Keep Us

                                                                                  Part 1

                                                                                      ***

The sky is ominous.

It hasn’t rained like this in quite some time. Droplets are beating like coins on the hard roof. The echo is loud, outdoor staccato sounds bleeding through the cracks of the ceiling and into the kitchen.

His father is making tea for the two of them. 

It had been a while since he’s spent some time with his father. The man is often away at work and the times he’s home, he just sits in front of his laptop either working on a new book or grading his student’s term papers. His father isn’t really that smart, he thinks. Not as everyone says at least. He just works hard.

Too hard sometimes, that he doesn’t have time for his family. Maybe that’s the reason his son doesn’t have any siblings.

“You want sugar on your tea?” his father asks him. He comes to in a sort of surprised manner, as if he’d forgotten for a moment that his father is there even though he’d been staring at him the whole time. 

“e-err… three teaspoons please”

After that is more silence. And all that’s heard is the sound of the rain still pounding the roof, and his father putting three teaspoons worth of sugar on his tea.  

It’s almost deafening. The spoon is making clanking sounds as it hits the inside of the porcelain cup.

He clears his throat. 

“How’s the university?”

He really shouldn’t be the one asking this. It should be the other way around. But since moving from Oxford to London, his father’s been awfully quiet. 

In the events preceding his mother’s untimely death –caused by a cancer in the blood which she probably contracted from the hospital she works in- his father was a gregarious man; always the life of the party. A wild child as his uncle put it. But ever since then - and it’s really such a shame because his father has these charming smiling eyes which his mother told him he’d inherited- the laughter had minuted, down to almost never.  It seems almost like he’d had two loved ones die.

Sometimes though, he’d catch his father smiling to himself and often, he’d wonder why.

“The university is as fine as it’ll ever be” his father tells him.

The cup is set in front of him and his father is making his way back into the guest room that he’s converted into a study. What’s the point, his father had said, of having a guest room if no one ever comes to visit? And he may be right, but it is quite sad that he’s taken to isolating himself there most of the time.

“Wait, dad, can we talk?” he asks the man. He isn’t sure what they would be talking about but he reckons he’d figure something out. His father turns around and he sees there on the man’s tired, rugged face, the smile that rarely makes itself known these days. 

The man takes a seat across from him.

“Alright. What about?”

He thinks of talking about the university and how his father’s next book is coming along, but it seems too formal and he honestly isn’t that interested in knowing. So he begins with “How are you?” instead.

A sigh escapes his father’s lips and he reckons his father’s already figured out it’s going to be a long afternoon. The man goes to look outside and it’s still raining. Probably harder now than it was earlier.