My father died when I was nine, of a heart attack or something. Postmortem. Stuff I didn’t understand. Found on his kitchen floor, cooking something or other. I don’t remember. The kitchen, which wasn’t a proper kitchen, just had a camping stove in it. Eccentric. That I remember. Smart, fiercely smart. I remember that too.
I don’t think about him every day, which maybe I’m supposed to. Or at least that’s what people say, isn’t it, when people die? “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about him.” But a week could go by without me thinking about him, a month even. I am a bad person.
Now I’m thinking about him because it is Father’s Day. An American invention, the day isn’t that much older than my father, who was born in 1936. Now we have cards and gift experiences featuring Ferraris, and all my friends join the throng at Euston station to travel home and deliver Old Spice by hand. Is that how it goes? I don’t know how it goes. I get the galleries and the cinema to myself.
When he died, I felt embarrassed. No, I felt shame. My friend and I were sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, and when her mother burst into the room doing a good impression of Munch’s The Scream, I thought she’d rumbled the fact we were up to no good (planning a list of things to steal for a treasure trunk, I think).
Then it was all police with radios that bleeped. Paramedics in yellow jackets. Kitchen. Funeral. I was a tomboy and had nothing to wear. I’m pretty sure I wore black Adidas tracksuit bottoms. She’s nine, what can you do? Her dad just died, let her wear what she wants.
A half-brother and sister – must be in their late 40s now – I’ve never seen since. At least there’s that – my father and mother were not together, didn’t live together. I have friends whose mothers now set one less place at the table. That must be harder, and I suppose it must be more difficult to lose a parent as an adult. Is it? To have memories soldered down, ones that don’t shift and change like a Magic Eye painting.
We don’t talk about him much: Alan Hugh James. But I have learned. I’ve learned from awkwardly asking my mother, once every five years maybe. By torchlight, as a 15-year-old, flicking through old papers in a spare bedroom.
He’d been married three times. His first wife ran off with his lab technician when he was a research scientist at Cambridge. Later, he was the headmaster of an approved school. He loved rock climbing. His great aunt was a silver medal-winning Olympic swimmer in 1920. He met my mother when he went into social work.
Other things I know first-hand: I know that I imagined myself as a writer when I tapped away at his collection of old typewriters. Or that when my sister and I went to stay we watched Neighbours on a black and white television – in 1995. I first read Roald Dahl’s The Twits on a camping trip together.
He loved art, photography and technology – he had computers before computers were a thing. He taught me how to clean keys with cotton buds soaked in TCP. I know his views on life and philosophy and academia, because he would write me 20-page letters about all these things.
But I don’t really know him. You lose a parent young and you feel like half a person. There were things in those old papers that I didn’t agree with, or don’t understand, or which made me laugh, or which hurt me. Father’s Day breaks an anchor and brings it all to the surface – with added Moonpig.
What’s to be done? Listen to The Streets’ Never Went to Church, Luther Vandross’s Dance With My Father; read Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Clive James’s My Father Before Me? All excellent choices. This is what I do sometimes, like finding solace in ballads after a breakup. Doesn’t change anything, as cigarettes don’t change anything, or alcohol.
I can’t stand Father’s Day because I hate that the last time I saw him we argued, and I told him that I hated him. Then I went to Anfield to watch my first ever football game with a neighbour. So I left him, and I can’t unleave him.
I could console myself by saying that he didn’t think much of Father’s Day anyway. But the truth is, I have no idea.
