by Joe Hammond
It was dark. It was raining outside, and in that moment the old stable beams creaked above us. It was just us and these tiny noises, and then it changed and we giggled off to bed.
How will the end of my life appear to my boy? In the long periods between connections I fantasize darkly about disappearing like granules of sugar in tea. Or that my absence might be registered like the absence of a treasured old cardboard go-kart – remembered fondly but no longer around. I’m frightened of the actual moment – when it’s confirmed for Tom that I am dying, and that maybe it’s easier to dissolve or to disappear on a Friday morning in a recycling truck. Because one day he will really know, and really say, and then loss will stretch out its lazy arms and legs and settle in.
*
I had trouble working out the number of birthday cards to stockpile for the boys. I wrote an article for the Guardian Magazine about writing thirty-three cards but my first draft contained various figures, so that at one point I confused my editor by also referring to the twenty-two cards, and later on that it would be twenty-eight. It had been an easy article to write, apart from the mathematics of it all, which was like one of those sticky strips that people hang up to catch flies but which instead attract tiny little floating anxieties.
The main difficulty was estimating the first of their birthdays for which I would be either dead or at the point when the act of passing a card to either of the boys might not be possible. These are quite profound sums and very different from those calculations involving apples and tenpence pieces through which I remember first learning arithmetic. Perhaps this is part of the point of learning maths, so that – at the end – you can easily use both hands to add up how long you have left.
There was a comments section attached to the article and I remember one subthread developed with readers trying to work out how I had arrived at the number thirty-three. I wouldn’t have expected such curiosity but it’s the idea of the future, or anticipating the future, and perhaps this is something naturally interesting or unsettling. In fact, I started the cards for Jimmy’s fourth and Tom’s eighth birthday, and with the way my body has atrophied since, I would say that this is exactly right and that I have yet again proved myself to be the world’s foremost authority and expert on the subject of my own decline. My consultants are just the people left holding the clipboards.
My friend lost his father when very young and told me that birthdays were the worst of times. But quite a lot of time went by and I procrastinated about the grade of card required. It was only when I started to notice the tendons shortening on my right hand that I finally got under way, and when I first took a scalpel to the card, and set both my pens and paints out on the table, I could have been a lonely, peaceful figure, seated on a rock in a cave accessible only at low tides, located somewhere in the Pacific, perhaps a hundred miles from habitation. I had decided to use pages from a large watercolour pad, so the nap was grained and textured. When I held it between the fatty parts of my thumb and index finger it had more of a presence than I expected. And progressing with the cards felt like something very permanent, like the handover from one person to another, different form of presence.
I spent some part of my career working with young people in children’s homes. And amongst the many hard circumstances I encountered, it seemed like the cruellest situation for a child to find themselves in a children’s home whilst down the road their parents and siblings were living and sleeping in some normal terraced house like everybody else. And there were always different reasons for this surprisingly common situation but always the same clean circular hole through the centre of some young person’s heart. And I can’t imagine that hole ever heals over – that it remains in place with the air whistling through it with the sound of faraway family dinners. I suppose I mention it because mine will be a different kind of absence and a different kind of silence, but it’s still absence and it’s still silence. And because of this I wanted my cards to convey almost everything about love.
Jimmy liked all the pens and pencils and paintbrushes I had set out on the table. I looked down and saw his little arachnid fingers traversing the front lip of the desktop, so I rolled a colouring pencil towards his fingers and he padded off with it down the corridor. A few moments later he was back and giggling with joy at his light-fingeredness, prodding me in the bottom with the pencil to underline his victory.
