The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

that I know what I am doing.

      On the table in the living room is a card with ‘Emergency Mental Health Support Line’ printed on it in red letters. I dial the number. The man at the end of the line introduces himself as Joe. It isn’t until I tell him that my dad has been locked in a toilet for two hours that I realise how panicked I am; I hear it lacerate my voice. Often, in the present tense of a shocking situation, we can only feel numbness; it is in the aftermath that emotions take shape.

      Joe is clearly a little confused by what I am telling him. In his line of work, the story of a man who is ill and locked in a toilet nearly always follows the same plot arc: he is making a threat; he intends to take his life. But my father’s condition is so odd and rare and complex – one that doctors have not come across in decades – that I’m not able to explain it on the phone. I just want someone to tell me what to do, even if they are ignorant of the context. I want instruction; I want a friend.

      Joe tells me: stay on the phone, go back upstairs and speak to him. ‘Tell your dad he has to come out.’

      Even though I’ve already tried this, I obey.

      ‘Dad, you have to come out,’ I recite.

      Silence.

      ‘You have to put some force into the words,’ Joe tells me, and I suppress an urge to laugh hysterically; I feel as though I am auditioning for a part. ‘You need to say it with authority.’

      I bellow the words. No reply. My dad has stopped speaking altogether: this is a bad sign. The echo of my voice makes it seem as though the tiny room has expanded into a vast space. I picture my dad sitting on the toilet in a state of zombie suspension. Or, perhaps he is standing on the seat, wobbling precariously – a rotund seventy-two-year-old, trying to escape through the toilet window.

      ‘I don’t think he can help it,’ I say. ‘I think it’s probably got out of control now.’

      ‘You’re doing very well,’ says Joe.

      Joe tells me to ring for an ambulance. And then he tells me he is sitting in his office and he’ll be there all night. I can phone him any time. I can update him and let him know my dad is safe. And, if I feel afraid, I can just call and talk to him. In that instant, I fall in love with Joe. It is something that has happened a few times over the past six months. Someone shines a light into the dark storm of crisis and we bond in the intimacy of that moment; it feels as though we have known each other all our lives, even though we are strangers.

      Why did Edward choose the toilet? Does he have a weapon? Do you think he is suicidal? These were the questions the woman fired at me when I called 999.

      I answered: don’t know, no, and no.

      They wanted his rejection of life to be defined as an absolute; but it was far more shadowy and ambiguous. The woman told me that the ambulance would take an hour to come. They were having a busy evening. I sensed a subtext in her tone: austerity and cuts were the cause.

      I switched off the phone. The streaky white door stared back at me.

      I called out to my dad once more. Once more, there was no reply.

      For the third time that day I telephoned my younger brother Stefan. He worked long hours in the City, but I figured he’d be home by now; his flat was just a few streets away from Dad’s. When he appeared on the doorstep ten minutes later, he was carrying a half-drunk bottle of beer. Stefan was in his mid-thirties. Our interactions usually followed the same pattern: we took the piss out of each other as though we were kids again. But this time we were both panicked.

      The hour stretched out before us. We argued about solutions. In the end, we surfed the net and picked out a locksmith. Not available, we kept being told. It’s a Friday night, we don’t have anyone …

      While I kept calling out to Dad, Stefan found a screwdriver in a toolbox under the stairs and slotted it between door and lock, trying to force it open. A presence by my legs made me jump: my cat Leo was purring and gazing up at me quizzically. Most of the time, she possessed the haughty, wilful air of a cat who regarded her owners as her butlers. In a crisis, however, she seemed to soften and do her best to offer purry support, to play her role as part of the family. I knelt down and stroked her, watching anxiously as my brother jiggled, flecks of white paint flying to the floor. The lock, which my father had screwed on himself, began to rattle as it bent away from the door. And then – snap! – the door swung open and I saw a look of shock on my brother’s face.

      Dad was wearing his pyjamas. He was standing upright, facing us, but he couldn’t see us. His body was locked into a strange repetitive loop, like a machine programmed to do an assembly-line task: his left arm would raise, jerk above his head, and then his right foot would lift. His scarlet face was screwed into a fist of agony.

      I flew to him. Negotiating past the jerks, I gave him a hug. I whispered in his ear that he would be alright. He was unable to reply. It was as though his mind and body had said goodbye to each other. His body was doing its own strange thing and he was trapped in it, helpless. I tried to take his arm and smooth out the spasms, but it ignored me and carried on. Stepping back, I thought I should let him be: to interfere any more might hurt him.

      The doorbell shrilled. The ambulance – early? But when I hurtled down to open the door, I found a locksmith waiting, ready to assist. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, giving him the bundle of notes my brother had passed me.

      When the ambulance did arrive, the crew were wonderful. Like Joe, they exuded warmth; they genuinely cared. My father’s state baffled them. They fired questions at us, and we did our best to explain his tendency to slip into catatonia. In the end they moved Dad into a wheelchair and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they eyed the stairs nervously. My father is five feet-five and weighs sixteen stone. One of my friends once remarked to me that he looked like Father Christmas, with white hair and a benign, round face that people found instantly endearing. How to carry him? They hummed and hawed. They brought up a transfer chair, a bit like a sack barrow, and strapped him in. The final turn of the stairs was tricky. Eventually, they got him to the bottom. They looked as though they wanted to cheer.

      The house felt lonely and empty after they had gone; night rain was freckling the windows. I pictured my dad and Stefan at the hospital, stuck in some side room in A&E. My brother would be there until at least two or three in the morning, whilst nurses spirited in and out doing tests, asking questions.

      In the living room, I gazed over at Dad’s armchair, tucked away in the corner. The seat was hollowed from use and the arm on which he rested his head to nap, curled up like a big cat, was frayed to strings of cloth. Next to the chair was a wooden cabinet on which he’d placed a pair of chunky black reading glasses, his newspaper tokens, his Bible, a list of things to do and to remember, and his pocket diary. I picked it up and opened the front page. It contained that line that all diaries have and few people ever bother to fill out: who to contact in the event of an emergency. Perhaps those who do are the ones who are vulnerable, aware of the hairline cracks in their lives, the threat of fracture. I was touched to see my name and number written on this line, and then felt shadowed by fear: I thought of my father in the toilet and imagined what might have been if I hadn’t been there.

      I wandered into the spare bedroom. Once this room had belonged to my mother. Her presence was there still, in the pleats and shadows. A basket of make-up at the back of the desk gathering a thick layer of dust. Her dressing gown, a long leopard-print affair, hung on the back of the door. On her bookshelf sat a row of spine-cracked favourites: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a textbook about Freud, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha. Today, 19 February – the day Dad had spent locked in the toilet – was her birthday. She would have been seventy.

      I grew up in this house, the neat semi in a cul-de-sac in a quiet town in Surrey, and stayed here until my university years. Mum was well then, and Dad – Dad was still stable. After graduating I headed north to a little place between Manchester and Liverpool called Appley Bridge, where I rented a room and wrote.

      I had expected to reach my late thirties and suddenly metamorphose into Someone Sensible who