And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  ‘When you look up there and think that the light from those stars set off hundreds of years ago, and then beyond them are the millions of stars you can’t see except with a telescope, and they’re thousands of light years away. We can’t be the only intelligent life in the universe. It’s a matter of making contact: if we keep sending signals from Jodrell Bank and so on, in different codes and languages, some day something will come back.’

  Another shriek: salt water, a gentle swell, the surprising warmth of two bodies meeting …

  ‘What do you think life can have been like at the start? You look up there and it’s obvious the stars are different bits of the one thing that blew apart when time began. Imagine them rushing together again. Imagine reassembling that first planet or universe.’

  ‘Reassembling?’ I said, playing God’s advocate. ‘So it must have been assembled in the first place, someone invented it.’

  A woman’s cry, a man’s guffaw.

  ‘No, it just happened—primeval soup, a sudden spark, then, bang, time began. No one could have made all those stars.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, straining to catch the sound of someone, two people rather, in the sand below us. ‘Think of all the frog-spawn that comes out of a single frog.’

  ‘Oh, so you think someone laid the universe, like a bloody great bird laying an egg? And what’s a shooting star supposed to be then? An egg falling out of the nest?’

  We bickered on a bit about creation. Below us, the sighs and moans and sand-scuffles ebbed away, to be replaced by my father’s immense snore—so immense I imagined it setting in motion a cosmic rhythm which would rock the stars backwards and forwards in unison. Across the bay, the lighthouse on St Tudwall’s island flashed through the night, went out while I counted to twelve, then swung round into sight again, slicing up the darkness like a cake-knife. I shivered and wished I were man enough to be able to fall asleep, or, if not that, man enough to tell my father I’d had enough and was going in to my bed.

  I woke at six, not only cold but damp. My father was awake already.

  ‘All right, son?’

  ‘Hum. My sleeping-bag feels wet.’

  ‘Yes. When it’s a clear night, there’s condensation on the inside of the plastic as well as the outside—I suppose it’s soaked through to your sleeping-bag as well.’

  ‘So the outdoor sleeping-bag isn’t working.’

  ‘Course it is—it’d be much worse if you didn’t have it. And on rainy nights you don’t get condensation.’

  ‘But on rainy nights you wouldn’t want to sleep out.’

  ‘Christ, you have got out of the wrong side of the bed, haven’t you.’

  ‘I’m still in it, Dad—and I’m soaked through.’

  We squabbled some more. I told him I’d never use one of his sodding sleeping-bags again, but then did so later that summer, after a party with Carlsberg Special Brew, and in the company of two friends. He must have seen I was ‘fresh’ (his affirming, exculpatory word for the stale predictability of drunkenness), but was delighted to see his invention being put to the test and helped us assemble the camp-beds. I remember nothing after that but the sky spinning round and me hanging my head over the side of the camp-bed. He was furious next morning (‘Can’t hold your drink: I’m ashamed of you’), but at least with the outdoor sleeping-bag we were able to wipe the sick off and not leave a mark.

  For the next ten years I hardly visited the Abersoch chalet. My father didn’t use it as much, either, and by the late eighties it had gone into decline: paint was flaking on the shutters he’d made to protect the windows from winter tides; bits of roof had been torn off in the 1987 hurricane; salt air was eating away the sub-frame. A letter came from the owners of the site: they were legally empowered to ask tenants to update their chalets every ten years; since my father had not changed his in twenty-three, would he now proceed towards purchase of a new one or surrender his site? Starting prices for chalets were 85,000 pounds, and they could offer as a discount what he had originally paid for his, 2,200 pounds. He had until the end of the year to comply. My father agonized, took legal advice, manoeuvred and begged, but failed to earn a reprieve. He drove down finally one short December day, emptied the chalet and watched them remove its two dismantled halves.

  Later he gave me some of the contents he’d rescued: a spade, a Frido, a game of petanque, a red Elastoplast tin, a pair of binoculars, our old water-skis and ski-rope. But not the yellow plastic outdoor sleeping-bags: he had put those somewhere safe for future use.

