Chapter 13 ~ Memories Fade
March 24, 2010
I looked at him as he sat reading his Wall Street Journal. One leg crossed over the other, foot tapping slightly, always agitated, always focused on the next action, the next task to hit his ‘to do’ list.
He had a PDA by then that beeped at him when he was overdue.
Sometimes I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him, as either of them, especially when they were together. Which wasn’t very often. Not by then.
I couldn’t tell you how old my father is.
I know his birthday, October twenty-third. Don’t know what year.
Not all information sticks.
I was in my early twenties. He looked to be in his fifties.
A gulf between us.
Not all information sticks in my head.
Though some things stick in my throat.
* * *
I have one memory of him that recurs.
One memory. Hardly a testament to a life well lived; a relationship well loved.
In this memory, my father tickles me.
I must have been more than three because I remember being able to talk to him about it at the time. Laugh about it, joke about it.
Friday evenings.
When he’d been starting his career in advertising, a junior project manager or whatever it was he’d been doing, he would always manage to get home early on Fridays. All my filming was done by then, so I would generally be home by Friday lunchtime, spending time with my Nanny, or an au pair, or whoever else they’d hired to keep me company. Until four-thirty came around.
At which time, I would be laying flat on my back in the middle of the lounge floor, legs stretched flat on the floor, arms out in a crucifix. Me, a little Jesus pinned to the living room rug.
Because my father was coming home early.
Because my father would tickle me just as soon as he walked through the door.
There I lay, every Friday afternoon, waiting for my father to come home from work, spread-eagled on the carpet for the pleasure of his laugh; his love.
The first time he didn’t show, I laid there until seven p.m. The au pair tried her best but I was a rock; steadfast, resolute. Stubborn.
I don’t know how long it took, how many weeks of him not arriving when I expected, but eventually I was there in the middle of the lounge for only ten minutes or so. In memory, retrospective blurring of time, it feels like only another moment or two before four-thirty on a Friday afternoon came and went without any activity on my part, save the slight twinge of something – too young for it to be melancholia or sadness or regret or remorse or loss or any other of those analysis words that I’ve learnt to lay over it in the intervening years.
It’s one of the few memories I have of my father from when I was growing up and it shines in, and because of, its isolation. I wish I could say it has the warm glow of tenderness but mostly the memory is of the tickles going away, of the emptiness of those Friday afternoons when he’d gone to some bar in Fleet Street rather than come home to play with his son, choosing to have a drink or two with the trendy media fuck-ups who could help further his career.
That’s my memory.
Desertion.
