Her Father’s Sex Life Is the Star of the Show

Jo Hamya

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An excerpt from The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

There was summer, a beach; a country they were still getting used to in the early stages of their holiday. There was a map of tourists on the sand with bared stomachs on striped towels, rows of skin pillowed up to brown in the sun. There was—ahead—the shoreline, the plastic rainbow litter of miniaturized buckets and trowels. Other people’s husbands standing desultorily over their spawn while their wives took a break, took Aperol, wore designer sunglasses, half watched little sand huts being drawn up: the erection of child-sized city-states on the coast, subject to parental patience and barely developed motor skills. There were teenaged girls in their first bikinis flirting with the local boys, and officiate beach wardens in navy polo shirts and navy shorts, lips half pursed around their whistles: eyes flickering to them, then away.

August. Sicilian islands. Sophia had taken her father out to sea. It happened naturally. She tugged his hand. She was, at that point, so much smaller than him. Her cheeks were as soft as the just-forming paunch of his stomach. The sides of her mouth were bearded with pulverized peach flesh, and clinging beach grit. Her fingers were unpleasantly sticky. She did not look like a serious person. But when she said, we go now, he hadn’t been able to imagine staying still. He took her hand and made himself move. It was hard. There was—

her little hand tugging—

(and the task of stooping to reach it; the cramped space left to pick up his knees in, and the soreness around his back, which had been a terrible new sensation in those days—)

her little hand tugging—

(the weather, which had been too warm:he hated beachwear, he had worn linen trousers in protest, he thought they looked quite good—)

her hand pulling faster—

(and the sudden fear: that they had not brought toys—one of those crude red molds of seashells she could have slapped onto the sand or an inflatable ball, though he wasn’t sure how well throwing and catching would go; the thing would have probably floated out on the water if she tried, so the question of how to entertain her, how to have fun, turned helplessly in his mind—)

they reached the shore.

Sophia’s mother watched them from the shade of a rented umbrella. Once they reached the sea, Sophia sat down in the water. Her father scooped her immediately back up. Patches of pink dress near her legs and her bottom turned mauve instead: came up wetly, like a bruise. It seemed to bother him more than her. On being set down, she’d shrugged; moved two paces forward, sat down again. She’d begun pulling fistfuls of sand up and lumping them into a mound. After some consideration, her father crouched down too—rolled up the sleeves of his button-up and his trousers.

He’d started gathering sand into his palms, sculpting more carefully than his daughter. He’d added a moat. He’d taken pebbles and stuck them near the tower’s base; made his hand into a claw and dripped slurries of sodden material over the edifice until the sand formed turrets. Each time his daughter made to help, he batted her fingers away. Sophia’s mother watched her do battle over a sandcastle; watched her pout and knock parts off as they were added. Her father laughing. Continuing to build.

It had been exhausting to guard. Sophia’s mother knew the beginnings of a tantrum when she saw one. Earlier that day she had used one arm to lift her daughter slightly above ground and another to slip a pair of blue gingham shorts under her feet while she thrashed. She’d tied a ribbon in the middle of the fabric’s elasticated waist, she’d smoothed cotton. When it was done, Sophia had scowled. She shook her head. She prepared her bottom lip for conflict.

This was a daily ritual. Sophia knew what she wanted. Another change of clothes. Another. Her father worked on his novel in the other room.

The beach; the fat pulse of the sun and its resultant waves of lightheadedness. Sophia’s mother touched her watch. She imagined swimming. She thought about how to do dinner that night, remembered dinner the night before—courtesy of her husband’s friend. Someone he hadn’t seen in years, another writer, whose daughter had been paid €15 to look after Sophia. A table of eight other strangers her husband was excited to meet again. She sat on the far side of the arrangement, away from him. That she could not keep track of their names, though evidently few people knew hers. That she had worried whether a sixteen-year-old she didn’t know was equipped enough to take care of her child. That it had been a night of not speaking, with a glass of red wine hovering under her chin by its stem, and recollections pooled by the others from university pubs she’d never been near. And—Aren’t you stunning? her least favorite of them said; gestured to the man she had married six years ago. Has he shagged you yet?

