He
wasn’t always a bastard. In fact, when I was little, he was, like
all dads, the Best Dad in the World. He could do anything, knew
everything and was the funniest man alive. In truth, he actually was
funny;
the only things he left me that were worth having were a singing
voice and the ability to make people laugh. That and he taught me how
to roll with a punch. Back in those days, though, he taught me to
play football, how to mend bicycle tyres and how to swear. We watched
Match Of The Day together every week. I was too young to follow
football; but Match Of The Day was our
time. We would sit in the garage together for ages whilst he hid to
avoid having to do DIY. He was full of life, and full of fun. I
waited like a puppy for him coming home. I always knew when he was
coming, too; he whistled everywhere he went, as though he had too
much happiness inside and had to vent the excess like a steam engine,
and if he wasn’t whistling, he would be singing a strange little
song.
“First
you put your two knees
Close
up tight
You
move them to the left
Then
you swing them to the right
You
do the something something
Something
something something
And
then you twist around
Twist
around
With
all of your might”
And
so it went on, the middle part sounding different each time, his
memory for lyrics worse than his memory for promises, until he
stumbled to the end
“…And
that’s what they call
Balling
the jack”
Whenever
he had to go anywhere in the car, I was there with him, soaking up
his stories about the War and about growing up in Glasgow. The one I
never tired of was about the day Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy
star,came to town.
A
crowd had gathered at St Enoch’s Cross Station to meet him, but
when the train arrived he was nowhere to be seen. Then suddenly, the
door of the guard’s van slid open, and out leapt the real live Roy
Rogers, on Trigger the Wonder Horse, wearing his full fancy western
rig. He gave a performance right there on the platform, then, with a
bound, Trigger jumped the ticket barrier, and the two of them rode
straight up the stairs which led from the station concourse into the
St Enoch’s Cross Hotel. I must have heard that story a hundred
times, hearing it grow more dramatic and spectacular every time,
while every time I squealed with amazement.
I
thought my Dad had won the War, been the most famous footballer in
Scotland and single-handedly invented the ‘Pull my finger’ joke,
and by the time I realized that none of it was true, it didn’t
matter. He was my Dad, I was his boy, and that was all we needed.
Then,
when I was twelve years old, my Mum died, and Dad didn’t whistle
any more. He was still filled with too much of something, but it
wasn’t happiness. At first it was grief. Then it was loneliness.
Then it was scotch.
A
couple of months after my mother died, Dad drew his last sober breath
and a stranger who looked just like him came to live with us.
He
embraced drinking as though it was coming home from a war. He began
tentatively, as though he couldn’t believe he’d found this
wonderful Land of Drunk, but then he threw himself into it like a
convert, and ran away from sobriety like it was a junkyard dog. Over
the years I’ve know many men and women who found a wonderful friend
in drink, only to then find what a terrible enemy it can be, but
never anyone who fell so far, so fast, and so hard. Maybe he started
because he couldn’t stand being without my mother; but pretty soon
he drank because he couldn’t stand being with himself.
At
first, it was just embarrassing. He’d be loud, clumsy and stupid
and he stank. He stank of booze and stale sweat, of urine and vomit.
The man I’d looked up to all my life, the man I wanted to be, fell
asleep in front of the TV every night with piss stains on his
trousers or his dinner down his shirt.
One
night, maybe a year after she died, I took my Dad a tray of food and
went back into the kitchen for my own. I turned around, and he was
right behind me, purple with anger and breathing as though his chest
was being crushed.
“What’s
this?” he said, shoving something into my face
“The
peppermill” I was confused, and so nervous that I may have laughed.
Then,
somehow, I was lying on the floor, my face in horrible pain. I heard
a crack as he threw the wooden peppermill and it smacked into the
cupboard door beside me. I felt wetness on my face and as I wiped it
away, my hand was covered in blood. I stared at it, uncomprehending,
and eventually I realized. He had punched me in the face harder than
I thought possible. After a while, still sitting dumbfounded on the
floor, I picked up the peppermill. It was empty.
So
it began.
I
could tell you all about the beatings of the next years. I could tell
you how he threw me down a flight of stairs and then kicked me back
up it, or about the way that the most casual, good humoured
conversation could suddenly be ended by a backhand crack across my
face for, to anyone but him, no reason at all, but there’s no point
going into the details. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me. I
don’t need it. I survived, and came through it pretty much okay.
