Little Big Man

by Katy Regan

  I look to Dad.

  ‘Dad,’ I say. He’s been so quiet, I’ve hardly noticed him. ‘What do you think?’

  He opens his mouth to speak but Mum cuts in.

  ‘Oh, don’t bloody ask him,’ she says, throwing down her napkin. ‘He sits on the fence; always has, always will.’

  For the rest of the afternoon at work, I think about what Mum said at Bobbin’s, but even more, I think about what Dad didn’t say. When I was young, I was very much a daddy’s girl. He shared my gregariousness (difficult to imagine these days when I go months without socializing), he was outspoken and ‘bubbly’ like me (even though I hated that word with a passion back then, synonymous as it was, I believed, with ‘fat’). Yet since Jamie died, he’s not just a man changed, but an entirely different person. Now, it’s like we only communicate through Zac, almost as if Dad is avoiding me. Put us in a room together without Zac and I’m not sure we’d know what to say to each other. It’s sad. I miss him. The day before the funeral, all three of us went to see Jamie in the chapel of rest. If you’d have asked me several years earlier how my parents would react should something unthinkable happen like my little brother dying, I’d have said it would be Mum who would become hysterical and Dad who’d be the tower of strength, love and composure, but this isn’t what happened at all.

  Instead, there was just this rage from him at first and, like I say, I never knew who it was directed at – Liam, himself or the universe. It seemed so out of control and primal. But then, he retreated into himself and cried, and I don’t mean silent, dignified tears, I mean head-in-hands inconsolable wailing. It was alarming, even in the circumstances.

  Dad had always crumbled at the first sniff of a drink, but in all other aspects, he was a loving father and husband and it scared me that he seemed to be dissolving right in front of our eyes; unreachable just when we needed him the most. It was like this puddle of grief shifted and slithered after him everywhere he went and you’d find him surrounded by it, submerged in it. I once caught him, a month or so after Jamie died – he didn’t know I’d seen – sobbing in the backyard very early one morning, banging his own head with his fist, as if he couldn’t stand what was going on inside it. He cried when you hugged him, clinging on to you for dear life. But Mum? She was hugging nobody. She was in her glass tower of grief: you could see her, but you couldn’t touch her. This was between her and Jamie only. Nobody else was invited.

  The man at the chapel of rest was very young himself – I remember that – and he seemed almost apologetic for being alive as he walked us down a wood-panelled corridor with a thick, dark green carpet like moss. We went past one, two, three rooms, until he stopped and, gesturing with his hand to a closed mahogany door with a brass handle, said, ‘Take all the time you need.’

  Inside it was cold and smelt of pine and antiseptic. They weren’t fooling me. This was really a mortuary, with wood panels and thick carpets; a mortuary made to look like a cosy house. The coffin, which was on top of a trolley (more mahogany), was against the wall on the right and, against the wall on the left, there was a small table with a vase of flowers on top and a picture of Jamie – the one the press had used. It was taken on a rare family walk over the dunes in Cleethorpes and in it, Jamie was ruddy, smiling, thick-set and dripping with life.

  The way Jamie’s body was laid out, he had his head nearest to the door, so when you walked in, all you could see were his feet. He was wearing his favourite battered black-suede Converse All Stars. Mum and I had even managed to have an argument about that. I said they epitomized Jamie and he’d be comfy in them. She said she was not having any son of hers being laid to rest with ‘two rats’ on his feet. (Little bro, I won out!)

  Like I said, I thought it would be Mum who’d throw herself over the coffin and wail, but it was Dad who broke down the minute we saw my brother. He stood, one arm wrapped around his chest, as if keeping his heart intact, lest it should tumble right out, and one hand over his eyes. I was crying too, silent tears running too fast for me to wipe them away with my cardigan sleeve, but Mum was dry-eyed. She was fussing over Jamie like he was a baby (and, of course, I understood once I became a mum myself that he was still her baby, and always would be).

  I edged nervously towards him. He looked like Donald Trump. (When Grandad died and Jamie and I went in to see him, the make-up they’d put on him had made him look so orange that, amidst the tears, Jamie had said exactly that. And it had lifted things; we’d sniggered snottily through the tears. But there was nothing to laugh about now.)

