Letter To My Dead Dad

It's Been 35 Years Since We Last Spoke.

Hello Dad,

I know you’re dead and that, but I thought I’d write to you. That was a bastard, by the way - you dying. I was tripping on LSD when I came home and saw you sprawled out on the floor, a collection of threadbare and bedraggled old rags separating you from the threadbare and bedraggled old carpet. I know mum had some blankets she saved for best, and if dying isn’t for best, what is? By the time I woke up, you were in the hospital. Mum was upset when the nurse said you cried after hearing I got an A in my A-level art exam. I don’t know why mum even told the nurse. But, in fairness, she was a wreck, being smashed to pieces by the very emotions she'd spent her whole life avoiding, now crashing in on her all at once, and, well, you can imagine. I saw the frightened child inside her. A little twelve-year-old girl. Still lost, still unloved, still not knowing why, and almost certainly blaming herself. I guess being dragged up by alcoholic parents will do that to you. The secret life of mum, eh?

We’d make our daily, silent and dreary drive up to the hospital. I can’t remember the name of it with so many other things not to think about. But mum was like on autopilot. Thomas had already been at university for a year in Scotland somewhere. Some flash place no doubt, you know what he’s like. And I was supposed to be going to art school in a few weeks. Meaning mum, in the space of a year, will have gone from being a housewife with a husband and two kids - all that she ever wanted, as far as I know - to a widow living alone, and having to go back to work for the first time in twenty odd years. If she could get any work, of course. I told her I’d not go to art school, but get a job instead to help her out, and stay with her for at least a year or two, and then go to art school. I was lying, obviously. I had absolutely no intention or desire to stay in that house, and every intention of getting out as quickly as possible and going to art school as planned. Brutal, really. Essentially I was asking her for permission, rather than actually offering some assistance. “It’s what your dad would have wanted,” she guessed, and I slowly nodded my head, like I’d learned watching people on the telly do in such situations, and thanked fuck, like I’d learned how to do all by myself.

One day, once we’d arrived home from another three hour death-endurance at the hospital, where, as opposed to sitting there watching you die, we spent most of our time walking around the grounds, pointing at architectural features we knew nothing about, and drinking cups of tea from the vending machine, mum said she wanted to talk to us. Like, as if mum had ever said or done anything like that before, so we knew it was going to be really serious, or really, really weird, probably both. Me and Thomas looked at each other, fearing the worst, which weirdly wasn’t her telling us you were definitely going to die, we knew that already, it was only mum who was still clinging onto some non-existent chance you’d survive, unconvincingly too. For show, I think. I don’t know. We were all guessing, the truth be told. Anyway, we all sat down in a way we never had before, me and Thomas trying to mitigate any harsh realities with strategic distances and seating angles, and mum said something about you maybe living, but not being able to move. I looked at Thomas, who raised his eyebrows and inhaled heavily, like someone who'd just been told his train was delayed. I said I didn’t think you’d want that. Silly really, nobody wants that, especially the wife and kids, if you know what I mean? The short of it was, there might come a time where we’d be asked if they could turn off the machine. Ruthless politeness that, turn off the machine. I didn’t even know there was a damn machine. In fact, I think mum may have invented it. Later, when I asked Thomas what machine mum was talking about, he just half-closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side, as if he’d just heard his train was going to be delayed for longer than previously announced.

I’ll tell you what, you’ve never seen three people not know how to end a conversation as badly as that little turnout. We must have sat there for an hour and exchanged about two minutesworth of words. So many sentences started yet so few reaching their end. “I ‘spose it’s what, you know, I ‘spose it’s what they do when….” and, “It’s a lot to take on, and there’s no right or wrong, we just need to….” Because all roads led to death, we’d all decide to stop talking our way down them at the point we realised that, and then just sit there, grinding our teeth, curling our toes, cracking our fingers, take your pick, whatever, until mum gave us permission to break the seal, breathe again, and go. Hide. Somewhere. Alone.

On the last visit before you died, we all sat around your bleak and paint-chipped hospital bed when you were in a coma, with mum saying shit like, “Alfie, can you hear me? Squeeze my finger if you can hear me,” over and over again. About one in ten times during this agonizing ritual, like a performing, dying monkey, you’d apparently squeeze her finger. “He can hear us!” she’d say, with much delight, as you continued dying in front of our eyes. I asked her to stop doing it, and to leave you alone. It reminded me of when she chased our budgie around its cage, trying to get hold of it to show that twat of a French exchange student who stayed with us back in ‘82. I can’t even remember his name, just his bulging eyes, mahoosive beak, and those permanent Ribena stains on either side of his mouth. As if mum ever bought Ribena before! She really showed him the good life. As the budgie flapped its wings to pieces and squawked for its life, I begged her to stop, but she wouldn’t; she just let it smash itself near featherless on the sides of the cage as her half-pissed and nicotine-stained fingers continued to terrify and clout the poor thing around. Old Frenchy thought it was well funny, and I really wanted to stab him in the face from then on. Yes mum, he can hear you, but it’s a bit of a drop in functioning from what, two weeks ago, when he was driving vans and building houses, wouldn’t you say?

Mum died last year, not your mum, obvs, I mean your wife. I didn’t really care, to be honest. Nothing much changed between me and her in the thirty-five years you’ve been dead. She didn’t really know me at all. But you’ll be pleased to know she did look after me when I really didn’t deserve it. I’ve had quite the battle with drugs all my life. Not really a battle; I just really like them. They don’t like me so much, and I guess the real battle has been coming to terms with that. I want to do them all the time, but they fuck me up and, well, hurt me and other people, people like mum. Not your mum, your wife. Can we just agree that when I say mum, I’m talking about my mum and your wife, OK? The amount of times I washed-up back to mum’s house, police after me, gangsters after me, or just no money, food, house, nothing. Usually a combination of all three. And bless her, she’d let me stay and deal with the consequences that a woman her age really didn’t need in her life. Or her house. Or her son.

