by Tony Parsons
I was grateful for that suburban childhood—for those memories of car rides and modest gambling and day trips, it seemed like a childhood crowded with life and love, a good time to be growing up, when Miss World was on the box and my mom and my aunts wore miniskirts.
And although my son’s childhood had more material things, it also had the numbing bankruptcy of divorce.
With all the diplomatic skills and emotional armor that a five-year-old could muster, he now ricocheted between his mother and her boyfriend and his father and his badly bruised heart. A video recorder and the passenger seat of a flash car seemed like small compensation for all that.
It felt to me that Gina and I—and the million couples just like us—hadn’t left much of an inheritance for the next generation.
“It worked between us because we made it work,” my mother said. “Because we wanted it to work. Because—even when we didn’t have money, even when we couldn’t have a baby—we didn’t chuck in the towel. You have to fight for your happy ending, Harry. It doesn’t just drop in your lap.”
“You think I didn’t fight for my happy ending? You think I haven’t got enough fight in me? Not like Dad?”
I was curious to know what she believed. There was a time, when I was young and cocky, when I felt that my parents knew nothing of life beyond their well-tended garden and their over-heated living room. But I didn’t feel that way about them anymore.
“I think you’ve got a lot of fight in you, Harry. But you beat yourself up sometimes. You can’t be the same man your father was—it’s a different world. A different century. You have to fight different battles and not expect anyone to pin a medal on your chest. Looking after a child alone—you think your father could have done that? I love him more than my life, but that would have been beyond him. You have to be strong in a different way. You have to be a different kind of tough guy.”
I put the medal back in its box and the telephone rang.
My mother’s eyes flicked to the clock and back to me, full of tears. It was just after four in the morning and this could only be my Uncle Jack calling from the hospital.
We both knew.
We held each other tight, the phone still ringing in the hall. Ringing and ringing.
“We should have been there with him,” my mother said as she would say so many times in the days and weeks and years to come. “We should have been there.”
Here’s what a happy ending looks like, I thought bitterly.
You spend your life with someone and then, if they go before you, you feel as though you have lost all your limbs.
At least my generation—the fuck-around, fuck-up, and fuck-off generation—would be spared the knowledge of exactly what that particular amputation feels like. Assuming that we don’t have any happy endings of our own.
I picked up the telephone and my Uncle Jack told me that my father had died.
***
In the morning I went up to see Pat as soon as I heard his footsteps padding across the floor to the box of toys that my parents always kept for him in their second bedroom, the room where he always slept when he was here, the room that had once been mine. He looked up at me from the toy box, a Star Wars figure in each hand, his eyes still puffy with sleep. I picked him up, kissed his sweet face, and sat down on the bed with him on my lap.
“Pat, your grandfather died in the night.”
He blinked at me with those blue eyes.
“Granddad had been ill for a long time and now he doesn’t have to suffer anymore,” I said. “Now he’s at peace. We can be happy about that, can’t we? He’s not in pain anymore. He will never feel any more pain again.”
“Where is he now?”
This threw me.
“Well, his body is at the hospital. Later it will be buried.”
I realized that I knew nothing about the bureaucracy of death.
When would they collect his body from the hospital? Where would they keep it before his funeral? And who exactly were they?
“We’re sad now,” I said. “But one day we will be grateful for Granddad’s life. We will realize that we were lucky—I was lucky to have him as my father, and you were lucky to have him as your grandfather. We were both very lucky. But we can’t feel lucky today. It’s too soon.”
Pat nodded, very businesslike.
“He’s still at the hospital?”
“His body is at the hospital. But his spirit has gone.”
“What’s his spirit?”
“That’s the spark of life that made Granddad the man he was.”
“Where’s it gone?”
I took a breath.
“Some people think the spirit goes to heaven and lives forever. Some people think that it just disappears and then you sleep forever.”
“What do you believe?
“I think that the spirit lives on,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s in heaven or if it’s somewhere else, some other place that I don’t know anything about. But it doesn’t just die. It lives on. Even if it’s only in the hearts of the people we love.”
“That’s what I believe too,” said my son.
***
With the slashed roof of the MGF cracking like a torn sail in a stiff gale, I drove slowly down the high street of the little town where I had grown up, not recognizing the place.
Everywhere the shops and small cafés that I had known had become real estate offices or the outlets of some big chain. No wonder the English have become so desperate to wave the Flag of St. George, to remind ourselves that our roots are just as deep and defined as those of the Irish or the Scots. This was my hometown. But it could have been anywhere.
I didn’t see a thing I recognized until I found my Uncle Jack in the back corner of the old Red Lion, this pub seemingly the one part of the high street that was protected by an unofficial preservation order. He was in a fog of smoke, cigarette cupped in his palm, drinking a mineral water under the oak beams and horse brass.
“Sorry about your dad, Harry.”
“Thanks, Uncle Jack.”
