Sweet Sorrow(38)

But for the moment it seemed there was nothing I could do to stop the road ahead buckling and twisting like a rope bridge. Cycling with my eyes closed wasn’t as helpful as I thought it might be and instead I fixed my gaze on the yellow lines, using them like rails, but found that I no longer had faith in the laws of physics or believed that continuing to pedal would be enough to keep me upright and so, passing the recreation ground, I slowed until the bike pitched to the side and I allowed myself to fall and crawl from beneath it so that I could rest.

The grass was cool on my back, the stars circling the sky and leaving trails of light like a leap into hyperspace, and I spread my arms and attempted to dig my fingers into the baked earth to prevent myself flying off into the void. Closing my eyes, I searched for something else to cling on to and found Fran Fisher, the way we’d said goodbye, the smile that seemed to play in the corner of her mouth when I tried and failed to speak, as if she really understood me. In a way that was not yet clear, she seemed to be the solution to a problem that was also unclear. But then nothing was clear to me. Best just to rest. I loosened my grip, rolled onto my side and lost consciousness.

At some time in the night, I had the strange sensation that Dad was there, his coat pulled over his pyjamas, talking to me softly. That the car was behind him, door open, engine running, headlights illuminating the park. That he lifted me up like a fireman and staggered to the backseat and drove me home, with Chet Baker singing on the stereo. There was a snapshot, too, of me vomiting into the toilet, and another of me sitting in that tiny bath, knees up against my chest, warm water from the shower on my back. It all had the quality of a dream but I do know that when I woke the next morning, badly bruised and with the poison still running through my veins, I was somehow in my own bed, in clean sheets, wearing pyjamas I’d not worn since I was a kid.





Dad


For the first eleven years of my life my father raised me, though this makes the process sound a little too considered and wholesome.

He was a musician in those days, a saxophonist, at least in theory. With Mum’s encouragement, and to my grandparents’ fury, he had dropped his accountancy course and instead he’d play for three or four nights a week in a number of groups, sometimes jazz, sometimes covers bands, leaving the days free to ‘work on his music’. The three of us lived in a rented flat above a butcher’s in a Portsmouth shopping arcade. Mum worked shifts at the general hospital and so my earliest memories are of endless, baggy hours, trying to get plastic soldiers to stand up on the carpet while Dad noodled along to records on his saxophone and a small electric piano that he sat behind like a child’s tiny school desk. It was a sort of elevated karaoke, my father lifting the needle on the run he couldn’t play or the chord he couldn’t find and so lifting it often, listening again, nodding along with the sax across his chest, then trying again. Babies exposed to Bach and Mozart are said to develop more quickly, with sharp analytical minds, but no one knows what five or six hours of bebop can do. It certainly didn’t make me prematurely cool or laid-back – quite the opposite – but there are still albums that are as familiar to me as nursery rhymes. Blue Train, The Sidewinder, Go!, Straight, No Chaser provided the soundtrack to the time we spent, content in each other’s company, in those three small rooms. My father was not the outdoor type. As a concession to parenting norms, we’d sometimes walk to the local recreation ground, as bleak and desolate as a military airfield. But the paddling pool was always empty, the slide was not slippery and scary boys monopolised the swings, and with my encouragement we’d soon head back to the flat, the soporific glow of the paraffin heater, the TV on but muted, Button Moon soundtracked by Cannonball Adderley, The Flumps by Dexter Gordon.

And sometimes I’d just watch Dad play; a tall but not handsome, slightly stooped man, with a craning neck and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed elastically when he laughed or played, like a gannet swallowing a fish. Young only in theory, he seemed out of time, a product of the post-war years, of coffee bars and National Service rather than the sixties and seventies in which he’d grown up. Even in his twenties his face was crumpled like something long-forgotten in a pocket, and his skin had an unnerving elastic quality – grab him by his cheeks and pull and his face would stretch alarmingly like a frilled lizard; the price, I imagined, of all that practice. But he had wonderful eyes, soft and brown, that would fix on us during his frequent bouts of sentimentality, and he was well liked and popular and kind – a talker to strangers, a helper of old ladies, and I loved him very much, and loved our life together in that flat.

Just before Mum returned from her shift, he’d join me on the gritty carpet to perform a little display of diligence in front of the fort, asking questions in the self-consciously earnest voice of a social worker or hurrying through an ABC, losing interest long before ‘M’. My father liked to call himself an auto-didact, frequent use of the term ‘auto-didact’ being the hallmark of an auto-didact, though if he was self-taught, my mum would say, it was by a substitute teacher. Still, he retained a great belief in the educational value of natural curiosity, and so I learnt about electricity by poking the toaster with a fork, about the digestive system by eating Lego, about water displacement by running my own bath. He wasn’t the kind of father to build a kite but if he had then I’d have trotted off to play beneath the pylons. Occasionally there’d be bouts of plagiarised clowning: chopped-off thumbs, objects pulled from behind my ear, noses snapped off then reattached – I was easily satisfied – and then he’d drift back to his music. He was not neglectful but he was … relaxed, easily distracted.