The evidence of such unremarkable meetings is absorbed into walls and disappears from history. And that’s OK for a boy who can remember and a daddy who isn’t dying. But for Jimmy and me these innocuous moments happen and disappear, likes diamonds sliding down a crease of paper into a draining sink. That moment when I was weak and dropped my cutlery, and Jimmy reached down and picked it up for me. Or those occasions when he decided I might want my hat and brought it to me, and when he sometimes tried to lift my trousers back up for me after I’d been on the toilet. This is it, before it dissipates through the walls. There is no after; this is no foundation. It doesn’t continue on or roll forward like the torso of a snowman, compacting and gathering into fullness. After I was prodded in the bottom I realized I should record these moments, so that they didn’t all disappear – that I should record this moment with the coloured pencil, and a different moment for each of Jimmy’s cards. I also like the idea that this was exactly why I was being jabbed in the bottom – that my little son was peering up on to the table and telling me to stop with all the silly Daddy doodles, and all the love blah blah, and to get the evidence down instead.
Because if I were Jimmy, I’d want to know. What was it? What happened exactly, in that brief time? Was it real? Who was that man? Who was I?
I doodled less as the boys reached their late teens. I couldn’t hold a pen or a brush by this stage, so the cards were typed and more like letters. From my desk I had a view of the pretty stone wall on the opposite side of the lane, a telegraph pole and the frosted tops of topiary from the large walled garden next door. I was writing to a broader Jimmy, with his looping bowl of a jawline; Tom was longer, with tufted wheat-coloured whiskers splaying out from the point of his chin. I had glimpsed these older boys before, when I was looking upwards from my watery world, seeing them moving around in the daylight up above ground. And I was existing ahead of them again now, walking around and touching the future bric-a-brac of their thoughts, having arrived in this quiet, unready future – like a street market in the hours before opening. I had made this time for myself to see what it could be and to reassure myself – wandering around and imagining, leaving little notes pinned to doors and attached to lamp posts, for my older sons to find in later years. And every one – every card I doodled and wrote and painted – was just a different-coloured way of saying that I would always be there, that I had tried in every way I could, and that I was sorry.
Fathers
By the time my father reached old age his lifestyle had softened and it seemed that visiting him with my very young family was no longer the risk it once would have been. At this more genteel stage in his life he claimed to have grown weary of the more unstable female companions from his earlier years. His sexual interest had moved on and it was a subject about which he could become extremely animated. He never seemed to allow for the possibility that Gill might not be interested, or that a toddler might be staring up at him in that moment.
The walls of his home were decorated with large black-and-white framed prints of old ships and, interspersed between them, smaller framed prints of Victorian soft porn – women in petticoats with the corner of a buttock or breast just about revealed. When upstairs and seated in his favourite comfy chair, or with his apron on as he washed up, he’d find an opportunity to play a semi-famous reggae song from the 1970s in which a man expresses his infatuation for a woman with a larger than average sized bottom. He’d soon start singing along to the lyrics and waving his arms about, becoming particularly animated by those lines in which the object of the singer’s infatuation is reassured by the singer that he is in no wa
y intimidated by the size of her rear. Like many elderly people, my father lived alone and I suppose it was natural that he might store up his reflections or want to sing along to his favourite tunes. He’d become quite isolated in his dotage, with just one or two doting female visitors: his chiropodist and the woman described as ‘cuddly’ from the village clothes shop.
Sometimes he’d just prefer to sit back in his armchair and regale us with his most recent observations about the various large sized women he’d come across in the doctor’s surgery or the hairdresser’s. Occasionally he’d date a woman who conformed to this scale requirement of his, but mostly he just enjoyed chatting to them in shops or, best of all, finding one riding a horse, so that he could ever so slowly overtake her several times on a country road.
There were times when his eyes would glisten and he’d grow nostalgic for the ‘wild women’ of his ‘bad old days’. He was sentimental about what he seemed to regard as this heyday of his romantic life, and was fond of recalling stories and women from this time. But when he did so, his adopted tone was one that might otherwise have been expected of an elderly widower recalling the sweetness of a courtship, from the 1940s perhaps, to a woman named Gladys.
