23. Without warning, he called one day from Heathrow Airport...

The twenty-third instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero says hello to his father and goodbye to the Travelling Companion.

Without warning, he called one day from Heathrow Airport and asked to stay with me for a week or two…

He arrived in Norwich the following afternoon. I didn’t recognise him at first. It had been almost five years. He looked dishevelled, weary, overwrought. I took him back to the flat to meet the Travelling Companion, who was very nervous. As I did so, I realised they’d each only ever had my accounts of one another to go on, and that both had been frequent sounding boards for my frustrations regarding the other. Which is to say, there was a significant amount of displaced resentment built up between them, refracted through me, setting us all further on edge, and stirring up the frail crucible that was our incipient congress.  

As for me and him, it soon became clear that there was something broken between us, and that the sacred pact we’d forged long ago had been loosened by time, divergence, and the unspoken animosities that arise between fathers and sons as they grow older. This schism only grew as the days and weeks went by.

In the end, he stayed with us for almost three months. It seemed he had no intention of leaving Norwich anytime soon, so I said he’d have to sort out his own place. A few weeks later he was living in a bedsit off the Dereham Road, perhaps ten minutes away. Somewhat aimless, he seemed unable to make do without company, and so was always calling me or turning up at our door. In her eyes, his exigeance seemed a mirror of my own. Like father like son. I tried to explain things to her, to make her see that I wasn’t heading in the same direction, but could never find the right words. His presence compounded her doubts. Here was a totally different animal from the one I used to eulogise, a hollowed-out version of the man I used to know. I was sure something had happened to him; something surely connected to his secret life an ocean away; or it may simply have been the final emergence of the sadness he’d carried with him his whole life, the final victory of despair over hope. Either way, it felt to me like he’d left half of himself back in America.

I found this incredibly difficult to deal with, because, like that eminent American Thoreau, he’d previously always been a picture of self-reliance, which was one of the qualities I admired most in him. We’d never really had much money, but he could always find a way of getting by and had long relished the challenge of proving himself adept at multiple vocations, which became like one of our games for him. He’d snare jobs like a lepidopterist catches butterflies, applying a singular and egalitarian zeal to the world of work. Lawyer, waiter, movie producer, bin man; he genuinely didn’t care. A job is a job is a job. And so, despite the chaos and confusion, he eventually did what he knew best and found himself just the kind of bullshit gig he’d had a thousand times before. Selling advertising space to local businesses. Only this time it was different. The kids who manned the phones weren’t impressed by the discombobulated drunkard in their midst. In fact, they hated the fact that, even in such a state, he was better at their jobs than they were. And so, they steered clear, which was perhaps the first time he’d ever felt shunned; and was further proof that his native charm was deserting him.

And it was a shock for me too, to see this fragmented form of the man I’d loved fragment even further. Harder still to accept was the extent to which I was beginning to resent his presence in my life. After all those years of pining, I now just wanted him to disappear; and the further away from the Travelling Companion the better, for I still cleaved to the faintest hope as far as that was concerned; and I knew that having him around was only making things worse.

But there was nowhere for him to go. It was as if he’d somehow collapsed in on himself like a once-magnificent star, reduced to a fraction of its former glory. And as time passed, he came more and more to resemble a sort of phantom, a shade, both present and absent all at once. Behind his milky eyes resided an increasingly addled brain, dulled by his ever-more delinquent drinking, which had by this point exploded into total dependency. As he poured the booze down his throat, he simultaneously poured over the reasons why things had ended up this way. But repeated speculation only led him further down those barbed metaphysical paths along which so many incurable minds seem to stumble. He’d never held to the notion of predestination, but somehow all that had happened to him now seemed fated. And if he now found himself at the end of a long line of innumerable personal choices, he was almost certain he’d never actually made any of them. Decision making is as nothing when compared to just what happens. All decision really is madness.

Like most alcoholics, he quickly mastered the techniques of trading on the guilt, shame, and sympathy of those around him. This chiefly meant yours truly, and by association, the Travelling Companion, who was quickly using up the last vestiges of loyalty she had to me in reluctantly helping him. After he’d quit the awful sales job, he’d regularly turn up at the council offices where I worked to borrow money, but really to reassure himself that I was still there to offer tutelary support. I can still remember the pitying looks the receptionist gave me every time he came in. And I can still remember his face, which was permanently florid, a maze of scarlet capillaries bursting across his nose and cheeks; his patchy grey stubble; his thin pale lips; and his sad yellow eyes.

Meanwhile, I was growing increasingly vexed at having to bail him out, increasingly bereft at his collapse and the demands it was making on me, and becoming ever more disappointed with myself because of the guilt and anger that raged inside me. What kind of son was I if my father was nothing more than an inconvenience to me? What kind of human being was I if I rejected the very man who gave me life? And so, I’d lend him a tenner and agree to meet him later, just to be left alone; and the receptionist would repeat her rueful look, which I’d return with an awkward smile, before marching glumly back to my desk to stare into the digital void once more.

