will break and she will drift away as if there was nothing between them.

He wants her to grow up. He wants her to have the chances and choices denied to him but at the same time – and this is the contradiction he holds tightly within himself - he wants the Zia whose whole world can be encompassed by his arms. But now she has Ginni, Emma and Francine and too many others of whom he isn’t even aware of.

There is a world growing outside of him. A world he will never know. Soon she will have other friends. And boys, and what will he mean to her then? A dutiful call? A filial act of obligation?

 

His wife returns home with a plastic carrier containing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc still cold from the supermarket refrigerator, and a party sized bag of cheese and onion crisps. She swings their daughter who is now cloaked in her witches’ garb in a wide arc around the kitchen. Zia whoops in delight, her hat flies to the floor, her feet narrowly miss the nearest of the kitchen chairs.

‘How was school today?’

‘I didn’t go to school, mummy. We had a mufti day!’

It takes a little explaining. He’ll tell the truth later.

He reheats his wife’s favourite lamb curry which they eat with rice and two different jars of shop bought chutneys. All three of them sit at the kitchen table. This is the first time they have sat together this week.

‘What are we celebrating?’ he asks when he’s pouring them both a glass of wine.

‘Oh, nothing,’ his wife replies. ‘I just thought…I deserved it.’

 

Three weeks later, Half Term and Halloween over, the coin still missing - not forgotten, but he’s learning to accept its absence as a new normal, something he will tolerate because he has no choice but to. And he has to acknowledge that despite his fears – irrational as he now admits  -  nothing bad has happened to him or Zia. ‘And nothing will,’ his wife assures him when he confesses. He expects her to laugh or scream, but instead she smiles – a weak, half smile - and places her hand on his shoulder as if he needs support. ‘I didn’t realise you were so superstitious. You didn’t think that coin was lucky, did you?’

 

Zia has written her usual wish list to a Santa whom she no longer believes in, while he accumulates the required yuletide stuff –  a snow globe (she always has a snow globe), scented candles, glittery wrapping paper, Christmas crackers – counting every penny as he negotiates needs and wants in Poundland and the Charity shops, but there is an item he cannot find – a calendar with pictures of her favourite singer from her recent world tour. It is enough to drive him half mad hunting for something which should be there but isn’t. In the end, he has to ask his wife.

‘It’s thirteen pounds and ninety-eight pence,’ she says. ‘Daylight robbery!’

‘Can I have a look?’ He holds out his hand.

She flicks her eyebrows to the heavens, but hands him her phone.

‘Do you want tea?’ She pushes herself up from her chair.

He shakes his head and scrolls. There are over 400,000 results related to her search – Amazon, Etsy, the official Taylor Swift domains and many others - but most aren’t for calendars. Many are not even related to the singer, but at the bottom of the screen there’s an offer on eBay for under a tenner. He clicks on this link, taps impatiently on the side of his chair for the site to open. It’s his wife’s eBay account. He knows it’s wrong but can not resist the opportunity to see what she last bought. Instead the screen opens at her selling history. It’s there. The King’s head in half profile, his left ear blurred and blunted from the imprint of the German bullet. George V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMNI: REX inscribed around its circumference. His silver coin. Sold for the cost of a calendar. Or a cheap bottle of wine and a packet of crisps.

He stabs at the X on the top right of the screen, places the phone on the table beside his wife’s chair and presses both his shaking hands hard into his thighs. The spinal stenosis has numbed his legs but there’s still a faint echo of pain where his fingers squeeze withered flesh.

‘Did you find a better deal?’ his wife asks on her return. One of the foxes grins at him as she places her mug on the coaster.

‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘It’s cheaper on eBay.’

‘Oh, is it? That’s good. Well, I’ll get it then, shall I?’

‘Yes, dear. If you don’t mind.’

About the author

Stephen Bridger is a former hospital doctor and a fledgling writer. 

Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)