A pause. A smile. An argument on the way home.

By the sea, Sophia’s protests had subsided into laughter instead: she’d learned to make a sport of demolishment. Her mother wondered whether she had enough good humor to deliver her daughter’s hat before she got sunburn, whether she’d put enough SPF on; considered the thick square of black polyester-elastane blend flattening her breasts and mulled over whether she had the time to buy something nicer. She was tired.

When she woke from her nap, the time on the umbrella had run out. It, her husband, and child were gone. There’d been no note to explain the latter’s departure, but she could picture it. Him, gathering Sophia up, awkward but sure, with one hand supporting her thighs and the other on her shoulder. Her mouth level with his ear. He liked to steal her away like that from time to time. When he did it, he would say something inane like, Mummy needs a break, and smile at his own benevolence. It’s an image she resented: a middle-aged man in damp linen trousers, carrying her daughter. When a beach warden had asked whether, for the discounted price of €2.50, she would like the umbrella back, it had been the kindest thing she had ever heard.

In his North London kitchen, Sophia’s father measures out two teaspoons of sugar and stirs them into his cup. There is a leftover plate in front of him smeared with apple preserves and dough. He takes it to the sink. On the counter, the Evening Standard urges him to take advantage of the country’s newfound freedom by tucking into oysters at Vinegar Yard, by seeing Titian conquer love and death at the National Gallery; it asks him to eat out to help out, a phrase even he has grown bored of turning into a joke by way of past lovers’ genitalia. The paper extols the benefits of a UK-based ‘staycation’—a word he has crossed out by hand in vermilion pen.

One evening in April, after a month of making small-talk in his local corner shop with whoever could bear to stand near him for an hour, he sat in front of a pixelated image of the foreign secretary, whose hands conducted such nightly proceedings in absence of the prime minister—he had fallen ill. A gold wedding band had flashed forward with statesmanlike authority while Sophia’s father heard change to our social-distancing measures now would risk a significant increase in the spread; while he heard damage to the economy over a longer period; while he heard measures must remain in place for at least the next three weeks. The hazmat-inspired podium on-screen played on with other speakers for the duration of an hour. He’d called Sophia first. When she didn’t pick up, he called her mother instead and howled. It’s not something his daughter knows about. She’d sent him a text the following morning with a smiley face, having only just recharged her phone. His ex-wife was already in the guest bedroom, unpacking a suitcase into its wardrobe when he cried in slower, longer breaths the second time, and lingered over the typed-out emoticon. With great patience, she taught him how to install a popular new form of video-call software as a way to breach this new form of distance.

Not seeing Sophia, in itself, was not an uncommon event. When his ex-wife left him, there were no arguments about who their daughter would go with. She had been small enough to need constant care he felt it was more natural for her mother to give, and which he couldn’t, because of his work. Gaps in contact became part of their relationship. He took care to mend them—with humor, with presents, and affection. He always wanted to know what she was turning into while she was gone.

During the months in which it had been unclear whether it was safe to see Sophia in person or not, his ex-wife had tactfully left the house once a week under the guise of shopping for food while his daughter moved haltingly across his screen, voice cutting and returning out of sync, face bleached by light coming in from a window in her background. When the calls finished, his ex-wife would reappear with stems of tulips he’d never have thought to buy for himself when alone. He’d watched her move about the house in clothes she’d worn when they were married. She left him again yesterday. Today, he sets his coffee down on the fat lip of the bathroom’s sink and rakes a comb through his hair. He clips his nails and rubs cream into his hands, takes a clothes brush over the light wool of his gray suit. Twenty minutes later, a cab dispenses him in front of a theater in Covent Garden.

Quarter to two in the afternoon. The first thing he does is text Sophia to say he has made it. He sends a smiley face as an afterthought. Then, he lights a cigarette by the building’s edge and searches the crossing to his right. Traffic. Horns coming up from the Strand. People’s sandals, jackets, bags, scurrying past. There’s a woman with her head bent and her thumb on her phone—such an ugly position, he finds. But she has a beautiful olive face and he likes the red color of her shoes, so he counts her in the composition. She has stopped on the pavement. Now, he is outlining her: making more manifest the jewel drop earrings among her hair and the bangles on her wrist. There’s her calf, her thigh. There’s the twist of summer dress on her chest. As though she knows it would please him, she puts her phone in her pocket and tips her head back at the sky. He has the sun on her face. Who else could make her beautiful like this?