  Diary

  Monday 9 December

  Midwinter half-light. The hardest frost of the year, and everything has ground to a halt, the ponds frozen, the trees under arrest, the canal locks locked. The sun can do nothing about this. It lies all day on its bed of hills, then sinks red-faced behind Pendle. It can’t get up. It can’t get up.

  My father is no weaker today, no more comatose. He drinks a raw egg mixed with sherry. He gets to the shower unaided. He sits in his armchair in the living-room and says: ‘What a marvellous family we are.’ It looks to me that he will last a few more days, weeks, even months, and I must go back to London. I sit with him as long as I can, the brief light fading behind his shoulder, knowing there is a risk I may not see him again. I kiss my mother at the door and she nods: yes, if I don’t make it in time she’ll keep the body there.

  My brother-in-law drives me to the station. We talk about whether a sudden death is better than a drawn-out one, and what ‘better’ means here, better for the living or the dying. We talk about my father’s sense of family—his failure to let go of his children, his assumption that he had a perfect right to invade whatever space they had, even as adults: how he would walk in on Gill and Wynn without knocking, take over projects of theirs, organize them without bothering overmuch if this was what they wanted.

  ‘I used to go at him hammer and tongs about it,’ says Wynn. ‘I’ve never taken to this family lark. You grow up and leave home and have your own children: that’s family. But he thinks it means him too—everyone together—so he’s a right to poke his nose in. We’ve had some real barneys, some right ding-dongs, But I respect him. I’ll miss him.’

  I remember the story of one of these fights, no more than a year ago. My father, back from the pub, had been walking around the outside of the house late at night, in his version to take the dog out, in Wynn’s ‘to check up on us.’ Wynn, also back from the pub, had shouted at him—a long catalogue of grievances, including, most recently, the dispute they’d had over Wynn’s proposal to borrow my father’s Hymobile for a golfing weekend, with an unspecified number of mates. A slanging match started. My Dad took a swing, and missed. Wynn put his fists up, and they traded a few threats and expletives. My father wasn’t used to fights: I couldn’t remember him ever having had one, not even with me—we both seemed to have a talent for avoiding them, a fear of pain or disgrace. Yet here he was squaring up against his son-in-law, unable to make himself scarce. Luckily, Wynn’s heart wasn’t in it either. There may have been a couple more perfunctory or intended-to-miss swings. But soon enough they’d fallen crying in each other’s arms.

  I wait on Skipton station. SOVIET UNION DECLARED DEAD says the front page of the Independent . It is not four yet but dark already and extraordinarily cold—colder and darker than I remember the world seeming before. The trains are all fucked-up: a deep freeze in the north, an overhead line down in Northamptonshire, arson in the signal-box at London Bridge. I’m due home in four hours. It takes me eight.

  Tuesday 10 December

  Piece in the newspaper about the prevention of bowel cancer. Colonic irrigation therapist Katherine Monbiot says: ‘Unless you’re having three bowel movements a day, you’re retaining stuff in there which becomes very toxic. Some people have forty pounds of impacted faeces in their colons, getting thicker, like tyre rubber.’

  I talk on the phone to Angela Carter, who has lung cancer. She’s very open about it: friends want to know how sh
e is, so she tells them, even if the news is bad. I ask her if she wants to review a new book by Raymond Carver, and she laughs, and begins to denounce Carver for the quietism and defeatedness of his characters, their dignified acceptance of the way things are. I realize later she is also talking about his quiet dignity when he died of lung cancer at fifty, and how she, the same age, intends to be different—perhaps even to rage and behave badly. I tell her about my father and add, not wanting to whine: ‘Well, he’s seventy-five.’

  ‘My father died at ninety,’ she says, ‘and in some ways that was much worse than if he’d died at sixty.’

  She agrees to take on, instead of Carver, a history of anarchism. (Later—about a month later—she rings from hospital: ‘I’m going to have to cry off anarchism. They’ve just tipped me the black spot.’)