*
If you don’t know it, Spirograph is a children’s toy made up of a pen and a set of plastic discs. It creates hundreds, or even thousands, of coloured concentric circles as a series of pretty patterns on paper. I mention this, not because I ever really had or used this toy, but because, if you were to track my father’s route throughout our weekend visits, you would find Gill to be the centrepoint of his perambulations – the place from which he would make repeated circular movements in to, and around, and back out again. If a coloured crayon had been attached to his feet, it would have made for a spectacular pattern.
Often he would appear before her offering a piece of memorabilia from his life, and sometimes he would arrive empty-handed with an anecdote: something recollected or perhaps drawing on the range of his social interactions with service providers and large female shop assistants. Occasionally he would ask Gill a question about her life, as if reading from cards compiled to assist a person’s integration into polite society. I think he was delighted to find himself politely enquiring about the normal details of another person’s life, even if he would seldom have time to delay the Spirograph long enough to take in the actual response to his enquiry. It always seemed like he found this part the least interesting feature of the exchange, and that he was also trying hard to perfect an air of casual nonchalance and the impression that his day was already overrun with tasks. At this stage in her life Gill hadn’t yet handed back other people’s overcoats and, given my slightly awkward and taciturn presence in this house, probably felt she had no choice but to accept the temporary draping of multiple parkas and mackintoshes around her shoulders. She would warmly welcome every approach, widening her eyes throughout the encounter and always asking the requisite number of follow-up questions. It was a simple arrangement and, watching the pattern, it looked a little like a woman throwing a stick for a dog as she tried to read her book. The pattern continued and he became so devoted that, within a few years, he declared Gill to be the daughter he always wished he’d had, and made the specific request that she refer to him as such.
If I make this sound in any way maladjusted, I really don’t mean to. There probably isn’t a person whose movements around their preoccupations wouldn’t make a pretty enough Spirograph pattern, and which wouldn’t grow more uniform and concentric with age. I was fairly stolid company during these visits and Gill, by contrast, quite delightful for a man who lived alone and had limited opportunities with people. She knew very little about the man he used to be and it never occurred to me to talk about any of that. I think he quite liked that Gill and I were normal people with normal lives and I’m glad that it made him feel good about himself. When we bought our flat he gave us a little money towards our deposit and, when we got married, he wore a nice suit to the wedding.
The first sign of trouble came when Tom was born. It’s not that he didn’t like the idea of having grandchildren and, after visiting, he would request we follow up with photographic evidence of his interactions with Tom. From time to time he would remember actual details about Tom – his genuine characteristics and interests. And he cared enough to deposit money into a bank account for his grandson. But the main problem with Tom was that he could not be relied upon to move out of the way of the Spirograph as it completed its round of patterns. It could be that the Spirograph returned to the centre and found a jigsaw or a nappy change under way. Or it could be that Gill or I were reading Mr Men books in the garden or that we’d taken Tom to the playground. These were awkward moments and what I remember is the magnified impression of his forbearance in the face of considerable disappointment; the sense that this was only one weekend in the year, and that it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that it would be his alone, given that his grandson had the other fifty-one.
Occasionally he’d wince into the car alongside Tom and, if a trip were planned to somewhere that had interest for him, such as a steam railway or village fete, then everything would go off without trouble. But the idea of anything other than these destinations appeared to cause him real physical pain, so that he’d grimace or tug painfully at his ears – or he’d turn to face us at a 45-degree angle, making uncomfortable long low throaty noises. It wasn’t just that he declined such opportunities, which would have been understandable, but something else took over in him that felt like an attempted bending of attention, away from his grandchild and back towards the established world of his own needs. If we were in the car, and we tried to settle on a destination or a parking spot, sometimes that would be so incredibly hard for him, and hard to dredge for a kind of coherent opposition. Just a frame lurching closer to the windscreen, his face screwed and contorting as he gripped the armrest or steering wheel, and a crooked forward-pointing finger urging us on to somewhere, anywhere.
