The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ him? They hummed and hawed. They brought up a transfer chair, a bit like a sack barrow, and strapped him in. The final turn of the stairs was tricky. Eventually, they got him to the bottom. They looked as though they wanted to cheer.

      The house felt lonely and empty after they had gone; night rain was freckling the windows. I pictured my dad and Stefan at the hospital, stuck in some side room in A&E. My brother would be there until at least two or three in the morning, whilst nurses spirited in and out doing tests, asking questions.

      In the living room, I gazed over at Dad’s armchair, tucked away in the corner. The seat was hollowed from use and the arm on which he rested his head to nap, curled up like a big cat, was frayed to strings of cloth. Next to the chair was a wooden cabinet on which he’d placed a pair of chunky black reading glasses, his newspaper tokens, his Bible, a list of things to do and to remember, and his pocket diary. I picked it up and opened the front page. It contained that line that all diaries have and few people ever bother to fill out: who to contact in the event of an emergency. Perhaps those who do are the ones who are vulnerable, aware of the hairline cracks in their lives, the threat of fracture. I was touched to see my name and number written on this line, and then felt shadowed by fear: I thought of my father in the toilet and imagined what might have been if I hadn’t been there.

      I wandered into the spare bedroom. Once this room had belonged to my mother. Her presence was there still, in the pleats and shadows. A basket of make-up at the back of the desk gathering a thick layer of dust. Her dressing gown, a long leopard-print affair, hung on the back of the door. On her bookshelf sat a row of spine-cracked favourites: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a textbook about Freud, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha. Today, 19 February – the day Dad had spent locked in the toilet – was her birthday. She would have been seventy.

      I grew up in this house, the neat semi in a cul-de-sac in a quiet town in Surrey, and stayed here until my university years. Mum was well then, and Dad – Dad was still stable. After graduating I headed north to a little place between Manchester and Liverpool called Appley Bridge, where I rented a room and wrote.

      I had expected to reach my late thirties and suddenly metamorphose into Someone Sensible who wanted to put down roots and buy a property. It hadn’t quite happened. I was still self-employed, a writer with a bank balance that hovered perilously close to the line; I had no family of my own; I was uncertain whether I wanted to be a mother. I was, however, in a long-term relationship. My boyfriend, Thom, was eight years younger than me, a book reviewer and a fellow book-lover. Our favourite thing was to wander around second-hand bookshops, rummaging the shelves for gems and stealing kisses in dusty corners. He lived in the north too, anchored there by a young daughter from a previous relationship.

      At New Year, Thom had come down to stay with me. We’d had a party in the dining room, pushing the table to one side, taking it in turns to pick tracks on YouTube. His dancing style involved swaying on the spot, whereas I resembled a manic hare. He’d stayed in the spare room, and we’d made love quietly, self-conscious as teenagers, giggling and stopping halfway through if we heard my dad’s heavy footfall on the stairs as he got up for a midnight snack. Thom had infused the house with energy, and when he’d left it had slumped back to flatness.

      Since September 2015 I’d been living out of a suitcase, zigzagging between north and south, boyfriend and father, happiness and duty, pleasure and sacrifice. I’d grown out of the habit of hanging my clothes up. I washed them, folded them, put them back in the suitcase, which served as an improvised chest of drawers. For Valentine’s Day, Thom and I had celebrated with a meal out in Manchester. I’d been looking forward to another trip to his place in Buxton, a town of grand green hills, ancient buildings, icy winds and clear spring water. Now it would have to be cancelled.

      Thom would be sympathetic, I assured myself. But I felt the itch of worry: I was seeing less and less of him. I recalled how hard it had been last September, when Dad had fallen sick, and those strange catatonic symptoms had first made themselves known. He’d been taken to A&E at St Helier hospital, then transferred to a geriatric wing in Tolworth Hospital. During those autumn months when he’d been hospitalised, life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and I was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I’d found that nearly every email I sent began with the words I’m sorry for the slow reply, that I’d begged for work deadlines to be pushed into the week after next, and set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. That night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would.

       2

      My first memory: I am four years old and sitting in our cosy living room with my parents and older brother, John. Our faces are reflected and superimposed onto the TV set as we watch The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. One family sitting in suburbia looking at another version of suburbia. Suburbs were once a place for the poor, for those who overflowed from the cities. Then, as the rural poor migrated to industrial cities, the wealthy middle classes moved out to the fringes. Gradually, suburbia came to be associated with neat gardens, neighbours twitching at curtains, 2.4 children and nine-to-five jobs. In the late seventies, Reginald Perrin satirised the sheer boredom of it all; Reggie seeks to escape it by faking his suicide, leaving his clothes and belongings on a beach to be erased by the waves.

      Suburbia was a place my parents had escaped to. My mother, Glesney, had grown up on a council estate in south London, at the Elephant and Castle; my father, Edward, came from a large working-class family in New Malden. My mum had been denied a good education by a chauvinistic father who said that university was a waste of time for a woman; my dad’s education had been meagre, but he managed to get a good job at the local factory. When they’d bought our semi-detached house, the estate agent had looked bewildered and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to buy this place?’ It was a house on a fine street, but inside it was a mess of loose wires, crumbling brickwork and walls painted in those lurid colours that were inexplicably fashionable in the sixties, avocado green and bright orange. The last owner had been an old man whose eccentricity had intensified into madness. His fingerprints were still on the walls, black smudges of wrinkled digits that looked eerie in their muddling of the elderly and the juvenile. There seems something prophetic about them now. My parents were thrilled, however. They had nearly achieved social mobility. The scene we watched together on TV was aspirational, for Perrin’s house showed how our place might look, his middle-class boredom the luxury my parents longed for.

      Another memory: I am gazing out of the window and see a man walking up and down naked. His clothes have been discarded, like Perrin’s on the beach, trailing down the hallway. (Or have the two merged together in my mind?) My mother takes me, my older brother and my new baby brother to visit Dad. The place he is staying in is a large, white building, with cranky radiators that gurgle. People are wandering about as though they are in the middle of some imaginary maze, seeking the centre. One woman has the cackling laugh of a fairy-tale witch. My dad has always been a playful parent, indulging me in my favourite game whereby he would grab me by the ankles, swing me like a pendulum and cry, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock!’ as my long hair brushed his shoes. This new version of my father is sitting in a chair in his green dressing gown. When he finally raises his eyes to look at us, I see sadness fossilised in his pupils.

      With my dad missing, the planned transformation of our home failed. The house sighed and slumped its shoulders, the paint peeled, and the fingerprints remained on the walls.

      I never asked my mum what had happened to my father. I felt too afraid, and perhaps she felt afraid of how she might frame that story. She looked tired and had a habit of biting her nails to the pink. She had started to take on various cleaning jobs. On one occasion a letter landed on the mat that brought her to tears. The local tax inspector had demanded a meeting, unable to believe that we lived off so little. My brother and I were taken along СКАЧАТЬ