Sometimes things remind me of those times; that strange, metallic
smell that comes when you’ve been hit in the nose; the taste of
blood in my mouth. There was always that taste of blood when he had
his rages; sometimes because he’d split my lip, but more often
because I’d bitten the side of my mouth to stop myself crying.
Crying made the beating worse, you see. Now, though, it’s over and
done and, in some quite abstruse ways, it was part of what made me
the man I am today. To deny the experience would be to deny who I am.
Suffice to say that for a few years it was like living in a country
where it rained rocks. Sometimes you would be caught unawares by a
sudden shower; sometimes you could do nothing but wait for a storm
that you knew was coming and which might last hours or days.
It
ended a suddenly as it began. I don’t know what was special about
this day, what was different, but when I was sixteen, he came home in
need of someone to batter. I don’t know why. I seldom did. Maybe
he’d lost at golf, maybe he’d crashed his car again; who knows?
Maybe it was just that there was a vowel in the month. This time
though, something inside me snapped, and I flew at him, fists like a
buzz saw, punching and kicking and butting and biting with everything
I had. He knocked me down again and again but I kept getting up,
blind with tears of rage, I just kept throwing myself at where the
punches were coming from. Eventually, when I sank to my knees, it
wasn’t because of the hammering I had just taken. I was exhausted.
I had let go of all the pent-up rage of three years of abuse, and I
was spent
He
didn’t speak to me for a week, and he never hit me again.
Somehow,
years later, we had a reconciliation of sorts. I worked hard to get
it – for my sake, not his. I didn’t want to spend my life as a
pent-up ball of bitterness like he had; I had seen where that could
lead. So air was cleared, apologies made and, in theory, hatchets
were buried.
We were never close again though. Forgiving isn’t
forgetting, and it’s hard to shake the hand that beat you. I would
visit him from time to time, and from the moment I arrived we both
counted the minutes until I could leave.
Unwilling
to continue to pick at the scabs of our relationship,I got on with my
life. Determined to be everything he wasn’t, I became a
quietly-spoken and gentle man, soft as feathers and hard as steel,
hard-working, dedicated to my wife and daughter, and, of course,
sober. I may not have been the best father ever, but God knows I
tried to be – I still do - and, over time, I even came to almost
like myself.
Shortly
before my thirtieth birthday I got a phone call telling me he was
dead. He’d played golf that day, gone to the pub, settled down for
the night with a glass of scotch and a dirty book and had died in his
sleep. All in all, not a bad way to go. My reaction was oddly flat. I
don’t know what I should have felt – the most significant
relationship in my life was over, the Man Who Made Me was dead, and
the brute that had hurt and terrorized me couldn’t hurt anyone any
more. Should I have sung “Ding, dong, the bastard’s dead”? Wept
and rent my garments in grief at all the time we’d never have? Been
quietly sad, but relieved?
None
of the above, as it turned out. I just felt numb and dead inside. All
I felt was surprise at my lack of emotion. Funeral done, I shrugged
my metaphorical shoulders and carried on as before.
Fast
forward ten or twelve years and I am driving alone down a motorway,
late at night. On the radio there is a documentary about the famous
Glasgow Apollo theatre. Talking about the big American stars that
played there in its heyday, the commentator tells a story about the
arrival of Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, and how, when a crowd came
to meet him at the railway station, he came out of the guard’s van
on Trigger performed for his fans, cleared the ticket barrier like a
showjumper and rode straight up the stairs that led to the station
hotel. I laughed out loud. It was true, all of it, and after all
those years, I finally had a happy memory of my Dad.
Then
the voice on the radio started talking about the great American stars
who had played the Apollo decades before. “One who made the Glasgow
Apollo his second home was the legendary Danny Kaye, who played there
countless times.” Cut to a clip of Danny Kaye singing.
“First
you put your two knees close up tight
You swing them to the left
and then you swing them to the right
Step around the floor kinda
nice and light
And then you twist around, twist around with all
of your might
Spread your lovin’ arms way out in space
You
do the eagle rock with such style and grace
You put your left
foot out and then you bring it back
That’s what I call ballin’
the jack”
Cut
to a car, stopped at the side of a motorway and shaking from the
sobbing of the man inside, slumped over the wheel, face in his hands,
crying his heart out for the loss of the father he had never once
stopped loving.
