Father away

Today is the made up holiday of Father’s Day, doubtless invented by card manufacturers and restaurateurs to squeeze yet more cash from us drones or something.

Cynicism aside, I cannot but reflect on being a Dad, and remember my own Dad, dead these 16 or so years, long burned and his ashes in the cold ground.

Being a Dad is the greatest thing I have ever done. Nothing I have ever experienced (and I think I have experienced a bit) comes close to the moment when my first child grabbed my finger, or when I held my second child, untimely wripped, in a blanket, tiny and small.

Since then they have given me nothing but joy. Joy and desperation and anger and pride and frustration and pleasure and fear and terror and astonishment and laughter and tears and worry and all those many, many things that “nothing” becomes in these cliches. But joy, and pride.

Whenever anyone I know announces imminent parenthood, my only meaningful advice is to let them know that once you are a parent, you cannot remember not being a parent. You can remember stuff you did, places you went, clothes you wore, things you did, but you cannot remember being – being – anything other than a parent.

Today I also try and remember being a son. My Dad, at some point a long time ago suddenly realised he couldn’t recall being a teacher’s son from Blackwood and could only recall being the father of a chubby blond boy from Manchester. I’m sure he did, just never got the chance to ask him about it.

My Dad never had any time for Father’s Day, ignored it at best, angry with it at worst. Good for him. Wish I had the innate irascibility to carry it through myself, but it’s more ingrained now.

So I recall my first (legal) pint. My first book (Goon Show Scripts. I was three). Walking Offa’s Dyke footpath the same summer that I Don’t Like Mondays was number 1. Being kept up to watch Python and Qs 7-9, at least. Watching a rugby team (no idea which) playing in red and shouting “Cymru am byth!” a barrel pint glass of lemonade in my hand.

I recall an impromptu lecture to a group of fellow ramblers in the Peak District when one asked why the cliff was reddy-brown, I recall fear and distance and anger and love, and most of all I recall carrying a very heavy wooden box on my shoulder and knowing it was too bloody soon to be doing that. Hardly got to know the man, only had 28 years.

I raise a glass to my Dad, and to being a Dad. And it makes me very happy.

Alternatively…

Water splashed down the walls, pooling on the floor, some forming into puddles, some running in rivulets across the floor, then the water changed, became red, incardine, sticky, thick, and then I awoke, screaming.

I live in permanent dread that I will walk into one of the toilets at work and will find that one of my co-workers, one of my colleagues, has chosen to take his own life in that toilet, in a bloody and horrific way.

To get to the toilets, I have to walk up or down a flight of stairs, and then push open a thick, heavy door – above it a grill lets you know if the light is on; usually it is dark.

I walk in and hit the light,  then every time, expect my next step to be into a pool of  congealed ichor, poured from the throat of some fellow wage-slave who has, bravely, realised there is nothing more and his is the only way to say something – say anything.

He has taken the only pair of scissors you can now order from the official stationery catalogue, and used it to snip (snip, yes, only snip will do – no sever or slice or split, snip, and snip alone) his carotid artery. Exsanguination.

It is an act of will. Not an act of resignation or of cowardice, or of fear, or of desperation. No, this opening of a vital tube with a piece of approved, pre-ordained and appropriate piece of equipment is an act which screams to the heavens “I will be heard”. I WILL. BE. HEARD. In my last act, I will state something, which will go beyond my life and echo into eternity. At last I have said something.

The next step, I open my eyes as the florescent tubes click and flicker into life, and there is no blood; there is no sticky pool of crimson life leaked from the throat of a hapless co-worker, there is only tiled, clean floor. A scrap of paper towel there, a smut of bog roll there.

Every time, this happens. Every time I go in, no-one has made that choice, no-one has taken that step, made that statement. I work with cowards. Why can no-one express, with one brutal and beautiful act, how we are all feeling? Why can no-one impose a sense of free will on the inevitable? Why do they live?

They live,  I realise, as I do: to bear testament. If I chose that path, if I was noble, brave and brutal and beautiful, who would be there to record that fact? What I would do would be a tale, but a tale is nothing unless someone tells it.

I shall narrate, relate, bear witness the pointlessness and absurdity, I will report their stand, their magnificence, I will carry what they choose to do to the rest of the world.

But they don’t.

And I can’t.

And they can’t.

And I don’t.

Which is probably for the best.