41-42 Years Old

The photo of him in my wallet.











Fathers keep photographs of their children in their wallets. Mothers, of course, do the same. I don’t have a photograph of you in my wallet. I don’t have a wallet. You do not have a photographable face.

There is a picture of an old ventilation structure on Brighton’s east pier that reminds me of you. A pipey thing, hinting at a face. Observed closely it’s clear that it is slowly turning into dust. If it could talk, it would say:

‘Don’t look at me. I don’t know. Hurhurhur.’

We’re sitting at an atmosphereless table. I’ve been trying to work out how to tell you about my son.

“He has arrived!” I consider shouting “He is flesh and blood and I can see his face at all times!”

Even now, as I stare at you and imagine ventilating pipes in Brighton I can also see him:

His real human face.
His starting-point blue eyes, shaped like almonds.

“Are you having a starter?” I say

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder what the soup is”

“It’s Asparagus” you say. You've read it on the blackboard. For some reason you reading the specials black-board in this fucking place is the absolute limit. I stand up. I scream:

“I am a father in real life now. I don’t have to keep coming here.” Then someone coughs and you say:

“Do you think there’s croutons?”

Looking back at our life together, none of it seems that realistic. The park. The smell of grass when you were first born. These things were just guess work.

Most notable difference is that my heart was ok then. Now, thanks to my son, my heart is idiotically deformed. It is a fat lip.

Also the world was ok then. It now ends and starts again about every 2 or 3 minutes. It goes ‘Uh’

“I failed you.” I say “I failed you and you deserved better.”

I remember the old Chinese One Child Policy. Does that still happen? All those notional babies. They must exist somewhere.

“Maybe you’re Chinese after all.” I say.

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know. Hurhurhur”

‘Uh’ goes the world

‘B’DOIYOIYOING!!!!!!!’ my fat-lip-heart.

40-41 Years Old

Long time since I wrote about you. Been in touch, but calls interrupted by the doorbell or an alarm or something. Lies. I am expecting a real baby. Less than a month now. Already all conversations are full of him.

I feel guilty because he makes me feel like a true father, but you never could.

You are in your forties already, and are contemptible at times. I can see you clearly, with different coloured eyes each time, hiding in a bedroom somewhere fondling some item of a man’s clothes and staring at your withered thumbs. The skin around the nails is oily, lined and thin.

Within you is an adrenal gland, releasing panic into you in small doses as you think about how deep and long your well of solitude is.

Your biology isn’t very realistic. I feel terrible for that.

The item of clothing is cream. It gives you a terrible sick feeling, first experienced at school. You remember school? Drawing pictures for me, your work output shamed me.

Your whole life has been devoted to making me feel either good or bad about myself. Is this how my real son’s life will be too? Probably a bit more complicated.

Why can’t you tell me how responsible I ought to be? And why aren’t I able to see anything serious happening. In an emergency, how does my constantly thinking about you and your thumbs, your elbow, your probably Chinese heritage, prepare me? I am not prepared.

The material of the man’s clothing is pale cream, it is thick, strongly woven. Good quality but old. Your nails are narrow and high-arched. They aren’t long. Downstairs in your fridge is another can of diet fizzy pop, waiting to break one of the nails.

My God. Why didn’t we do something better? Anything. We could have been out flying jets. We could have been lions for a day, roaring on the plains of Africa.

I try hard to make you suddenly extraordinary. You can breathe fire.

You breathe fire into the pale cream trousers in your hands and feel even further away from the rest of the world than before.

The fire alarm is going off.

39-40 Years Old

I’m trying to see things differently. All this year I have had the perspective of my daughter’s elbow. It is 40 years old, like the rest of her. I have used the elbow to help her this year.

There was a time when she almost fell but I, the elbow, leapt towards a photocopier to keep her up-right. There was a time when she may have missed her tube, and so I, the elbow, knocked aside someone else to get her through the closing doors.

