by Joe Hammond
The perfected air of nonchalance was the first to go, so that he became a little more strategic and observant. Within the first twenty-four hours the fluidity of the Spirograph gave way to a series of thwarted pounces. He was becoming a much more peripheral figure and I could hear the dishwasher being emptied in a very noisy way. When the vacuum cleaner suddenly ploughed through the centre of a little family scene, it felt like a very specific point was being made.
The day before we were due to end our visit my father decided that he needed a large table moved. He hadn’t previously brought up any furniture-moving requirements. The inspiration seemed to come from nowhere and was accompanied with a quite desperate sense of urgency. I could tell a lot was at stake, but Gill had fallen asleep with exhaustion and I was looking after both boys. I don’t think he had factored in these environmental considerations because, by the time I could answer, he was already holding one end of the table with both hands.
‘Do we need to do this now? You know that Gill’s …?’
I was holding Jimmy horizontally in the crook of both elbows, like an armful of firewood, and turned around, gesturing towards our bedroom with the top of his head. I don’t know if it was the pain of an emerging tooth, but during these uncomfortable periods he required to be permanently held, very precisely, in a horizontal position, as if he was functioning as the replacement fluid bubble at the centre of a spirit level, and this was not at all about teething or colic, but instead about the process of putting up new shelving.
‘Does it really need to be now?’
What is it about old men and tables? By this point he wasn’t listening but was crouching low down, circling the edges of the table.
‘I just can’t put him down right now. Can it wait?’
I don’t believe he answered, but I must admit to having been distracted by Tom’s own frustration with a tricky stage in the construction of the fuselage of his Lego helicopter. Tom and I examined the instructions for a few moments and then I turned to Dad and wrestled Jimmy on to my hip.
‘Look, I can take one end …’
I moved to grasp the table with my free hand, but I don’t think the offer was sufficiently exclusive and my father abruptly swivelled a hundred and eighty degrees away from me. He goose-marched one leg forward, angrily flicking his chin and fingers upwards to the gods, as if directing the percussion section for his own private Wagner table-moving opera, and disappeared through to the kitchen.
A little time went by. With relief, I considered the table-moving safely suspended. By the time he had rejoined me in the living room, away from the table, I was giving Jimmy his bottle whilst watching Tom with his Lego. There was peace for a moment, and Gill was still sleeping. I looked around at the four of us. My father’s gaze seemed fixed on some indeterminable spot, but the scene seemed almost the picture of a weekend away with the grandparents.
So it was a shock: the kinetic energy of this next moment was a shock. His arm thrashed at the air, snarling that something was for ‘God’s sake’ – and then my very fit 83-year-old father leapt forty-five degrees up from his seated position. With his crimson V-neck camouflaged against the upholstery of his favourite soft chair, he momentarily resembled one of those highly adapted stick insects, invisible within their surroundings, that wait for days and then cantilever violently towards their prey.
This lithe old man lurched towards the table, grabbing one end of the beast as he vainly attempted some movement of its being towards his required location.
I looked over and remarked on this being the behaviour of a baby, but I think the words dribbled out and reached no further than the ends of my feet. Weak and old as he clearly was, having been frightened by this man at a very young age, it was always very hard not to feel overtaken by those ancient feelings.
And I don’t think he was aware of my remark. He was sweaty and angry, and was particularly upset that a table leg had become snagged up in a ruffle of carpet.
‘I only … I …’
He was panting and straining heavily at this stage, as if single-handedly attempting to manoeuvre a large reluctant mammal into some kind of pen.
At this point, Gill walked in and he snapped upright in his stance, flinging out an arm in my direction.
‘He won’t help me! He won’t help me move the table!’
Gill looked at the table; she looked over at me.
‘But he’s feeding Jimmy!’
Looking back at this specific moment in time, I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the momentary physical shrinkage his body underwent. His arm remained in position, aimed directly at me, and little thin pools of fluid floated across his eyeballs. He remained perfectly still, like someone in the immediate aftermath of being shot with a pistol in a stage play. Gill’s simple and undeniably factual statement must have felt something like a bullet. And I think, in that moment, his full and unconditional love for his daughter-in-law hissed like a hot coal dropped into a bucket of water. She had observed him in this room and he must have wondered – must have looked down – just to check that he was wearing anything at all.
‘I … I’m sorry … I … I need a …’
And with that he disappeared. To his office or his bedroom or somewhere.
It was about an hour later that he returned, and his response conveyed the brilliance with which he had configured his thoughts about our interaction into a simple, user-friendly concept. He resurfaced to make clear that, if we were to have any kind of meaningful relationship, from now on I must understand his need to be indulged. He’d worked out that I was missing this point. He came out to simplify matters and also to state, for the avoidance of doubt, that this requirement of his would never change.
