by Craig Cliff
My earliest memory of my father is probably like these copies: a string of memories, moving from the original moment — if it ever happened — to my current recollection like a Chinese whisper, changing slightly each time I trawl it up. The memory is simply a close-up of his tattoo. He must have been lying on his stomach with me placed on his back, because in my memory the letters of his tattoo take up my entire field of vision. In reality, the letters were small: he could make the entire tattoo disappear between his shoulder blades when he stretched his arms right back like he was preparing to hug a giant totara. I know I couldn’t have read and understood the words on my father’s back when I was still learning to crawl, but my first memory is tainted with the knowledge I gained much later. And so it goes that in my first memory of my father, the infant me reads: What mortal coil?
Though I’ve known this phrase all my life — or so it seems — I don’t know what it means or, more precisely, what it meant to my father. It just hangs, like a punchline to a lost joke.
My father would take the five hundredth copy of famous works of art and show it to people. He’d ask them what they thought it was and sometimes used the best answer as the title for his final copy. People saw all sorts of things in the Mona Lisa. The image became a lot more about the viewer than the viewed. I’m quoting my father here or, more correctly, the programme from a gallery exhibition of his photocopies in 1994. I doubt my father would have said half the things attributed to him in this programme, but it’s the closest thing I have to an adult conversation with him about his art.
In the early stages of his copying project I was allowed to be my father’s assistant. I would rip open new reams, straighten piles of copies, refill his glass of water, anything he asked, but most of the time I just sat on a box of copy paper and watched him work.
He copied and copied Les Demoiselles d’Avignon until it looked like a child’s drawing of a stegosaurus.
He copied and copied Nighthawks until it looked like a portal to daylight.
He copied and copied and copied The Scream until it stopped screaming, but it never smiled.
Of course, these are only my impressions. My tainted, grown-up impressions.
I am the elder of two brothers. If my father had his way, I would probably have four hundred and ninety-nine siblings, each a variation on him. But it is just me and Sebastian. For what it’s worth, I look more like our father. I have his dark complexion, his straight hair, his nose (which he used to call his ‘fly landing strip’ but my grandmother calls ‘the Kirby nose’). Sebastian is a paler version of me, his hands a little more delicate, his hair curly like my mother’s.
I’ve been told from a young age that I also have my father’s moods. As a six year old this meant I tended to brood rather than go into tantrums, that I didn’t like meeting new people, would prefer to hide behind my mother, and even showed disdain for my grandmother because, as she tells it, I associated her with my mother going back to work.
Although he exhibited only the five hundredth copy, my father would keep all the copies he made of an image. He intended to make animated shorts of the copies, showing them distort under the copier’s focus, just as soon as he could find a Super 8 movie camera in a decent condition at a police auction. Meanwhile, boxes and boxes of used copy paper piled up around the Xerox.
When he began to tire of copying paintings, he started copying photos of his childhood.
He copied and copied his parents’ wedding photo until it looked like two people facing away from each other.
He copied and copied his fifth birthday party until it looked as if a mushroom cloud was exploding at the centre of the table where the cake had been, and tombstones were gathered around the edges instead of party guests.
After family photos, my father began to copy things that weren’t quite flat. His hand, a rock, my skateboard. The problem was everything became flat after only one copy. It became a game for him, I imagine, searching for new objects that would work best on a Xerox. Things that would tell the best story as they jumped into two dimensions, then fizzed off in unforeseen directions. This fixation meant the search for a Super 8 camera was neglected, though he continued to hoard the boxes of used copy paper in his workroom. Even if he decided never to use these intermediate copies, I don’t think he would have thrown them out. So much of the power of the five hundredth copy was derived from the knowledge that there were four hundred and ninety-nine copies somewhere else. That these copies could reconcile the original and the final copy.
His workroom became so full of copies that he had to step over boxes to get in. He sat on boxes while he copied. Sometimes he would climb atop the boxes to sleep in the gap that was too small for another box beneath the ceiling, but he could fit if he lay on his back and splayed his feet outwards.
To watch him copy at this time, he would have to lift me over the boxes in the doorway and sit me on a stack of three boxes on the other side of the Xerox, even though I was tall enough now to see the bar of green light zip over another copy, which became another original. Sometimes I would flick through a ream and see a dead bird decompose into a murky T shape before my eyes, or a handwritten letter disintegrate until there was nothing but speckled grey.
Although he was achieving the greatest success of his career with his copies of copies, my father seemed to slip into his moods more frequently. Some nights he would eat dinner without talking, like it was an effort to be in our company. This is how it felt, or how I recall how it felt, because every time I pull up one of these memories, I run the green light over it again and it distorts a little more.
Sometimes my father would not make it to the dinner table, staying in his workroom for days with the door shut, but he wouldn’t be copying. I know this because I would wait until it was dark and sneak downstairs to look through the crack below the door and see there were no lights on, and no flash from the copier. But I could hear him in there, breathing heavily.
