The Cigar Box
Holland Park. A rare family day out. My sister, brother and I stood quietly squinting in the sun at a peacock. Faces pale and bags under the eyes from a summer holiday spent indoors playing Tomb Raider. Dad reappeared, let out a loud fart, gestured to the peacock and asked “who the fuck is that?” A young mother nearby tutted and ushered her kid away.
There’s a photo of me as baby, Dad holding me at arm’s length like a ticking bomb, cigar hanging out the side of his mouth stuck to the tackiness of his lip. I’m the youngest. He was already fifty by the time he had me and it was made no secret that I was, clearly, unplanned. He once told me strangers would comment that as a baby I looked like a little china doll. Something he’d recall with consternation, not fondly, as in what was this old white man doing with this doll.
Still, when I was small I thought of him as the mischievous devil to my mum’s stern angel. I associated him with bunking off school and eating sweets, and her with rules.
He’s always been a master storyteller; bitingly funny, able to switch between accents and perfectly time his jokes. When I had to do a school project interviewing someone in our family I’d picked him. It didn’t occur to me to talk my mum who had, y’know, emigrated from martial law and a dictatorship. Everything orbited around him.
I sometimes wonder if my propensity for long, probing interviews came from listening to his stories. In the project, I wrote about how he likes ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and Ella Fitzgerald, cheap fudge and sausage rolls, but he really loves model aeroplanes and boxing. If I remember correctly there’s another childhood photo of my brother with Barry McGuigan and Frank Bruno both in sharp suits, with Bruno holding my weeping sister as a baby.
Dad had a fleeting dream of being a newspaper cartoonist but, quite by accident it seems, ended up in the NHS working as a care assistant. After years of getting fired, failed relationships and punching various landlords —spookily familiar — he’d found a modicum of stability working in the health service, tending to people much madder than he was. It’s where he met my mum.
During the Winter of Discontent, he was front and centre of trade union strikes and proudly kept a yellowing cut out from the paper of him in a Lenin cap holding up a road-wide banner emblazoned with “end low pay for public services”. He still speaks about the following years under Thatcher as if they were a civil war and is at his most animated recalling ‘gotcha’ moments with management where he acted as a union rep.
The picture painted to me of him is one where he’d been radical via being unbothered by prejudices, especially of people who could keep up with his motormouth. It meant, by the time my mum and him were together, he was the loud, odd one out in a motley crew of maligned gays, IRA sympathisers and freshie immigrants.
By the time I was born, though, I met a different man. Anxious and controlling, his paranoia made him reluctant to leave the house. Cynical of a society that had not delivered on the financial comfort or status he’d wanted. At night he had screaming terrors loud enough to wake the neighbours and I’d imagine mine and my sister’s eyes bulging with fright in the pitch-black of our room like a cartoon. They were nearly always nightmares about intruders. This extended to him shamelessly intercepting me catching the bus with friends in case I was snatched away into a child trafficking ring. Or there was also the obsessing over avoiding dog shit, a hangover from an old news story that said it caused blindness in children. I was shocked at both how embarrassing this was but also that he didn’t seem to care as long as his anxiety was placated.
As I approached my teens talking to him began feeling like passing time with a family acquaintance. He didn’t know me and didn’t seem interested in getting to know me. I’d zone out as he launched into another story I’d already heard. I preferred spending hours languishing in the bathroom listening to music and tweezing my eyebrows into oblivion or trying to achieve the tightest ponytail, only for him to start hammering on the door. My preening often clashed with him gearing up for night-shifts at a notorious psychiatric ward. It was agency work when he should’ve been long retired and it wasn’t until much later that I found out about the quicksand of debt he’d been in. I do, however, recall rifling through his coat for some change as he was busy getting ready for the commute and finding a bottle of vodka in his pocket alongside the nitroglycerin spray for his chest pains.
Our relationship continued to strain though I wonder if he even noticed. He began this fine art of being simultaneously stifling but openly disappointed when his children didn't go out into the world to conjure up high flying jobs and investment bonds to buoy him through retirement. Like anyone else you want to wrap your parents up in cotton wool and give them back everything they gave you twice over. And to not achieve that feels like an ongoing failure. But my Dad’s unabated astonishment began to feel like an attack. He started to dredge up updates on school friends I’d long lost contact with, on how they’d bought fancy apartments in north London or were excelling in their work, and presented this information as a form of poking fun. As if the answer weren’t because they were already stinking rich. For someone who based his entire formative years on fairness, I found this new person incredibly hurtful.
