I often see him on the train, on a bench, in a park; the paper man. Weary of the world and thin. Being blown about as the world sees fit to move him. Apparently carefree; underneath wild-eyed with fear drowning in big distant watery blue pools.
I saw him on the train a few weeks back. Upright, clinging to a pole as the train tried to dislodge him from this world.
The last time I saw him, I carefully measured out the correct level of morphine, the 3 pink pills, 2 white and a rattling handful of bulbous capsules. I tried not to look as his crepe paper hands folded around the pills, painfully rolled up and into his mouth with a creaking swallow. Like translucent paper the world pressed in on him until the pain was visible in every movement of what was left of his body. Unable to touch, trying to cocoon his frame with some warmth of the lightest duvet. I fed him tepid tea. I said goodbye. I shut the door.
3 hours later I got the call.
~
This one has been a long time coming. To the point where I am now up at 1:30 writing everything that is bursting out from my head. There is so much I want to say, but I am at a loss how to write this.
~
It was five years ago this week that he passed away, my dad. Not something that gets brought up frequently. In class we talked about how we make the really big events in our lives as small as we possibly can. Don't you think - think about those life-changing events? How do you talk about them to others? We scrunch them up into tiny little balls, so that we can deal them better and make less visible the feelings and emotions.
It was all so cliche, all so mundane. Life is at times. It was ultimately his own fault. Other people have worse problems. Worse lives. Worse sufferings. And I am certainly not alone in facing this one; it was nothing more than a banal fact of life we must all face as children growing into adults.
~
Aged about 8 I would go to bed and regularly asked God not to let my dad die. He didn't believe in God, he was an Atheist. But I prayed for him anyway. He made me a real dog kennel for Percy the PoundPuppy. He looked after me when all these strangely dressed grown-up people were in our house for a party and made me cry. He put me on his shoulders when I was too scared to climb down the hill at Dovedale. He took me, my sister and Corinna to parks, pools and farms in his embarassingly bright banana yellow Ford van. (I think on this one my mum traded her roast dinner making skills in for a Sunday outing after!)
On outings he would often stop on a Derbyshire lane. Pick up the road kill, pop it in the boot and take it home to pluck and eat. First we were grossed out, in time curiosity got the better and we learnt how to skin and pluck game. He would threaten to put my rabbit in a stew, I would find him feeding him in his hutch every morning that I had forgotten. He woke us up at 4:30 in the morning when we begged him to take us into work with him at the newsagent, then take us to Jock's cafe for breakfast after. He would draw us silly pictures and cartoons.
It was a waking nightmare that persisted before each bedtime (that and making sure the wardrobe door was shut so as not to allow the alien monsters in). It was always my dad dying that I worried about most in the world. The bossiest 8yr old you ever saw; I would tear around the house indignantly ripping up his packets of cigarettes. Taking them to my spot in the garden and tipping them in a hole along with his whiskey. Poor sod, whole bottles of Teacher's whiskey I poured down the back of our garden along with broken, no soggy, golden packs of B&H.
I loved my dad. Aged 8 he was the world, he was my world. Him, my mum, my sister who followed me around and annoyed the hell out of me (or so I told everyone), my bunny rabbit, our shop, our house, our garden, Corinna our neighbour, and our awful bright yellow banana car.
~
A few years later things had changed; a lot. And by now I was an atheist.
~
I felt like I lost my dad a long time before the physical reality occurred. What was once tall, sturdy and strong had been shredded into a pile of nothing. Many knew him as the mild-mannered paper man, and he was to others. This guy would stop and talk to the tramps on the street. Tell us that he had a theory that Trolley Ted the tramp who collected the trolleys was a secret millionaire. He would do his weird mortifying embarrassing flirting with the church ladies, chat and moan to the workers as Bass; it is difficult to admit that at home was quite different.
He barely spoke to anyone; we most definitely barely spoke. I set my stall out from that night I accidentally overheard a nasty comment he made about me and how I looked to my brother. It was the final piece of shit that stuck. It hurt. But aged 16 I was going to act in the most mature way I knew... and just ignore him from that point on. We barely spoke till my 18th. People who knew us would come to our house, with my mum, a very warm giving person, who let in any waif and stray. They would see my dad sitting there in silence with his cigarettes and whiskey, folded in a corner of the living room, under our giant overgrown cheeseplant and beach mural wall, silently doing paperwork. Those who didn't know us automatically assumed he wasn't even around.
