There’s a Short Story about My Father I’m Planning to Write
Non-Fiction by Geoff Inverarity
My father is dead. I have him on my shoulders. Like so many men since the beginning of time, I have my dead father on my shoulders. I’m carrying him through a shadowed forest, because he has lost his way at the end of his life, and I must help him find it. He is exhausted, bewildered, wondering how he has strayed so far from the path. He is grateful I’ve come; he’s been waiting for a quarter of a century. I help him to his feet, his legs buckle; I steady him for one last journey back to more familiar places where he can finally rest. I heave him onto my back.
There’s a short story about my father I’m planning to write, and in this story, set in the beginning of the last of the good days before his death, he and I are driving to Edinburgh, the city I’ve come back to after twenty years to help him reach his end.
This is not the official plan as far as he is concerned, because at the moment he is counting on another few years, and I am just here to help him get back on his feet after surgery. That’s his story. In the story I’m planning, which I will never be able to tell him, we would be driving back to Edinburgh from Dunbar, a small seaside town about fifty miles away if you hug the coast east along the the Firth of Forth. In the way of these sorts of stories, this will be the place that the epiphany takes place, there will be redemption, everything will coalesce, become crystalline, perfect. I will write a story about the past, youth, lost vigour, the end of strength, and the story will have as its theme the problem of closure, and how it must always be infinitely postponed, always receding into the distance like a road in an endless desert.
I will explain how we were at the end of the world so that my father could come back to a place he knew more than sixty years ago when he was young and beautiful and there was nothing but possibility.
We have travelled back in time.
My father’s name is Gordon, and we walked together where the crowds walked years back in the days before the package holidays to Spain and Portugal, and the girls flirted with the boys and any one of the girls might have kissed him, any one of them might have been his wife, might have said “Gordon, I love you,” in those days before Europe caught fire and before he sailed away from his mother who had already grieved one man, her husband, in a war, and dreaded losing another. Her only son came back home safely with a strange little English girl with a strange name, Daphne, the name of the girl he married, so that it was no longer just my father and my grandmother. Gordon and Daphne lived in Edinburgh and visited every Sunday even though my mother was English and found her new mother-in-law hard to understand, but they always visited, especially after the children were born apart from the first two weeks in August when they took their holidays and went thirty miles down the coast to the old fishing town of North Berwick, and that was that. I remember our holidays there with great affection; we spent the fortnight as a family, something that happened only once a year. My brother lives there now.
But this is a story about the day my father leapfrogged across more than sixty years to when the cliff top would have been filled with something apart from the ghosts crowding in on his vision. The girls would walk gaily, arm in arm, and the boys would pass and the girls might smile and the boys might exchange glances and the girls might look at each other and nod and whisper and perhaps they might stroll back (just looking all . . . casual, ken), and the boys might too and they might pass each other again and perhaps there had been a mistake she wasn’t that pretty, but there were plenty more girls and it was only Friday on the first day of the Trades Fortnight and anything could happen over the next two weeks. Nothing but the future; nothing but possibilities.
The Black Douglas’s Castle still looms in ruins over the harbour after almost a thousand years and over the deep pit in the dark red sandstone cliffs chewed out by the savage winter storms and the terrible gales off the North Sea coming down from Iceland. This is where the swimming pool sat, a wall forming an artificial lagoon between the stacks of rocks and holding back a part of the tides, its chilly waters changed twice a day. The pool wall is gone now, sea bathing no longer holding any attraction for a generation raised on holidays in the Mediterranean. A new community centre, all glass and aluminium, sits up on the cliff to the right of the castle, and the tides rush in and out again below as they have done for tens of thousands of years. The change huts which lined the pool are gone too, and the benches, and most of the boys and girls are dead now, from war, or broken hearts, or carelessness, or cancer.
In this story, I will have my father take my arm and point down the empty bay and tell me about the hundreds of people packing the rocks, about the music, about the future he could not see coming. As I listen, I hear regret and sadness in his voice. He seems far away, and he will grow farther and farther away as the weeks drag on. I strain to hear what he is hearing: laughter, the sounds of life, his youth.
I think I shall write about these earlier days, because certain things have not happened yet. I would rather not write about what happens when he finally dies, although there is a moment of strange comedy I might do well to record, something that he might have appreciated with the sort of wry, black-tinged sense of humour he showed at a final visit to the oncology clinic, when he is terrifyingly yellowed by kidney failure, as if the urine was backing up in his body, filling him up like a sample bottle. He is so yellow that people stare at him, fascinated. He sees the way they look at him, and cannot meet their eyes, ashamed to be dying. When he can barely walk and his breath is already deserting him, he is taken by a kindly, soft-spoken nurse so that she can weigh what is left of him. After a few minutes, he comes back to sit with us. There’s a pause, as we all try to think of conversation, what to say when there’s nothing to talk about except how soon he will die, then he says, deadpan, “Well, I’m cured.”
