‘Have you seen the news?’ my mother asked, WhatsApping me a link to a BBC News report about Withernsea Lighthouse. It explained how, in July of 1976, it had been decided there was no use for it anymore and its bulb had been turned off for the final time. But after forty-four years of inactivity, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there had been a change of heart.
When I consider a lighthouse I picture a candy-striped tower situated on a rocky spur, its beam illuminating dark and turbulent waters while waves lash and batter its walls. Withernsea’s, though, is set back a quarter mile from the beach, a giant white pepper mill surrounded by residential buildings and convenience stores. Visible from miles around, it is the town’s one distinguishing mark, so when you finally stand in front of it and discover that it’s flanked by terraced houses you feel a little tricked. As if it never had a purpose at all and if you looked behind it you’d discover it was just a cardboard cut-out propped up against a stand. The lighthouse’s distance from the coast, so far away it can’t possibly have served any practical use, certainly suggests that nobody ever had any real faith in it. Its presence is so obviously wrong, so uniquely unnecessary, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was both designed and built with a light that was always destined to be extinguished.
Since the late 1980s Withernsea Lighthouse has performed many roles. Enter it and turn to your left, heading into the base of the tower, you will find yourself in an RNLI museum crammed with nautical curios and leggy fashion mannequins 196dressed up to resemble distinguished lifeboat men. Turn to your right and you will find an exhibit dedicated to the life of Kay Kendall, a Withernsea-born actor who starred in the film Genevieve and became Rex Harrison’s third wife before dying of leukaemia in 1959. Head through that and you’ll find a café and a large garden, where outdoor plays are often performed by the local amateur dramatics’ society and where once, for a charity abseil, my brother Robert landed, having just descended the 127-foot tower dressed as Gary Glitter. In essence, Withernsea Lighthouse has become the architectural equivalent of a defective Swiss Army knife, capable of performing any function the town requires apart from the one it was created for. Then came 2020, when it was decided that its lamp would shine once again and continue to blaze until the pandemic was over. The BBC report featured an interview with Lyndsey Jones, the lighthouse manager, who put great faith in the value of the gesture.
‘I think it has given people a bit of reassurance,’ she said. ‘People of Withernsea have referred to it as their “Beacon of Hope”.’
Later that day I phoned my friend Zoe for one of our regular lockdown check-in calls. I began telling her about the news report then stopped myself, remembering that, thanks to me, she has come to hate Withernsea Lighthouse. On trips to the town together we somehow always end up there and once inside I will become gripped by a compulsion to climb each of the 144 internal steps and reach the viewing platform at the top, which offers a 360-degree view of the town and of the broader Holderness coast. Each time a visitor reaches this point they receive an A5 certificate of achievement, and I now have so many that I could easily paper a downstairs bathroom 197with them. Fearful of heights, Zoe always declines the trip to the top, choosing instead to dutifully wait at the bottom of the stairs amongst the museum exhibits of dead-eyed figures and displays of sea-worn artefacts, queasily looking up at me as I ascend.
‘It’s weird,’ I told her, trying to move the subject away from the building itself, ‘because, at the exact moment when they switched off that lamp in 1976, I nearly died.’
I was playing with the timeline a little here, adjusting it to fit the narrative, but give or take a few hours it was true. I was just a couple of months old at the time and had been on holiday with my family in Scotland. From what I understand, my parents had dozed off, leaving me lying helpless in my pram and exposed to the full power of the sun. On any other year in Scotland, I might have been at a greater risk of drowning from rainfall, but the summer of ‘76 was one of the hottest on record, a time when a new-born baby left outside without the shelter of a parasol could be roasted to perfection in a matter of minutes. By the time my mother responded to my cries I was beet-red and had puffed up like a bag of microwave popcorn. My temperature hit the forties and she became convinced that I was done for. When my mother and I talk about it now, she’s flippant and blasé, recalling the situation as if she were repeating an anecdote about an overcooked chicken. At the time though, she’d been inconsolable, wrapping me up in damp towels and holding me to her breast, howling, convinced that God had plans for me.
