Read by Louisa Gummer
‘Sex never survives marriage!’ Dad shouted into the suburban street from his electric wheelchair. The words knocked about the tarmac and brick like a lost tennis ball.
I was eight years old and it had been a turbulent few weeks.
‘It’s not the sex, Frank. It’s the wheelchair,’ said Mum, shepherding me and Amy into the car, arms spread wide in the manner of a distracted limbo dancer.
Before Dad came home pissed from The Cricketers and sat on the TV remote in such a way as to force its capricious buttons not only to switch on the set but tune to channel 245, a shopping channel, he had been extremely tall. And that was something. A significant signifier. I’d anchored my identity in the choppy waters of childhood with the truth that father was high and daughter was low. It’s only natural that a child looks up to their dad. And when your dad is literally tall, it makes the metaphor all the clearer. And being both eight years old and short and having a Dad who didn’t possess a shotgun or an interest in sport (‘wankers with haircuts’ was how he described anyone athletic) or a job to shout about, his height was my trump card, my silver bullet. However much Stacey banged on about her dad’s BMW or Dave whined about the executive box he once went to at Arsenal because his dad worked for an important building contractors, I could always silence the playground with –
‘Yeah, but my dad’s seven foot tall.’
He wasn’t. But he was big and I loved the way he ducked to get through doors. Normal doors too. Not dwarf doors. Not medieval doors. And I loved people joking about his missed basketball career. And calling him Lofty. And asking him what the weather was like up there.
Dad found it all less funny.
‘Fuck off,’ he often said and smiles withered.
*
Two men with a dirty Transit van, big hands and baseball caps dropped off the wheelchair. It came in a huge brown box. Mum thought it was the new washing machine. We’d always needed a new washing machine. I’d never been alive without us needing a new washing machine. It was one of life’s great truths. Like watching Neighbours or Man United winning everything. The scream of the machine’s spin cycle comes to me in feverish nightmares even now. Mr Silovsky from next door once knocked down our front door because he thought we were killing a pig. We weren’t killing a pig. It was the knackered washing machine that needed replacing.
‘You have a back door, mate?’ asked the man in the New York baseball cap (his friend had a Los Angeles baseball cap.)
Dad, tall, and always suspicious, asked why.
‘It’s not gonna fit through this fucker,’ said the man in the Los Angeles baseball cap then, following a nod from the man in the New York baseball cap, apologised for swearing in front of us girls.
It was the first time I’d heard a door called a ‘fucker’. It would turn out to be an afternoon of firsts.
The swearing, baseball cap men were gone by the time Dad had pulled open the box, the cardboard falling to the ground like booster rockets from the space shuttle.
‘That’s not a washing machine,’ said Mum.
And she was right. It was an electric wheelchair, Knightrider black with knobs and buttons and comfy-looking cushions that made you feel warm just to look at.
Dad spent the afternoon assembling the thing. Silver rods and plastic wrapped in plastic were laid out on the garden’s flattened grass and nettles. It looked like a robot’s autopsy. At one point, he tried borrowing the car battery, but Mum said she’d rip his balls off if he even went near it.
To do Dad justice, he was expert at controlling the chair from the off. He was sensitive to the sensitivity of its controls. His fingers showed more understanding than I’d ever seen displayed towards Mum when I’d looked through the scarring white light crack of their bedroom door.
If his employer, a man with a moustache I’m sure crawled off for its own night-time adventures, was similarly impressed by Dad’s handling of the machine, it didn’t stop him from firing Dad within an hour of Dad’s arrival at work and following that hour’s one informal warning and two written formal warnings relating to Dad’s refusal to leave the wheelchair.
‘But he can’t fire me. It’s discrimination,’ said Dad in the garden later, tuna stuck in the gaps between his teeth. ‘There’s paperwork that’s got to be done. Nut tightening, etcetera. Shit, I can do that in the chair.’
Dad worked as a scaffolder.
And it was the first time I’d heard him say ‘etcetera’.
Mum was in her bedroom sobbing. You could hear her gasping for air. It sounded like Paul, the fat lad, during PE lessons. Like her lungs were curled up in embarrassment.
‘But you’re not disabled, Dad,’ I said, looking down at him, seeing how the hair at the back of his head twirled in a circle, like water down the drain. Not only was this the first time I’d seen the top of his head, it was the first time I'd dared contradict him.
I might have expected him to shout, to give me a bollocking. He was well capable of doing so, evidenced by the times he’d stepped on my Lego.
He didn’t, though. He beckoned me over. I came after he promised I wasn't in trouble.
‘Put your arm around me,’ he said and I felt half-scared, half like I wanted to laugh. Here was Dad, in a top of the range wheelchair bought on his credit card, asking for a cuddle. In the garden. ‘I’m the same height as your little sister now. Don’t you forget that.’ I stepped back and he held my glance like what he said was dead important. ‘Anyway,’ he said and stretched to pat my head, but couldn’t reach.