Disagreements turned into standing arguments which turned into periods of not talking at all. From a few weeks to months to a year. I took solace in the relationship with my mum and would make myself upset thinking of the life she could’ve had without him. After a particularly draining shouting match where he’d begun to laugh as I was close to tears, I’d returned to work nursing a family rift alongside another ignored salary raise request. An article I’d commissioned, edited and had ready to go was published without my knowledge on the main site leaving me with nothing to run. With no tangible budget, I’d been expected to pull “content” out of my arse. But on an occasion where I’d actually had a chance to do the job I was lured into the company for, it was nonchalantly used for someone else’s benefit. I felt ragged.
I marched over to the editorial desk and took in a lungful to begin my rant but, not looking up from his computer, the editor interrupted my impending polemic with “Calm down.” and the desk collectively sniggered. You couldn’t be earnest in the VICE office, you see, you had to veil everything with a joke. My eyes widened with humiliation and like when the pig’s blood drops on Carrie I thought for a brief moment I might be able to telekinesis chokeslam him with a laptop stand. He quickly apologised, insincerely, but I was already surveying what a bunch of spiteful pussies they were. Sitting there with their teenage girlfriends who didn’t understand cocaine-induced impotence and their Fleet Street fantasies when they were, in fact, hyenas picking at the carcass of a dying industry at my expense.
I remember, vividly, walking into the toilets not blinking trying to keep the tears from rolling before kicking one of the cubicles in until the bottom door hinge had buckled. When I stopped I heard someone else in the furthest cubicle also crying, doing that awful choking and catching of breath when you’re really crestfallen. It made me regain my composure and I squatted to the floor only to see a pair of Converse levitating out of sight.
It felt like I couldn’t move an inch in life without someone, somewhere dismissing my feelings of frustration. That sneering “get over it” sentiment of an army sergeant in clean, dry clothes looking down at some exhausted pleb trying to find their footing while climbing a neverending wall.
After I’d moved home and my settlement was being finalised I decided to read one of the case documents that I’d long avoided, and just left with the solicitors to pore over. It was a data request for all company correspondence about me, admittedly, with large chunks redacted but otherwise your worst nightmare. Like someone doing a dramatic reading of every disparaging text a friend had sent about you but not to you. Hundreds of pages stretching from colleagues who’d been in your house to managers who’d never spoken to you, all closing ranks, screengrabbing your private conversations and fabricating fantasy exchanges to paint you as the bad guy. I had struck out with low blows too but I was one person. It was shattering. But it also fortified my belief that unfairness wasn’t this mystical characteristic of free will but something people actively did to each other. Either to protect themselves or just to be a prick.
Walking a fine tightrope between reality and sanity after that came the next argument with my dad. It started with me screaming at him to be a parent for once, to be supportive to which he responded that I was a “fuck up”. And that was the last day I used his name. Over the next few months, I switched everything to my mother’s maiden name, Fuertes, roughly translated as strong or in some contexts resilient, which felt quite on the nose. Months went by without speaking. I passed him in the street like he was a stranger and ignored all olive branches.
That’s around about the time his heart had started to stop. Just for a millisecond at a time but long enough that he’d lose consciousness. We’d been tentatively nearing civility when, quite by coincidence, I was in the room as it happened another time. The heavy glass tumbler of whiskey he’d surreptitiously got for chest pain dropping to the table next to him and making a fluttering sound as it rolled from side to side. It happened fast but as he came to I noticed something I’d never seen before. Without that default of bravado and of laughing things off he was frightened.
Mortality has a way of accelerating the mending of hurt you thought you’d carry forever. As he waited for a diagnosis a more reflective, more remorseful person emerged. One who could understand my frustration and be proud I could stick up for myself. And I cautiously welcomed this not because I don’t know how much longer he’ll be here but because I’d missed him.
I was tasked with packing his overnight bag as he was admitted to the hospital for a pacemaker and settled into his armchair to cherry-pick entertainment from the mountain of clutter on his table. Some mint humbugs, a book on Mike Tyson. Under a precarious stack of magazines, there was an old cigar box. I opened it and found the Miraculous Medal I’d given to him in primary school that he’d take on night-shifts to protect him from the most illustrious schizophrenics. Then there were more sweet wrappers and silly trinkets I’d brought back from shoots abroad. Underneath all of them, however, were articles I’d written meticulously cut out from the paper and stacked together.
Imagine that, I thought, all this time thinking he had no interest in my life when I all along I was his life.
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