‘I thought that the angels had come to take you to heaven,’ she used to tell me. ‘Because you were too beautiful to live.’
Had she known of Withernsea back then and learned that its lighthouse was being decommissioned, she’d have no doubt 198seen a deep significance in the timing. The light that went out in the tower would also inevitably go out in me, her sweet, cherubic boy.
‘Well,’ Zoe said, when I was finally done talking. ‘It’s nice to see how you’ve taken a global pandemic and found a way to make it all about you.’
‘No,’ I said, protesting. ‘Not at all, I just thought it was funny that she said I was beautiful. You know what I looked like when I was a baby, I’d have let me burn too.’
It was a weak defence though, and both of us knew it. Yes, I was a hideous-looking child, all chicken feather hair and a dazed resting expression that suggested my parents had spent a great deal of my infancy handling me like a hot potato, but Zoe and I have been friends since birth and if there’s one thing she knows it’s my bad habits. This is one of my worst and I confess that I do it all the time: hear people’s stories and somehow snake them back to me and one of my own. Someone might tell me that their pet has died and, once I’ve got the obligatory sympathies out of the way, I’ll find a way to pull things back around to me.
‘God, it was the same with my old cat Sam,’ I’ll say, my words bubbling with overcooked emotion. ‘As the drugs hit his system, he looked me straight in the eyes as if to say “Why?” then he went limp … and died.’
It’s an ugly habit I know, made especially so during a global crisis, when millions have died from the virus. There was no angle where I could truly justify guiding the story back to me, unless I caught COVID-19 myself and survived, at which point, oh boy, would I have a story. But lacking the brazen artifice to fake a persistent cough and claim that I do have the virus and that this is all about me actually, I tried instead to 199lead the conversation in yet another direction. Away from my embarrassment and over to the broader issue of my concern for Withernsea in the face of a COVID-19-triggered economic downturn. Another looming death.
‘I don’t know how it’ll survive all this,’ I said, and this time my concern was genuine and heartfelt.
*
When I first visited Withernsea almost thirty years ago, it was already in the process of slowly and defiantly falling to its knees. While it possessed some radiation of the charm it had back in its heyday, the high street still buzzing with tourists and lit by the glow of plastic buckets and spades, it was very much in its decline. I didn’t realise this at the time, too hopped-up on the thrill of new beginnings and impressed by everything I encountered there. Having never known what a seaside town with money was supposed to look like, Withernsea glimmered with the promise of better things.
It had once been a thriving resort town, the train network delivering thousands of Yorkshire holidaymakers over to its shores each week. Look at photos of the town back in the early part of the twentieth century, or at the rail tourism posters painted by Albert Lambart or Maud Briby, and it could easily be mistaken for the set of a BBC costume drama. Well-dressed families were depicted swanning along the promenade. Flapper girls perched upon the groynes or lay supine on the sands, shading themselves with Japanese parasols. But things started to change in 1961, when the head of British Railways, Dr Beeching, revised the branch rail network and pruned the route to Withernsea, deeming it not profitable or popular 200enough, the signs of atrophy quickly began to show. Lack of footfall led to the exit of anything grand and the town went from flourishing to surviving. Businesses went under, the fine houses and hotels became old folks’ homes or were portioned up into low-cost flats and the town stopped being a place that people painted pictures of.
Many here are still resentful about the demise of the trains. When I’d mentioned them to James from the lighthouse a few months before lockdown he’d informed me that 10,000 people had visited by rail across the fortnight before the line closed. ‘Does that sound unviable to you?’ he’d said, his words burning with a fire that made me feel as if, not only had the network closed down the day before, but that I had been personally responsible. This strength of feeling wasn’t new to me though, it was how I’d first learned of the existence of Dr Beeching. On November 5th, sometime during the mid-’90s, a few of the locals chose to demonstrate their ability to bear a grudge, crafting an effigy of Beeching and setting fire to it before pushing it out to sea. A group of us gathered to watch it bobbing in the water, sputtering and smoking as it floated away.
‘Who’s that supposed to be?’ I asked a woman next to me.
