by Adrian
not just because of her hard memories of Dad. “You’re making a mistake.”
“I just…” Alone on the phone, with only that distant voice to focus on, it was hard to
put into words. What did I want to say? That I wish it had been different. That now, when the
last sands in the glass were running out, I wanted to make it different. That I wanted another
chance?
He looked grey, my Dad, when I met him at the hospital. He was a big man, still,
wide across the shoulder and chest, but the hulking bulldog of memory had dwindled. His
throat was wrinkled and baggy, and his eyes sunken into a face that was hanging off the skull.
Still strong, though, still something there of the iron figure of childhood, and I thought of
Tennyson: “and tho' we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and
heaven...” And here was my Dad, Ulysses coming home at last.
He just nodded, when he saw me, and pointed out that I was late. He hadn’t seen me
in months but he wasn’t one for sentiment. My picking him up was no more than his
patriarchal due. Nothing had changed.
I had seen him more recently, of course, but that had been to the steady bip of the
heart monitor, and his eyes had been closed.
He shouldered his way into the passenger seat of the car with that same belligerence
with which he did everything: Dad vs. the world, always. His manner, sitting there, was pure
resentment, staring out of the window, barely looking at me as I got in.
“Belt up, Dad.”
That brought a furious stare, and I was almost glad of it.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Seat belt, Dad.” I saw his hands shake a little, clicking it in, but I knew that trying to
help him would make things worse. After, though, I said: “You can smoke, if you want.”
And because that had been the thing the hospital had been insistent about, of course –
no smoking indoors – there was a mote of gratitude in his eyes, or I thought there was, as he
lit up. And I thought to myself, Maybe this will work. I’m going to make this work.
When he came out of hospital – the hospital that did the surgery after his attack –
they’d talked to me about all sorts of care – after all, I had the money these days. I didn’t
want any of it. Three weeks in that private place was too long, but it’d taken that to get the
work done at my place, to give Dad a place to come home to.
He had seen the house once, I think, a couple of years before. I’m not sure that he
remembered. His expression, standing on the gravel of my drive, was so familiar to me. It
was the way he looked whenever he saw something new that he didn’t really understand but
would be forced to deal with: that pugilistic look, hands curled most of the way into fists,
head thrust forwards. He had met all of life’s challenges that way. When he married mum I
bet he looked like that at the altar. And it had always worked for him. I recognised that now.
He had bullied and threatened his way through life, from school to work to the way he ran his
family, taking no lip and no excuses. In the end, it was only his own heart that the strategy
hadn’t worked on.
“Come on in, I’ll show you what I’ve done,” I told him. “Tea?”
“Three sugars.” He said it defiantly, and I guessed that some unwise doctor had tried
to have words on the subject despite my telling them – paying them - to let him have his own
way in pretty much everything. Health professionals have to know best, I’m sure, but there
was one thing that I’d bet wasn’t on his records.
“Your room’s through here,” I explained, indicating where my games room had been.
“There’s an en suite, and obviously you can do what you like with the décor, just let me know
and I’ll get someone in.”
He stood in the doorway like a prisoner contemplating his cell, and grunted, and I had
hope: no scathing comment, no growl. No words of approbation, but that would have been so
wildly out of character that I might have had a heart attack myself. He didn’t even comment
on ‘en suite’ or ‘décor’ which were words he might have derided in times past.
When I came back from making the tea, he had figured out how to turn the telly on
and find the football, and was squatting on my sofa in such a way as to take up most of it, but
he gave me a nod, and even a mutter that might have been thanks when I passed him the cup.
His eyes were on the match, though, and I left him to it, pottering about with the housework
and getting some emails done, listening to Dad’s blow by blow commentary on the game. He
was never so loquacious, so enthusiastic, as with football. It was the son he had wanted, I’d
often thought sourly to myself – aggravating, disappointing at times, but always coming
through for him. “Yes!” I heard him cry, and “No!” and all the rest: “Go on! Get it in, son!
You blind bastard! How could you miss at that distance?”
And when he got really excited I could hear that deep bass in his voice, the rumble
that was a constant of my childhood from the many, many times that Dad got angry, with us
or with mum or with the world. I stopped typing, when I heard it, because the memories had
me by the throat, and I thought, Oh no, this isn’t going to work, Hannah was right, but then I
13
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
shook myself, because it had to work. This was the second chance I had worked so hard to
get, in a world that almost never allowed them.
