Ash Logan wants his father to go back home...
The doorbell rings at 3am - as I opened the door, it came as quite a shock to see standing before me none other than my own father.
"Hi son! I thought I might come and stay with you for a few days. Taste a few of life’s pleasures down in old London Town."
"Where’s Mum?" came my reply.
"She’s at home. I’ve left her. It just didn’t work out. It’s a shame son but it’s the way of the world."
"It didn’t work out?" I repeated. My mother and father had been together for nearly 40 years. In my view that was much more akin to, "it seems to have worked out rather well."
Can I come in?" he asked.
My father went straight to the fridge and peered inside with the look of a hungry desperate man. It was happening. Just like I’d read and heard over the years. The roles were changing. I was becoming the parent. I was being relied upon in the way I had done on him throughout my youth. This man who had taught me everything I knew from algebra to taking penalties was now looking for some answers of his own.
"I need to stay son. Your mother and I are finished. I’ve nowhere else to go. Please. You’re all I have."
It’s a curious thing that when trauma is being suffered by parents the children are suddenly their only friends. He explained he couldn’t tell his friends, and the ex-lovers thing was something "your mother created in her head."
"Why can’t you tell your friends, dad?"
The reply was the first real insight he had ever given me into the nature of father and son relationships.
"You wouldn’t understand. Just take it from me."
So my father had announced his arrival into my life. I was all he had, after all. The problem was I was presumably the only one for my mother as well.
A few days quickly became weeks and has now turned into months. The first morning set the tone. My father took me to a café not far from our flat that had once been a favourite haunt of his many years ago in the student days.
We discussed the problems in his marriage to my mother and on several occasions he threatened honesty on a level I wasn’t ready to hear. It’s impossible to find the right balance between wanting to know why and wanting to know why. The irony is that I don’t feel able to discuss the issues behind the break-up of a forty-year marriage. Ironic because my father seems to have no problems discussing them with all and sundry. Not because I feel I should keep them to myself, but that as far as I can fathom, there were none. It just stopped.
It’s unusual. Very unusual, but hey, I wouldn’t understand. Not yet anyway.