‘Dr Beeching,’ she said, adjusting her scarf.
‘Why are they burning him? What did he do?’
‘He killed the trains.’
In doing so, Beeching almost killed the town as well, removing a vital tourist route and kicking off an economic decline from which it will likely never fully recover. Withernsea now exists on a knife edge, and the arrival of the pandemic risks removing that knife entirely, transforming it into a holiday destination marketable only to people who slow down for car crashes. The Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is 201so aware of this that they recently launched a campaign urging people to move to the region, using the slogan ‘God’s own county. Tucked away in the naughty corner’. It’s an odd angle to take but not without justification. There is a sense that, for some reason, this part of the country is being punished and always will be.
In my lifetime, several of the town’s flagship businesses have closed down. Eastgate Potteries, which had been operating since the 1950s, fell foul of the decline in UK manufacturing not long after I’d stopped working there in the late ’90s. Proudfoots supermarket, where I’d got my first job back in ’93, stacking shelves and operating a huge rubbish compactor next to the chiller, had closed down too, the site now split between an Aldi and a Poundstretcher. Teddy’s Nightclub, a staple of the entertainment scene, underwent so many reinventions that it essentially disintegrated. A shed-like cabaret bar and entertainment complex, Teddy’s rested on the promenade, its rump exposed to the waves and the marquee above the door boasting ‘The Place to be in Withernsea’ and ‘The No.1 Nightclub in the North’. Words that reached for something but in reality meant that it was the one place in town where you might get to see Bernard Manning or Alvin Stardust perform. It went through a few changes over the years and briefly changed its name to The G Spot, which is how it appeared in the background of my sister’s wedding photos, peeking over the wall of the ornamental flower garden where they held their shoot.
‘The G Spot’s going out of business,’ people said, laughing, ‘because no one can find it.’
Then it went out of business and people laughed some more. When it burned down and collapsed into the sea people laughed in a different, bleaker way. The empty plot where 202it once stood is now surrounded by a border of huge fence panels, each plastered with a large black and white image showing Withernsea back when it was thriving. Scenes of packed beaches and grinning figures in Edwardian dress encouraging passers-by to consider the good old days and not the crumbling and neglected foundations that they conceal. It’s the equivalent of an actor circulating a twenty-year-old headshot, and no one is fooled.
The one stable part of the local economy is still the arcades – a series of interconnected warehouse-sized buildings that run back-to-back with the high street, their doors wide open, broadcasting the clatter of the penny falls and the blare of video games across the valley gardens and over towards the promenade. The locals know the arcades as ‘The Muggies’, either because they mug you of your money or because ‘only the mugs use them’. It depends on who you talk to. But even during a recession they are a draw. I once took a girlfriend to them and tried to win her a plush Hello Kitty from a crane grabber machine. After a few failed attempts, I managed to snag one and hoist it upwards, but just as it was about to drop down the chute and into my girlfriend’s waiting hands, the claw spasmed and opened up, releasing the toy back into the pit of Kitties. I called a member of staff over to tell her what had happened and she just laughed at me.
‘Of course it did,’ she told me. ‘It’s rigged.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair.’
‘It isn’t,’ she said, gesturing to the dozens of flashing machines around her. ‘But how do you think they pay for this place?’
She walked away and I headed back to the machine, pushing another coin into the slot thinking Fuck you, I’ll show you rigged. Not knowing quite what I meant but determined to beat 203the system and impress a woman with my ability to eventually spend £25 on winning her a cat-shaped stocking stuffed with seven pence worth of shredded medical gauze.
But whatever I think of them, to see the arcades in 2020, all shuttered and silent, their flashing lights switched off, is to consider the town without a pulse.
A lot of the local hope around regenerating Withernsea and turning around its fortunes, has been placed in the construction of a new pier. The town’s original one was opened in 1878 and in exchange for one penny, tourists were offered the opportunity to walk to the end and experience what it was like to stand 1,196 feet out into the North Sea. Then someone obviously thought, ‘Hey, maybe we should build a lighthouse to make sure no one crashes into this thing.’ But by the time that was built the pier had been almost totally destroyed by a series of storms and nautical calamities, several ships having blundered through its iron girders, whittling it back until only the crenelated stone entrance remained. Walking out that far into the sea is now the sole reserve of suicidal waders and wildly optimistic pearl divers, neither of whom make for appealing faces of a tourism campaign.