The elbow that I am sometimes betrays her instinct for kindness. I have bent back out of waving. I have reached out to take the last thing on the shelf. Savagely I have won at tennis.

In my year as one of her elbows I have learnt how ruthlessly I love her. Often I have had to hold tissues to her streaming eyes in the toilets at work because they won’ talk to her. To hold too tightly her son.

But she is successful. The tube she caught took her to a meeting. She was devastating in the meeting, she looked confident with her elbow occasionally on the desk, leaning in, banging the wood. When I was her elbow, she could cut through all red-tape. When I was her elbow she was decisive.

There were no tasks we could not complete faster together than when I was just her normal human father. She could clear tables, lift her son, break into the house when locked out. And yet

Out here on her elbow I don’t notice much how happy she has been. I can’t tell that she remembers when we first went over a bridge, and we stopped to look at the water and she felt so thirsty suddenly. She suddenly felt unsure of which way to go.

She can never tell her elbow that on that bridge was the first time she had the idea that she could jump into the water and drown herself.

My daughter is forty and most of her body doesn’t understand her.
My daughter is forty and I feel so many miles away, even though I am always by her side. As an elbow.

38- 39 Years Old

Thrift. We saved up all year and bought a car. Everyone chipped in even though everyone of us is poor again.

The whole family in one house again. The house is larger than the one before, but falling apart. We can’t go anywhere on the oceanic carpet without bumping into each other and then we smile and say

“Good morning!” and everything seems to be ok. As if a big kind family in a house is the most acceptable thing in the world.

As if being happy is the most acceptable thing in the world.

As if being together and not wishing we could go somewhere else and sit silently alone were the most natural and acceptable thing in the world.

Yes, and we are all recycling too. We never get in a plane.

You drive the car in the style of a lady in a Hitchcock film. You drive the car as though you’re driving towards the unknown sweat of adventure and very probably murder and anonymity and the majestic American landscape. The colour of your eyes burns through the lens and people watching go blind and insane with desire for you and the life you drive towards. Even when you’re off to the shops.

Fronde, your son and my grandson he still makes an effort to talk his old Grandad. He talks to his MawMaw too. MawMaw is what he calls your mother. The other day he said:

“Maw Maw – I’m being picked on at school. It’s terrible, those nasty boys. Grandad – I’m worried they will never change until the apocalypse.”

And then he hopped off the lap he was on and dashed into the kitchen where he found you stirring a cup of tea. You were stirring a cup of tea and your cold knuckles brushed his cheek. And you suddenly didn’t blame me for your existence. You suddenly didn’t blame me for his existence or the existence of pain and ingratitude and loss. Because we bought you a nice car, and we all chipped in, and there is tea in the cupboard.

There is tea and biscuits in the cupboard as though it’s the most normal, acceptable thing in the world.

37-38 Years Old

I am stopping everything for a 'year'. Shutting down the imaginary world where I have a daughter and she gets older by one year for every 365 words I write. I need to fix a few things. Everyone in the imaginary world will lose a year. Only I will know.

I have deleted my imagination. In its place is an 'Object'. It serves as a bookmark to remind me there is supposed to be something there. I am alone with my object. Everything feels nice.

The Object is a shape. I regard the shape; I pick it up and carry it around with me. First under my right arm, next under my left; as though The Object is some important document.

Now the Object is a small oblong of wood. Inexpensive, ugly, a cast off from something horribly clunky. I give it a good shake. I shout at it, shout right into the grain. I toss it high into the air and don't catch it. I listen to the sad knockknockknock music of the landing. I plug it into the internet and download everything in Wikipedia into it. All the words in Wikipedia are now written into the fibre of the wooden object. It grows ugly with the shape of the letters which teem like crude oil inside.

"Now you're a data stick!" I really don't know why I say these things.

I immediately regret giving The Object so much powerful knowledge. It copies itself a billion times. To stop it multiplying further I turn it into stone. The Object becomes a vast landscape, a stone desert and every rock I stand on knows the secret of my soul.