Most of my childhood memories are of Dad being angry, and mostly at me and
Hannah. He wasn’t a natural, when it came to having kids around. He wanted us quiet and out
of sight and not interfering with his own few hours of liberty between work and sleep. He
didn’t want to hear the complaints of teachers when we had misbehaved. He didn’t want to
hear from Mr Dyer down the road that I’d gone out with a friend and thrown stones at his
greenhouse, or to have the police bring a thirteen year-old Hannah back at two in the morning
made up heavily enough to get served in a club. And when our misdemeanours did break into
his life, he only reacted in one way. He was angry and aggressive towards whoever made the
complaint, because we were his kids and it was none of anyone else’s business. Then, behind
closed doors, he would tear into us. Sometimes it was his hand, but more often it was just his
voice and his presence, the eruption of that anger that was never far from the surface with
him. He seemed to spend his whole life filled to within an inch of the brim with undirected
frustration at the world at large.
Only, of course, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t often that Dad got really angry, it was just
that what other people counted as angry was just mildly annoyed on the Dad scale. But we
did see it, Hannah and I did.
When we were older, we dealt with it in different ways. She moved to Australia – a
year over there after Uni, travelling and tending bar. And then she had met this guy, and was
applying to live there, and, well, she’s practically Mrs Crocodile Dundee now. Me, though, I
started on the anger management courses. They couldn’t understand it, when I turned up for
them. I was practically the only person not referred there by a court or
a therapist, the calmest of the calm, but I took it all in, all the little coping strategies, because I never, ever wanted to become like Dad.
By the time the football had degenerated into replays and pundits, none of whom,
naturally, knew as much as Dad thought he did about the game, it was evening. I was already
nervous about tomorrow – first full day with Dad in the house, and I was supposed to be
working from home as well. I cooked up eggs and potatoes, which Dad complained was
breakfast food, and made sure he took his pills. We ate mostly in silence, Dad with
yesterday’s paper folded open on the table beside his plate, just like I remembered, and the
little telly on in the background, dispelling any awkward silences with a murmur of reality
TV and documentaries.
Quiet mealtimes, another staple of my childhood, except that Hannah and me would
always find something to complain about, about the food, and poor, hardworking mum would
be telling us that was all we had, and we’d better eat it, and we’d always push and push, until
Dad’s angry little eyes would lift from the paper and he’d bark at us to shut up and eat it or
else.
“Going to the loo,” Dad grunted, and set off for the stairs.
“Dad, there’s your en suite,” I told him, but he was already shuffling over until he was
standing at the foot of the steps, hand on the bannister rail, head thrust forwards as always,
just another of life’s problems, except that it wasn’t the steps that were his enemy, but time
itself.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Seriously Dad, that’s why I put it in.” I abandoned the table, because the doctors had
warned me about stairs and the dangers of a fall just now. Your father is very weak, they had
warned me, and I had almost laughed in their faces. If there was one thing he would never be,
it was weak.
“I’m going to the loo,” he insisted, turning that baleful look on me, hand on the rail
still but feet uncertain how to proceed.
“Dad-“
“Will you leave me alone!” and there it was, that deep rumble, the soundtrack of my
childhood: my father’s anger. “I don’t need you. I don’t need your help. I’m going to the
loo!”
And I remembered – I couldn’t not remember – when Hannah and I had pushed him
too far. There was this one time when we were raising hell in the kitchin when mum was
cooking, and Dad was trying to watch the match, and Hannah and I were arguing – no idea
what about now – and mum was telling us to get out from under her feet, and every so often
Dad would bellow out from the couch that he was trying to listen.
And then it had just been Hannah and me making noise – no TV, no mum – and when
we looked up, there was Dad in the doorway, and it had been a hard week at work, I think,
and he had been looking forward to that game, clinging onto it through all of life’s
aggravations, and we had killed it for him, with our shouting and screaming and carrying on.
And we thought he would hit us, and we thought he would shout at us, but we’d
pushed him too far for that, and he just stood there and stood there fighting for control, until at last Hannah shouting out that I had started it – or maybe I said that she had – and he broke, hunching forwards, the hair tearing out through his skin, tortured red eyes staring out at us
from above the muzzle that ripped its way through his face, teeth sprouting into yellow fangs.