The proposed new pier would be half the length of the original and feature a two-story restaurant and renewable energy centre, fitted with solar panels, wind turbines and a hydro-electric generator. The architects rendering looks modern, appealing and forward-thinking, which of course means that funding for it has been refused by the Rural Development Programme for England, who stated that the project doesn’t meet with national priorities. But when I read a newspaper interview with Torkel Larsen, the head of the Withernsea Pier and Promenade Association, he still seemed pretty chipper 204and positive about the whole thing.
‘The upside is we do have everything in place. The only thing we haven’t got is the money.’
This is as close to an honest town slogan as it’s possible for Withernsea to get, with ‘doesn’t meet with national priorities’ pulling a close second. It’s certainly preferable to the unofficial one I most commonly hear when I tell Yorkshire folk where I’m from.
‘Withernsea is a shithole,’ they’ll say, and I’ll immediately go into defence mode, as if I were standing up for a feeble friend who was being kicked by a bully. I mentioned this to Zoe, hating the idea that my town was always being beaten while it was down.
‘But it is a bit shit though isn’t it?’ she said.
‘No, it not. It’s just …’ I fumbled for a word and she let me hang there for a while before chipping in.
‘Shit?’ she said.
‘I was going to say “tired”, but yeah, okay,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want anyone else to say it.’
After we got off the phone, I felt a bit uncomfortable. As if I’d betrayed Withernsea by admitting that it was flawed. So, I messaged my mother, asking her how the town was getting on, wanting to know if she’d heard anything. She was typically positive and dismissive of my concerns.
‘It will be fine,’ she said, her message followed by a string of smiley face emojis and a GIF of a dancing dog.
‘How though?’ I said, pushing. Not wanting the soft response and knowing that my mother’s default setting is optimism. ‘How can it be fine?’
‘I’ve been talking to the angels. 
’
‘What have you been asking for?’ 205
‘For it all to be ok soon,’ she said. ‘They always do what I ask. You have to repeat your request three times. It works for all sorts of things.’
It’s true that my mother asks the angels for everything. For spaces in busy car parks, for her favourite performers to win on The Voice, for sunburned babies to survive to adulthood, and now she is asking for Withernsea to get through all this.
‘The Government,’ she said, ‘doesn’t care about Withernsea at all, but the seaside angels do.’
All this talk of angels gave me the in that I needed, allowing me to talk about the thing I was really worried about.
‘I’m worried about Dad getting the virus.’
‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. The angels are on it!’
My father’s health hasn’t been something I’ve liked to bring up too often during the pandemic, not wanting my mother to dwell on his vulnerability too often. But as days and weeks lost their form and meaning, one of the ways I’ve have kept track of time is through my father, whose life expectancy I am in the process of measuring out based on the various diagnoses of his ailments.
‘He has Type 2 diabetes, advanced kidney disease, myeloma and he needs a heart bypass,’ I tell people, airily counting off his disorders on my fingers and making light of them because to do anything else would be unbearable. ‘Oh, and he’s going deaf too, but I don’t think that’s fatal.’
I’m doing the maths. Factoring in the cumulative impact of his illnesses and how they might come to affect the time he has remaining. We’ve already been given a ballpark figure for the myeloma. When my parents got the letter from the hospital confirming how much time he likely has left, my mother phoned me up to break the news.206
‘It says we have forty months,’ she told me. ‘Mind you, it took a month for the letter to arrive, so I suppose we have thirty-nine now.’
We both laughed at this, then fell into the small silence of feeling bad about it. And if she’s as like me as I think she is, we would have both been using that time to think about the ‘we’ in her statement. It’s not just my father, it’s all of us, working out how much time we have left with him and how to capitalise on it when, thanks to lockdown, our mother is the only person who is allowed to see him.
