All Smoke And No Mirrors

My dad looked, not unlike a classical sculpture, roman nose, hollow cheeks, almond-shaped eyes, tanned skin, close wavy hair. He was sporty, he could sing well, dance and he was very very funny. My mum adored him and always put him before us children; if he was in a bad mood, which happened very often, she took it out on us. If he was in a good mood then she was at her happiest and she was good at being happy, something I haven’t inherited.

There were many strange quirks to his personality, one was that he didn’t like responsibility of any kind, it made him incensed with anxiety, he remained oblivious to anything associated with our schooling or anything to do with paying bills or the running of the household. He never achieved much professionally, just did enough not to get sacked for thirty years until he was made redundant in the first wave of redundancies to hit his company. As far as hobbies were concerned he like to play football, tennis, cricket but mostly he liked drinking beer and engaging in playful banter, five nights of the week with a group of friends - none of whom made old bones.

I don’t know how many a day he smoked but as a child I rarely remember him without a cigarette in his hand. On car journeys the smell of smoke caused me to have terrible travel sickness. My mum delighted in telling everyone how I was always being sick, she would accompany these tales with lots of eye rolling. I still feel sick now if I smell cigarette smoke. I remember one time when I was about eight years old, he asked me to hold his cigarette and I took a drag. How horrified he was, mortified, what was I thinking, he said. Children just do what their parents do, don’t they?

One day when I was about twelve, he just gave up completely, took up running instead to the point of obsession but the drinking he never gave up. He could run sixteen miles the morning after sinking five pints and he was very proud of it.

I’m not sure how old I was when I realised that not everybody has the mirrors in their home coated in talcum powder. There was an occasion when I’d had a friend around and she’d remarked on how dirty the bathroom mirror was so together we cleaned it. I remember later on there was a big fuss and I was told that dad didn’t like looking at his reflection and that he covered the mirror in talc, leaving just enough clarity to shave. I accepted this explanation, the mirror was recoated and I never cleaned it again. Years later my mum told me that he was once hospitalised with terrible skin problems after a period of stress - I don’t think I got the full story. What I do know now after seeing photographs of him as a young man is that he looked like a Greek god. It makes no sense.

He had a shocking temper, I recall one occasion when he pinned me down on the bed, whacked me around the head while spitting in my face and yelling something incomprehensible. I went through a phase as a child when I was only satisfied when he'd lost his temper, I pushed all his buttons until he lost it, after which it was almost like, everything's okay now, dad's lost his temper we can relax. However I was often on eggshells in the family home; if the phone rang after seven o’clock at night and it was for me he would get really cross. He could sink into thoroughly black moods for days on end too, and the slightest thing would set him off. I left home as soon as I could.

Overall his redeeming feature was his sense of humour. He was funny, I mean he was hysterical, off the wall, ridiculous, all my friends loved him. Much of his humour was physical, funny walks and voices, contrived tripping up in the street, all sorts of nonsense. One of his best acts was pretending to be dead, he’d lie on the floor in a mangled position which his face pointing up and his eyes fixed, unblinking. As a child it scared me half to death sometimes because he’d keep it up so long. The funny thing is that when he died, very suddenly in his sixties after a massive heart attack, I was present in the hospital at the bedside and he looked exactly the same, exactly as he did when he was play acting.

My mind half told me he was joking with me but there was blood in a tube in his mouth. There had never been blood in his mouth during any of his silly games. Somehow it felt as if he’d chosen that time to go, he’d lost some of the fitness of his youth and looking back it seemed that some of his shine had gone in the months preceding his death. Perhaps he was having the last laugh.