by Gary Kittle
was her only child? There was an agenda here I wasn’t privy to.
‘You’re intending to shack up with that… that..?’ He held my gaze, unblinking.
‘I thought you liked her,’ I whispered hoarsely.
‘Like? I tolerate her. It’s not the same thing.’ He grimaced suddenly. ‘It takes a lot of tolerance to be a father.’
‘Meaning?’ I knew he’d break eye contact and he did.
‘You’re still a kid. Too wet behind the ears. You’ll be back in a month, and all this disruption will be for nothing!’
Disruption? Would that have been such a disaster? If nothing else it would have proven him right, given him the perfect endorsement for that much favoured organ of fatherhood, the overactive advice gland.
‘Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad.’ Was he trying to protect me, then, until I successfully navigated my wet phase to become the dry, joyless adult he would have approved of? By that time I had come to realise that, in his eyes, there would always be a part of me that remained ‘wet’. Well, I had a word for him, too.
‘You’re narrow-minded!’ I spat across the no-man’s-land of kitchen table top between us. ‘You think there’s something wrong with me. Just because…’
My mother looked suddenly flustered, as if these were the first cross words to pass between us. ‘Listen, why don’t we…’
‘No!’ Father roared, bringing his fists down on the table, so that it jumped towards me like a man trap.
‘Oh, Barrie, please don’t…’
‘I just want my own space, where I can be whoever and whatever I want to be whenever I chose.’ I couldn’t have been more pellucid had I said it wearing a skirt.
‘You’re not ready and you’re not going, and that’s final!’ And out he stormed, his tattered agenda flapping definitively in his wake. What was written there remained illegible.
I planned subsequent visits around his absence. There were unavoidable exceptions, of course: Christmases, my wedding, and now this – my mother’s funeral. It was very sudden, painless. The kind of death everyone hopes for but seldom gets. She went to bed and never woke up. It was July. She’d slept with the windows open. I’d like to think she was still asleep as the sun rose and warmed her feet beneath the duvet, but she’d probably been long gone by then.
Father approached with my tea, encroaching on my memories like a waiter. His appearance hadn’t changed too much over the years, and I wasn’t expecting anything to be different beneath the surface either. After all, what is bark but just another type of wood?
‘One and a half sugars, right?’ Funny he should remember that, since I could not recall him ever making me a hot drink. He had certainly never been the kind of dad to make a mug of hot chocolate before reading you a bedtime story; the television got all the attention at that time of night.
‘So what are you doing with all this time on your hands?’ He’d only been retired three months.
‘Learning how to cook,’ he half-grinned. But it wasn’t a joke. ‘How about you?’
The question caught me off guard. I was married with a daughter, a full-time job, a house. I still had my life; I lacked his wisdom of how it feels to have most of it suddenly ripped away.
‘Listen, Dad…’
‘It’s all right,’ he began, slumping down into a chair. ‘It’s just…Well… When you’ve been with someone for what feels like forever, that’s what you expect: forever. Stupid, isn’t it? You know you can’t go on and on, but somehow you take it for granted they will. At least until you’re out the way. But now…’ It was almost eloquent.
I tried to think of life without Marie and couldn’t. It reminded me of Yoko Ono’s glass hammer hanging next to a regular nail with an invitation written on a card: imagine. I tried so hard to visualise the glass head driving that nail further into the wall, but of course it was impossible. I simply couldn’t remember a time when Marie was not around. Even when I thought of childhood, her imminent presence lurked somewhere among the shadows, like a masterpiece hidden beneath an inferior landscape.
‘It’s a bit of shock, is all I’m trying to say,’ he sighed. ‘I’m not sure if…’ His words trailed off, inviting the possibility of remarkable tears. This was the closest we’d come to being close. In my mind’s eye I saw the hammer strike the nail and shatter.
‘You could stay with us for a while,’ I volunteered, not knowing if that would make the tears less or more likely. Suddenly the prospect of my father crying, of showing any emotion other than anger was worse than seeing Mum in her casket.
‘I’ll be all right.’ He didn’t look up. I was glad.