His catalogue of illnesses had put him in a severely at-risk group and soon after the announcement of lockdown his doctor advised him to shield himself from the public, adding that he’d be guaranteed a bed in the event that his life became threatened by the virus. By that point though, he was long used to having his life threatened and soon saw the upside in a government mandate for him to stay at home and watch TV without being chastised for idleness.
‘It’s not easy,’ he said when I phoned him up on Father’s Day, a smile in his voice, ‘but I’m coping somehow.’
This was followed by a crinkling noise, which I recognised as the sound of him opening a packet of biscuits and shoving his fist inside it. This in turn was followed by the sharp crackle of my mother snatching the packet away from him.
‘Ian!’ she barked. ‘Diabetes!’
She scolds him like a dog, but he needs it. Left to his own devices he would eat himself into a coma. Despite the knowledge that his blood sugar alone is enough to kill him, he still cram-eats sugary snacks whenever he can. He conceals cakes from my mother in the same way teenagers hide cigarettes from disapproving adults, the lit tip held inward towards the 207palm, shielded by the shell of the hand. Except with my father, who has never smoked, the cigarette is replaced with an individual fruit pie or a Cadbury’s mini roll.
‘Is that a fondant fancy?’ my mother will ask, and he’ll lower his head in shame then hand it over.
‘It was just one.’
‘Yeah, well it might as well be one cyanide pill.’
We use the language of death and suicide flippantly, like it doesn’t scare us. If we took it seriously, we might have to stop and think of Robert and of how we were all too late to save him. So, we joke, look on the bright side, talk to angels, chastise each other and make light as if we’re not fearful.
‘If you think I’m living here with your ghost,’ she tells my father, ‘then I’ve got a shock for you, mister.’
Because she doesn’t leave the house anymore, my mother is always there to police my father. This is her job now and there is a large part of me that feels mad about this. That she always had to dedicate herself to looking after a man who doesn’t seem inclined to look after himself. And beyond that, she has a set of kids who can’t fend for themselves either and collapse into helplessness at the first whiff of drama. It’s tough at these times to remember that I’m one of them and as much a part of the problem as any of us. In that sense there’s something to be said for my parents’ quarantine. Before the virus our mother had to look out for all of us, her stumbling, mewling brood, but now, locked down with my father, he’s the only one of us she has to protect because he’s the only one she can.
Despite being the most at-risk person I know, and having his every movement monitored, my father has taken to quarantine better than most. Within a few weeks of lockdown most people I knew had started to appear on Zoom chats looking as if they’d 208spent three weeks handcuffed to a radiator. Not long after that they would start to make out that their webcams were broken. Vanity was dying, the pace of life was slowing, and people would have to adjust. My father though, was made for this life, and it’s one way that we’ve found some common ground.
My father and I have never been super close. We’ve never been enemies either, never at conflict, but despite our similarities, we’ve never really been at ease when left in each other’s company. We both love music, like the same kinds of food; we each have a hard-wired habit of saying the incalculably wrong thing in any given situation and an inclination towards queasiness while drinking ale. These things should unite us, but put us in a room together and we adopt the stilted conversational style of two strangers forced into each other’s orbit at a party.
‘Have you two met?’ the host might say. ‘I’m sure you’ll get on. You have so much in common.’
While I would have self-immolated to get my mother’s attention, I was always happy to leave my father to his own devices. To let him sit undisturbed, watching sport on TV or indulging in fastidious DIY projects. When I failed to be dynamic and sporty, he was disappointed. Then my brother Ben showed an interest in football and tennis and I felt relieved of the burden. I could indulge in my own pastimes, freed from my father’s spotlight and scrutiny and time. With Ben soaking up his attention I was able to do whatever I wanted, without him being involved or judging me. And then I, we, had those forty months. Thirty-nine. Counting down. With his heart, maybe thirty? Add in the kidney disease and what, twenty-five?