*
I’m not sure if it’s bad luck, or a familial quirk, but I realize I don’t know one single old man who isn’t some slanty-crowned despot in a comfy chair. It’s a little sad for me that I don’t know any old men who are different to this. I know they are out there. Or that some of them are out there. Because it looks hard to be old in this country. But when people trot out clichés about a crisis in masculinity, it’s never old men who are mentioned. It makes me wonder if a little more infrastructure is needed or whether more children’s playgrounds should be turned over in middle-class areas and made into something that could overtly celebrate and trumpet the lifelong achievements of this disenfranchised group.
Because I know so many men who have arrived at this point in their lives feeling frustrated and underappreciated – and wondering why so much of the available attention is being commandeered by the very young. I see them carrying these brick-shaped feelings aloft, in high-up teetering gilded hods. And I don’t think it necessarily makes them bad people, just that they seem to have haltingly arrived at this late place in their lives to find a vast gap has opened up for them, like a ravine, between what they had long ago expected and what was finally delivered.
They are often to be found, in gardens and living rooms, stamping and stomping in a kind of territorial dance – the very tall and the very small – fighting over who had this or that toy first. For example, in her retirement, my mum married for the first time and we stayed with her and her husband over the summer. Like my father, it’s not at all that this man doesn’t enjoy the company of Tom and Jimmy, or that he’s not fond of them – because he quite clearly is – it’s just that this regard is harder to maintain when children decide on their own particular forms of play, at their own appointed times. And so it proved when Jimmy – at eighteen months – failed to return a shoehorn that he’d been playing with. It wasn’t larceny that we were initially aware of, and it only came to light when some of Tom and Jimmy’s toys also started disappearing. It took some investigat
ion to unlock the mystery but, one by one, the missing toys were found squirrelled away in various unfathomable locations.
My latest stepfather is nothing if not tidy, and this requirement – to have everything in its appointed place – was the initial tersely delivered rationale for hiding Tom and Jimmy’s toys. I didn’t find his response particularly measured, but I felt some sympathy for this elderly man, resisting the impact of his own debilitating ill health, and suddenly coping with the debris of children’s lives. I hoped we could find a solution but, in that moment when the mystery of the toys had been revealed, it proved difficult to engage any kind of eye contact. Instead, the initially injured party stooped a few yards from us, working away with a duster for a prolonged period, at an area of the kitchen table about four inches square. He seemed perturbed by the surface and fixed his glare on its obstinacy. It was one of those unfortunate silences when a key party in a conversation remains temporarily distracted. But what happened next surprised us because, when he finally lifted his gaze from the table, the glare and perturbation remained, and even seemed directed in our direction. I think his right foot lifted ever so slightly and his knuckles pressed into the tabletop. When this downward force was released, his knuckles had whitened and his foot came back down with something like a stomp. He seemed particularly emotional and wanted to make clear that Jimmy had started it and that the provocateur in this situation had yet to return his missing shoehorn. I suppose we could have got the two injured parties together to sort this out, but it was 7 p.m. and Jimmy had already retired to his cot with a bottle.
*
Jimmy was just a few months old when we last visited my father and we were experiencing the familiar parental challenge of life with a second child. My father was also finding it challenging, but for slightly different reasons. Our lives were now stretched between the two young children, and the Spirograph was struggling to establish the clean consistent lines required for effective patterning. He would attempt his anecdotes exactly as he’d done before, but then a crying baby – or requests for more banana – would invariably result in a story left half finished. And I think he felt dismayed to see various mementos deposited amongst the wider debris of Lego and soiled nappies. I could see that he was becoming increasingly frustrated by the claims being made on Gill by his grandchildren. In the weeks leading up to our stay, Jimmy had been awake for long stretches during the night. Both of us had been lacking sleep and we were aware of not being great guests. We tried to explain, and the spaces at the end of Gill’s apologies seemed tailor-made for some kind of sympathy but were instead filled with the dogged remains of half-completed anecdotes from earlier in the day.