“You want one of these? Or shall we just do it?”
“Let’s just do it.”
My Uncle Jack was at my side as I dealt with the bureaucracy of death. I was still numb from lack of sleep and the shock of knowing that my father was no longer in the world. But my Uncle Jack’s craggy, chain-smoking presence made it a lot easier for me.
We drove to the hospital in the MGF and collected a pitiful little bag containing my father’s belongings from the front office.
His wallet with his picture of his grandson inside, his reading glasses, his false teeth.
This was all that was left of him, handed over to me without sentiment or condolences. Why should they be sad for him? Or for me? They never knew my father. We moved on down the chain.
For some obscure administrative reason, we had to register the death in a small town that I had never been to before, although with its Burger King and Body Shop and real estate offices, it looked depressingly familiar.
Part of the great procession of living and dying, we were behind a young couple registering their baby’s birth and ahead of an old woman registering the death of her husband. And I wondered why Nigel Batty complained about men dying before their partners. What a relief to not have to visit this place, what a relief to not be condemned to living on alone.
Finally we went back to my hometown to see the undertaker. Like the pub, this was another place that had never changed in my memory—getting drunk and dropping dead, the two great perennials of the English high street.
With its gloomy window display of white headstones displayed against acres of black silk, it had always looked closed when I was growing up, this boutique for the bereaved, and it looked closed now. When I was a child just discovering that I wasn’t going to live forever, I used to walk quickly p
ast this place. Now I went inside.
And it was fine. Uncle Jack lightly rested a hand on my shoulder and I talked calmly to the undertaker about the funeral arrangements, as if this happened to me every day. With the death certificate between us, it seemed perfectly natural to be talking to this somber old man in black about my father’s burial. The only truly strange moment was when, almost apologetically, the undertaker produced a glossy brochure. I had to choose my father’s coffin.
It was a brochure like any other—tastefully shot, beautifully presented—and the undertaker gently led me through it, starting with the cheapest, most simple pine numbers going right up to the top of the range model, a large hardwood coffin lined with red satiny material and adorned with big brass handles.
My first instinct was to go for the most expensive one—let’s push the boat out, nothing’s too good for my old man. But my second instinct was that the top of the range coffin was just a touch too elaborate for my dad to sleep in for all eternity.
I hesitated and told the undertaker that we would go for the second most expensive coffin. And when Uncle Jack and I were back on the street, I was pleased with my choice.
“Your old man would have had a fit at that posh coffin,” my Uncle Jack grinned.
“The most expensive one?” I smiled. “Yeah, I thought that was a bit much.”
“Gold handles and a red velvet lining!” chuckled Uncle Jack. “It looked more like a French knocking shop than a coffin!”
“Talk about turning in your grave,” I laughed. “I know what he would have said if we’d gone for that one—who do you think I am? Bloody Napoleon?”
I could hear his voice.
I would never hear his voice again.
I would always hear him.
thirty-five
“Two ducks check into a hotel,” said Eamon. “Best hotel in Kilcarney. Big weekend for the ducks. But—no, listen—they get up to their room and they discover they don’t have any condoms. No problem, says the man duck—I’ll get room service to send some up. Call down to room service. Eventually the boy appears with the condoms. He says—do you want me to put these on your bill, sir? And the duck, he says—do I look like some kind of pervert to you?”
Eamon removed the mike from its stand in complete silence. They were going to put the laughter track on later.
“I feel for that duck,” he said, moving across a stage that seemed somehow brighter than usual, in front of an audience who were noticeably better-looking than normal. “Because there’s no real sex education in Kilcarney. My dad told me that the man goes on top and the woman goes on the bottom. So all through my first serious relationship, my girlfriend and I slept in bunk beds. You see, where I come from, sex is hereditary—if your mom and dad didn’t have it, the chances are that you won’t either.”
He placed the mike back in its stand, grinning into the lights.
“Luckily I’m a good lover now—but that’s only because I practice a lot on my own. Thank you and good night!”
The audience applauded wildly as Eamon skipped to the side of the stage where a beautiful girl with a clipboard and headphones handed him a bottle of beer. Then he seemed to swoon, sinking to one knee, the bottle of beer still in his hand as he half-turned and retched into a sand bucket—a real sand bucket, not a pretend one.
“Cut, cut,” the director said.
I ran onto the set and crouched by Eamon’s side, my arm around his shaking shoulders. Mem stood by my side, wide-eyed with concern and unrecognizable with her clothes on.
“Don’t be afraid, Eamon,” I said. “It’s only a lager commercial”
“I’m not afraid,” he said weakly. “I’m excited.”
***
I wasn’t excited. I was afraid. Very afraid.
My father—my father’s body—was at the undertaker’s. And I was going to see it.
The undertaker had mentioned the possibility of seeing the body—viewing the loved one at rest, he said quietly, proud of this service they offered at no extra charge—and this meeting, this final meeting between my father and me, had assumed impossible proportions in my head.
