When Daddy Comes Home (18 page)

I
tried to force myself to put those memories aside but the picture of Antoinette as they took her by the arms and marched her down the long tiled corridor was fixed in my mind. The smell of the hospital odours, disinfectant mingling with cheap soap, stale food and musty air that over the decades had oozed into the very pores of the walls, still lingered in my nostrils. Once the hospital had been a poorhouse for destitute families and when Antoinette had first visited it at the age of fifteen, she had recoiled from the echoes of past misery which still lingered there. The hopelessness of the hundreds of people who had passed through its doors hung like an invisible cloud that wrapped itself around her until she had almost choked on their wretchedness.

I asked myself how I had ever found it inside me to forgive my parents for what had happened to me. I thought of the hours of therapy I had sat through while psychiatrists tried to make me accept the reality of my childhood and the legacy of the abuse my father inflicted on me.

But why did it have to happen, I asked myself. What had made a man become what he had become? At what stage of his childhood had he realized he was different, I wondered. If a child is born unable to walk when do they look at their peers
and realize that their contemporaries can run whereas they can only crawl? When does a child born with no sight miss the freedom that seeing gives? At what age does a child who cannot hear know what continuing silence means?

When a sociopath hears his peers talk of feelings he never experiences, does he envy them? Does he wish he could feel the joy from small things that they experience? Or does he feel superior and confuse lack of feelings with strength?

Looking back through the years, I remembered my father’s craving to be liked and admired but also his rage when he imagined he had been slighted or snubbed, and I thought that it was the latter.

As an adult I had come to understood who my father really was: a man who imitated feelings to such an extent he believed he had them. He did not grieve for my mother when she died, because he could not understand what he had lost from his life. He was incapable of it. All he knew was that she had become the past, and he only lived in the present and planned for the future. In a way, I pitied him for his inability to feel.

My grandmother had tried to excuse my father’s legendary rages on an accident in his childhood – maybe every parent who spawns a monster does – and my mother had often told me the same story, as though it would make me sorry for him and all his acts of cruelty could be excused. When I was older, she expanded on the story, telling me that it was not only his childhood trauma but also the time he had spent serving in the army during the war that had damaged him to the extent that he was not responsible for his actions

Joe was the eldest child in his family, born into the slums of Coleraine. He was a handsome child with a ready smile and an infectious laugh. Tall for his age, with a mop of dark auburn curls, he was the apple of my grandmother’s eye. For
the first two years at school, his bright enquiring mind had made him popular with his teachers. His reports were good and his mother, who by now had produced two more children, was proud of her eldest. But tragedy struck when he was eight.

My grandmother was lying in bed, heavily pregnant with her fourth child, when she heard a scream followed by a thump. Hurrying into the adjoining room where all three children slept in the double bed, she saw two sleeping bodies not three. Joe had crawled over the bodies of his siblings to the landing where he had tripped and fallen headfirst down the narrow flight of uncarpeted stairs. He lay in an unconscious heap at the bottom, his head nearly touching the door. His eyes were closed and their long lashes cast feathery shadows on a face so pale that for a moment my grandmother had thought he was dead.

Her anguished scream tore through the paper-thin walls of the tiny terrace house and brought the neighbours running. In those days there were no telephones in the impoverished districts of Coleraine and no means of summoning an ambulance urgently. A neighbour’s son was hastily sent running to the doctor’s house and precious minutes were wasted before the doctor arrived. The boy was carefully lifted up, placed on the back seat of the doctor’s old car and driven to the nearest hospital with his frantic mother.

Several weeks were to pass before the family was reassured he was out of danger.

During that time, my grandmother visited him every day. Heavily pregnant, a shawl thrown over her shoulders for warmth, a long black skirt rubbing the tops of her scuffed boots, she made the journey across town, never minding rain or cold. Once there, she would sit at her auburn-haired son’s
bedside, praying for his life. She gave birth to her fourth child during that harrowing time – another boy and her last child. No sooner had she recovered from her confinement, than her daily walk recommenced and she took up her vigil at her son’s bedside.

My grandmother remembered vividly the day his eyes opened and he saw her and gave a faint smile. Years later, her eyes would still mist over when she recollected that moment. Joe recovered his health but for months was unable to speak. When he finally managed a few words it was with a stutter so bad that his face would redden from the exertion of forcing out the syllables.

It was thirty years before a welfare state and work in Belfast was scarce. My grandfather, a cobbler, worked long hours in the tiny back room of his house repairing shoes. With small children, a baby and two adults to feed, money was scarce and there was little left over to pay medical bills for his eldest. Life was a daily struggle and money for a private tutor to bring Joe back up to the standard at school he had been before the accident was an unheard of luxury. Neither parent had the education themselves to help. Instead one year later he returned to the local school, behind with his schoolwork and with a noticeable speech impediment. At the age of nine he was placed in the same class he had left – the one for eight-year-olds.

Tall for his age, he towered above the other children. They thought he was an easy target and made the mistake of teasing him – and teasing was something that my father simply could not tolerate. He responded with aggression and his popularity waned.

His mood changed and the previously happy little boy disappeared.

My grandmother knew he was unhappy at the school but there was little she could do. It was then that his sudden rages started. With a growl, he would leap at his persecutors, his fists drawn back and, with all the strength he possessed, he would let fly until his tormentor was on the ground. The other children quickly learnt not to tease him and to be wary of his fists.

It was not until Joe became an adult that he learned how to make people like him again.

I thought about the parallel lines my childhood and his had run on. I was damaged in a different way, unable to express myself and seen as an outsider. I was also bullied at school but unlike him I never fought back. As a child, I had watched the world as though through a sheet of glass. I had never felt part of it and, as I became older, making friends scared me. I could not identify with other children so what could I talk to them about?