Though for many years he had lived quite an unhealthy life, for the last decade or so he had lived as a vegetarian and was very trim and agile for his age. I mention this because, when he reappeared from his temporary isolation, he did not look in great shape. He was lurching, his shoulders curling forwards, his feet struggling to keep up with the sedentary pace of his upper body. The strain of the earlier events had resulted in a rapid physiological decline.
‘You need to indulge me.’
This phrase continued. This simple phrase. So simple that it suggested an idea fully comprehended. Bruno Bettelheim, that great Viennese psychologist and thinker, once wrote about those moments in life when something is known to a person so completely that the words required to communicate this knowledge form with unusual clarity and precision. In this case, with my father, I think the obverse was true. He was wrestling a concept so obtuse that simplicity was all he was capable of.
‘I’m not going to change. You need to indulge me.’
One of the problems of having been frightened by someone at a very young age is that anyone’s anger in any situation takes you back to the original fear. And the corollary, certainly for me, was that my own anger had always been inaccessible, even in situations when that would be something quite natural and appropriate to feel. It’s meant that I have long been regarded as calm and unflappable under pressure, when it’s nothing more than adaptation – just carefully concealed fear dressed up as serenity.
So instead of dealing swiftly and decisively with my father’s behaviour, I used the wrong kind of fire extinguisher. I tried to point out what seemed self-evident to me: that Gill and I have two very young children, that Gill had been up most of the night and that we were barely managing as parents. Unfortunately, this didn’t work – as if I had used the foam extinguisher instead of the powder one, or water when I should have used foam – so that whatever had been combustible just became more inflamed.
There are those moments on a football pitch when a player loses it. Maybe they feel unfairly treated by the referee – who has perhaps sent them off or awarded a penalty to the other side; maybe another player has done this or that to them and that other player has gone unpunished, and it all becomes too much for him. The oily cocktail mixing with his endorphins
becomes something heady and spirited, and this foaming-mouthed, crimson-faced player leers beseechingly, this way and that, towards an invisible darkness where he feels his rage makes perfect sense; his arms flailing, fending off the unwelcome reasonableness of calmer teammates. Because throwing reasonableness at rage is like throwing water on to cooking fat. But why not? I throw reasonableness at a lot of situations. When I’m unreasonable, I throw reasonableness at that. When I should be unreasonable, I throw reasonableness at that too. So I took his arm; I appealed to his reason as he lurched from room to room, shaking me off. His arms flailed as I tried to get in front of him. I was just reasonable, which didn’t get us anywhere. Eventually he sloped away and spent most of the rest of our stay either hiding in his bedroom with a cold flannel over his eyes, or playing his power-ballad mix-tape in the kitchen with the volume turned right up.
The next morning he finally stirred from his room as we started the car, and complained of a headache. Very reasonably, we showed him some sympathy. We very reasonably encouraged him to visit us (knowing that he wouldn’t). We were very reasonable when thanking him for looking after us. He’d renovated the summer house for Tom to use during our stay and, very reasonably, we thanked him for this too.
And that would have been it. It could have ended there. Normally, it would have. All unhappy families work like that: someone says something they shouldn’t, hits someone they shouldn’t, fucks someone they shouldn’t. Nothing much is said and then it happens again, and even less is said.
But in this case, I haven’t seen my father again. I’ve spoken to him, and it’s one of these conversations that effectively brought an end to our relationship – the one true, honest conversation I ever had with him. It was the point at which he ducked out of being a father. His heart was never really in it.
*
I’ve seen photos of my maternal grandfather and I look quite similar – the same long spine and hairless egg-shaped face. He separated from my grandmother when my mum was still a young girl and went to live somewhere in mainland Europe, from where he sent a letter saying that presents were on their way. But the presents never arrived and neither did he. She never heard from him again and no one mentioned him much after that.
In her old age, my mum has been keen to talk to me about her father and how celebrated he had been as a doctor. She will often talk about his notoriety and famous patients. Though he had been a non-practising Jew, she now considers this part of his cultural heritage and, therefore, hers too. She also tracked down descendants from the entirely new family he started several years after he’d left. And it always struck me that – in building this fuller portrait of her father – each and every new piece of acquired information affirmed something long neglected, as if all that really mattered was the accumulation, and not what may have been revealed about who her father really was.
There have been other cherished fragments of carefully restored information, cheerfully recalled – that he had a dog called Shit and that he boasted of his ability to ‘break’ women. And there are the treasured artefacts from his life: the book he wrote, that was ‘ahead of its time’, and his old cigar box.
And saddest of all, that he had always treated her as his favourite.
