The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ idea of how fantastical they were. I hadn’t the life experience to discern that men did not always bring happy endings.

      Homework always came first, however. Mum had repeatedly impressed upon me that life had no future without a good education. Though I’d passed my eleven-plus I’d been destined for the local comprehensive school, until my mum intervened – fighting ferociously with the council to get me into the local girls’ grammar school. I had been sulky about the idea at the time: Mum had explained that girls did not perform as well when they studied in classes with boys, for both sexes just ended up showing off to each other. I’d thought: boys are just the thing I want in my class.

      As always, Mum was right. On my first day, I’d fallen in love with the school. It was set in the sprawling grounds of a park; in the playground you could hear the yowls of peacocks from a nearby mansion. Local geography highlighted the class divides. Those who came from wealthy families lived in the big, white birthday-cake houses near to the school; those of us who were in the poorer division headed for the bus to take us on the long journey home. But class did not seem to matter so much, not the way it had in primary school. On my first day, I sat between a shy girl called Lucy, and Henrietta, the daughter of a Surrey vicar; and I got the bus back home with a new Sri Lankan friend called Eshani. For the first time in a long while, I was lucky enough to have good friends, and I treasured them dearly.

      It was almost 7 o’clock by the time I finished my homework that evening – an essay about Lady Macbeth. Hungry, I went downstairs for dinner. Just four plates had been set at the table, as my older brother had recently left home; the shouts and babble of dialogue from the TV next door suggested my younger brother was watching Grange Hill.

      In the kitchen, I found my dad pulling a tray of chips from the oven. He set them down on the surface and stared at them gravely.

      ‘You’ve burnt the chips, Dad,’ I pointed out casually. I didn’t really mind. I liked them that way, crispy and crunchy between my teeth.

      My dad pulled off his oven gloves; I heard the pounding of his footsteps on the stairs. I watched the chips cool into a row of blackened fingers. As I ventured upstairs, I could hear weeping. I felt my heart thump, conscious that ignorance might be better than knowledge, that it might be safer to go back down.

      The bedroom door was ajar. I crept closer. Dad was sitting on the bed, saying: ‘I burnt the chips, I burnt the chips’ over and over and Mum was there with him. Dad’s face was red, as if the tears he was shedding had been wrenched from his gut, and Mum was making shushing noises as though he was her child.

      I crept down the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked in circles and chewed nervously on an apple. When my mother eventually came down, she explained that my dad had ‘schizophrenia’ and that sometimes it was hard to get his medication right. The amazement on my face startled her. ‘Didn’t you notice all the pills he takes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you remember when he took off all his clothes and walked down the street and then none of the other children’s parents let them come to play for a while …?’ There was something oddly casual about her tone, as though we were exchanging gossip about someone else’s family. Our discussion was brief; I was too shocked to summon any questions about my father’s illness.

      Later, after my parents had gone to bed, I sat in the bath and wept at this strange and sudden rewriting of our lives. Through the warped window glass, I could see the yellow lights of the house next door. I imagined the faint sounds of laughter as they sat and enjoyed dinner together: a conventional family, the one I’d fooled myself into thinking we were. At school I had been reading my nonsense poetry to my friends and they’d teased me for being ‘mad’; did that mean his illness was weaving its way into my words?

      That night I was finally able to find the correct word in the dictionary. It informed me that schizophrenia came from Greek roots, skhizein meaning split/tear and phren, the mind. The key had turned.

      The next evening my dad made tea again. A trio of us at the table: Dad, me, my younger brother. We ate in silence. It was a Tuesday, which meant Mum had her evening class for A-level psychology. Without her, the house felt empty and eerie; she always created a sparkle, a warm energy, a love that gave our home an ambient glow.

      After dinner, I stood in the hallway and watched my father from the slit between door and frame. The beard he was growing highlighted his gaunt cheekbones. He was sitting in his armchair reading the Bible; this was his new obsession, something he clung to as though it was keeping him afloat in the world. Looking back, I wonder if he combated his voices by reading about men who had heard the voice of God giving them divine instruction; while he was labelled mad, they had been celebrated as prophets.

      Upstairs in my room I got to work: I took an envelope from my rucksack containing a passport photo of my friend Anil. Using a Pritt Stick, I carefully glued the photo to a square of card with a college logo watermarked on its background. The next bit was trickier; I carved lettering into a rubber and used ink from my fountain pen to paint over the letters, before stamping it over the photo. The final touch was a dash of Blue Peter: a wrapping of sticky back plastic. And there it was – another fake ID. Anil had already paid me 50p for this. It was a way of earning extra money, since my weekly allowance was considerably smaller than most of my friends. It meant we could get into nightclubs with ‘proof’ that we were over eighteen. Nightclubs meant alcohol, boys, smoking: all the things that we missed out on at a girls’ grammar school where everyone was well behaved, wore coats that were the correct shade of navy, and where hems above the knee were forbidden.

      I found myself thinking of Laura Palmer as I slotted the ID card back into the envelope. Twin Peaks was an obsession at our school. Laura lived a double life: her good girl, blonde, high-school sweetheart one, and her darker two-boyfriends-on-the-go promiscuous druggie one. (This splitting of people into two, normal self and doppelgänger, seemed to be a feature in the series as it went on.) That division was something I identified with. One half of me did my homework, achieved grade As, looked meek and innocent, was made form rep and obediently picked up the register each morning for my teacher; and the other smoked illicit cigarettes in the park on the way home, made fake IDs, lured boys on dancefloors, and shared fumbling trysts with them in dark corners in clubs. It seemed hard to allow the two to blur together and perhaps, I wondered, it was something the male sex found easier to do, to be whole, unified.

      The ID card finished, I got stuck into my writing. It was becoming my addiction. When there was a knock at the door, I jumped. A stern silhouette appeared.

      ‘You’re not to have sex before marriage – it says so in the Bible,’ my dad intoned in a robotic tone.

      I rolled my eyes in exasperation. Dad looked upset, then he was gone.

      The next day I recalled the incident and felt lost, as though the dislocated exchange with Dad had had nothing to do with me. When I told my mum about it, she just laughed and told me not to take any notice of him, which made me feel better. And this was how I survived growing up with my father. I saw the same process occur in my younger brother – a distancing, as though my father was an unfortunate and obscure relative staying in the house, someone we all had to tolerate.

      Much of the time Dad was so quiet he was like a ghost – though sometimes, when he was doing the washing up, I’d hear him shout: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’, trying to bat away the voices that swirled around him like a malignant wind. Once, on the bookcase by his chair, I found a list he’d made of rebukes to its torments –

       I am not under house arrest

       I am not a Muslim

       I am a Christian

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