Living with other people is hard. Living with others who are tricky is harder.
My father – a congenital liar – made our lives a misery. I am just like him.
If my mother wanted to dig at me she’d say
‘You’re exactly like your father.’
We’re both swarthy, well he was he’s dead now,.
Both up for a punch up and both committed Socialists.
When Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 the old bastard still stood by them.
We think his family came from Bela Rus, but nobody has ever got the bottom of it.
He looked like Stalin, his face furniture mimicking old Joe’s bushy moustache.
My fathers lying covered everything from speeding tickets to school uniforms.
Asked how much a cake cost he would say a quid
Ask ten minutes later, the cake had risen to £3.00.
His lies caught him out. Nothing was straight forward. Nobody knew where the truth lay.
Staying away in the week. Coming home sullen and moody. His pugnacity putting everybody on the back foot. Knowing he was coming into the house had us hiding behind doors to read his mood. The slightest misdemeanour would result in my mother getting a pasting.
I think we’d all agree that the basis of a good relationship is trust and honesty.
My father could never be trusted.
I loved him with the passion of the archetypal daughter.
My mother, the recipient of his anger, once asked me whether he had touched me.
I didn’t know what she meant.
When I did let the question rise to the surface of my consciousness I was in his hospital room.
he was dying of Cancer.
I sat with him as he rattled his last breath.
When the nurse came into the room and lifted the blankets I took a peek at his paternal manhood. His legs were over a frame, skinny legs like a flat wooden ruler,’ hanging over a metal frame.
He’d always been hench; a boxer who made the first garage gym in our road.
I peered at his placid dick, waiting for a memory to surface.
It didnt,
I knew then that he’d never ‘touched’ me.
Not a man to talk about his feelings he cringed at the word ‘Feminism’, had no time for ‘Spiritualty,’ and convinced my poor mother that he was a faithful husband.
For years my mother and I knew he was having a secret liaison but we couldn’t get to the root of.
Years ago I took the dawter, ‘oosbind and myself to a spiritual healing.
We drove to Netherfield, a one lamp town.
The healers, wearing white coats, and speaking little, prepared us for the laying on of hands. A middle aged women with short hair, positioned us on a bench and waved her hands around. Clearing the energy,
The following week we had to go back for a second clearing.
I lay on the bench and the short haired helper, in a gruff voice. asked
‘Is your farver caller MO?
‘He had several aliases. Mo being one of them.’
‘Does your farver have a friend called Jean?
‘Dunno”
‘Does our farver work the markets in Sheerness.’
‘Yes.’ I said.
‘Well he comes into my pub, stays the night, with a woman called Jean and leaves.’
‘Fuck me.’
‘I don’t like them’ she said and helped me off the bench.
We were finally given the information we lacked.
My father disappeared into the night. Turns out he was living next to a hire tool shop in Luton
Jean married him just before he died so she could collect all his assets. I’ve no idea how much money he left, but there was a job lot of hospital towels with ‘Hospital Property’ stitched in red. He ate up the space. Energetically he gobbled up the air like a hungry ghost.
Finding space in a manic household is difficult. When we moved here I made a shrine. I cleared a table and put all my spiritual bollox on it.a
Pencils and jewellery, a lamp and big lumps of amethyst.
All 80’s self help books talked about creating your own safe place. So I did.
I am, not surprisingly, pathological about truth and honesty. Watching the yellow Buffoon call everything he doesn’t agree with ‘fake news’ does my head in. His dishonesty stinks.
I can intuit a lie in a nano second. I’m no detective but I am able to discern a liar, never kid a kidder. Television crime dramas hold little excitement for me as I can detect the killer in the first ten minutes.
I shared a flat with a beautiful boy in Hampstead.
I always felt uncomfortable with him, I knew he was hiding something. Miss Marple kicked in. We were standing by the kitchen sink, he said something that was clearly untrue. I had a pair pf scissors in my hand and I went for the jugular.
In the split second before I stabbed that poor man to death, I stopped myself, curbing the father in me. I’ve never picked up a weapon against anybody since then.
Then two decades later he contacted me to say he was Gay and finally coming out of the closet. He’d hidden his secret for thirty years.
We still talk.
I’m not a great one for secrets.
What could possibly be that important that you have to hide it away.
I thank my errant father for teaching me how to live my truth.