‘It’s an open offer.’ But what good would it do: him crunching through shattered glass and us tiptoeing on eggshells, afraid to say anything let alone be ourselves? We were as far apart as ever, I realised, two magnets that could never be pushed together for longer than agonising moments such as these.
He looked up, and it was a relief to see that his eyes were dry. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. The magnets were heading off in opposite directions, a silence in their wake.
‘I’d best get going,’ I said at last. Before I start crying for both of us. My mouth felt dry and the weak tea didn’t help. I waited for some response, but it seemed I’d lost both my parents after all.
‘You’ll come again?’ he ejaculated - part question, part statement, part cry for help.
All I could do was stare at him for what felt like another lifetime. You poor old bugger. I wasn’t angry with him anymore, just tired: tired of feuding, resenting, coveting vengeance. I turned away, unable to bear it any longer.
‘Wait,’ he called. ‘…Son.’
I imagined his grey, wrinkled fingers desperately pushing his magnet so close to mine that they were almost touching again. I half-turned to meet his gaze and, for the first time, we were no longer man and boy.
‘Come upstairs a sec,’ he sighed. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’
Her wardrobe doors were wide open, but it wasn’t the carefully hung dresses and skirts that grabbed my attention; nor the rows of high-heeled shoes. It was what had been pulled out from the back and left accusingly on the carpet.
‘I was always so tight with money,’ he admitted, as if this was in itself a great secret. ‘This house has always been cold.’
Frowning, I stared down at the two electric heaters that had apparently been my mother’s guilty wardrobe secret. I’d seen the heaters many times, of course, but had always been told how Dad didn’t like to waste money we didn’t have, ‘so we’d best put them off before he comes in.’ But I had always assumed he at least knew of their existence. Were things so dire that a pair of three bar electric heaters was in the same luxury category as a new car or a foreign holiday?
‘I knew all along that she had them,’ he whispered, as if Mum were still lurking somewhere. ‘But I never said anything. I’m not that mean.’ If I was supposed to be impressed, I wasn’t.
‘Why didn’t you just tell her it was all right, then?’ I wasn’t angry, just bewildered.
‘Some things are best left unsaid,’ he declared. ‘And I knew it was as much for your benefit as hers, you and that weak chest of yours.’
‘I don’t have any secrets from Marie,’ I declared. Or did I? I’d left her at Auntie Belinda’s – why? Because I was ashamed of my father’s loneliness; or scared of what he might say in his grieving?
Having bested eloquence he tackled the profound. ‘Sometimes a marriage works badly for so long it can’t work any other way.’
‘Was that why…’ Was that why he’d been so set against my leaving home? And when he said marriage, did he really mean family?
He brushed past me and from the upper shelf of his own wardrobe brought down a small metal box with a key protruding from it. His awkward effort brought back memories of his younger self digging in the garden, mending the fence, chopping fire wood. Now his joints were unwilling and made odd noises of dissent. He opened the box and passed m
e a folded document. ‘I was saving up.’
Some men keep a mistress; some men buy a classic car and lavish it with the care and affection they feel ill-disposed to show their spouses; this man had put down a deposit on a caravan in Felixstowe. ‘I was going to take her down to see it on our anniversary, but then...’
His face seemed to sag with fluid: sweat, tears and spit; and suddenly he was sinking fast.
‘That’s only two months away,’ I said aloud, and realised that for some time I’d been talking about the woman who brought me into this world but had now departed it, without feeling anything. I loved her dearly and cried myself to sleep in my wife’s arms the night she died; but back here, in the family home, the old taboos had tacitly reasserted themselves, oozed up through the floor and into my bloodstream without my noticing.
Was this what it was like to be Dad, never feeling anything, good or bad? He’d taken her for granted; now the chance to make amends with this summer house on wheels had been stolen from him forever. And that was what would kill him – swiftly, if he was lucky.
‘Sometimes she looked so sad, so tired and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be the one to put a smile back on her face, just once. Do you know what I mean? Just once. Was that so much to ask?’
‘I remember you and her having a right laugh sometimes. It wasn’t all hard work and going without,’ I lied desperately.
He looked away, and before I could capture a response he was
