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My dad is cutting a hole in a two-litre plastic milk bottle. The hole is opposite the handle so he can pee into it and hold it at the same time. It's his favourite invention. For now. He's making one for me and won't be persuaded otherwise. He has them all over the house in case he gets caught short. Still very practical, then. Going through his pockets for a penknife I find a note. It says, My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours. He has been giving this note to everyone. I'm showing Dad a picture of Mum. I often do this when he comes to stay. The photograph of Mum sits on the windowsill in a silver frame next to a photograph of him. A posthumous needle at my stepmother.
'What relationship with that woman?' Dad asks.
'Your wife,' I tell him. 'My mother. Jane.'
'Really?'
'Yes.'
'Incredible!'
'Yes.'
'I can see it now.' His voice is a little wistful.
'Good.'
'Incredible ...' His voice trails off; he is holding the photograph, 'Is that my wife?'
'Yes. She was,' I tell him. 'Your first wife.' Actually she was his second but we won't go back that far. Nor do we mention the third. 'Incredible,' he says. 'Is it really? What's her name?'
'Jane,' I say.
'I've drifted,' he says. 'Haven't I?'
'Yes, Dad,' I laugh, 'you certainly have.'
The photograph is a black-and-white picture he took in 1953, just after they were married and went to live in Gibraltar, where he was stationed, and where my elder brother, Patrick, and I were born. Mum, her salty loose curls, smiling, a ripple of sea behind.
'What's her name?' he asks again.
'Jane.'
'She's very attractive,' he says.
'Yes, she is.'
A glint ignites both eyes, 'So how can that be your mother?'
Touché. He's in a good mood. But what he far prefers is photos of himself.
'You're an egomaniac, Dad.'
'A what?'
'E- go- ma- ni- ac,' I enunciate slowly.
Jonathan, my husband, looks askance. Tries to clip me with his eye.
'Hego- nami- hat?' Dad says.
I deal out a photograph of him in dashing army uniform.
'Who's that?' he asks.
'Who do you think?'
'Is that me?'
'Yup.'
'GO ON !' he chides. He's enjoying himself. Centre of attention again. 'How old am I there?'
'Twenty. Twenty- one.'
'No! How old am I now?'
'Ninety- seven,' I lie.
'I'm not.'
'You are.'
'Really?'
'Really.'
'I can't be.'
'Eighty- seven then.'
'Eighty- seven?'
'I promise.'
He looks at me as if I've gone mad.
Dad loves it here. Which has its problems. He doesn't want to go home. He won't sleep in a room but stays in a shed in the garden with his two dogs who sleep with him, and who are allowed to do anything they want. Jonathan calls the little one Psycho Dog. It guards things. When Dad tries to get into bed it sits bang in the centre of his pillow then growls and spits if you try to move him off. In the morning I invariably find Dad at the bottom of the bed, no bedclothes, foetally curled, trying to keep warm, with the dogs stretched out slap in the middle. Yet he won't have it any other way. Dad is an easy guest, and, at the same time, a very high- maintenance one. He thinks we are always in the garden in the sun. Having drinks. Picking veg. Talking about him. He feels useful here. And all he wants is jobs. Seven a.m.: 'Give me a job.' From dawn till dusk every day: 'What's my next job?' They are getting harder to find. Something he'll succeed at, something that doesn't bore him, something that will give him a sense of achievement at the end. If possible, something where he can invent a better way of doing it – with a piece of string, a bungy- clip, or No More Nails, which he applies with his hands straight from the nozzle and then wipes all over my fleece, which he is wearing because, just before he came, he unpacked all his clothes and brought three Mars bars and two rolls of kitchen towel instead. Any job with his penknife is popular, such as cleaning lichen off the garden chairs. That lasts an hour. But penknife jobs are high risk, however much he likes them, because he gets carried away: scrape, scrape, cut, cut, gouge, gouge. Washing seed trays is safe, if dull, but he can put them all over the lawn to dry, and this, pleasurably, looks like a lot of work. There should be A Book of Jobs for the demented, for I am running low. Mentally, Dad is shot; physically, he's indestructible. Nothing tires him. He can touch his toes. Pain doesn't affect him. He has never had anaesthetic at the dentist, and still does his own first aid. Apart from yesterday, when he came back from trimming the hedge and was compelled to ask for a plaster. I reeled back in horror at the saucer- sized wound in the palm of his hand where a length of old Sellotape had worn away revealing a shiny scarlet swathe of no- skin.
Dadland © 2016 by Keggie Carew. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
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