Whenever I’d really annoyed her, or needed the grievousness of some adolescent misconduct spelled out, my mum knew just what to say.
“Ooooh,” she’d begin, head held at one side, eyes narrowed for her edict, “you’re just like your father?”
I could never stand being compared to my old man.
That would be the mainly absent father and husband who’d embarked on a lengthy and indiscriminate string of hook-ups and affairs while I was still in nappies and my little sister in utero, a string that culminated in a knotty union with my mum’s married cousin. It was the revelation of that particular quasi-incestuous tryst that prompted her to finally kick him out of the family home when I was five.
I could never stand being compared to my old man. That we bear such a close physical resemblance is galling.
“I’m nothing like him!” I’d yell in response to the maternal decree, all angsty teenage rage, “And I never will be!”
One of my earliest childhood memories is of mum kneeling next to my bed in the darkness and patiently explaining to me that mummy and daddy didn’t love each other anymore, and that daddy was moving out. The only thing I found upsetting about the conversation was how upset I could tell (even in the dark) it was making mum.
Dad was hardly ever about anyway, and when he was it just meant we had to keep quiet or risk him getting grumpy. Of course, the actual moment he arrived home every few days had always been kind of cool, especially if he was wearing his uniform (damn, would having a dad in the fire brigade still bestow kudos if he no longer lived with us?). I’d always enjoyed the smell of his hat, but apart from that, and the odd half hour playing Scalextric slot-car racing with him, I could take or leave the bloke.
He took the Scalextric set with him when he left.
***
Forty years later, he’s back in London and I’m in Melbourne, with a long term partner and two kids, slightly older than my sister and I were when he split. He’s been battling prostate cancer for a while, been through surgery and radiotherapy, and nothing seems to stick. My sister says he thinks he’s dying, but he’d never admit that to me. So I decide we’re due a trip back to England.
My mum, sadly no longer around, was a big-hearted, beautiful human-being with a sense of fun that lit up the world around her, but never magnanimous. My upbringing was accompanied by her unfolding saga of my father’s transgressions.
Through weekly or fortnightly after-school visits (the swimming pool followed by the chip shop) and occasional overnight stays at his rented digs, I kept my distance.
When I was sixteen, he took us on our first overseas holiday, two weeks in the Algarve in a sprawling group of about a dozen, including my mum’s cousin, still his main squeeze, and her husband and kids (it was the eighties by now, but the seventies still prevailed among this set).
Wrapped up in that punch was eleven years’ worth of resentment.
Late in the holiday, a formative binge-drinking session at an “authentic” Portuguese barbecue laid on by the resort led to my taking offence to something complimentary he said about Thatcher, and finding in his remarks reason enough to aim a punch at his face, so maddeningly like my own. Wrapped up in that punch was eleven years’ worth of resentment. Resentment of not just his absence, but how easily it had come to him. Plus there was the Scalextric
I’m not sure if the punch even connected, but the volley of red wine vomit I followed up with was right on the money.
Since Algarvegate I’ve kept less of a distance. Though, of course, since I emigrated eight years ago, more than ten thousand miles divide us. There are conversations we’ve never had, and never will, at least not on Skype (when we get close, he shrinks and winces at the impending torment), but we get on okay, my dad and me.
I make sure we spend plenty of time together while we’re in London. He’s often there while we’re marshalling the kids through crowded museums, around monuments and attractions. He tries to help out when our son gets stung by a bee, and it’s not his fault there’s nothing to be done. With all of the hustle and bustle and photographs, there is no time for the conversation.
We part at Greenwich train station, our last day together having been spent at the park and National Maritime Museum. Before he goes, I ask him to explain to me one more time why the meridian is not where it used to be. I’m still not sure I get it.
Then he hugs us one by one, leaving me until last. Teary emotion tends to come a little readily to my father, which has sometimes irked me, but it doesn’t irk me now.
‘I love you, son,” he declares to the neck of my t-shirt.
“I love you too, dad,” I tell him, and find I mean it after all.
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