The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

I was still self-employed, a writer with a bank balance that hovered perilously close to the line; I had no family of my own; I was uncertain whether I wanted to be a mother. I was, however, in a long-term relationship. My boyfriend, Thom, was eight years younger than me, a book reviewer and a fellow book-lover. Our favourite thing was to wander around second-hand bookshops, rummaging the shelves for gems and stealing kisses in dusty corners. He lived in the north too, anchored there by a young daughter from a previous relationship.

      At New Year, Thom had come down to stay with me. We’d had a party in the dining room, pushing the table to one side, taking it in turns to pick tracks on YouTube. His dancing style involved swaying on the spot, whereas I resembled a manic hare. He’d stayed in the spare room, and we’d made love quietly, self-conscious as teenagers, giggling and stopping halfway through if we heard my dad’s heavy footfall on the stairs as he got up for a midnight snack. Thom had infused the house with energy, and when he’d left it had slumped back to flatness.

      Since September 2015 I’d been living out of a suitcase, zigzagging between north and south, boyfriend and father, happiness and duty, pleasure and sacrifice. I’d grown out of the habit of hanging my clothes up. I washed them, folded them, put them back in the suitcase, which served as an improvised chest of drawers. For Valentine’s Day, Thom and I had celebrated with a meal out in Manchester. I’d been looking forward to another trip to his place in Buxton, a town of grand green hills, ancient buildings, icy winds and clear spring water. Now it would have to be cancelled.

      Thom would be sympathetic, I assured myself. But I felt the itch of worry: I was seeing less and less of him. I recalled how hard it had been last September, when Dad had fallen sick, and those strange catatonic symptoms had first made themselves known. He’d been taken to A&E at St Helier hospital, then transferred to a geriatric wing in Tolworth Hospital. During those autumn months when he’d been hospitalised, life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and I was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I’d found that nearly every email I sent began with the words I’m sorry for the slow reply, that I’d begged for work deadlines to be pushed into the week after next, and set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. That night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would.

       2

      My first memory: I am four years old and sitting in our cosy living room with my parents and older brother, John. Our faces are reflected and superimposed onto the TV set as we watch The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. One family sitting in suburbia looking at another version of suburbia. Suburbs were once a place for the poor, for those who overflowed from the cities. Then, as the rural poor migrated to industrial cities, the wealthy middle classes moved out to the fringes. Gradually, suburbia came to be associated with neat gardens, neighbours twitching at curtains, 2.4 children and nine-to-five jobs. In the late seventies, Reginald Perrin satirised the sheer boredom of it all; Reggie seeks to escape it by faking his suicide, leaving his clothes and belongings on a beach to be erased by the waves.

      Suburbia was a place my parents had escaped to. My mother, Glesney, had grown up on a council estate in south London, at the Elephant and Castle; my father, Edward, came from a large working-class family in New Malden. My mum had been denied a good education by a chauvinistic father who said that university was a waste of time for a woman; my dad’s education had been meagre, but he managed to get a good job at the local factory. When they’d bought our semi-detached house, the estate agent had looked bewildered and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to buy this place?’ It was a house on a fine street, but inside it was a mess of loose wires, crumbling brickwork and walls painted in those lurid colours that were inexplicably fashionable in the sixties, avocado green and bright orange. The last owner had been an old man whose eccentricity had intensified into madness. His fingerprints were still on the walls, black smudges of wrinkled digits that looked eerie in their muddling of the elderly and the juvenile. There seems something prophetic about them now. My parents were thrilled, however. They had nearly achieved social mobility. The scene we watched together on TV was aspirational, for Perrin’s house showed how our place might look, his middle-class boredom the luxury my parents longed for.

      Another memory: I am gazing out of the window and see a man walking up and down naked. His clothes have been discarded, like Perrin’s on the beach, trailing down the hallway. (Or have the two merged together in my mind?) My mother takes me, my older brother and my new baby brother to visit Dad. The place he is staying in is a large, white building, with cranky radiators that gurgle. People are wandering about as though they are in the middle of some imaginary maze, seeking the centre. One woman has the cackling laugh of a fairy-tale witch. My dad has always been a playful parent, indulging me in my favourite game whereby he would grab me by the ankles, swing me like a pendulum and cry, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock!’ as my long hair brushed his shoes. This new version of my father is sitting in a chair in his green dressing gown. When he finally raises his eyes to look at us, I see sadness fossilised in his pupils.

      With my dad missing, the planned transformation of our home failed. The house sighed and slumped its shoulders, the paint peeled, and the fingerprints remained on the walls.

      I never asked my mum what had happened to my father. I felt too afraid, and perhaps she felt afraid of how she might frame that story. She looked tired and had a habit of biting her nails to the pink. She had started to take on various cleaning jobs. On one occasion a letter landed on the mat that brought her to tears. The local tax inspector had demanded a meeting, unable to believe that we lived off so little. My brother and I were taken along with her to see him. The man was kind, but he looked shocked when he asked, ‘Don’t you ever go out to dinner?’ and she replied in the negative.

      Dad returned home some months later. But he did not go back to work and, a year on, he disappeared again. Once more, he became a mysterious figure in a dressing gown in that strange white institution that seemed to me a place somewhere between a hospital and a school for the anguished.

      By now, I had started primary school, which made me conscious that I was different from the other kids. They were dropped off at school by parents who had swish cars; they lived in comfortable houses; their clothes were crisp and their shoes shiny. My shoes had holes in and when I changed out of uniform into my day clothes, they had a whiff of oddity about them. Someone once asked me why I wore clothes from jumble sales. Dressed in a ragged ra-ra skirt of mauve and lemon layers, which clashed with an off-white Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I wasn’t entirely sure how to reply.

      The solution arrived with books. My mother had learnt the art of living off very little. She returned from jumble sales with bags bursting with tatty, dog-eared novels which cost a penny each. I read at night in bed and in the garden in the summer days, lying on the overgrown daisy-studded lawn and under the shade of a lilac bush, before breakfast and during breaks at primary school. Everything was wrong in theory. But in practice I was happy. I had Enid Blyton, Anne Digby, E. S. Nesbitt and Roald Dahl. In Matilda, Dahl describes how his heroine escapes from the unhappiness of her childhood through a visit to the local library:

      ‘The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.’

      I couldn’t necessarily look to my parents for wisdom anymore. My father was hidden and my mother, though loving, was preoccupied with trying to keep us fed and not lose the house. My brothers were no help, either. My older brother was distant; my younger brother was still a toddler, though fun to tease.

      Books became my glorious escape. Their invented narratives were coherent, where every detail of the plot contributed to a whole and all made sense in the inevitable happy ending. By contrast, the real world was puzzling in its chaos. I was acquiring a sense of how stories were shaped but my own family’s narrative remained a confusion, a tale seemingly without logic.

      ‘What happened to your dad?’ was