A - 1

1

An inch-thick finger of wood props the window open and a scowling wind
upsets the net curtains as the first light of day intrudes.

This is the calm.

My father is sleeping.

I have watched over him now for a year or more and each night is the
same. He puts off going to sleep for the longest possible time, will
not even so much as glance toward the bed until his eyelids are swollen
with the body's need for rest. And yet, even then - even as he slips
beneath the sheets and closes his eyes to the dark - even then, peace
eludes him. For a period he will wriggle and shift, uneasy among the
blankets and pillows. With a niche carved, his body settles into a
comfortable nook but still - this will not betoken a sure drift into
somnolence. As the body eases so the mind begins: conjuring images of
me and my mother asleep alongside him, our hands and the smell
generated from our bodies and our warmth flooding his nostrils, and an
ache like toothache but situated in his heart and lungs shifts his body
from one side of the bed to the other. For a long time he struggles to
prise other thoughts, more recent memories, loose from the damp earth
but - he never succeeds. Each night my father cries softly into his
pillow, and the tears soften the otherwise rugged descent into sleep
and so - and so - sleep comes.

But sleep is no friend. My father's dreams gather about his bed
clutching nail-bitter wood, bastinadoes and scantling with which to
strike and hobble. He spends the better part of each night kicking and
lashing wildly beneath the bedclothes, a man in the dark struggling to
identify his opponents. You will hear him. He says my mother's name,
whines like a patient in need of anaesthetic. He is Dorothy's farmhouse
and sleep is the twister spinning up through the bed, leaving
devastation in its wake and shaking the waking world to its very
foundations. The glass of water and the knife on the plate with the
cracker crumbs left on the bedside table hum with an ice-floe
vibration.

I am daily harrowed, watching my father sleep.

At some point the night gives way to day and the nightmares submit to a
resigned void during which there is calm. With the intrusion of the
aforesaid scowling wind, he is calm. There is little movement, precious
sound. Watch him draw the long easy breath through his nose. See the
same breath used and observe the way in which it skulks clear of his
mouth.

This is all the peace my father has. The hour seized between dawn and
wakefulness.

But the night is far from over, and perhaps the worst is still to come.
Step nearer. Tilt your head roughly forty-five degrees and hover as
close to the pillow as you can without disturbing him. Take a moment to
observe the filaments of silver streaking his hair. My father is
thirty-one. He has eyes and a nose and a mouth like other men. He
sleeps in a t-shirt because he is self-conscious, even as he sleeps
alone. You would not say he is good-looking, but neither would you call
him ugly. My father is plain, quiet, timid, gentle, lost.

Now watch. Two sudden short breaths through his nose. Is he going to
sneeze? No. His eyelids twitch and a hand appears from beneath the
sheets to rub his nose, two fingers like a child's gun move to the left
and the right and then withdraw. He is still sleeping. Don't mistake
me. It is the body we are watching, physical actions. We are watching
the body reassert itself. The legs stretch beneath the covers, the toes
indicate the far wall opposite. Don't be distracted, though. Focus your
attention upon the space between my father's eyebrows. At present there
is nothing but pale skin (although if you look close, much closer than
that, you will see the history of a line, the feint tense impression of
a crease).

Now. See the snap. Watch the vicious fold crack back like the matt
black slap of a belt on bare skin. The eyebrows push together like
sumos wrestling. Hear too the sudden whistle boil through clenched
teeth. Stand now, and draw back: watch my father bring his knees up to
his chest, look at the mouth opening as if with sudden pain - as if a
short and sharp knife has been inserted between two lower ribs and as
quickly withdrawn.

He is not yet awake, even now. Not fully awake. A few minutes will pass
before my father comes to himself, a few minutes during which all of
the cess and bile of the last so many months will bubble up, filling
the space attained during an hour or so of uninterrupted sleep.

He will shortly wake.

Before he does, let me tell you a story:

This is not a true story. Rather this is but one of the stories my
father employs to make sense of the end of his marriage. They reside,
these stories, coiled and cancerous in his belly, lying one atop the
other like sleeping snakes.

He imagines a future in which he meets someone - someone prepared to
listen, someone prepared to understand the journey he took from whole
man to shell, someone prepared to help put Humpty Dumpty together again
- and he imagines telling this story. This story or another. So much
better to concoct a fantasy that clearly depicts his own acknowledged
failures whilst simultaneously drawing a pained, humble, sensitive
outline in the sand for the benefit of the viewers at home, so much
better to pretend to understand why something went wrong.

But in point of fact my father has no idea why his marriage ceased to
function. Connie became tidal, intimate and then distant; and then
lunar, silent and dark. She was morose, closed off, given to fits of
crying and stuttering violence. Unlike the man in the story, my father
attempted to penetrate her armadillo hide every way he knew how: he lay
with his ear pressed flat to the armour, he attempted to slip fingers
and tools beneath the plated skin, he cajoled, caressed, worried. But
nothing came of it. He returned home from work one day to find her
gone. She filled a holdall with clothes, took a picture frame from the
bookcase in the living room and left. My father called her mother,
asked where she was, broke down. Connie's mother wouldn't say and -
held him at arm's length, as if she blamed him for something but wasn't
at liberty to say. He asked her what it was, both then and later, time
and again, repeated, frustrated telephone call after telephone call.
The frantic awful pleas and demands to - just - speak with her. It was
over and nobody ever told him why. The armadillo was removed from the
premises in a box and hidden somewhere far from sight.

Which brings us back to the story that is not a true story. I could
have chosen any of his attempts to understand the failure of his
marriage, but I selected the one I did because it is the closest to the
truth without actually being true.

I am, after all, here.