Kestrels
A requiem for my father. True, but not bitter.
“And we all have our faults,” the vicar smiles. “I believe that God is more interested in the good in us, than the bad.” I don’t believe in god at all, but I know you were a good man, really. It’s just that I want to make sure I become a better man than you. God or no god.
And amongst the photo albums I find one I made when I was seven or eight, with the plastic camera I got for my birthday. I discard it initially, knowing that back then my photography skills left much to be desired, so I was unlikely to find in there the dignified portrait I was looking for. But curiosity got the better of me and I flipped through the dog-eared album — and there is a particularly un-dignified photograph of you that sort of knocks the breath out of me. I don’t remember taking it, but I can sort of conjure a memory that won’t be far from the truth. You are standing in our back room and I will have leapt in front of you, camera already raised, face obscured but for a toothy grin. “Smile!”, I will have demanded; and you pulled a silly face, preserved forever on Kodak paper. It will have made me laugh then. It reminds me that you liked to make me laugh once.
And in the photo we do finally choose it is Christmas, a few years before we were born, and you are holding a beer mug and waving. It is entirely appropriate and it is entirely inappropriate. Life’s funny like that, isn’t it?
And it is 2002 and you’ve come on a school trip to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We’re eating our lunch in a hall down the road, and you have a coffee in a can which heats itself up when you open the ringpull. This impresses you. I don’t know why I remember that.
And we’re in Wales and you’ve caught an eel. On the whole I want nothing to do with this, though I peer curiously into the bag where it is writhing furiously. In the sink in the chalet — we used to have baths in that sink, I loved that— you slice the eel into chunks. It’s still moving, even as you cut it up. We talk about this the last time I see you and, by coincidence, Lorna recalls the same story the day after you die. Funny.
And the night before you die the most spectacular storm is rolling across the sky, making the house tremble. The ink-black clouds are lighting up like a flash of day in a dangerous night — once, I swear, they glowed red. Can lightning be red? You would know. If you didn’t, you would make it up. Jagged white storm-fingers reach across the sky as if searching for you, and we are expecting a phone call, the phone call, soon. This is a tempestuous night. And as I watch the sky, I am vividly aware of you asleep in your hospital bed. The storm peals around you, the lightning fingering through your painful dreams (what are you dreaming while the sky falls around you?) and illuminating the murmuring ward. But you aren’t aware of any of this, not any more. This is your last storm, and you sleep right through it.
And these are the times we were the closest. There were nights when we would sit together, alone, and you would nurture my eclectic fascinations. Music was a mainstay: you got me singing ‘Walking In The Air’ a few times, although I think you — a former choirboy — feigned how moved you were; I have never been a natural singer. I recall, too, putting on the video of Fantasia and standing on a chair, pretending to conduct the ‘Tocatta and Fugue in Dm’ while you watched. Other times we would sit in the garden and look at the stars, and talk about black holes and constellations. Sometimes I would wake up before six and walk to your car with you before you left for work, and you would point out Venus or Mars for me in the half-dark sky.
And one time I couldn’t sleep and I asked you to come into my bed with me and you said, “count to a hundred and I’ll be there.” I counted to six hundred then gave up.
And it is 2007 and this is the worst thing you have ever done to me. It’s my sixteenth birthday. I’ve had dinner out with my boyfriend then we’re all at home in the front room together, my head resting happily on his knee, my brother throwing wrapping paper at my sister. When you come home, you linger in the doorway for a moment then leave immediately; in the back room we hear the familiar hiss of the first can opening and the TV turned on. Later, when everyone is gone, I listen at the top of the stairs and — although I remember the whole night well — a few phrases are burned into my memory, word for word. “I come home, his head in a boy’s lap,” and, “in my day, you’d go to prison” — to which Mum retorts, “so are you saying he should be in prison?” And after a pause you say, without a great deal of certainty I admit, though you say it anyway: “yes”.
And I don’t really think you meant that in your heart, not now, but you said it. I was sixteen and you said it. And although I forgive you now, I couldn’t then, and I am proud of myself for that.
And it is Christmas Day, four years ago I think, and you are standing outside the King’s Arms smoking a cigarette. I haven’t seen you for exactly two years. I see you before you see me, and I can’t believe how old you look. You’re sixty, but truly, you look about eighty. You look so small and dilapidated. When I greet you, I pull out of my inside pocket an unframed photograph of me receiving my degree, at the graduation ceremony I did not invite you to. You’re taken aback as I give it to you, and you thank me, and there are tears in your eyes.
And when I was eleven, I entered a short story I’d written into a local competition. You were normally supportive of my writing, in fact maybe it was because you were so supportive that you were so angry; because I am submitting the story by email rather than posting it (or something like that, I don’t really remember) and you have it in your head that this is against the rules. “Are you fucking retarded, boy?” you roar, shattering a glass in the sink before storming off. And in the competition I win a special commendation, and in my head I think “fuck you”.
And when I was twelve we were taken on a school trip to see a children’s Shakespeare company, and we have to write a review of the show. I write a scathing review and, as well as turning it in as homework, I inexplicably send it to the theatre company. A few days later I am summoned to the headmaster’s office, who takes particular umbrage at the little graphic I included of the company’s logo in a bin. At home, I tell you about this and you laugh your head off.
And I bump into you aged seventeen outside The Bull, where five years earlier you left Mum’s fortieth birthday party so drunk that you tripped over the kerb and went face-first into a lamppost; a rare occasion where your drunkenness was funny; and you ask me how sixth form is (I never went) and whether I have a girlfriend. I am so wearily unsurprised by your lack of interest in my life that I do not bother to correct you.
And on your death certificate it says “decompensated liver disease”, but Lorna and I joke that it might as well say “Kestrel Super Lager”. Those black and gold cans were everywhere when we moved out of Tickford Street, crushed behind furniture and full of rainwater in the garden. As we pore over photo albums there is picture after picture of one or the other of us playing with one of your beer cans — and so, as we adjust to your sudden departure, the Kestrel jokes persist. And now it is moments before your funeral and they have summoned us to the hearse to follow the coffin in. And now, exactly now, a kestrel descends from the sky and soars over the war memorial outside the church, and none of us can believe what has just happened.
And there is not that much difference, really, between someone who is alive and someone who has just died: they look exactly the same. So when the blue plastic curtains were hastily drawn around us and the doctor examined you and said “so, yes, he has passed,” it was not a self-evident fact. And quickly enough we are out of the hospital and preparing your funeral, but your being dead remains the mere professional opinion of the doctor and the coroner and the funeral director — unverified by my own eyes. So the day before they bury you (who knew that a six-foot hole would be so very deep?) I am your last and only visitor between this world and the next, and the sight of you strikes me like a stone. You are dead.
And this is not the beginning of some consistent state of knowing. It is a series of recurring realisations. It is like standing on top of a huge gorge knowing, objectively, how extraordinarily deep it is and yet, every time you look down, it plunges further than you ever could or will imagine.
And you’re down there somewhere, and every now and then I will reach down with my long arms, and graze my fingers along the shadow of you.
C.C.A. — 6.3.1953–19.7.2017