He too must have felt apart from his contemporaries. He must have watched his schoolmates playing and laughing, and felt separated from them. Whereas I had tried to mimic mine, he couldn’t. Loneliness for me resulted in further isolation and depression. For him, it became rage and bitterness.

In my father’s mind, nothing was ever his fault; it was always someone else’s. Every wrong action could be justified, every selfish deed excused. Seeds which might have lain dormant took root and grew into something dark and twisted. My father chose to take a different route from me.

For a moment I felt sad as I recalled my father when he was a young man and I had loved him. But the memories of the man he was as I grew up quickly obliterated any others, the
one who had inspired such deep fear that the only way to cope with it was to shut down completely.

I thought of the last few days I had spent in Larne and of the last time I had seen my father alive. I had caught the shuttle service to Belfast after social services had contacted me to say he had been admitted to hospital after a mild stroke followed by pneumonia. If I wanted to see him before he died, there was little time to spare. Far from understanding my own actions, I had booked the morning flight, gone to the hospital and asked for directions to my father’s ward. With every step, I asked myself why I had come. Why had I caught that plane from London to Belfast? Why should I want to see him?

Finding his ward, I pushed open the swing doors and entered a room where old men lay dozing in their metal beds. I saw my father. In preparation for my visit, he had been dressed in clean pyjamas, wrapped in a wool dressing gown and, with freshly combed hair, had been placed in an upright arm chair beside his bed. I could see that he had only a short time to live. Approaching death had stripped him of his power and reduced him to a form that appeared peculiarly boneless. His mouth hung slackly open; drool had gathered in the corners and escaping flecks had left damp tracks on his chin. Rheumy eyes made misty by the onset of cataracts showed no recognition as they stared blankly into space.

All signs of that vital force that I remembered inhabiting his body were gone. My father, the tyrant of my childhood, the man who had sexually abused me at six and made me pregnant at fourteen, was dying.

Again I asked myself why I had come. Why was I standing at the foot of this bed? Why had I walked back into that other life which came complete with its torment? Standing there with an overnight suitcase at my feet, I told myself that
no one deserves to die alone. But the truth was that the invisible shackles of our blood tie had drawn me back for the last time.

My father’s frail old man’s body shocked me. The faded stripes of his pyjamas contrasted harshly with the red leatherette chair, a rug covered his knees and his sockless feet were tucked into green plaid slippers. Only one age-spotted hand grasping the corner of his rug and kneading it with his fingers showed that he was conscious. He moaned softly, still without giving any sign that he was aware of my presence, and I took his other hand. Looking closer to see the cause of his distress, I saw that ulcers had formed inside his mouth dotting that sensitive area with their small white blisters. I called the nurse.

‘Please clean his mouth,’ I told her as, with some annoyance, I pointed them out.

‘He might have lost the power of speech but he can still feel pain.’

Seeing him now, so powerless to help himself, made the anger I had felt towards him for so many years, the anger I wanted to hold on to, shrivel and die within me. He’s just an old man I told myself, as something akin to pity rose in its place.

Pulling up the second chair, I sat near him and studied the face which both age and sickness had rendered curiously expressionless. Wavy hair now turned white still covered his head thickly. His teeth had been removed, causing the cheeks to sink and the chin to drop. With that final indignity there was little to remind me of the charming charismatic man he had once been to the people who saw his public face. And there was no sign of the monster that had tormented me for so many years.

I remembered being told by the nurses at the hospice where my mother had died that the last of the senses to go is hearing but I had no words for him. For this parent, there were no last thoughts I wanted to share and neither were there memories I wanted to bring alive for him to take on that final journey.

Did he even know I was there? I wondered, as the minutes became hours which ticked away silently and slowly. Reaching into my bag, I took out a book which served as a shield to hide behind, a trick I’d learnt as a child when I wanted to escape the anger of my parents’ voices. But try as I might to prevent them, images of my father as a younger man floated in front of my eyes. Pictures of the smiling handsome man who many years ago I had loved came uninvited into my mind. I willed myself not to look at them but no sooner were they banished than another memory followed; that of the man with the bloodshot eyes and mouth that quivered in rage at any imaginary wrong. I saw Antoinette the child cower and once again felt her fear.

The nurse came to my side as dusk fell. ‘Toni, go home and rest. This could last for several days. We’ll call you if anything changes.’

Not knowing what my father had been, she gave my shoulder a compassionate squeeze.

I went not to his home with its old-man smell of stale air and unwashed bedding, but to a friend’s house where a spare bedroom had been made ready. Supper was waiting when I arrived but all I wanted was to go to the privacy of my room. There I felt I could crawl into the welcoming bed and switch off from the world. Once alone, I could force my mind to centre on pleasant thoughts that would barricade me from the past. It was a ploy I’d perfected over the years.

So tired was I from the day’s events that no sooner had my head touched the pillow than I fell into a deep dreamless sleep. It seemed that only minutes passed before the ringing of the phone forced me unwillingly awake. Knowing already that the call was for me, I wearily reached for the extension phone placed by the bed.

‘Your father’s taken a turn for the worse,’ said the ward sister. ‘You’d better come.’

I dressed hurriedly, pulling on a warm tracksuit and slipping my feet into trainers, then went to alert my friends. They were ready for me, the husband in the car running the engine to warm it, for they knew the ringing of the phone in the early hours of that cold morning could only mean one thing.

We were silent on the short drive to the hospital. I knew that closure of a kind was happening but the knowledge brought mixed feelings. Soon, the only person left responsible for bringing me into the world would be dead and the death of the remaining parent makes us aware of our own mortality. There is no one left who sees us as a child, and that alone creates a feeling of vulnerability. And I knew that with him would die answers to the questions I had never had the courage to ask.