He does it for everyone: today is a benevolent day. A waiter in the restaurant to his left drops a tray he is using to lay silverware on the tables outside, and it’s not unpercussive, the noise it makes—he can add it, somehow, to the thrum, to the music he imagines in his head. It might be excessive, but he makes the silk anemones on the restaurant’s windows shake in their pots when it happens, little purple-pink shivers in green. The inside of the theater ahead is visible through glass walls: the people within are like marionettes, waiting to be moved. When the cigarette goes out, he puts on a cotton mask and goes in.

Now, the presence of others. He waits in a queue elongated by the space individuals keep between themselves and others. Collects his ticket, stub of stiff white; is given an orange plastic square in exchange for his suit jacket. It’s a trade down rather than off, but the room is hot. He is approached, gingerly, on whether he would like to buy a programme for £10 and accepts. Then he is served bad-wedding kind of wine at the bar, cold-misted glass smeared by hot fingers and not enough poured in: he regrets asking for it. It costs £10.25. Still, he enjoys himself. It’s the contained way everything exists in a theater. Everyone around him is doing the same: ticket, bag check, programme, drinks. Everyone is sipping the same sweating, overpriced alcohol and comparing notes on their pamphlets. If he came here tomorrow, he would find everything identical. It’s a relief that things are normal, with only slight alterations. The half-faces, with eyes peering over cloth. The arrows on the floor, directing movement. They go mostly ignored.

The thing about the theater foyer is that it has been recently renovated. The open-plan glass extension that spills seamlessly into the old front of house is new: there was less space before. The wall that has been taken down used to display posters of past and ongoing performances. There had been a greater sense of being ushered into the depths of the building, of exiting the world for a few hours to see something less real than what was outside. There had been no windows. The embrace of artificial light. How it is now, transparent, and stippled with other buildings’ shadows, with London streaming in full view, is, he supposes, a new sensibility being asked of the arts. But even so, there are good things about the building’s new set-up. At almost two o’clock, in the height of summer, the sun comes in. The foyer, where it meets the theater’s front of house, turns everything into a glasshouse where he can watch things grow.

Three-quarters of Sophia’s audience is made up of young people in their twenties and early thirties. They cluster in groups, leaving around them empty space. They know each other’s presence is the potential for sickness or death, and so they display an exquisitely exaggerated consideration in keeping to themselves. They take pictures of everything. The gold balustrades on stairways, the carved walls. They take pictures of themselves. Everything about them is as immaculate as a painting: color, pose, poise. Their fingers and dexterous wrists, managing their camera phones. None of them lean back, or let their mouths unconsciously drop open. They take off their masks and become plastic, perfectly suspended with arched backs and pursed lips. He sees them pretend to do things like drink wine or read their program before tucking away their devices to drink wine and read their programs. He enjoys watching them, and so it is almost a shame when a woman wearing a headset touches his elbow. But he likes the way she tunes her eyes fluidly into a smile above her mask. He has attempted this before and failed. She does it well. She does it so it looks real; instructs him by her example to match the same quick change of pace. She’s head of brand engagement and social media for the theater, she says. She is working on his daughter’s play. They have half an hour until it starts. Would he like a quick tour?

She leads him to a wood-paneled lift. Its doors open instantly for her. She points at his drink, apologizes and says, you’ll have to leave this; turns her head like a saint while he unhooks the cotton around his mouth and drains his medium measure of white in two awkward slugs. He leaves the glass next to a bouquet of lilies on the table beside them.

Plum carpets and mirrors on the surrounding walls. He must be very proud of Sophia following after him, the woman tells him while the lift takes them up. If she had a famous author for a father, she’s not sure she would do the same.