Now and then I notice the noise of my own breathing (huffing is more accurate), and I’m reminded of my father. The dark version. The sound of my own breathing always comes with the question: Why has this happened again? Why do I slip into the same moods as him, as impotently as he did, with the knowledge that I will probably pass this trait on to my son, and he to his son, and on and on? But I might as well ask: Why copy and copy the cover of the Beatles’ White Album? Or: Why do I dream about a wedding ring appearing in a cabbage over and over and over?
Once, during one of my father’s lock-ins, I was sitting on the stairs that led down to his workroom and heard what sounded like an animal yelp coming from behind the door. It was short and high pitched, the sound a dog makes when you stand on its tail, before it whimpers, pleading with you not to step on anything else. My mother must have heard the yelp from the kitchen; she came down and offered me rhubarb crumble and ice cream to lure me away from the door.
Shortly after this, my father lost his wedding ring. He wasn’t in a dark mood at the time: he had been copying with the door open, enthusiastic again about the limitless originals he could copy. When he joined the rest of us at the dinner table, he smiled and started dishing up mashed potatoes for everyone. He was eating corn on the cob from our garden when my mother asked where his wedding ring was. He looked at his left hand as though he expected the ring to be there, his mouth still full of corn kernels, his lips glowing with butter.
My mother started to cry before he could finish his mouthful. I had never seen her cry before. My father said the ring was probably in his workroom — he might have taken it off for a second while he changed the toner and forgotten about it. This made her cry even more. Then he told her it was okay, that he would look through his boxes, it had surely just been knocked into the one that was last open. He left his corn cob half-eaten and went downstairs, but when he looked through his boxes, there were only copies of copies. While flicking through the newest box of copies — these were of things from his garden: runner beans, yellow zucchinis, cabbage
leaves — he let out a yelp. I was sitting on the stairs, as I was the last time I heard him yelp, but this time the door was open and the sound was deeper and easier to explain.
‘I got a paper cut,’ my father said, half to me and half to himself. He sucked the blood from his index finger and added, ‘I never get paper cuts.’
When he opened another box — this one contained copies of my GI Joes — and dug his hand down the side of the copies, he grunted as he was cut again, and pushed the box over and opened a new one. I’m not sure if he was becoming frantic because his fingers were suddenly getting cut or if it was because he had made my mother cry and couldn’t fix it.
He didn’t find his ring in any of the boxes and he got so many paper cuts that he was forced to stop making copies for a week while his hands healed. When the cuts on his ring finger were gone, he went to the jeweller’s and got a replacement wedding band. It looked just like the old one, except it was the same width all the way around. The original had tapered on the underside after years of wear. Years of clapping hands, clenching fists, thrusting into pockets. I wonder sometimes where this lost gold went. Was it absorbed by my father’s ring finger? Or did he leave a tiny, imperceptible trail of gold behind him?
When my father died, I never saw the body. The story goes that he slipped out of bed one night without waking my mother and walked into town in his pyjamas. It was a windy night, but he managed to climb to the top of an eight-storey construction site. I imagine most people think he was there to jump, or at least to think about jumping. To rehearse it. All I have are the snippets of testimony I can recall from the inquest, which ruled that it was an accident. The facts are that when a security guard shone his torch up to where my father was, he fell down a lift shaft and died. I woke up the next morning and my father was dead, though it was left to a young police officer — who sniffed a lot, though he didn’t seem to have a cold — to relate a primitive version of this story to my mother, Sebastian and I. Five days later I held one of the six handles of a coffin that definitely had a body inside, but whose? It was a closed casket due to the state of my father’s body after the fall, but it could have been any body inside.
Though my father’s death felt unreal to me as I carried the coffin out to the hearse, for some reason I still felt like crying. Instead, I smiled at the people on the end of the rows because one of the other pallbearers had told me that was the best way to keep from crying. Everyone smiled back at me. It was a confusing time.
And this is where I must slip into dreams. I know you’re not supposed to talk about your dreams, that they seem contrived when you try to recount them, but to me dreams are just copies of copies of copies of your waking life. And besides, dreams are all I have for this part of the story.
Within a few months of the funeral I was having dreams in which my father resurfaced in my life. At first these dreams functioned like a bad made-for-TV movie: I would catch glimpses of him in the street, maybe on holiday somewhere, and then I would set about tracking him down. When I found him, he would be married to someone else, be part of another family. Sometimes he denied being my father, but I would tear off his shirt (which became easier to tear — more and more like tissue paper — with every dream) and turn him around and point to the tattoo between his shoulder blades and say, ‘You are. You are.’ If I was lucky, in the last few moments before waking, I would manage to have a conversation with him, but only about trivial things, like my cricket game on the weekend, or that I did well in a maths test.
Slowly, the quests to track him down wore away and all that was left was my father reappearing of his own accord and apologising for faking his death. Then, the faking his death was cut away and he would just return to the house we had lived in when he died, and there would be this unspoken apology. A sheepish look.