I have, you’ll be glad to know, fucked thousands of women, some absolute beauties too, mostly beauties, actually. I wish you could have seen some of them, but I imagine you’d have tried to fuck them. Yes, even at seven or eight years-old, I had a fair idea what was going on during the many times I sat in your work van while you disappeared into some house for half an hour, coming out all sweaty and red in the face. You’d buy a tin of paint or whatever on the way home, so it looked like we’d been out buying stuff for work.

I cheated on most of my girlfriends. My first love, Lucy, was an absolute cracker. Perfect really. I should have stayed with her. But when she wasn’t around, the little fella downstairs made the decisions, especially after a few bevvies. I told mum once, I told her how much I loved Lucy, but couldn’t seem to stop cheating on her. Ever the wise one, mum said, “You’re just like your old man, you can’t keep yer filthy mitts off the women,” before standing up, and walking into the kitchen to do nothing. Not entirely nothing, she certainly left me to stew in that little Freudian pot of piss on my Jack Jones.

Another of my loves, Grace. Wow. She looked like the women in your stash of, hmm, we’ll say, nature magazines, and she walked it like she talked it, if you know what I mean. An absolute stunner. She wouldn’t be seen outside unless she’d spent hours fixing her make-up, hair, and clothes. And wow, did she turn heads. A bimbo, yes, a trophy, yes, but under all that paint and miniskirts, she was sharp as a razor. And mad as a box of frogs. That’s quite the combination, right? But at heart, much like Lucy, after everything, she was a very sweet girl who I believed loved me, and that takes some doing.

But it was when Grace and I got together proper that the drugs really took hold. Two broken biscuits don’t equal one good one. While, in retrospect, it’s obvious I already had a problem with drugs, up until you were untimely ripped from your mortal coil, it could have been, and probably would have been, nipped in the bud. But with your death, the void of any real authority, and the arrival of heroin and crack, I think it’s safe to say I significantly downgraded my potential, I could have achieved more, I could have been a better person. Having a dad would have helped. I’m not blaming you - your death, I mean - by the time I was sixteen, I was pretty much already trauma’d-up. A few events come to mind, I won’t bore you with them now, although there was one that stands out, Remember that magic club I used to go to, over the other side of West Hill, up by that church you used to call ‘Paddy’s Windmill’? I still don’t know why you called it that, and I’ve Googled it… scratch that, I’ve looked it up many times. Anyway, the devil’s in the lack of details here, suffice to say I helped his magic wand produce a un-magical fountain of spunk. I know mum didn’t tell you because she told me not to tell you. She said you’d go up there and ‘tear him into pieces’. I’m not quite sure what she meant by that, but if you had, wouldn’t it have been a laugh to put all the pieces into a velvet bag, say ‘abracadabra’ and bring him out whole again? I got the feeling mum thought I was lying anyway. Or she wanted me to be lying. She always called me a liar. And stupid. And good for nothing. And mad. Later in my life, a therapist said mum had developed a ’covert incestous' relationship with me. Fuck me! Well, no thanks, but you know what I mean. I’ll tell you what, these people who exist to make you feel better have an amazing ability to make you feel a whole lot worse (I mean the therapist, not mum, although now I think about it…)

I’ve certainly had a laugh, though; life so far has been quite the ride. And although at times I begged for it to slow down, I’ve never wanted to get off. I’ve run my own business now for about twenty years. Seeing what working for other people did to you kind of made not doing that a necessity for me. Through a combination of being in the right place at the right time, some luck, some help from friends, and some commitment from me (probably in that order too,) I’ve managed to fund a life I’m not quite sure I deserve. Not because I haven’t worked hard - I certainly have - but because I’ve spent most of my life being a selfish person. The question that hovered over every situation in which I found myself (see, no responsibility: ‘every situation in which I found myself’) was, ‘What can I get out of this?’ And although it’s abated somewhat as I’ve got older, and I’m not the selfish man I most certainly once was, it has done so mainly out of laziness. As my drive to achieve has slowed, less do I seek rewards, ergo, less the need to be selfish.

On the subject of work, sorry about the Amway stuff. I know me and Thomas hounded you both to do that. But watching it slowly humiliate you in front of everyone in the street, then everyone you knew, then anyone you could get to come to our house for another damn washing products party, still hurts me. In a way, it kind of marked your transition period from young man to middle-aged man. Me and Thomas wanting our own bedrooms, with our own baths that had an every flavour of milkshake dispenser fitted to the side, was just too much to give up, and those snide bastards that came over and sold the bullshit to us really sold the bullshit to us; me and Thomas. Those fuckers preyed on our malnourished and no luxuries to be seen existence. They sold the dream to me and Thomas so we’d force the reality on you and mum. And bless you for giving it a go, when I knew you knew better. So, yeah, sorry about giving your midlife crisis a domestic cleaning products theme.

I dream about you all the time. Always the same dream, really; different places, different people, but there you are; you’re not quite dead, but not alive either. It’s like you are there, and we can communicate and that, but you can’t affect any change in the life of the living. A fair reflection of the true state of our relationship, really. People say to me, “Do you still think about your dad?” which misses the point entirely. Neither do I start thinking about you, nor do I stop. You are always there, a part of me. Actually, I am always here, a part of you.

You dying, eh? At least you can’t do it again, I guess.

With love

Your son.

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The End

Chris Dangerfield

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