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Authors: Michael Robotham
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Particular men will try to redefine the word ‘affair’ or say that sex and love are two different things because one is physical and the other emotional.
Pathetic, self-serving bullshit! Nothing absolves. Nothing exonerates. My father taught me that. He beat it into me, cursing my mother’s name.
‘Put your hands through the stair railings,’ he’d say. ‘Hold your elbows.’ He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from his trouser loops. Doubling the leather in his fist, he swung it from behind his back in the widest possible arc so that it whistled through the air before it landed.
If you saw my father now you wouldn’t recognise the monster that once lived behind his watery blue eyes, not when you see him flirting with the nurses, making cheeky comments about their sex-lives, acting as though he’s in with a chance.
He shows them his old tattoos, which seem to be melting and leaking down his arms. He used to works as docker for the Bristol Port Company at Avonmouth. Tough work. Man’s work. But most of his thirty-five years were spent as a union rep, avoiding each round of redundancies and telling his ‘comrades’ that he had fought the good fight, but now it was about ‘limiting the losses’ and ‘protecting as many jobs as possible’ – most notably his own.
Meanwhile he propped up the bar of the Three Kings on the waterfront, preaching about the evils of capitalism and Margaret Thatcher, who he called the wicked witch and vowed he would ‘piss on her grave’. Now he’s doesn’t even know she’s dead. How ironic! My old man and Margaret Thatcher, both afflicted by dementia – a disease with no regard for class or fairness or old hatreds.
Most days he doesn’t recognise me. He calls me Stevie and thinks I’m his best mate from fifty years ago. He keeps telling me the same story – how he and Stevie stowed away on a ship to America, but it was only going as far as Glasgow.
I visit him after work and take him out of the nursing home for long walks. He can power along for miles, following the coastal footpath with his odd, shuffling gait, until I tell him to turn back. Sometimes I think I might let him keep going. He’d walk all the way to John O’Groats if nobody stopped him. Some dementia patients get anxious, but my old man’s emotions are blunted and stultified. Children fascinate him – they’re like mini-people – and tears are just water leaking from a person’s eyes.
I should hate him. I should want to punish him, but he wouldn’t understand why. Instead I feel a peculiar kind of loneliness – as though someone who should love me has forgotten my birthday.
Sometimes I write letters to him in my head – not the man he is now but the one he was then. I tell him that I’ve tried to understand why he did those things and quite honestly, given what’s happened since, I think I do. He was an alcoholic, but his addiction wasn’t an addiction – it was a hobby or a pastime. He was being sociable. He was being a man. He couldn’t let his mates drink alone, could he? Many of these same mates also drank too much and beat their wives, but didn’t see their behaviour as a compulsion or something beyond their control. Drinking was just drinking, never addiction.
It wasn’t until my mother died that my father lost himself completely in the bottle – and it wasn’t her dying so much as the circumstances of her death. And it wasn’t the car accident so much as the man behind the wheel. And it wasn’t so much the man driving as the fact that his severed penis was found in my mother’s mouth.
That’s tough to swallow (and I use that sentence with no pun intended). The
Sunday Sport
ran the story on the front page. You can imagine the quips. My father didn’t go to the pub so much after that. He drank at home, lecturing his children just as he once lectured his mates. A new sort of anger burned in him, a cold hard gemlike flame, and it felt as though a line had been
Particular men will try to redefine the word ‘affair’ or say that sex and love are two different things because one is physical and the other emotional.
Pathetic, self-serving bullshit! Nothing absolves. Nothing exonerates. My father taught me that. He beat it into me, cursing my mother’s name.
‘Put your hands through the stair railings,’ he’d say. ‘Hold your elbows.’ He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from his trouser loops. Doubling the leather in his fist, he swung it from behind his back in the widest possible arc so that it whistled through the air before it landed.
If you saw my father now you wouldn’t recognise the monster that once lived behind his watery blue eyes, not when you see him flirting with the nurses, making cheeky comments about their sex-lives, acting as though he’s in with a chance.
He shows them his old tattoos, which seem to be melting and leaking down his arms. He used to works as docker for the Bristol Port Company at Avonmouth. Tough work. Man’s work. But most of his thirty-five years were spent as a union rep, avoiding each round of redundancies and telling his ‘comrades’ that he had fought the good fight, but now it was about ‘limiting the losses’ and ‘protecting as many jobs as possible’ – most notably his own.
Meanwhile he propped up the bar of the Three Kings on the waterfront, preaching about the evils of capitalism and Margaret Thatcher, who he called the wicked witch and vowed he would ‘piss on her grave’. Now he’s doesn’t even know she’s dead. How ironic! My old man and Margaret Thatcher, both afflicted by dementia – a disease with no regard for class or fairness or old hatreds.
Most days he doesn’t recognise me. He calls me Stevie and thinks I’m his best mate from fifty years ago. He keeps telling me the same story – how he and Stevie stowed away on a ship to America, but it was only going as far as Glasgow.
I visit him after work and take him out of the nursing home for long walks. He can power along for miles, following the coastal footpath with his odd, shuffling gait, until I tell him to turn back. Sometimes I think I might let him keep going. He’d walk all the way to John O’Groats if nobody stopped him. Some dementia patients get anxious, but my old man’s emotions are blunted and stultified. Children fascinate him – they’re like mini-people – and tears are just water leaking from a person’s eyes.
I should hate him. I should want to punish him, but he wouldn’t understand why. Instead I feel a peculiar kind of loneliness – as though someone who should love me has forgotten my birthday.
Sometimes I write letters to him in my head – not the man he is now but the one he was then. I tell him that I’ve tried to understand why he did those things and quite honestly, given what’s happened since, I think I do. He was an alcoholic, but his addiction wasn’t an addiction – it was a hobby or a pastime. He was being sociable. He was being a man. He couldn’t let his mates drink alone, could he? Many of these same mates also drank too much and beat their wives, but didn’t see their behaviour as a compulsion or something beyond their control. Drinking was just drinking, never addiction.
It wasn’t until my mother died that my father lost himself completely in the bottle – and it wasn’t her dying so much as the circumstances of her death. And it wasn’t the car accident so much as the man behind the wheel. And it wasn’t so much the man driving as the fact that his severed penis was found in my mother’s mouth.
That’s tough to swallow (and I use that sentence with no pun intended). The
Sunday Sport
ran the story on the front page. You can imagine the quips. My father didn’t go to the pub so much after that. He drank at home, lecturing his children just as he once lectured his mates. A new sort of anger burned in him, a cold hard gemlike flame, and it felt as though a line had been
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