Fragments of my Father

When I’m being harsh I think of my father’s love like one of those oversized Easter eggs – the kind wrapped in gold foil, with red ribbon tied around the middle – exciting to receive, but a hollow shell containing nothing of substance. He loves me in an abstract way, worries about me and for me, but he doesn’t know me, not really. He has said more than once – the last occasion being at my wedding reception – that I am the most honest person he knows, but as much as I enjoyed the compliment, it is not true. I can be, and have been, as mendacious and deceitful as anybody else.

He doesn’t know the real me, and I suppose I know as little about him, in spite of listening to his stories, told to captive audiences at dinner parties across the decades, of his days in the Ulster Constabulary and the merchant navy, of being ordered to fish a dead body out of a well only to have the slippery corpse escape the rope and land on top of him, pushing him under the fetid water. Or when he and his fellow constables buried barrels of confiscated poteen in the garden of the station house instead of destroying them, and then dug them up and went on a bender for Christmas. Or the time he crossed the road to avoid an encounter with the writer Brendan Behan on a London street.

Like many men in their prime during the sixties and seventies, the meat of my father’s life took place away from the home, in board rooms and offices, restaurants and bars – places of wood panelling and ashtrays and fingers of Scotch. When I was a young child, the ritual of his homecoming included being lifted and held for a moment in a miasma of cigarette smoke and alcohol vapour before he deposited me and retired to his chair in the living room, where the television captured his attention for the rest of the evening. After an adequate dose of news and current affairs, he watched sitcoms from England or America, and I sat as close to him as he would allow. We laughed together at the hapless idiots of Dad’s Army or Gilligan’s Island, and it was a sharing of a sort.

On family holidays, we drove from town to town, staying at low-slung motels with bare brick walls and chocolate-coloured décor. My sister and I sang out the names of the towns like incantations – Dookie! Yackandandah! Badaginnie! Nar Nar Goon! Dad was the tour guide of the obvious, but his enthusiasm was infectious. ‘Look, there’s a cow! See that horse?’ In one motel a goat ate Dad’s suede jacket. In another, I celebrated my birthday and received a doorstop edition of the Concise Oxford dictionary as a present.

Each year in summer we rented a house in a different seaside town for a few weeks. At the beach Dad wore the same pair of tiny faded blue shorts year after year and refused to put on sunscreen, so that by the end of the first day he was unfailingly ablaze with sunburn. Despite being a merchant marine he had never learnt to swim, so instead he stood in the shallows and stirred the water with his arms, or else waded into the breakers and let them crash against him.

For a brief period in the eighties we were drinking buddies. I had returned from a year’s exchange in America too late in the year to return to school to do my HSC. In limbo, I was available for marathon lunches and pub crawls with AFL stars, TV journalists and others who were free of nine-to-five commitments. My father was proud of the way I held my liquor and of the attention I attracted, although he circled the wagons after a close call with a now-notorious former entertainer who tried to pick me up outside the toilets at the Hilton Hotel.

It wasn’t the first or last time he rescued me or warned off an unsuitable suitor. There were fisticuffs with a deranged composer who had been haunting me, long before I had heard of the term ‘stalker’. There were threats made to the randy neighbour who groped me at a local street party. There were hindsight mutterings in the wake of my disastrous first marriage, which was ironic considering my ex-husband’s sins mirrored my father’s in ways that bordered on the Shakespearean.

I lost his attention again when I had children. Their radiance cast me into such deep shadow that I felt obliterated, but in the same way that we watched television shows together in the days of black and white, I could imagine that we shared the experience of adoring my children. At the very least it gave us a topic for conversation. But even that is gone now that failing sight and hearing, along with the progression of dementia have severed the last shreds of any bond we may have shared.

His attention now is given over to benign hallucinations of babies, and visitors from who knows where, who bring him gifts of ribbons and flowers. His eyes roam unmoored around the room, mostly blind to the television that nonetheless still transmits its news and current affairs, its quiz shows and cops shows into his sightless eyes and deaf ears. He is confused now about how many children he has, and what their names are. He has more of a relationship with his GP, his podiatrist or the nurse who gives him his chemo infusions than he has with his daughters.

But he still remembers that stinking well, and the Christmas poteen, and probably the name of the street where he avoided Brendan Behan. Those stories and so many more like them are the fabric of his real life, his coat of many colours, and for whatever reason, being a father is just a pocket in that coat – a pocket with a hole in it that his daughters have fallen through.

~ Lucinda Cotter