  Mum was fussing: ‘Why have they got him lying like that? He doesn’t look comfy, Michael. I want to put his pillow under his head. Couldn’t they have put make-up on his hands? They’re all mottled.’ They were a horrible, sickly purple-yellow colour but his face looked almost normal, save for the make-up and the swollen jaw that looked like he had a bad toothache. Dad just stood back and cried; he didn’t get close to him, kiss his forehead, or hold his hand as you’d expect of someone seeing their child for the very last time. Mum shot a look backwards at him: ‘Michael, did you not hear me? I want to put a pillow under his head. That’s flat, that is, there’s no support.’

  Jamie, would you listen to them? I wanted to say. She’s even snapping at him now you’re dead. If he could have seen us, I knew he’d have laughed.

  ‘OK, I’ll go and get one,’ Dad managed, but it was so quiet, so small, almost as if he felt he didn’t have the right to be there. Then he turned and walked out, only coming back to hand the pillow to Mum before saying he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to leave.

  Later, Mum could silence whole rooms with her story about seeing her son in the chapel of rest, just as she could with her vitriol against Liam and ‘What He Did’ – like spreading the gospel, only in the reverse. She’d tell the hairdresser, Laura, anyone who’d listen how handsome Jamie had looked, how perfect; how Michael couldn’t even touch him for the last time. She wasn’t interested in the etiquette of death. She just wanted to talk about my brother, dead or alive. But Dad didn’t talk about Jamie, Liam or, come to think of it, much at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mick

  After a childhood listening to my old man and his mates regale me with their stories of being broadsided by monolithic waves, and witnessing the camaraderie in their near-death experiences, I wanted some of that too. I wanted the glory; to go to sea like some lads want to go to war: to be a hero in my own town. Ironic that now, with my boy lying dead in the ground.

  It was June 1971, and I was sixteen when I finally got a job on the boats. Naturally, I got it from someone in the pub. It was where everything happened, after all, where everything started: relationships, lives (that summoning phone call from your mother at the hospital), jobs and big ideas. But it was also where those things ended too. And chances. I know all about chances …

  Still, I’d got my dream gig as a galley boy, peeling spuds, rolling fags and washing pots. But I was drinking with the big boys then; besides, you had to drink to keep warm, keep awake and simply deal with twenty hours straight in the freezing wet and cold. Every day, twice a day, we’d get our ‘issues’ from the skipper: two mustard jars of rum and three cans of beer. But right from the start I’d be one of those who’d hide my issues in a drawer and pretend I’d never got them, just so I could get another. By the time I met Lynda in ’76 I was already a problem drinker, although neither of us saw it like that. My party animal ways were one of the things she loved about me the most; that I rolled with the good times. And there were lots of good times: whole summer days, when I wasn’t at sea, getting plastered and sunburnt outside The Fiddler. Our impromptu barbecues were the talk of the town – Mick and Lynda Hutchinson, always up for a laugh, a party – and people loved that here because nobody (nobody we knew anyway) had much money. We couldn’t afford to jet off on holiday. What we had was each other (and booze), and that felt, for a short while, like paradise.

  The signs were already there, though. About two
years after we got married, before the kids came along (so, around 1982), me and Vaughan Jones (already infamous in Grimsby by then) got a job on the Jubilee Quest. She was a five-hundred-foot beauty that was to go fishing off Mauritania for mackerel and herring, then take four days to land on Gran Canaria, which was how long it took to get the tonnes of fish off the boat. This meant a four-day party for crew with nobody back home, but a chance to fly home to see your wife and kids if you had them. But Vaughan convinced me we needed the party more than any wife, and so I told Lynda that because it was my first trip, I wasn’t allowed to go home. My little scheme was only scuppered when Lynda bumped into my mate Tony Mackay, also a first-timer on the Jubilee, down Freemo Street with his wife, while I was probably propping up a poolside bar with Jones. ‘Hang on, Mick told me you weren’t allowed to go home,’ Lynda said, to which Macca (everyone called him that) pissed himself laughing and she, not wanting to appear like the fishwife, the bore, laughed too apparently: Cheeky bugger, I’ll kill him! It was only twenty years later when I’d hit rock bottom and Lynda had given me that ultimatum – It’s the booze or us – that she told me how gutted she really was that day she saw Macca in the street. And not just because I’d lied, but because I’d been weak enough to let Vaughan lead me astray, because (the way she saw it) I wanted to be drinking with him more than being at home with her. That was the day, she also told me, that it began to dawn on her that I may have a problem, although it would be a long time before she used the word ‘alcoholic’.