How would I feel when I saw the man who gave me life lying in his coffin? Would I unravel? Could I stand the sight of my great protector waiting for his grave? I couldn’t stop myself believing that it would be too much, that I would crumple and come apart, that the years would be wiped away and I would be a sobbing child once more.
When I saw him lying there, the brutal fact of his death would be beyond all lingering doubt and disbelief. Could I take it? That’s what I wanted to know. I had learned that fathering a child didn’t make you truly adult. Does a man have to bury his father before he feels truly grown?
My Uncle Jack was waiting for me in his usual seat at the Red Lion. My mother had shaken her head and turned away when I asked her if she wanted to come with me. I didn’t blame her. But I needed to know if I could live with the knowledge that I was alone now.
Not alone, of course. There was still my mother, sleeping with the lights in her bedroom blazing all night long, bewildered to be alone for the first time in a lifetime.
And there was Pat, bouncing between the joy of seeing Gina again to the suffocating grief in our own home.
And there was Cyd—out there somewhere, lost in some other part of the city, sharing her life with some other man.
But with my father gone, there was a part of me that felt alone—at last and forever.
Even when relations between us had been strained, he was always my shield, my guardian, my greatest ally. Even when we bickered and fought, even when I disappointed him or let him down, I was always secure in the knowledge that he would still do anything for me. Now all that was gone.
Uncle Jack stubbed out his roll-up and drained his mineral water. We walked to the undertaker’s, not saying much, although when we went inside and a little bell jingled announcing our arrival, Uncle Jack placed his hand on my shoulder. My uncle wasn’t keen to see his brother’s body. He was doing this for me.
The undertaker was expecting us. He led us into an antechamber that looked like some kind of changing room. There were heavy curtains on both sides, divided up into maybe half a dozen individual compartments. I took a breath and held it as he pulled back one of the little curtains to reveal my father in his coffin.
Except that it wasn’t my father. Not anymore. His face—the only part of him that was visible with the coffin lid opened just a shade—had an expression that I had never seen before. He didn’t look peaceful or as if he were sleeping or any of death’s soothing clichés. His face was empty. More than that—it had nothing to do with him anymore: it was drained of identity as well as all pain and exhaustion. It was like knocking on a door and discovering that nobody was home. More than this—it was as though we had come to the wrong place. The spark that had made my father the man he was had gone. I knew with total certainty that his soul had flown. I had come looking for my father, to see him one last time. But I wouldn’t find him here.
I wanted to see Pat. I wanted to hold my son in my arms and tell him that everything we had both tried so hard to believe was all true.
thirty-six
Usually I stayed inside the house, well back from the window, watching from behind the blinds as the silver Audi snaked down the street, looking for a scrap of parking space. But today I came out when I saw them coming—the now familiar car with the familiar configuration inside.
Pat’s blond head in the backseat, looking down at some new trinket he had been given. Gina in the passenger seat, turning to talk to him. And in the driving seat, this unimaginable Richard, the semi-separated man, cool and confident at the wheel, as if ferrying Gina and Pat around town in his Audi was the natural order of things.
I had never spoken to him. I had never even seen him get out of his car when they delivered Pat back to me. He was dark, b
eefy, and wore glasses—a suit that worked out. Good-looking in a Clark Kent kind of way. There was a tiny parking space just in front of the house, and I watched him expertly reverse the Audi into it, the bastard.
Usually Gina knocked on the door, said hello to me, and quickly kissed Pat good-bye. The handover was done with minimum civility, which was about as much as either of us could muster. Still, we were trying. Not for our sake but the sake of our child. But today I was waiting at the front gate for them. She didn’t seem surprised.
“Hello, Harry.”
“Hi.”
“Look what I’ve got!” Pat said, brandishing his new toy—some scowling plastic space man with an unfeasibly large laser gun—as he brushed past me into the house.
“Sorry about your dad,” Gina said, staying on the other side of the gate.
“Thanks.”
“I’m really sorry. He always treated me with great kindness. He was the gentlest man I ever met.”
“He was mad about you.”
“I was mad about him too.”
“Thanks for Pat’s toy.”
“Richard bought it for him in Hamley’s.”
“Good old Richard.”
She shot me a look.
“I better be going,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t like Pat playing with guns.”
She shook her head and gave a little laugh, one of those laughs that’s meant to indicate that it wasn’t funny at all.
“If you really want to know, I believe that there’s enough violence in this world without encouraging children to think that guns are a form of light entertainment. Okay? But he wanted the gun.”
“I’m not going to give him up, Gina.”
“That’s for the lawyers to decide. And we’re not supposed—”
“I’ve changed my life to look after my son. I took a part-time job. I learned to organize things in the house, stuff that I never even had to think about before. Feeding him, clothing him, getting him to bed. Answering his questions, being there for him when he was sad or frightened.”