  Wednesday 11 December

  The Great Freeze all over England. Temperatures ten below. Six die in motorway pile-ups. All train services between Leeds and King’s Cross suspended. Impacted ground. I think of Harry Lime’s funeral in The Third Man : ‘It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna’s Central Cemetery.’ Will they have to use electric drills for burials up in Skipton? Do they have special undersoil heating, as at football grounds? It’s as well my father has asked to be cremated.

  Progress report last night. He drank some tea when he woke, managed an egg for breakfast, and had a gin and mixed (teaspoon-size) in the evening. But he was too weak to sit in the living-room. And when he went to the toilet, he could not get up again. My mother had to call a friend, a nurse, from down the village. The two of them lifted and dragged him back to bed.

  I turn up the passage in Sons and Lovers where Paul and Annie Morel giggle like schoolchildren as they mix their mother a mug of milk and crushed morphine pills. They pretend it is a new sleeping draught from the doctor. ‘Oh, but it is bitter,’ she complains, before falling into eternal sleep.

  We shiver under the raw, wide, starlit sky.

  Thursday 12 December

  He seems to be on a plateau of some kind, or slowly falling ground: each day a little weaker, but getting enough food down to last some more. My mother went out yesterday to buy panty-pads for him. I remember her delicately wiping his bottom the day I left, and how the soiled sheets so distressed him, though there wasn’t much, just babyfudge. Ten below again: no trains to get up by, even if I was needed. The GP said yesterday he thought he might go on for six weeks yet, even three months: you just can’t tell. My mother worries that he seems to be breathing through his nose as well as his mouth now; she thinks he will die at Christmas ‘and spoil it for everyone,’ as if it wasn’t going to be spoilt anyway, or mattered this year, or as if his death would be more copable with if it happened at some other point in the calendar.

  Freezing fog. A consultant in Hampshire charged with attempted murder after allegations of euthanasia. A Kennedy cleared of rape in Florida. An animal rights campaigner accused of masturbating a dolphin. Going through my desk, I find a letter my father must have sent me months ago. ‘Dr P. B. Morrison’ it says on the envelope: he is the only person in the world to address me as Doctor; it’s been the chief benefit of my Ph.D—to allow him to believe I’ve followed in his path after all. Inside the envelope is a typed copy of a letter he submitted to his local Conservative MP: scrawled across the top, in handwriting, for me, it says: ‘I know you don’t want to hear my political views but I hope you will take the trouble to read this from beginning to end and see where we differ. Perhaps you could even submit it to your letters page, leaving out my name and address, just signed: A Northerner.’ It’s the letter of a disaffected Tory: why is British economic growth worse than that of countries which lost the war ? Why is industry in decline? Hasn’t there been too much public and private borrowing? Can’t they think again about the poll tax? There’s his usual bee-in-the-bonnet stuff about left-wing infiltrators, but also this: ‘You may consider that I sound like a Socialist, which I am emphatically not, but I do go out and about quite a lot and I listen to Joe Public. Many of us feel that the government is living in a world apart and creating greater and greater differences in standards.’ Maybe I’ve gone soft because he’s so ill, but I find myself agreeing. I doubt if I’ll admit it to him, though.

  Last night, in the ice-darkness, terrible squawks and howls, like somebody slaughtering their pet goose for Christmas. More likely a fox taking a hen or chicken. Today a friend in Blackheath village confirms, yes, it would have been a fox, a female—mating, though, not murdering: ‘Those fucking foxes and their death-throes.’

  Friday 13 December

  A letter from an old schoolfriend ends: ‘Send my love to your parents, too. I always had a soft spot for your dad, even though he was a domineering old sod.’

  I ring my mother twice. The morning report is good: he is weaker, but drank nearly a pint of milk; he intends to get up and have a shower. The evening report is less good: he moved no further than the commode by the bed; the doctor came and said the bases of his lungs were getting heavy; he is running a temperature of a hundred, and though this might be to do with his electric blanket being turned up high (as it has been for the past week: she has noticed the red burn-marks across his thigh), it could be pneumonia—the beginning of the end. She will ring in the morning and tell me if I should come. I resolve to anyway, drinking several whiskies and fretting that I won’t get there in time, that he will die tonight, Friday the thirteenth.