‘Why do you want to be in a wheelchair all the time?’ asked my sister.
‘Beats walking,’ grinned Dad. This didn’t convince us. Teachers were always explaining the importance of walking and using our legs generally. Physical exercise helped with your spelling and sums because it worked up a sweat in your mind. Or something.
Dad narrowed his eyes and edged the wheelchair towards our feet. ‘God spoke to me on that shopping channel. He was middle-aged and sexy and had blonde hair. And He told me to buy this wheelchair. You two wouldn’t want your Dad to be contradicting God now, would you? God can turn you into salt and the like.’
Struck by the salty, mysterious power of Our Lord, my sister and I shook our heads with the fragile innocence of the penitent.
*
After we’d moved out, to live with friendly, bald Jim with the widescreen TV, Mum tried her best to keep us away from Dad. The court, ruled over by an unsmiling woman who was either the head-teacher at my primary school or looked exactly like her, with that metre ruler nose and Terminator stare, having had it explained that Dad’s wheelchair was a lifestyle choice rather than a medical necessity, quickly curbed his visitation rights.
I remember Dad shouting about the Nazis and hellfire and damnation. It feels like a dream now, druggy in its smudged focus.
*
I visited him shortly before he died. A room not much bigger than a coffin. Room enough, though, for a wheelchair at the foot of the bed. Something like a loyal dog. I don’t think it was the wheelchair, it looked too new, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to risk upsetting the man. He had trouble speaking as it was. The pain of nostalgia might short-circuit his brain.
That day, there was something foetal to his body. His limbs hardly managed to raise the white sheets. His height must have been a childhood fantasy remembered with Father Christmas and God. The only things you’re sure of as a child are those that don’t exist.
He beckoned me to his ear, just like you see in the films when some bad guy repents of a lifetime of evil to reveal some important plot point to the good guy. Dad didn’t repent, though.
‘Your mother,’ he wheezed. ‘She left ‘cause of our love life. Not the chair. You needed knowing. Are you married yet?’
Nodding, I felt the need to touch him but he looked too fragile to embrace. I’d not want to crack his ribs, something like candlesticks. As if he was a stray dog, I patted his head.
‘He’s watching, you know.’ Dad’s eyes flicked to the ceiling. First off, I thought he meant a CCTV camera. But, turning, I could see nothing but cream Artex. Looking back to Dad, a smile almost split his face in two. ‘He’s up there and he’s watching. And when I die I want you to bury me …’ Coughing, side-table water offered, recovery. ‘… bury me in the chair, won’t you, love?’
*
I drove straight to Mum’s. She’d outlived three husbands since leaving Dad. The last had suffered a midnight heart attack, the details foggy. Mum changed the conversation when asked about it – offering questions about my family, my job, the type she didn't typically ask.
She brewed a pot of tea. Old people like brewing tea. It makes them feel as if a lifetime of being English wasn’t such a waste after all. Bending over a teak coffee table, she looked to have shrunk half a foot since my last visit. I sat on a sofa more cushion than chair.
She didn’t want to hear about Dad. She didn’t ask if he still had his wheelchair. With her cherry-blossom hair tight in a bun and the front room drowning in pictures of European dance-floors (she’s never happier than dancing with wide-eyed Italians to Europop) she told me that she didn’t want to turn into one of those crook-backed women trapped in the past.
I waited for a polite enough time, until -
‘Can I ask you a silly question?’
Mum stopped fussing over the tea and looked up. Her eyes sparkled like showroom refrigerators.
‘Why did you leave Dad? Why really?’
Steaming liquid rolled from the teapot. Its sloshing reminded me of sleep. Not of feeling tired, but of the emptiness of night, the miniature death. I often dream of growing extremely tall and not stopping even when my head is crushed against the ceiling. And Mum swept the tea-stream from one china cup to another without pause.
‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘It was the sex. I could get used to a wheelchair. But a woman, especially at the age I was back then, has certain needs. I could never get used to celibacy. Mind you, it never survives the marriage.’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘The sex.’
And she asked how much sugar I wanted in my tea.
(c) Tom Mitchell, 2014
Tom Mitchell is a teacher and a father, with fiction published at Londonist.com and Defenestration magazine, and sports-writing at The Classical. Having been a featured finalist for the recent Twitter Fiction Festival, he tweets excessively at @tommycm to an ever-decreasing amount of followers. He has also recently moved to Orpington.
Louisa Gummer trained at Mountview. TV includes EastEnders (BBC1); The Sitcom Trials (ITV), various commercials and independent films including The Ultimate Truth (Best Foreign Film, Long Island) and The Orange Tree (Shooting People's Mobile Cinema). Theatre includes Girls’ Night (UK No1 Tour); Listen to My Heart (Brockley Jack); The Sitcom Trials (Edinburgh 2004 & Tour). She's an experienced voice-over artist.
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