And most evenings he’d be there, a haunted and haunting presence, stood across the road from my office, waiting for me to finish work, weakly waving his hand to get my attention as I stepped out onto the street. After several more jobs of his own had come and gone, he found himself on the hunt again. This offered him a renewed, but hollow, kind of impetus, and so together we’d head down Magdalen Street, find a pub, and he’d take me through the vacancies he’d found that day, which would be weighed up and either discarded or used as the foundational narrative of a more hopeful future, predicated on a salary and set of circumstances that would never materialise. By this time, I knew in my heart that he was done, and that the ritual of the job search was now just mere reflex. To keep him happy, I’d pretend to go along with the charade while the booze kicked in, and the agony of it all was at least partially obliterated.

These were the eventide hours of respite; moments when we met on the level playing field of mutual intoxication and reminiscence. Botham’s Ashes, Boris Becker, the black-ball final. Glastonbury, Ghostbusters, the Great Storm. All the hours we’d shared together, the games we’d played, the walks we’d taken, the books we’d read, the conversations we’d had, and the people we’d known; all the laughs and the silliness and the joy. I guess this is what the experts would call ‘enabling’, but for me it was simply a temporary alleviation of the distress caused by seeing him in such a depleted state. Sure, they obscured the truth, and were almost certainly more for my benefit than his, but those drunken colloquies represented the dying embers of the deep affection we once shared and were all I had left to give him.

I remember one evening in particular – after the pub had called time – when I had to help him outside because he could hardly walk. We sat together on the kerb for ten minutes or more, while he tried to regain his composure. While there, I noticed the sole of his shoe had broken away from its upper, so that I could make out his sock-less foot inside, blackened slightly by grime from the street. And I remember feeling desperately sad. I resolved to buy him a new pair the following day, but this solicitous thought passed as quickly as it had formed because I was distracted by the sound of a rowdy group of people across the road. He was totally oblivious to the happy noises they made, whereas I was suddenly full of anger that I was sat there with him and not carousing with them, or with a similar group of people my own age. After a few more minutes, I helped him up and set him on his way, but by the time he’d steadied himself, we were alone, and where before there had been peels of careless young laughter bouncing off the buildings, there was now just the sorry slap of his semi-detached sole echoing along the street as he staggered away. I’ve never forgotten that sound.

It wasn’t long after this that the Travelling Companion’s sympathies for my father expired completely. She was rightfully resentful that all my emotional energies were being directed toward him, and that she was left looking out for this sad and sorry boy who offered her little but the outward manifestations of his own self-recrimination; who wanted everything from her but could give nothing in return. The offer of a teaching job in Brighton came at just the right time. Suddenly, she had an entirely reasonable way out of this mess.

Just a few weeks later, she finally gathered about her the threads of fortitude that she needed, spun them into the kind of summer dress designed to crush the soul or stall the objections of any erstwhile suitor, and took me deep into the Norfolk countryside, to a beautiful little churchyard we’d visited many times before; and there, on a perfectly delightful gingham blanket that she’d spread out on the grass between the graves, alongside some jam tarts and hot coffee, delivered the news that I expected but had tried my damnedest to deny for so long. I’m leaving.

With those words, the world, or my comprehension of it, seemed to dissolve. At that precise moment, I was sure that in the vast darkness of space, billions of celestial bodies had suddenly lost their powers of attraction, displaced by a new centripetal force which was simply the sight of her in that dress; a painful vision of the very thing that, from then on, I would be denied forever. And with that dismal knowledge, the broad East Anglian sky blackened, the sun, moon and stars snuffed out by some invisible hand, until every point of light, every piece of matter, every element, was extinguished, and nothing remained in the universe except the flower she wore above her right ear and the hollow ring of my cries cast into the void.

Within a few days she was gone, and suddenly the flat we’d shared seemed bare and entirely stripped of its personality, which had all been imparted by her anyway. Much like our relationship, I brought very little to the party; some old books, some old records, a few dirty socks scattered about the floor. The last face-to-face conversation we ever had was about a lamp. You want what? The lamp. The lamp? Yes. Which lamp? The one with the yellow shade. The lamp with the yellow shade? Yes. Is it still here? Yes. Of course, I knew the lamp she was talking about; it was the only one left. I’d never bought a lamp or anything domestically useful in my entire life. And so, I went and retrieved said lamp with said yellow shade from the bedroom, where it had already become an effigy of sorts, a vessel that somehow still connected us; and thus, for me, a last beacon of hope.

As I handed it over, I remember thinking I’d never, in all our time together, seen her look more beautiful than at that precise moment – her convex fingernails, her mole, the scar on her chin, all exquisite in their imperfect perfection. Then, almost as an instinctive response to this thought, my other hand reached out to touch hers in one final effort at rapprochement; but she recoiled and looked at me with her dark, chastening eyes, full of pity and terror; and I knew that this was the last time I’d ever feel her skin on my skin and that what had just happened was now nothing more than an act of trespass. I apologised. She took the lamp, said goodbye, and walked out. I closed the door behind her and that, as they say, was that.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.