The time spent searching for my father in dreams was replaced by my dream-self stewing in my bedroom, fantasising about confronting my father and asking what the bloody hell he had been up to in the years since he left us. Was he still an artist? Did he have any more children? He was back, but I was still missing him, still angry.
Eventually, all my dreams took place in this universe where my father had faked his death only to reappear and move back home — except he didn’t have to appear in every dream, they could be about something else.
In one of these other dreams I’m watering the veggie garden and the cabbages are the size of fishbowls so I decide to take one in for my mother to make coleslaw. Sebastian and I are there, staring over her shoulder, when she cuts it open — and there, in the heart of the cabbage, is my father’s wedding ring. It isn’t shiny and golden like in a fairy story. It’s dull and grimy, like a washer that needs replacing. But when my mother pulls it from the cabbage, which has moulded its leaves around the ring like swaddling around a baby, and holds it up to the light, I can see that it is thinner on one side than the other. It is definitely my father’s ring. The original has returned. But because my father is still alive in this dream, my mother just puts the ring aside and Sebastian and I go back to doing our homework until he gets home from his part-time job — we will tell him the story then. We will see his face, surprised. We will consider how the ring ended up in the heart of a cabbage — its journey from the ice-cream container of scraps by the kitchen sink, to the compost heap, to the soil …
While my dreams were repeating imperfectly, evolving, my mother remarried. The first time was to one of my father’s high school friends, who’d lost contact over the years but reappeared for the funeral and took it upon himself to help my mother through her grief. He was like my father in many ways: quiet, determined to the point of neglect, quick-tempered. My mother divorced him because he was neglectful and quick-tempered — she only gained the courage to do something like this after my father’s death.
She has recently married again (I have never worked up the courage to ask her if she sees the irony in her procession of husbands), this time to a man who sells fish from the back of a truck but is surprisingly well off.
Each time she marries, my mother moves into the new husband’s house. It was hard moving the first time, leaving my childhood home, the last home my father lived in, wallpapered with memories of him — but all my dreams were set in this house, so I never really left. Then I moved to Hamilton to go to university, and my mother got divorced and moved into a new house, briefly, before moving in with the fishmonger.
My mother carries my father’s replacement wedding ring with her wherever she moves. Whatever the house, I know I could find this ring in the top drawer of her bedside cabinet in a pink clamshell earring case. But this is just the copy. It never had time to taper on the underside before it was plucked from my father’s finger and returned to my mother with the rest of his personal effects. The ring I dream about is the original, the one that will not return — or worse, that I believe will return, but I will not be there to find it.
Sometimes it feels like I have spent so much time dreaming of the alternate universe where my father is still alive that it is merging with my real life, making it harder to distinguish between dreams and memories. My father getting paper cuts looking for his wedding ring and me finding the ring inside a cabbage both feel as if they come from the same place. But one happened, the other will not. It’s as if my brain has torn down the walls between real and imagined, and gone open plan.
And then, two days ago, Sarah told me I am to become a father.
It still feels like a rumour to me. The only proof I have is Sarah’s assurance that she read the pregnancy test correctly and that she knows. Proof will come — her belly will grow and there will be ultrasounds and I will be able to feel the baby kick — but right now the existence of a foetus in my first and only long-term relationship feels the same to me as the fact that my father does not exist.
Even while Sarah was telling me we were going to have a baby, I felt as if this wasn’t about me. As if it was another scene in the story of my father. The story I am writing w
ithout him. This is why I trawl my memories and dreams for him. Why I am missing him more now than any time in the last five, ten years. Why I stand before the mirror and look for my father’s face as it was in my childhood photos. I feel closer to him now than at any time since his death. Closer than when I carried his casket or when I’ve dreamt of him or looked through photo albums. I feel like he is within me. That the last of my childhood husk will shortly flake off to reveal my father, like a backwards Russian doll.
I have had two days to get used to the idea of becoming a father, and in those brief moments where I feel I have my head around it, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for my child’s sake that I will become too perfect a copy of my father. That my depressive bouts will become more frequent, each a copy of the last, distorting, darkening, losing detail, making it harder and harder to pull myself back each time until I cannot return. I fear this more than anything. But he was also the father who caught stick insects and put them in empty Nutella jars with holes punched in the lid and gave them to me, but only for an hour, after which the stick insect was put back on the same branch it had come from. The father who could play any song off the radio on the harmonica, but refused to play anything by Dire Straits because he said all their songs sounded alike. The father who lifted me over boxes of photocopies and let me be his assistant.
But then I wonder about the story of his death — the great mundanity at the centre of all of this. What was he doing on the eighth floor of a construction site in his pyjamas? The inquest cannot be trusted: the security guard was the husband of Sebastian’s teacher, and the coroner overseeing the inquest was a friend of my grandparents. Nothing could ever be clear cut with my father.
When I am in a certain mood, there is an endless supply of things to be angry at him for. The things he will never do for me and the things I will never understand because I am both too close and too far from him. I can’t read What mortal coil? without the knowledge of his death, knowledge he did not have when he got those words inked on his back. But still it lingers, like a taunt from the returned father in my dreams.