  I go to bed with Tennyson, and find this, in ‘Maud’:

  Strange, that the mind, when fraught

  With a passion so intense

  One would think that it well

  Might drown all life in the eye, —

  That it should, by being so overwrought,

  Suddenly strike on a sharper sense

  For a shell, or a flower, little things

  Which else would have been past by!

  And now I remember, I,

  When he lay dying there,

  I noticed one of his many rings

  (For he had many, poor worm) and thought

  It is his mother’s hair …

  Who knows if he be dead?

  Whether I need have fled?

  The peeling of the senses by grief: I suppose it’s true. (But no consolation.)

  Saturday 14 December

  The phone goes at six-forty. It is dark, and feels like the middle of the night, and I know it must be about my father and I think he is dead. He isn’t, but my mother’s anxious to get me there quickly: his two-day-old cough is much worse, he is drowsier and mumblier, she doesn’t think it will be long. I make a cup of tea, get dressed, stagger out in the dark, the streets so icy I skitter about with my briefcase, overnight bag and the plastic carrier full of Christmas presents. The Blackheath train is fifteen minutes late, it’s ten minutes at London Bridge before there are even any listings on the tube destinations board, but somehow I make it to King’s Cross to catch the eight-ten, the first Leeds train of the day, the last person on, with twenty seconds to spare. I want to get straight on the phone to my father in triumph—he loves these extraordinary piece of luck stories.

  I remember two of his. One is about flying into or home from the Azores, with a group of RAF officers: they had lined up to be parcelled out between two planes—the man in front of him was the last to get on the first plane, which went down killing all aboard. The other luck-story, scarcely a life or death matter but related in the same solemn tone of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, concerned a camera smuggled through customs: ‘I put down three bags in front of the customs officer. He said: I’ll search this one and this one. Nothing. He zipped them up again, never looked at the middle bag, and off I went.’ What would my father’s life have been without these little scams and victories? Not his life, anyway. What will my life be like without his stories of them? Not mine.

  It is cloudless again. Mist lies in hollows. A foal stands wispily beside its moth
er. Across from me, a young British-Chinese businessman, twenty-five-ish, with a mobile telephone and Game Boy, argues long and bitterly with the guard about the injustice of not being able to buy a Saver Fare on the train, then spends the disputed twenty pounds twice over on a long phone call retailing the incident to his sister. The train sits endlessly outside Leeds station, but my luck’s in again, I catch the Skipton connection with two minutes to spare. White paint flakes from a signal-box. The sheep-pens are full again between Shipley and Crossflatts. At Keighley station I look across to the spot where I stood two Saturdays since. It seems—is—a lifetime ago. The Monday before that was the investigatory op. The Thursday after he sat for three hours at his computer. How quickly it has come to this—me on a train back, knowing he may already be dead by the time I get there, a race against death which he can’t win even if I don’t lose.

  The Joy of Lech

  A SKIING TRIP to Lech, Austria. Long after the time most parents would have written off their children as surly adolescents scarcely to be endured even for a weekend, and long after the time most children would be holidaying only with their contemporaries, here we all are for a fortnight together, father, mother, daughter, son. Friends at university have spoken enviously of the wonderful après- ski life awaiting me—drink, parties, drugs, girls—but I can’t see how I’m. going to come by all this with my parents inhibitingly omnipresent and my sister, supposing I did get away from them, lumberingly in tow. On the slopes I’m tormented by glimpses of beautiful faces and long hair streaming from bobble caps. In the long waits for the lift or cable-car, I dream how this evening I will come upon her at the bar, the special one I have been waiting for. But the accommodation is a ‘small family hotel’; my sister and I seem to be the only humans aged between nine and forty-nine; the disco action is somewhere else in town, not here. At least there’s nothing to distract me from my work: while everyone else is sitting in the bland pine-and-whitewash meliorism of the hotel lounge, I keep sneaking back to my bed to read a bit more Marlowe or Tourneur or Webster, blackness and murder, infinite torture in a little room.