Yes, of course, he says, he is very proud, though he doesn’t know how accurate the word ‘famous’ is. She assumes he’s being modest; tells him she had to google his name for a picture reference of who to find in the foyer. The results had turned up his Desert Island Discs, a Telegraph article ranking him one of a hundred most important people in twentieth-century British culture, a well-stocked Wikipedia page.

Sophia’s father demurs. For all this so-called fame, she still had to google what he looked like, who he was.

It was meant as a joke, but he can see he’s embarrassed her. He starts to say, and Sophia’s play? Do you like it?—only for the lift doors to open. She looks at him expectantly, says, Please, and waits for him to step out. Two awkward steps. He’s sorry, he pleads with her. He doesn’t know where to go.

Now she smiles in that same skilful way, with all of the uncovered parts of her face, as though something has been restored. It’s just this way, she allows, and leads him forward. He watches the back of her head recede for a moment. It has acquired, inexplicably, a kind of malevolence.

She likes his daughter’s play very much, she tells him once he has caught up. It’s very generous of him to come.

He wants to ask her what she means by this, but they are at the doorway of a booth now, where the woman in charge of social media tells him to feel free to look around from the entrance, but not to go in. She points out screens, which project the stage below. Crew members run in front of the camera. Bits of music play: loud, then not. What he is seeing is the preparation to stream that afternoon’s show on their website, his companion explains. Since mentions of the play had been doing so well on various social media, they thought they should try to broadcast it online. Audience members had become so used to replicating life on a screen thanks to the pandemic, thanks to video calls and home cinema, remote parties and kitchen discos.

To Sophia’s father, each black-clad production member is a ghost ensuring his daughter’s work haunts the internet. But he nods.

No, that is very good, he concedes, and means it. He tries to override the sudden clench of muscles in his stomach. The tech booth, with its dimmed light and damp smell, has none of the glamor of the rest of the theater. Rust-colored carpet has clots of mud and glitter in it; gunmetal and plastic equipment with raised black and red buttons protrudes from everywhere. It is a small, claustrophobic space with him lingering in the doorway. It enables everything. It does not feel right to be in it. He thinks of how beautiful the photos taken by audience members in the light-filled foyer must have been, and how ugly it is in here. On a Tannoy overhead, a woman’s voice asks him to take his seat: she tells him the afternoon’s performance will begin soon. And dimly, on a Tannoy overhead, Sophia hears a woman’s voice asking the theater’s relevant visitors to take their seats. She tells them the afternoon’s performance will begin soon.

A line from Sophia’s play:

 —Would you like a cigarette?

A line from Sophia’s play:

 —No. I’m always meaning to quit, aren’t you?

A line from Sophia’s play:

 —I don’t think so. The body accepts its daily increments of harm.

It’s like cocktail-party conversation, Sophia’s father thinks. It makes absolutely no sense.

Onstage, the actor finishes smoking, and the obvious thud of a bedframe hitting a wall resumes, again and again. After the two actors had finished their prolonged build-up to sex, the upper section of the kitchen’s high back wall had revealed itself as a partition; lifted, introduced a new set. It was impressively done. The new set looked nothing like the kitchen: it was a white box containing a white bed and nothing else. From somewhere, a smoke machine misted the area with soft vapor.

At first Sophia’s father hadn’t been sure of the intent. The new part of the stage looked like heaven compared to the gnarled wood, the clutter it sat above. But now that he has been watching the two actors fucking in it for almost ten minutes, it looks unreal. It looks like a new-age porn set.

His first honest thought had been that a sex scene this prolonged was a brilliant device to kick off a play with. It was the sort of move that gave the overall work the potential notoriety of a classic. If it had had nothing to do with him, he would have told Sophia she was every bit as clever as her father. But the shirt on the floor is undeniably his. He’d like to inform Sophia that when he did bring women home, it happened late, and lightly, and he’s sure she never witnessed it first hand. He finds it hard to picture her lurking by the stairs. He thinks of the production crew he met in the tech booth half an hour ago moving neatly, capturing each actor’s move as it happens.

When he hears the beginning of an orgasm and knows the sex is coming to an end, he lets some saliva back into his mouth.

Shock.

