He started dying long ago. Shot through and hanged and plucked and cut up until he resembled something new, but not better. Better dead, my father always said. Better that, than in some home. But which home he meant was never specified. He never left the end-of-terrace house in front of the field with the abandoned concrete reservoir. He never wasn’t there. Whistling up the stairs. Cleaning shotguns on the dining room table. Leaving cartridges on the dresser, in preparation for an intruder he could shoot and defeather. Hang for three days. Pluck, like he plucked my mother, then diced into one of her cakes.
He’d wait by the landline, clutching the address book with the rose petal cover and our surname embossed like brail or scar tissue, as if to prove that we existed; that the family he’d created could be as legitimate as the names that’d been listed in the book itself. Names that met other people for drinks on a Friday. Names he remembered from boarding school and had contacted in an attempt to refind old friendships, but which had long since become unobtainable to the likes of him. Bewildered unavailability mistaken for rejection. A personal shanking below the lowest, most pointless rib bone, at a 75 degree angle. The knife just kissing the lung. Oxygen exiting slowly for an agonising and lowly death.
My father is an inner tube. Rubber cracked and slapped across the face of his mother, who was unable to cut the bailer twine that dead creatures dangled from, on her Keep Calm and Carry On porch. Instead she coughed up a tapeworm. Instead she lost her mind. It walked off with her husband’s medals, born down the aisle of a church and cushioned by a flag. Suffered for, bled for, amputated for and, instead of rationally abhorred, wept for.
Ding ding.
My father rang the bells.
My father calls me. His remaining son has become a series of biro-dug crosses on those tea-stained treasure map address book pages. All the rest, or at least most, have been entrenched by a man grasping his fountain pen so hard all the blood has rushed out of his knuckles, and the line of the word he is writing–
Fuck you.
–bends the nib and almost tears through the paper.
Fuck out of my life, will you?
He sits on his bones on his favourite bar stool, alone in the village pub, wrapping himself round a reconditioned 1st generation iPhone, stalking old school friends on Facebook but unsure which buttons to press.
‘What took you so long to answer?’
‘I didn’t hear it, that’s all.’
‘You going deaf, boy?’
I just don’t want to speak to you.
‘I can’t believe you would see me calling and not immediately pick up your phone.’
I feel septic.
‘How’re you?’ he asks.
‘Fine, got a cut that won’t heal.’
I can hear him thinking, standing by the table in the hallway, slightly too wide now to get past comfortably. Notepad and pens. Drawer for some stamps. Everything covered in dust. ‘How long’s this been going on for?’ he asks me.
‘No Dad.’
‘It’s not your fault, remember. Your brother, I mean.’
‘That’s not–’
‘What did you use?’
‘Use?’
‘How did you do it?’
‘It was a chainring.’
‘A chainring?’ he says. ‘A bloody chainring? That’s such a dirty thing. What’s the matter with you?’
‘I was fixing mum’s bike.’
‘They gave it back to you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ah.’
My father’s eyeing his armchair and wondering how long it’ll take before I hang up. ‘I thought you meant you’d been harming yourself,’ he says, laughing. ‘You know, people used to ask your mother if she self-harmed. In fact, people would see these marks on her arms and they’d ask me if I knew what she was doing. “Baking cakes”, I’d say. “Baking cakes all day”, I’d tell ‘em, “and not ones worth burning yourself for on the oven door!”’
A pause.
‘I think they thought I did it.’
Another pause.
‘They must’ve thought I hurt her. Yes. That’s why no one round here speaks to me anymore. But I never hit her,’ he says.
‘I know that, Dad,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
He coughs.
‘Yeah,’ says my father, stroking his chin. Pulling his fingertip over the embossed lettering of our surname and wondering what the time is. ‘Your mother said you’ve quit your job.’
‘I’ll get a new one.’
‘When your leg heals?’
‘Yeah.’
I cough.
‘Well, uh, farmer’s asked me to get rid of this fox for him. Been stealing his pheasant. Burying them with their feet poking out the ground in one of his fields. Anyway, you could help me, if you–’
‘Have you spoken to Stephanie?’
*
My father hangs up the phone. He hangs up himself with some twine on the porch. I could go, I suppose. We could hang there, together. Ageing. Inedible. Making feathery small talk while we try to mature. While he anticipates the train that will take me away again, and I, failing to meet his eye, silently wait for the bailer twine to snap. Crack my kneecaps on the floor. Blood sprayed on the door to dry brown.
I go into the kitchen and find my little sister underneath the sink. She’s drinking from a bottle of bleach. I say, ‘That’s a child safety cap,’ and point to the child safety cap on the floor. ‘How’d you get it off?’
She burps.
She says, ‘You know me,’ and offers the bottle.
‘What do you want me to say?’ says my sister, perusing the ashtray by the sofa. ‘That everyone was already mourning? That one more death wouldn’t transport them to a place they weren’t already in and prepared to come back from?’
‘You’re not my friend,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’
‘I’m not your enemy, either,’ she says. ‘I’m much worse than that. I’m your family.’
‘Then why can’t I ignore you?’
She smiles. ‘You’re still afraid he’s living through you,’ she says.
‘Who?’
‘He sounded surprisingly cheerful on the phone.’
‘Oh.’
‘As though you may actually go visit him.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Could be fun.’
‘No.’
‘Like a game.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Count to five.’
I could burn it down. Stand at the side of the road below the gate. Below the pathway that divides the front garden. Watch it burn. Watch it turn into ash you can pinch with your thumb and forefinger then sprinkle around like salt. My sister, listing on the reef of my sofa, says, ‘No.’
I say, ‘Oh.’
She says, ‘It’s not as simple as setting fire to unwanted property. And besides,’ pausing to yawn, ‘you may actually get done for arson if you stand there holding the match.’ She takes a long sip of bleach. ‘You need to find out what really happened to Gentleman Jim. Have you ever, actually, thought about what it feels like to linger like he did? Like our grandmother still is?’ My sister nudges another inch closer to my end of the sofa, touches her nose on my knee, puts her hand on my thigh and squeezes. ‘You’ll just be killing a fox,’ she says, quietly.