So, when my mother and sister booked a burlesque tour of Tenerife in September of 2019 and my father needed someone to take him to see his cancer specialist, I volunteered myself 209immediately. I booked some time off work and drove over to Withernsea, dedicating myself to the idea of compressing forty-three years of distance into two days. When I learned that my little brother Ben wanted to come along too, I saw an even better opportunity. The three remaining Farrer men, together under the same roof for the first time in what must have been twenty-five years. We would hang out, drink, talk, laugh together. Bond. All of the things we never did because we’d always been reluctant or incapable.
Time still had a hold on us back then and the five hours in the waiting room of the hospital in Hull felt almost injurious. My father stared into space, I sat reading a Patti Smith memoir and Ben fiddled with his phone, Googling miracle superfoods and supplements that might stall or reverse our father’s cancer while Macmillan volunteers plied us with biscuits and hot drinks. The three of us, united as we’d never been and as uncomfortable together as we’d always been, waiting to find out when one of us would die.
‘Spirulina,’ Ben said, leaning over to our father. ‘And Golden Milk.’
‘Sorry?’ my father replied, confused by what he considered to be demented non-sequiturs.
‘They’ll give you more …’ Ben paused then, wanting to say, ‘time, they’ll give you more time with us’ but searching for a word that didn’t suggest some kind of end point. ‘They’re healthy. They’ll keep you healthy.’
‘Oh, right,’ our father said distantly, distracted by the offer of a biscuit from one of the volunteers. ‘That’s good.’
Ben and I were under orders from our mother to pay attention to everything the doctor said at the appointment, to ask questions. My father, defiant in his deafness and refusing to 210succumb to a hearing aid, will often reply in the affirmative or nod in understanding even if the thing that is being said sounds to him as if it’s being indistinctly whispered through a keyhole. In recent years our conversations have taken on the shape of a confusing improv routine.
‘They’re talking about redundancies at work again,’ I might say.
‘Yes, I feel the same way.’ He’ll reply, hedging his bets with a positive response.
‘If it happens to me, I could lose the house.’
‘Yes, alright then. Good idea.’
Frustrated by this sort of thing, I would often make a game of it, seeing what I could get away with saying. I might make him a cup of tea, then add with a smile ‘Do you want me to spit in that?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he’d reply. ‘That’d be lovely.’
‘I’ve made it with water from the toilet,’ I’d say, handing a mug to him.
He’d gratefully take it from me then, cupping it in both hands and taking a small, satisfying sip.
‘Lovely.’
But these kinds of games lost their fun once I learned that he was dying. So, I did my duty and paid attention when we finally reached the consultation room, Ben and I quizzing the doctor about every detail. Trying to squeeze a promise of more time out of him. The meeting was quick and the news was largely positive. We learned that the cancer was not yet at a stage where it required chemo or some other drastic measures. That the protein levels in his blood hadn’t changed.
‘So, as long as those levels don’t change,’ Ben asked, ‘then he can keep going and going, right?’211
‘In theory,’ the doctor said, turning from his screen of figures to face us. ‘But nothing is certain.’
‘Yeah, yeah, but that’s good isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ the doctor said, allowing himself a smile. ‘That’s good.’
But later, when we WhatsApped our mother to report the news, she was confused, Ben and I each interpreting the information differently. From me she learned that the situation hadn’t worsened. From Ben she learned that as long as the myeloma continues to stall our father is potentially immortal. In the immediate aftermath though, we were all celebratory. I took the two of them to a fish and chip restaurant on the way home and we all ordered big, wolfing our food and savouring it because it seemed that we finally all had licence to enjoy the pleasure of our senses. Confident then, I suggested my plan, that all three of us should hang out together that evening and continue the celebrations. Ben had other ideas though and asked that I drop him off at a friend’s house on the way back to Withernsea, as he wanted to watch the football instead. I said that was fine, figuring that I at least had my father and time and hope. When we got back home and my father was happily settled down on the sofa, I offered to get us some wine.
‘I can’t drink,’ he said. ‘It interferes with my heart medication.’
‘Shall we watch a film then?’ I said, switching on the TV and selecting the movie channel, where the opening scenes of a film starring Lady Gaga were playing.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘This is the one where she becomes a big success, and he dies at the end isn’t it?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Shall we watch that Winnie the Pooh film instead?’