  The first time I ever used that word was when I stood up in a freezing cold church hall at my first AA meeting in the January of 2006. Hello, my name is Mick, and I am an alcoholic. I thought they only said that in films, but you have to do it in real life, and the word had felt like a terrifying relief to get out, like exorcizing a demon. It was six months since we’d lost Jamie, two years since my first attempt to give up, on my own, and I wasn’t just serious about giving up then, I was desperate. Suicide was the only other option. Sounds dramatic, but that’s the truth. Jamie had died. I’d failed him, my family and my whole community – at least that was how it felt – and the only reason I had to live then was Zac, who I loved as much as Jamie. But nobody wants a drunk for a grandad, let’s face it, and the way I saw it, if I failed at sobriety, the only thing I had left to give, then what was the point of me? I sobbed in front of seven strangers at the AA meeting that night. They said I’d done something so brave coming in the first place. I’d never felt like such a fraud in my life.

  It took Lynda a long while to forgive me after the Jubilee Quest debacle. There were tears, apologies, empty promises – the staple diet of the alcoholic – but then obviously, because I was an alcoholic, I just carried on as before. And maybe that wasn’t so bad when we could both go out, but then when the kids came along and it was a case of Lynda at home with the babies and me at sea or in the pub, then the fun ended – for her, anyway.

  This was the eighties, though, when things were still comparably good in the fishing industry and Lynda – although furious for much of the time – was too occupied with the kids to bother trying to drag me home from the pub. By the time we got to the late nineties/early noughties, however, the jobs had really started to dry up and Lynda had to take on shifts at a care home to make ends meet. I felt like a failure, so I drank more and Lynda hated me more, and so I felt more of a failure and on it went. My drinking got messier, uglier. With fewer lads down the pub (they were out trying to get work, doing whatever it took to keep their families afloat when their fishing careers were sinking, which was what I should have been doing) I often found myself the only man at the bar; I was the sad, lonely alkie. But why? That’s the question I ask myself still now. Yes, we were skint, but I had two gorgeous kids and a beautiful wife who could have fallen in love with me again, if I could have got a grip. And where did it come from, this addiction? I would have liked to blame it on an appalling childhood: I loathed myself, so I drank. But it was the opposite for me: I loved the drink, so I drank and drank, and then I loathed myself. It was all so avoidable, so unnecessary. But I’d fallen in love, seduced by the sweet release booze gave me, helplessly addicted to that moment – the tipping point, before which you still have a choice to carry on or not carry on. But then I always wanted to carry on, wanted the boat to tip so far that it couldn’t then right itself, so that I could slide – like a slippery catch being returned to the sea – right out of that net and into the delicious, boundless deep.

  The problem with that is that you have to come up for air eventually, and face the truth about yourself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Zac

  Fact: The blue whale has the largest heart: it weighs approximately 1,500 pounds.

  My other grandad’s name is Vaughan Jones and he was a fisherman too – Mr Singh told me. Mr Singh is mega brainy. You don’t think he is, you think he’s half-asleep because he sits in his shop with one eye closed. But he’s like an eagle: he watches everything from up on his stool, and he knows everyone in Grimsby because he’s owned shops in every area of town.

  I only found this out yesterday (if I’d have known sooner, I would have asked him ages ago about my dad). But I just asked him if he knew him by chance – I thought it was worth a try.

  ‘Do you know Liam Jones?’ I said while I was paying for the milk. (I also bought a Mars Bar but it was the first chocolate I’d had that week. I definitely deserved it.)