In the air is a song:

"We have lost the mountain.
We have burnt the gorge."

Panicked, I think of something pretty and the desert is devoured by flowers. Poppies, cornflowers, bluebells bloom. With the next wind the song on the air sounds much happier:

"Valley and glenn. Valley and glenn"

Every single word from wikipedia floats harmlessly away as pollen. All copies delete.

The Object is now a bouquet, which I hold, standing still like a clown.

"hu-rrah!" I say this to no one.

36-37 Years Old

Today I found my father's blog.

If you can believe this, someone at work showed it to me.

"May! Doesn't this guy sound like your old man?"

All my friend's at work know about you Dad. I have to tell someone. I'm sorry.

I'm glad Dad has let me have a go at this. I am going to set the record straight about a couple of things.

Firstly, my son. He has been extremely unwell. His colon became twisted a couple of years ago (we don't know how this happened) if it hadn't righted itself septicemia would have killed him within a couple of days. We attend clinic after clinic to run painful (for all of us) tests to find signs it might happen again. I have never, would never allow my son to undergo cosmetic surgery of any kind. My whole family enjoy a balanced, sustainable organic diet.

Some things about my father:

1. Calls in the middle of the night, out of his mind on rum. Whistles at me. Laughs at nothing.

2. Talks like a baby whenever he is left alone with my husband.

3. Showed my son how to tie a noose.

4. Is racist towards the Chinese.

5. Cannot accept love.

To demonstrate what my father calls acceptable parental communication, here is a letter I received aged 22. When I received it it also contained a check for fifteen thousand pounds, which I have never cashed. Which would certainly have bounced. I have a tattoo of my husband's name in Chinese letters on my wedding finger:

Hello!!!!

In the corner of he room is a box. In the box, a drawer. In the drawer, a letter. On the letter, my name. That is all that really exists of me. My name is father. My name is Father tattooed on a letter in Chinese characters. I am in the drawer tattooed on paper in ink in Chinese letters, the word Father. Helloooooo!!!!

There I am allright. I love you.

You don't even exist

REALLY big KISS

All year I have been pretending to be my own daughter, all year covered in tattoos. the Chinese symbols for

Here I am. Your Father.

35-36 Years Old

It is exactly half way through my daughter's life, for a treat I am not going to be her father today, but will reveal myself as the God of infinite creation which in reality I am. I created her world as a zone of success, populated with people I would love and who would love me. A world in which all my faltering plans for contentment can exist. Specifically the dream of being a good father.

"Where shall we go to eat? We can go anywhere."

She is made of my imagination. She can say absolutely anything at this point, there are no rules.

"Oh, let's go to ASK. At least you know what you're getting."

Knowing what you're getting is extremely important to my daughter. We're in ASK, she has ordered for me the Gnocchi in Gorgonzola Sauce. We are sharing a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

Reading the menu:

"oh WOW! They've got dough balls!" So happy it breaks my heart, she says, "but I thought you could only get those in Pizza Express!"

I am the God of infinite creation.

Later on I am swallowing gnocchi and pinot and going quietly blind. My daughter is grinning still, not just because of dough balls, but also because Fronde, my grandson, has been given hormones and surgery against all sound medical advice to enlarge his six year old penis. He swings it before him now as he leads them around town, pythoning into MacDonalds and the shopping arcade.

Suddenly bored and furious with power, I make ASK vanish; we are floating in space! I scream into the face of my 33.5 year-old child:

"We are floating in space! What do you think of that, you fatuous bore! hahahaha!"

In space, there is not much light. There is a bubble around us to allow us to breath, the steam from my gnocchi and her peppery sauce has already created condensation. My daughter wants to complain. She thinks there has been a power cut. Defeated I return us to ASK. I burst the bubble.

"Let's do this more often." Smiles while she pays. On the way home her father, God of infinite power, makes every traffic light green.