‘Does he die in the end?’
‘Oh, everyone dies in the end.’212
We sat there for a while, feeling no further need to talk, until a friend texted me to ask how things were going. I told her honestly and she replied with a poem called ‘Bookends’ by Tony Harrison, about a non-communicative father and son, separated from each other by their persistent and dominant silence. She said that, no offence, but it reminded her of my father and me. I read it on my phone while the two of us sat at opposite ends of the sofa, allowing the blare of the TV to fill the silence that always existed between us whenever my mother wasn’t in the room.
That my father and I don’t really talk to each other doesn’t matter that much when she is around, always there to flood the space between us with her anecdotes and tall tales. One of her talents is that she can recall great reams of dialogue without stumbling and is fond of reciting ‘Jabberwocky’ in its entirety. Not a hugely long poem, I guess, but a strangely mangled one that she often breaks into without warning. Sometimes just to amuse herself and other times to lift a glum atmosphere in a room. And I think it’s because of this that, whenever I read poems, I think of her voice. The way she possesses the words. This meant that, although she was absent, reading ‘Bookends’ made her present. The words seeming like her commentary on my relationship with my father, a banging together of our heads.
You’re like book ends, the pair of you …
… say nothing, sit, sleep, stare …
I felt this poem. Registered the sad notion that only our silence made my father and me a pair, then did nothing to act upon it. Mostly because, by the time I’d finished reading my father was asleep and snoring, but also because I wouldn’t have said 213anything anyway. Neither of us would ever do anything so blatantly affectionate as express love for one another, but we each implicitly know that it’s a given and that saying it out loud would only ruin the pleasant, reassuring feeling that we got from knowing we’d never have to. So, I watched him sleep, his mouth lolling open and his breathing growing heavier, while over on the TV a terrified Pooh shuddered at the notion of the Heffalump.
My father had perhaps been asleep in this way for half an hour when he suddenly woke with a small yell and a look of panic on his face, as if startled by something explosive and, in the process, startling me too. My reflex was to immediately consider a medical complaint. Was it his heart? Can a kidney burst?
‘Do you want some stewed apple?’ he said, turning to me then briskly pushing himself to his feet and heading into the kitchen. ‘Your mum made some before she went away.’
Without waiting for me to answer he came back and handed me a bowl of stewed apple and custard, the contents slopped over the rim. Then the two of us sat in silence again, eating at opposite ends of the room. Each of us like fucking bookends, wasting time while the months ticked away. Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two …
*
When lockdown started I wasn’t too concerned about my family. It was a time of no visiting. No hugs. Of regular phone calls and long-distance tenderness. For most people it would be a struggle, but I thought of it as something I’d been in training for, geographic necessity already stretching our bond and our love across the Pennines. This distance though, had always been a choice. I knew that I could visit whenever I liked. But now, with 214the pandemic, the thread that connected us felt strained and uncomfortable, frayed. I heard horror stories of deaths and of families not being allowed to attend funerals. I thought of my father dying alone in a room, gagging on a ventilator. I worried I might not get back to the town to see my father before it was too late. And less so, to finish this book that had started out as a collection of stories about a place and had turned into a distraction from my death, and a record of other peoples.
Trapped at home, I lived online and grabbed hope where I could get it. On Twitter I watched a BBC Look North piece on Dean Wilson, interviewed on his phone while standing on Withernsea beach, discussing his pebble walks.
‘I’ve been writing more than I ever wrote before,’ he said, his hood up, the rain lashing him. ‘On the beach I feel comforted. On the beach, I don’t know what loneliness is …’
In the @ replies someone had responded with ‘Ah, there’s the life I’ve been looking for’ and it was a strange feeling, to see somewhere I had lived being pined for and idealised in this way. They wanted Dean’s life. My life. And it was cut off from me. This shithole. My shithole. And I missed it.