He dropped forwards, hands already clawed and bristling when they touched the ground, and
there he was, those horrifying jaws snapping in our faces as we screamed and cowered at
mum’s feet, his work shirt a ruin about his massive barrel chest and all his rage, his anger at
the confusion and bafflement of the world, at last given proper voice as he howled at us.
I don’t know how long he stayed there, but I remember his hot, rank breath, the
burning, metal scent of it, of him. I wet myself. I thought I was going to die. I was only
seven.
And now he was starting on the stairs, and I should have left him, but I didn’t want
him to fall, and in the end just my continued presence was enough – a lightning rod for his
frustrations ad being unable to make himself climb the steps. When he turned to me his eyes
were already red.
“Dad, seriously, just calm down-“ but too late for that, and I saw his skin ripple, his
jutting head twist forward further, and that fear, that seven year-old’s fear, came on me so
strongly that I couldn’t move. He was growling and changing, ripping awkwardly from his
shirt, his face vomiting forth that snarling muzzle, barking out those raw animal sounds to
deal with my challenge to his authority, to deal with the world’s challenge.
And through my fear, I felt something else that rose to replace it, a desire to answer
the snarl with a snarl of its own, the part of me that all those courses had served to restrain, and I knew that I could let it go, let it off its leash, and then we’d see who was top dog. That was the way of things, for us angry men, the law of the pack.
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Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Everyone liked me at work. I was the man who never lost his temper, no matter what.
I could deal with the most obnoxious client, the most duplicitous supplier, the lazy co-
worker, the bullying supervisor, the recalcitrant piece of equipment, and I never broke a
sweat. I knew that I couldn’t afford to. I had put a lot of work into never letting the beast out.
And I closed my eyes, and fought it back this time, for all that it was ravening to deal
with this – a challenge that it could understand, unlike everything else in this modern world,
and then I took a deep breath and opened them again.
“Oh, Dad,” I said. “Oh, Dad, I’m sorry.”
He crouched at the foot of the stairs, and I could see every rib through his patchy,
mangy pelt, and the drawn-back lips revealed a mouth of blunt and missing teeth. His rheumy
eyes looked confused, unsure where he was and why, all that animal rage draining away from
him with a sound that was more whine than anything else, a great, grey wolf near the end of
his strength, near the end of his days, a shadow of what once had been.
When I put a hand out to him, he flinched, just a little, before sniffing, and he knew
me then, for kin, just as he had known us when we were kids, and snarled and raged at us, but
never more than that.
“Come on Dad,” I said, and he let me gather him up – a great weight, but no more
burden than I could bear. “You want to go upstairs, we’ll go upstairs. I’ll have a chairlift
fitted. It’s fine.”
16
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Not a Cat Person
Stewart Tyrrel had never spared any thoughts for where his colleagues lived. For him, they
existed in virtual space, book-space, there alongside the classic authors of antiquity, the
writers of commentaries, the publishers of papers in respected journals. There was no need
for any of these people to have a physical presence in the world. To be tied to one home, to
the gross physicality of a single human body, diminished them somehow.
Certainly George Bechter’s house avoided any latent expectations. This? This great
pile of a Victorian, enough rooms to mak
e a Bed and Breakfast out of it, three storeys of
mouldering red brick. And yet George’s writing had always been so insightful, so carefully
detailed and meticulous. Finding this sprawling domain as his home was like visiting the
author of some fabulous diet to find them twenty stone and cramming cakes.
Nor had he envisaged the Widow Bechter, clad in respectable black, waiting on the
curb for him. George had never spoken of family.
“Mrs Bechter.”
“Dr Tyrrel, thank you for coming.” She hovered at the gate as though reluctant to
even set foot on the property.
“It’s the least I could do. I counted your husband as the most incisive mind in our
field. He was a brilliant man, Mrs Bechter.”
You didn’t have to live with him, was the look in her eyes. “I’m sorry to ask for help
like this, but his book... his publishers are threatening to reclaim the advance from the estate, and... there was never much money to start with. He said it was almost finished. He said that
only a week before he...”
“It will be an honour to bring his final work into print,” Stewart confirmed. As she
was apparently not going to, he strode down the path to the front door, which forced the
Widow Bechter to follow in his footsteps. Once that Rubicon had been crossed she
apparently felt confident enough to turn the key and usher him in.
Bechter’s house smelled faintly of rot – not of human death but of ancient things
being given over slowly to the new life of mould and damp. The place was still cluttered with
his possessions, perhaps just as it had been when the man’s heart had finally given out.