Does he do it again, now, at the very end? He’s gasping for breath, a rasp which is partly a groan in his throat, and the breaths are coming farther and farther apart. Finally, there’s a breath that has no companion, and he stares, sightless it seems, at the ceiling. My brother and I, each holding a hand of our father’s, have tears pouring down our faces; my sister-in-law begins to sob, my partner is crying softly behind me. We begin to exchange glances, and look to the nurse. Then, like a bad actor, he hauls in another breath, then another. Then a pause. Longer and longer. His throat moves, and we can hear him swallow. There are no more breaths. He has made his last sound.
The next day, however, a new story appeared.
Months before, on the day following my father’s surgery, my brother and I had been visiting the hospital. My father told us he was having a visit from his solicitor. He was going to add a codicil to his will. Small bequests to the gardener and his home help. We gave the meeting with his solicitor privacy, drank foul coffee in the cafeteria. Went back in when the legal machinations were completed. So that happened. A generous and thoughtful thing to do on such a fraught occasion.
Or so we thought.
My father’s solicitor came to the house the morning after the death to read the will. He came to the codicil made that night at the hospital. The codicil was not to the gardener, nor to the home help. Their modest bequests had been a part of the will when it was originally drafted some years before. There was, however, a brand new codicil:
£35,000 to a woman, Jenny, who had been his lover for over twenty years while my mother was still alive and ever since her death seven years before.
I felt a terrible sadness for him. I knew then that he had been carrying a huge burden, and he had carried it to the moment of his death. He died with his past slipping away between his fingers, holding only a secret he shared with nobody apart from the man he paid for legal work. He died certain in the knowledge that his secret would be revealed within a few hours.
When did the confusion of his dying cut off his thoughts, feelings, fear, and guilt? Perhaps everything was there until the very last moment as he gazed, eyes staring horrified into the final absolute void as he plummeted. Even on his deathbed, he would not speak, fearing the judgement of his sons. Instead of dying the patriarch, the elder, the authority, he died the liar and shabby philanderer. An ordinary man in the end, dying just out of reach, as we are all in the end just out of reach of each other.
My father only spoke once about his experiences in the war as a naval officer on a ship protecting the Atlantic convoys. He told me of the mountainous seas, the torpedoes in the dark, the explosions, the terrifying noise, the fires, the knowledge that his ship could be next. As a boy, I used to imagine him at the front of a line of boats, leading them to safety. He was their hero and their protector; I imagined our family as little boats strung along in his wake, his ship enormous, steel-plated, ours small and vulnerable. Like little ducks, all in a row. As the pieces of the story of his secret life began falling into place, I thought of him again, of my mother and brother’s ships behind his, then mine, then our partners and his grandchildren, stretching out behind him, a tentative line in a vast stormy ocean, steady as she goes for safe harbour, and instead explosions, fountains of water, jagged wounds in the sides of our vessels, the sea rushing in. And his ship disappearing into the darkness. As we struggled to stay afloat, I knew that he had sold out our positions to the enemy.
He surely believed, reasonably enough, that our respect would be lost as soon as the solicitor got to the final codicil. Even the ship he captained was taking on water. There would be flames and screaming in the darkness. Everything he had constructed, the authority behind every argument, every outrageous opinion was well and truly sunk.
In the last hours, after months of decline conducted with a stiff upper lip, he had finally cried out wordlessly in distress. There might have been pain. I think there was fear; perhaps he missed his Mum. The doctor, who lived just a few doors down, came in minutes. He assessed the situation, and announced he’d administer morphine. As the drug took hold, my father’s body relaxed; distress faded into the soothing opiate shadowland. After that it was a matter of an hour or so.
Armour must have been forged, invisible to most of us, and I was as oblivious to the barricades being built and studiously maintained as I was to the cunning worm of secrecy that I realize now must have informed every conversation, every Christmas dinner, every family vacation, every glance, every breath, every second.
Those were different days. You stayed in a marriage, you kept up appearances. However, I prefer to think that my father genuinely loved two women and that both loved him in their different ways, but that the three of them were not free to act in unison, so to speak. Polyamory was not a Thing, or even a word. They weren’t bohemians, artists, or actors; they were born, they lived, and died swaddled by conformity. They simply did not do the things that were not done by the people who did not do those things.
