He seemed to like Jon. I think he saw, like I did, that Jon was the kind of stray my mum was drawn to. She was always on the side of the dismissed or the fragile. When we went to choose a cat from the RSPCA she chose the oldest, and scruffiest, the one that no one else wanted. She even asked which cat had been there the longest. Me and Dad laughed when they showed us. He was an old, ugly, ginger tabby that spat and snarled when you went near. One ear half bitten off and a mean face. My mum insisted we would have him. She said that he spat and snarled because he had to spit and snarl to survive, that he just needed somebody to care for him. She was kind of right; he eventually stopped scratching. He would find my mum as soon as she walked through the door and fall asleep on her all the time. We called him Rasputin. He never liked me and Dad though.
Anyway, we were the kind of family that welcomed … outsiders, I suppose. Having Jon around made us both make more of an effort. One thing we were never allowed to be when Mum was alive was rude. Rudeness and dropping litter were up there with grievous bodily harm in her book. With Jon in the house my dad had to speak now and again. Or at least grunt.
Jon was fascinated with my dad’s toys. I remember his face the first time he walked in the workroom. He looked like he had woken up on the moon. His eyes were popping, big and wide, and his mouth dropped open and didn’t close all the time he was in there. He walked the perimeter and let his arm reach out and hang over all the toys. He didn’t touch any of them, his left hand just hovered above cars, soldiers, trains and boats, following their contours, shapes and lines. After his first visit he was hooked. He started going there every day.
The workroom was an outbuilding, just a few steps from the back door. It must have been used for cattle when the house was a working farm and there was still a warm animal smell sometimes, just for a few seconds. On a couple of his better days my dad had whitewashed the inside walls and fitted work surfaces. It was just like his room at our old house except much bigger. On three of the surfaces were rows of toys he was making, each row at the same stage of completion. He did each step for each range of toys at the same time, so all morning he would be painting all the car bodies red or sanding all the feet of the soldiers. It saved time and made sense but sometimes he joked that it was like working in a factory. The fourth work surface was empty. At our old house he used this for his wood carvings and sculptures. He laughed when he called it ‘my creative space’ but I knew he meant it. It was the desk where he enjoyed the work the most. It was where he made the stuff he wanted to make, the pieces that never sold at the markets because they were too expensive or too weird, or both. The fourth desk was still empty here though. There were no strange and ugly carvings of bizarre, angry creatures or giant men, carved out of wood and painted steel silver.
I didn’t know how my dad would react to Jon’s presence. He wasn’t used to having someone with him when he worked and me and Mum had always just left him to get on with it. If the door was closed, he was working. Maybe Jon disarmed him, like he had me. After a couple of days, I dared to look in, to see what was going on. I saw my dad showing Jon some simple techniques: sanding, cutting and shaping.
There were quite a few breakages, snapped pieces of wood and cut fingers and blisters, but then, after a few days, it seemed to click. There wasn’t the usual Jon chatter. He was quiet and concentrating and it was the only time I saw him relax. His eyes stopped darting, his shoulders dropped and he was absorbed. And he was good, it came as easily to him as painting came to me. Within a few days he was attempting the racing cars that my dad made and I wondered how such an awkward body could produce such smooth and controlled pieces. I watched them one afternoon and they seemed happy in their silence, hunched over their wood, sanding and shaping. I didn’t feel left out. I went to paint my rocks and stones on the fell and at the end of the afternoon we would meet up back in the kitchen. Me with paint-flecked hands, them with wood shavings in their hair.