I could never understand why he started to disappear from our lives. No more games, trips out, to work or presents from trips abroad. No picking me up or dropping me off at netball or sports events. It seems quite trivial, as I know many people who would kill to have had any kind of relationship with absent parents. But it was that very change from presence to absence that was most affecting. I knew and exactly what I had lost. And couldn't work out what I had done wrong.
Meanwhile, Sareka and then Vaughan were still having the relationship I once had. I had been replaced. I took it personally. I started to grow up, our relationship changed. I'd tried the lot: trying to please him and make him like me again somehow. Cooking foods he liked, helping at the newsagent, good grades, lots of reading so that I could argue with him about maths, science, literature the things he liked to discuss. I would always match his obstinacy, stand my ground no matter what and we would argue till my mum told us to shut up.
By my later teenage years I hated everything about him, hated the very things about me that were like him. Railed at him for all his stupidities; did whatever it took to garner some sort of reaction. I got beyond frustrated. Nothing worked. I got angry. Very angry. I set my stall out. I was rude, abusive retaliating. I could be just as stubborn as him and fight my corner. Even cooking foods he hated, like pasta, just to piss him off! Who knew pasta could be so offensive!
Nothing.
I remember getting ill aged 18, seriously ill, one Christmas. Slipping in and out of consciousness for about two weeks. I remember two things. 1. Every time I woke up, Frank Sinatra was on TV. EVERY SINGLE TIME - it freaked me out. 2. When my mum finally got him to come upstairs to see me (not Frank, but my dad). Even despite how long it had taken him. It was days. All I wanted was a hug from my dad. I cannot even tell you the last time I'd had one. It was years. It was awful. He couldn't even hug me properly. It was as if he'd never hugged anyone before in his life. I don't think he knew how.
Now THAT was the final straw.
I got well, saw a counsellor, retook my a-levels and I left for Birmingham University.
I never spoke to him much after that.
Leaving home changed things further. As Rick grew up, a similar pattern emerged. They were closer. they shared a love of art and drawing. Despite that, even their relationship changed - but that is her story to tell. And I have no doubt my brother has his own too. I learnt that on the plus side it wasn't just me and in some warped sense of relief at least it wasn't personal; he was equally absent to us all.
The paper man seemed to struggle under the weight of life.
He took redundancy. Had operations on his feet leaving him barely able walk. He faced an attacker in our newsagent with a machete. At his fathers funeral, we learnt about his childhood. He drank more and smoked more and by now you could see the fright in those wan watery pools staring out at you.
When he got ill there was no surprise. No drama. No sadness. A perfunctory "well what did you expect" from drinking and smoking so much. The doctors chased the cancer around his body like the Coyote after the Road Runner, constantly being outsmarted and never catching the prize. Too late for radiotherapy. Too late for chemo. Strips were torn from him until his skin was translucent. I could see his veins and bones. I could pick him up and move him from sofa to bed. I had carried bundles of newspapers into the shop that weighed more than him.
You think when someone is facing (I can't even write it)... It makes them see the wrong in their lives and want to correct it. The reality is, we don't live in a soap, or a TV drama. This person is not finishing this series to go on and star in a West End Musical. It's just too incredibly frightening to deal with.
We had no revelatory moment. The moment I had perhaps invented and replayed in my head a million times. The moment where he says he's sorry for all the things he's done. I thought - "God, this man is STILL so f**king selfish".
No, God, this was just a sad, scared man who was just petrified of dying.
When the doctors said they could do no more for him. His response was: "I want to go home".
Home with us.
We boxed away all our anger and frustrations. Took him home and tried to look after him as best we could.
The rest is obvious, tedious, predictable, unsurprising and sad.
~
5 years on, those little balls of scrunched up grief, have slowly and painstakingly been unravelled. Some are torn, some are ruined. Some have opened up, very creased around the edges, to revelations about our relationship I can only look at and understand now:
I am stubborn.
I always fight for the underdog.
I loved arguing, believe in what I am saying and fighting for.
I don't draw the pictures of his imagination that he and Sareka saw, but I imagine and write those images that are in my head. We all share a strange little fantasy world born from 'Milo Minderbenders' fantasy life.
I went to university to study literature.
I could pluck a pheasant. (If EVER the opportunity arises).
All the emotions I went through with my dad have given me the ammunition and the tools to explore my acting in ways I would not have had the capacity to do otherwise.
I learnt to question everything, not settle for things at face value.
As a result I am an Atheist. I appreciate life for life's sake and the beauty and frailty of everything around us.
I love Pink Floyd.
I ABSOLUTELY hate pasta!
Thank you for the weirdness.
You crazy, mad, gentle, emotionally stunted, scared, sad, passionate:
paper man