There’s another story that came out gradually. I had flown over to Scotland when I got the news about my father’s emergency. There was a chance he would not survive the surgery, but he had pulled through. I got to my father’s bedside in the ICU and found him in a perilous but stable state. He was able to talk with effort, and I struggled to find the right thing to say. I decided that I would let him know that he didn’t have to worry about me. I was doing well, having success; he could turn all his attention to his recovery. I had just had a poem included in an anthology of the year’s best poetry in Canada, so I told him about the publication. That should do the trick! I thought. With an enormous effort, he raised himself a little. I smiled, waiting. He gathered his strength and gasped out the classic Scottish question: “How much are they paying you?” “Well,” I said, “nothing, but it’s very prestigiou. . .” He cut me off with a dismissive moan and collapsed back onto the pillow. Well, thanks for that, Dad, I thought, cutting him huge slack considering his situation, but knowing perfectly well that he meant it.
However, there was more afoot than I knew at that point. His words have never really stung, he was in extremis, and the anecdote has been useful as an introduction to poems when I’m giving a reading, guaranteed to raise a laugh. (How wry! How healthily self-deprecating! “Parents! I know, right?”) It’s why, I suppose, he was moved to tell my partner a week or so before his death that mine was “the greatest waste of an intellect” he’d ever seen. Again, wow. Thanks, Dad.
The missing information here was that a vacation had been planned for what turned out to be the night of my father’s surgery, Jenny told us later. She and my father were to have gone for two weeks to Largs, down the coast from Glasgow, less than a hundred miles from Edinburgh, the sort of holiday spot people went to in the old days, in the glory days of seaside towns like Dunbar and North Berwick. How did she get the news that the holiday was not to happen? Who would have called her? How long did she sit beside a neatly packed suitcase wondering why she’d been forgotten? Her heart must have been breaking, she must have been so sure that by this time, seven years after my mother’s death, they were more or less free of the lies that ensnared. She would probably have imagined a family emergency of some sort taking precedence, and knowing she never came first was something that must never have ceased to sting, but she would still be distressed by the silence. Of all the things she imagined, however, she would not have known what actually happened: that my father in his agony had called his daughter-in-law to come and drive him to the hospital, to help him inch his way down the stairs to the car. It’s possible he could have got to the phone, and broken the news to Jenny, but I’ll never know. I might have asked Jenny how it all happened for her, but we left questions hanging, intending to invite her to come to Vancouver in a year. Six months later, we had a short note from her sister. Jenny had died. No details. I believe her heart was broken, finally, gratefully even, exhausted after so many years of secrecy.
That missed holiday was just the beginning of his torment. The walls closed in, the days grew shorter for him. As the cancer in his liver worked its evil, his eyes took on a yellow cast, then his face. He grew ashamed of his appearance, tired of waiting. He said, “If there’s a pill I could take, I’d take it now.” I was aware of the physical suffering, but I have come to believe that it must have been the spiritual torment that had opened a second front in his war with death that pained him more. He didn’t stand a chance.
I hope he knew at the end that I would never turn away from him, just revise my opinions. That I would see him as a complicated man who had lost his way a little, found the complexity of living confusing, but had kept the family together, perhaps mistakenly, as best he could under difficult circumstances, for which, admittedly, he was largely responsible. I was glad he had found a measure of happiness in his life, especially in the final years, but my heart sinks at the thought of his last days, knowing that his life would be exposed as a fraud, because he was a man who judged others harshly. He certainly judged me harshly for my failed marriages, and I think he would assume that I would do the same, write him off in the same way he wrote off inept politicians, corrupt businessmen, dodgy tradesman, sketchy builders, shady foreigners, unreliable friends, lazy bastards in general, and poets like me who do not get paid for their work.
None of this has happened yet in the story I am planning. For the time being, this is the way the story ends: we are driving back to Edinburgh from our day at the seaside, early, to avoid the rush hour, or we will be stuck in traffic and that will be that. We are in his big fast car; he is relaying orders to me at the steering wheel. He advises me on lane changes, when to put the turn signals on, safe braking distances. The light is failing a little, and there’s a chill to the air, but the weather is clear and we are together, and it is a day which is not quite over yet.
In the end, it was always a love story. We walk on together through the forest.
It’s very dark now, but I think I see friendly lights in the distance. There is a house beyond the trees filled with life and all the people who loved him, ready with a welcome forgiveness. A large gin and tonic is being prepared. We’re almost home. »