When I was seventeen, on New Year’s Eve, three months after passing my driving test, I mowed down a motorcyclist on a country road. There were no street lights, and the motorbike had no headlights. The first I knew of our collision was a red windscreen and how it changed from one whole transparent piece to a vermilion mosaic. I stopped the car but the wing on the driver’s side was concertinaed and I had to climb out of the passenger side. There was a crescent moon that night and I could only locate the motorcyclist from his series of low muffled sounds. Kneeling down beside him in the verge, I lifted his visor and was relieved to receive a breathy request for his asthma inhaler. But as I went to search his pocket I noticed that his arm had come away at the elbow. Then I noticed he had only one leg and that his foot was missing from the other. The police arrived shortly after. And about thirty minutes later, in the back of a police car, a kind policeman told me that he had died.
I often think of this man in the verge. I think of how he talked to me, oblivious to the catastrophic damage that had been done to him, believing that all he needed was the inhaler in his pocket. And I also think of my mum, as she lies grinning in a verge after the carnage of this one-time father – the grass growing up in long tufted clumps around her – still believing that what she needed was the idea of his eminency, and his old cigar box.
*
Four months after that visit to my father’s, I needed to phone from Portugal to tell him my news. For some reason, I worried this might be hard for him, so I’d arranged for someone to be there when I phoned. But over the course of the conversation I got the impression that something else was on his mind, or perhaps that he was having to accommodate something sticky lodged in-between his gums. His reaction to my news sounded strangely formal, like sentiments a visiting dignitary might express.
I don’t think this makes him a heartless person. I know that he’s as much a feeling person as any other. Three years before, his dog had died and I think this loss had remained so profound that it was hard to feel the loss of a son. Some years before this, there had been an occasion when he astonished me by bringing out a huge bulging photo album. Gill and I sat beside him as he opened its creaking leather cover. I could see that it was a record of much of his life, and there were photos of me I never knew existed, but, with the manner of his flick-through, there was very little time to dwell on anything – as if he were looking for something very specific in a catalogue. Eventually, a double spread remained open and his fingers reached in, tenderly feeling the glossy image of a dog he once owned. Several pages further on, and there was another one. He looked at both of us, in turn, his eyes watering over as he recalled the names of various Border collies, along with touchingly detailed descriptions of their different qualities and features. Eventually, either it all became too much or he ran out of dogs (it wasn’t clear which). The album snapped shut and was returned to a cabinet drawer.
I could hear him at the other end of the line, searching along his bookshelves for an emotional response to my diagnosis. He probably knew something was called for but couldn’t quite locate the motivation for it, and the conversation soon petered out, with a kind of strange, sad flatness, as if there hadn’t really been any need for it in the first place. I wasn’t fully aware of this at the time but, from comments he later made, I realized how painful it was for him that I was taking currency away from his own minor ailments, and I suppose that would make someone feel a little less sympathetic. He could see his own death being upstaged somewhere on the horizon, which wasn’t at all what he wanted.
I know that when I describe my father, it might be hard to understand why I would have persisted with the relationship. I now realize I should have pulled away many years, or even decades, before. But at the time I believed he would come good and I think, had he been a younger man, or less isolated in the way he lived, he may well have done. When I was seventeen, and had my terrible car accident, I remember him wrapping his arms around me and, in that moment, I felt comforted. In that moment, he had been my father. It had taken a collision; sometimes it does. But I knew it was possible. Something in me still believed that. And also that I needed it; or that I needed him.
I thought of what he would have done for one of his dogs if they had fallen ill – that he would have stayed up all night by its side, holding a beaker of water to its mouth; that he would have taken his jacket off and tucked it gently in around his beloved companion. His life was full of such kindness and care towards animals. This was really who he was. I choose to believe this. And I feel sad that I never really knew this different man but sadder still for him, for what was squandered in his life.
In the weeks that followed, we prepared to come home for Christmas, and my father was keen to visit. It felt like something pos
itive from him and, when we discussed this meet-up, I naturally inflated the extent to which we were all looking forward to seeing him. I thought this would offer the most helpful platform for our conversation.
‘What happened, Dad, when we came to see you …’
I paused, considering how direct I felt able to be.
‘Yes?’
‘That can’t happen again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I should have said at the time … how upsetting that was.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Thirty seconds, it would have taken.’
‘What would?’
‘I only wanted it moved a few feet.’
I did feel deeply sorry for him. There was something very weak and very old in his voice. I probably knew him and understood him quite well in this moment, and maybe that’s a kind of closeness, even if he is unlikely to have felt this way. But in recalling what was then said, I should add that this conversation with my father took place amidst the calm aftermath of those watery days following my diagnosis. And Tiago the Engineer, with his vast hydroelectric power plant, and the water that kept coming. I was listening to this man on the phone, with his lingering feelings of hurt and injustice, and it felt like this – or thought felt like this: that this moment of realization was like hundreds of tiny silver ball-bearings, which had long been jostling and circling endlessly inside me – for years maybe – around the deep sides of a large funnel, and had suddenly changed momentum and curved their gravitational direction downwards, rolling downwards in unison, out through the spout, with a rumble and a swoosh and a zip.