For as long as I can remember, my dad and I have been very close. My mum died when I was four, so it was kind of obligatory that we spend time together – he was the only parent around.
As a kid, I loved being with him. Whether it was waiting while he cooked our once-a-week meal of egg and chips, or watching as he mowed the lawn with an old upright petrol mower – in defiance of electricity – or playing pool – which he was rubbish at – we always had fun.
As I got older our relationship shifted, and I started to assume the role of my dad’s sidekick.
First, I was his drinking enabler. I’d sip on a coke in our local pub, while he’d drink Boddingtons. Next, I graduated to drinking partner. I’d force down a shandy, while he’d drink Boddingtons. Finally, I assumed the role of wingman, which involved me standing awkwardly in an over-50s nightclub as my dad chatted up middle-aged women. While drinking Boddingtons.
In those days my dad and I would talk about a wide-range of topics. The unexpected bruising in the aftermath of his vasectomy. The sex he was having with a woman who lived up the road. The number of shots of Jagermeister he had drunk one night in Spain.
But there was one thing we never even came close to discussing: the life – and death – of my mum.
It’s not as though my dad wanted us to forget her – we’d visit her grave on Sundays and clean the headstone with a chamois leather, but conversations about who she was, or what she was like, never happened. I’m still not sure why. English stoicism? Grief? Maybe it was down to my dad marrying again (for the third time, it ended in divorce), or perhaps he just didn’t know what he should say to two young children who had lost their mum.
The only times we’d come close to the subject were in the pub. After a few pints my dad would ask if I remembered her. But it was difficult to know what to say. I’d manage a strangled: “No, not really,” before sipping a drink and looking away. Then we’d return to a more comfortable subject, like how my dad once, allegedly, bench-pressed 266lb.
I didn’t know it at the time, but years later this concealment would end up costing me quite a lot of money. And not just on self-help books.
Amid the fog, there was one thing I did know about my mum. My dad once told me that she had booked them tickets to fly to New York, on Concorde, for his 40th birthday. That would have been in March 1989, but she was too ill to make the trip. She died five months later, on 13 August.
When I was a teenager I decided that once I had a proper job I would make that trip for her.
So when I got my first job as a trainee reporter in 2009, I started saving up. I found a cheap flight to JFK, roped in my friend Tom, booked a hostel in the East Village, and by January 2010 we were there.
Tom and I did it all: we went up the Empire State building, we went up the Rockefeller building, we went up the Bowery.
On our jaunts around the city I found myself lingering at the main attractions, thinking about my mum, trying to imagine how she would have felt. She grew up in Preston, a northern English town, and I wondered if she would have felt like she’d made it amid the glamour of New York City. Would she have wanted to live here? Would she have had her photo taken with the Naked Cowboy? Was the Naked Cowboy even around in 1989?
When I got back to the UK and saw my dad, he listened, relatively patiently, as I told him about how the buildings were really tall and how the roads were really busy and how the Statue of Liberty was kind of small in real life.
“So what made you want to go there?” my dad asked.
I’d normally have deflected the question. But this experience felt too big to gloss over. I was proud of myself for making the trip, and it’d revived a long-suppressed desire to begin talking about my mum.
“Well. I didn’t want to tell you this beforehand,” I said. “But I always remembered you saying my mum had booked a trip to New York, and how you never got to go because she was too ill. So I thought I’d go there and, sort of, take the trip she never got to take.”
I could feel myself getting upset as I waited for his response. There were tears in my eyes.
“Oh that’s nice,” my dad said. He took a sip of his pint.
“But that wasn’t New York. That was Paris.”
It took a moment to sink in.
Paris? Paris??? I’d been to Paris years earlier and I hadn’t soaked in anything! I hadn’t taken deep breaths with my eyes closed, I hadn’t relished the feel of the Parisian wind on my face.
I’d taken some Paris pictures on a disposable camera but they hadn’t made it on to MySpace – this was pre-Facebook – because I didn’t have a scanner. And anyway, who flies Concorde to Paris? It’s a one-hour flight!
That was six years ago. I wouldn’t exactly say it was a watershed moment, but since then my dad and I have slowly started talking more.
I’ve learned that my mum had expensive tastes. In clothes, jewellery and furnishings. I learned that she could touch type. I learned that she spoiled me and my sister.
I’ve learned that she got terribly sick during chemotherapy. I learned that the day before she died she managed to eat some eggs and was chirpier than she’d been in weeks – that it almost seemed like she was getting better.
I’m probably never going to know as much about my mum as I would like. But I’m happy to be slowly finding out more, and I’m glad my dad and I are better able to talk about her.
Last month I texted him, asking what alcohol my mum liked to drink. Her birthday was 3 June, and I wanted to toast her with her favourite beverage.
“Your mum liked lager but also Bacardi and coke,” he replied. More new information: my mum had terrible taste in alcohol.
On 3 June my girlfriend and I duly went out and drank lager, and Bacardi and coke, and remembered my mum. And this time, when I told my dad about my homage, I’d got it right.