  ‘Who’s asking?’ said Mr Singh.

  ‘Me,’ I said and Mr Singh laughed. ‘He likes cooking, like me, and he’s got dark hair. He grew up in Grimsby.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ said Mr Singh. He looks so different when he smiles. You can tell he’s kind deep down.

  ‘It’s for a school project,’ I said. It was the first thing that came into my head. ‘An investigation into local people.’

  Mr Singh laughed again then, and thought really hard for a long time. ‘Liam Jones …’ he said, drumming his fingers on the counter. Mr Singh’s hands are so dry they look like they’ve been dipped in flour. ‘A Grimsby lad, you say? How old are we talking?’

  ‘Dunno, thirty-two?’ I said. It was a guess because my mum’s going to be thirty-two in November and normally your boyfriend is the same age as you.

  Mr Singh shook his head slowly, but then it was like someone had reached inside his head and switched both his eyes on. ‘Liam Jones. I know Liam Jones! He’s Vaughan Jones’s lad.’

  ‘Who’s Vaughan Jones?’ I said. It felt really exciting.

  ‘Vonny Jones? He was a well-known skipper, was Vaughny from the Rollo Estate. I bet your grandad knows him.’ (I was nodding and grinning even though I’d never heard of him.) ‘I haven’t seen Vaughan for more than ten years,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Since way before you were born. But Liam used to do a paper round for me when he was a teenager and I had Singh News up on the Rollo. Why you want to know about Liam Jones, anyway?’ he said. ‘What’s he got to do with your school project?’ But I was putting my shopping in my bag as quickly as I could, and then I was halfway out of the door. ‘Thanks, Mr Singh!’ I shouted behind me. Then I ran home, fast as a peregrine falcon. I had to write everything down before I forgot.

  It was the Thursday before we had a long weekend off for Easter and everyone (not just Connor) had ants in their pants and couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t, because this morning Teagan had said to meet her at Harrison’s bench in the playground at break time because she’d had a brainwave about the Find Dad mission. Harrison’s bench is a bench dedicated to Harrison who was a boy who died from a brain tumour when we were in Year 3. He came in to see us when he’d gone bald because of the cancer, then in the summer holidays he just died. You couldn’t believe it. Nobody wanted to fill his empty chair in the classroom, so we just left it, but every time you walked past, you could feel his ghost.

  Teagan was already sitting on the bench when I got there, eating a bag of Frazzles.

  ‘I’ve thought of the most import
ant question to ask your mum,’ she said. Normally we have to say our code word, ‘mango’, before we talk about the mission outside the roundabout HQ but she just started talking.

  ‘What is it then?’ I said.

  ‘We need to ask her where she was the last time she saw your dad. It’s what they do in all investigations for missing people; I saw it on a documentary last night.’ Teagan watches loads of documentaries because her mum likes them so much. I watched one with her about a boy who had no arms or legs, just stumps; but he was still happy because his family still loved him. ‘They ask the searcher – the person looking for the missing person – when they last saw the person, what they were doing and if they were acting weird.’

  ‘What, the searcher?’

  ‘No, the missing person! Der! The searcher would know if they were acting weird themselves, wouldn’t they?’ I nodded but I wasn’t sure. My dad did a runner ages ago now, so how would my mum remember anything? And was doing a runner even the same thing as being a missing person? It all felt confusing.

  ‘It’s basically just retracing your steps,’ said Teagan, when I didn’t say anything for a bit. ‘But it’s really effective. We need to ask your mum to go back in her tracks to that day she last saw him, because that will give us the most clues about where he might have gone after that. Trust me, it’s what professional detectives do, except they interview people in a proper police station, whereas we’ll just have to do it in your kitchen.’

  Teagan crushed the remaining bits of the Frazzles up in the bottom of the packet. If you do that, the crumbs are like ‘bacon bites’ – the best part by miles of the Pizza Hut salad bar, only you don’t have to go out to Pizza Hut. You get the Bacon Bites Experience for 56p. Me and Teagan discovered it.