As soon as I was cleared to travel, I drove over to Withernsea to see my family. My sister, Becky, my brother-in-law, my mum and dad, all congregated in my parent’s garden, each of us carrying folding chairs and moving cautiously, as if traversing a minefield. We positioned ourselves at two-metre intervals and sat down with mugs, a stone circle of anxious tea drinkers. There was something tense in the air and we were all aware of what it was; that one wrong move, one stray breath, and we could kill our father. He seemed pretty content though, and largely fearless. His life hadn’t changed, instead the world had adjusted around him.215
When he headed into the house to feed the pets I saw a chance and took a photo of him from the doorway, wanting to preserve every normal moment that I could before weight loss and hospital beds took over. In the image he is standing there by the worktop, surrounded by his cats and dogs, who are all looking up at him and tracking his movements like flowers following the sun. I was keen to capture him going about his daily business but as he placed the bowls on the kitchen floor he looked up and caught me taking another photo, becoming immediately self-conscious.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, his cheeks colouring.
‘For you to go and live in the nuclear bunker and wait until all this is over.’
This was the first thing that popped into my head when he asked me. On the outskirts of town, not far from my parents’ house, there is a decommissioned cold war-era nuclear bunker. It’s now a tourist attraction and people often get married there, but crucially it sits 100 feet underground and has a blast door. There is no safer place for miles around.
‘But I don’t want to live in a bunker.’
‘I don’t want you to die.’
‘Well, I’m not that keen myself,’ he said, reaching into the back of the cupboard for a packet of chocolate biscuits.
*
Once we’d spent a while in the garden I took Millie for a walk into the town to see how it was looking after a few months in lockdown. I’d been dependent on updates about it from family members who weren’t leaving the house very often and could only speculate on how things were going. We wandered 216down the atrophied high street, where every closed and shuttered storefront looked dead and brittle somehow, as if, had I reached out to touch one, it would have crinkled and flaked like dry leaves. But I didn’t, because no one touched anything anymore. When we reached the locked-up Army recruitment building we crossed the road and looped back around, heading past the shuttered arcades. Outside Smiles for Miles a few people in masks were selling handicrafts from pasting tables, but I didn’t stop to browse, not wanting to carry home anything dangerous and infect my father. Instead, we headed over to the valley gardens, where a young man stood alone bouncing a tennis ball against a wall, a shell-suited Steve McQueen waiting for, if not a great escape, then at least for the arcades to open again, so he could restart his life and get back to beating his high score on Dance Dance Revolution. Behind him, towering over everything, stood the lighthouse, a small light visible at the top. Hardly the seeking beam the news story had suggested. Not so much a beacon of hope as a glimmer, but there nonetheless.
Millie and I walked back to my parent’s house and we all said our goodbyes on their doorstep. At the moment when we would all traditionally hug and kiss, we faltered, unsure of how to approach it when we weren’t allowed to touch. For want of anything better, Becky hugged herself tightly, swaying gently, as she does when she holds me. The rest of us followed suit, metres apart, swaying, self-hugging. All bar my dad, who only really has it in him to hug pets and mint condition vinyl albums. So, he watched, uncomfortable, as we did this awkward dance on his driveway.
‘Drive safely,’ he said, and somehow this seemed to be a little too much emotion for him to be showing, so he headed back 217into the house. My mother remained by the front door as I got in the car and drove off, watching her in the rear-view mirror. Still self-hugging, swaying, shrinking.
*
Later, on the motorway, I called Zoe on speaker and she asked me how my day had gone.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘It was all good. Everyone’s okay.’
I didn’t tell her that I was scared for my father. That while I didn’t believe in angels, I’d still hedged my bets and asked them three times to spare him anyway. Not asking that he be allowed to live forever, just that he outlive the beacon of hope and that I didn’t have to see many more of his months ticking away from a distance. Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen …
‘But never mind that,’ I said, ‘how are you doing?’
‘God,’ she said, breathing heavily. ‘Where do I start?’
‘At the beginning,’ I said, ‘don’t spare the details.’
I kept my mouth shut then and listened to her talk about a problem with work, enjoying the sound of her voice, the twists and tangents she took, and the escape of a story that wasn’t about me.218