I love you, Tel-Boy

Breaking the curse

My Dad died five years ago, a week before Christmas, and I haven’t laughed since.

I mean, I laugh all the time. But not the way he made me. I can hear an off-key in my laughter now, that wasn’t there before: there’s a rattle and chime, like a piano that isn’t quite in tune, or I’m slamming the keys too hard, or something. The music is muddied by the echo.

If you force yourself to laugh, you can hear a bark in it. That’s when you know you’re pushing to find that sweet spot where the laughter takes you over, and you become helpless with it. Jelly. You can’t get there with effort or will; it’s a natural happening, like surf smashing into you, and knocking you to the sand. It’s collapse, and Dad hit that mark every time we talked. Which was nearly every day.

Dad was an ordinary, brilliant man. A gifted plumber, drainlayer, gasfitter. He had good hands and built our house himself - a half-finished, nineties, contemporary home on poles, suddenly on the market when the couple who were building it broke up. For years we lived among plasterwork and looped cables, while he toiled his twelve-hour shifts at a petrochemical plant and constructed the damn thing on his days off.

He could do everything but the electrics, on account of being colourblind. Ringing up and paying for trades now is hard for my mum and me: it just feels wrong. Dad could handle anything.

He could mimic any accent, and anybody - his grandest clients when he was a toolbox plumber in Fulham and Chelsea, his hairy-arse mates, and any character at any site he ever worked, from the foreman to the dinner-lady to the apprentices. He never punched down by mimicking only their accent. He’d seize on something else - their pessimism, say, or their indecision, or their wheeling-dealing in stolen copper or British Rail tickets, and mimic that. He’d add a bit of physical comedy as well - a flounce, a silly walk, a jive. Collapse.

He went into plumbing after hating his few months at the foundry where my grandfather worked, but leaving school at fifteen might easily have left him poorly informed. But Dad read all the time - he was autodidactic. He inhaled news. There was nothing he couldn’t tell you about twentieth-century military conflict. I used to ring him up during the Gulf War and ask him to explain it to me. I wish I could ring him now and ask him about Syria, Gaza, Ukraine. His would have been a long, considered view, and would definitely have influenced mine.

There was plenty he wouldn’t talk about - his parents, mostly. I think the guilt of emigrating took its toll. He was barely thirty when we drove away from Nana and Grandad at their terrace on Montagu Road, Peterborough, bound for New Zealand; my grandfather apparently said, “Well, we’ll never see them again,” when our car vanished around the corner. He was right. When Grandad died suddenly barely two years later, Dad walked into the paddocks behind our place on the low flank of Taranaki Maunga, and my mum told me to let him go.

But we talked about everything else. He knew everything worth knowing about me.

He’s still the only Favourite contact in my phone.

Dad was chronically unwell for several years, and you adapt. Late in his life, we didn’t talk about the inevitable, because it was inevitable. His was a degenerative disease. He would decline. But I’d been worried since I was a little girl that he would get sick and die; I was used to the low-hum anxiety. “Are you going to die, Dad?” I’d ask, and he’d squeeze me and say, “Not until I’m 107.” The specificity of that was comforting. Also, Dad knew everything, so it made sense he would know this.

My kids didn’t notice their Grandad never left the house or took them anywhere - he sang and told them silly stories and we ate together, and it was enough. They accepted it when our weekend plans changed and we couldn’t visit Grandad today, because Grandad was tired. My Dad was no age for this - 67, 68, 69. His older neighbours were out walking their dogs, cycling around the estuary, driving campervans around the country. They could go to the beach with their grandkids; they could make it to the mailbox.

But even though Dad couldn’t do these things, we were having such a great time. He loved watching birds. He followed the news, talked lengthily to me about that, the kids, my column each week; he listened to my unhinged book reviews on the radio and was always the first to call when I came off air. He enjoyed watching the seasons change, and every sunset. He kept himself smart, and the kitchen clean. He could do odd jobs and make the usual decisions. He loved my mother; he insisted she go overseas to visit our family.

“Where’s his quality of life?” a consultant said to me once in a hospital corridor, and I remember thinking, what a failure of imagination you have.

Dad’s parents and others in the family had all died young, of diseases common to working people. I needed Dad to make it to 70, to break some kind of curse, and he did.

I can’t talk about being the only one there the night of his catastrophic decline. I can’t talk about what he told the paramedic about the Do Not Resuscitate order in his notes. I can’t see an ambulance now without remembering my last ride with him to the ICU, or the next few days we spent together in a bay with discreet curtains, or having to call my Mum in Germany to tell her, very gently, that she needed to come home.

Everyone misses their late parents and mourns in different ways. I’m sure there are healthier ways than mine to grieve. I’m not looking to win the Dead Dad Olympics; I’ve accepted he’s gone, although that in itself took years. I walk into my mum’s house now and no longer call “Hey, Dad.” I’ve stopped imagining his outline in his favourite kitchen chair. I can sit at his place at the table. I can stand in front of his tool bench in the garage and not feel sick. There are whole days, now, where he doesn’t even cross my mind.

That’s progress. You learn to live under a low-watt bulb.

This week, my newly teenage daughter went to high school for the first time. At bedtime we were lolling around while she told me what they did in each lesson, including PE.

“We played Duck, Duck, Goose,” Maddie said, and I interrupted, “What’s that?”

“You’ve never played Duck, Duck, Goose?” She was astounded. She called to her brother. “Hey, George! Girlie over here [that would be me; that would not be a compliment] doesn’t know what Duck, Duck, Goose is!”

George burst in and expressed astonishment. “We just didn’t play it at my school,” I said.

“Back in your day,” observed Maddie. “What did you do? Play with the old hoop and stick?”

The words hung there for a moment: The ol’ hoop and stick.

And then it came. That first wave of a laugh you didn’t expect. The giggles you can’t control. The shaking. The infectiousness of it - you’re holding her, she’s holding you. The dog looking at both of you, oddly. Gasping for the next breath and for the first time in ages, really wanting to live.

Collapse.

Terence McFall

4 May 1949 - 22 December 2019