Despite renovations to the exterior lot, theaters in Central London remain impossibly old. Chairs are small. Even with the new rules, where space is left between occupied seats, proximity to others is unavoidable. The great horrified hush around him is tightly strung. It would be so easy to break, and feasibly, to his advantage. How often, he reasons, do groups of middle-class theater-goers endure watching simulated sex next to strangers? That, he could say in a sensible tone, is not what happened at all. He would not even have to raise his voice too much above normal volume to be heard.

The woman to his right is still grasping her phone and the glove of four sloping bones that make up her knuckles look ready to come out of their skin. For something else to look at, he slants his eyes two seats to his left, where another woman wearing round glasses is sitting. She seems to be having the opposite reaction—she is slouched back; bored. Oddly, the woman with the phone is the older one; from the look of the top of her face, he’d put her in her thirties. Round Glasses looks like she might still be at university, possibly just out of school. She has a buzz cut. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s that the younger generation has grown up with an unavoidable stream of sex on their phones: inTV shows, in ads for perfume and cars. She is probably used to it.

Other, terrible, thoughts. Has Sophia heard him come? He listens to the actor do it and decides, evidently not.

More urgent concerns supplant that notion. He has to chew them down. First that Sophia has, however indirectly, thought of him having sex.

It is surprising to him that he cannot receive this idea with more cool. During their holiday, he made sure to write anything radically vulgar without her assistance. And the book they came out with contained very few fucks in the end—mostly, it was almost-adults making innuendo; a lot of anatomical wisecracks and longing. A lot of ships in the night. Part of him had taken it for granted that when she read the finished work, she had skipped over certain passages. The way he recalled it, the part-time nature of their relationship as it existed back then meant they had been distant enough with each other to speak frankly about sex in abstract, or else, to veil it in writer’s jargon, but too close for conversation to veer into personal context.

The next problem is that Sophia is aware of the possibility of his body existing unclothed, and that she has found it to be a problem in the world. He rids himself of the saliva in his mouth.

Sophia is aware he has a dick.

Wrong word. He can feel his tongue prune; ridges on it like an allergic reaction to bad food.

Sophia is aware he has a cock.

No.

A penis.

That settles, somewhat. Who doesn’t, after all? But then the next crushing thought. Sophia has written a play in which everyone can see a supposed representation of his penis.

He breathes; moves his knees forward until they touch the seat in front of his. He scans for something meaningless he can look at onstage while he thinks and arrives at the espresso mugs on the kitchen counter. They are plain, and blue.

Sophia has written a play in which everyone can see a supposed representation of his penis, and she has done it to evoke disgust. Possibly he is reading too much into it, but it has turned the woman to his right into a death mask, and the woman to his left cat-like with tedium. Neither option is good. There is enough in him to still feel wounded. If he could walk around the theater appealing to the audience for help, he would. He’s not sure which is the larger slight: that she will continually expose him to a new cohort night after night, or that each show will find his body ugly. And what was she thinking, casting this actor with geometrically cut pubes?

Too quickly, before there’s time to stop it, he wonders whether he’s supposed to reciprocate. What Sophia has done is undress him with clinical assurance, and perhaps he is supposed to do the same to her play. Someone like him has been conjured; it follows that she might have written herself in, too. If at some point an actress portraying her onstage emerges naked, will he be expected to keep his face level and stern? Should it go like this: here are Sophia’s breasts; there is her cunt; here is her body as meaningless event? It is not as though he did not used to, in his own matter-of-fact way, lower her into baths, or unload her from a shit-stained nappy.

But there is a difference, there is. When he finished doing those things, he pressed the soles of her then-tiny feet to his mouth and said, I love you, you’re mine. None of that care has been given him. In twenty or so years, she might have to wash him while his body degenerates. Will she find him disgusting then? Does it matter?

None of these hold a candle to the remaining fear. Glibly, he had assumed Sophia did not tell him about this play for a long time out of embarrassment; to eliminate the possibility that he might tell her it was bad. So far this is not something he can do in good faith. He’d brought his heart to his seat to watch with, and it turned out there was no need. She was better than him. Now the realization—perhaps her omission was to spare his feelings, not hers.