A Man Melting (2 page)

Life is a series of imperfect repetitions. This is what my mother’s grief counsellor told me — and I now repeat here, imperfectly — the one time we spoke. This was before I met Sarah, before I went to university, back when the dreams were still fresh. I may have said the word
haunting
to the counsellor, I’m not sure. I remember his waiting room didn’t have magazines, just a
Calvin and Hobbes
omnibus, and that he hardly spoke. When he did speak, it was to say something oblique, which he’d leave hanging, letting the silence push me towards talking again. But when he said, ‘Life is a series of imperfect repetitions’, softly, like it was meant to ease my mind, I realised the only person I wanted to talk to was the one person I couldn’t talk to any more.

My father the artist.

At the peak of his career, my father’s tools were a stack of copy paper and an old Xerox machine he’d bought from
a police auction. He bought a lot of things from police auctions. He began by photocopying great works of art from library books. Reproducing the reproductions. I was maybe six at the time.

One of his first projects was a photocopy of the photo of the
Mona Lisa
from
The Masters of the Italian Renaissance
. The first copy turned the image black and white — it was already becoming something else — then he took the copy and placed it face down on the glass and copied that. He continued copying the copies, each time the image getting a little blurrier, a little less like the original. After about ten copies, a horizontal line appeared just below her hands. The photocopier was already well used by the time it came into my father’s possession, and it tended to add its own flavour to the reproductions. After another ten copies, the line had blurred into other parts of the painting and looked as authentic as the sitter or the bridge in the background, which was now completely black. Patterns began to appear where there were no previous patterns. The Mona Lisa’s shawl, or whatever it was, started to look like an Aztec poncho. My father kept copying the copies until he finished the ream of paper. Five hundred copies. The final copy looked like the original only because you knew what to look for. You could make out a dark triangle in the middle of the page, with a lighter tip on the top corner, which was the face. But it was only a face the way the moon has a face.

My earliest memory of my father is probably like these copies: a string of memories, moving from the original moment — if it ever happened — to my current recollection like a Chinese whisper, changing slightly each time I trawl
it up. The memory is simply a close-up of his tattoo. He must have been lying on his stomach with me placed on his back, because in my memory the letters of his tattoo take up my entire field of vision. In reality, the letters were small: he could make the entire tattoo disappear between his shoulder blades when he stretched his arms right back like he was preparing to hug a giant totara. I know I couldn’t have read and understood the words on my father’s back when I was still learning to crawl, but my first memory is tainted with the knowledge I gained much later. And so it goes that in my first memory of my father, the infant me reads:
What mortal coil?

Though I’ve known this phrase all my life — or so it seems — I don’t know what it means or, more precisely, what it meant to my father. It just hangs, like a punchline to a lost joke.

My father would take the five hundredth copy of famous works of art and show it to people. He’d ask them what they thought it was and sometimes used the best answer as the title for his final copy. People saw all sorts of things in the
Mona Lisa
. The image became a lot more about the viewer than the viewed. I’m quoting my father here or, more correctly, the programme from a gallery exhibition of his photocopies in 1994. I doubt my father would have said half the things attributed to him in this programme, but it’s the closest thing I have to an adult conversation with him about his art.

In the early stages of his copying project I was allowed to be my father’s assistant. I would rip open new reams, straighten piles of copies, refill his glass of water, anything
he asked, but most of the time I just sat on a box of copy paper and watched him work.

He copied and copied
Les
Demoiselles
d’Avignon
until it looked like a child’s drawing of a stegosaurus.

He copied and copied
Nighthawks
until it looked like a portal to daylight.

He copied and copied and copied
The Scream
until it stopped screaming, but it never smiled.

Of course, these are only my impressions. My tainted, grown-up impressions.

I am the elder of two brothers. If my father had his way, I would probably have four hundred and ninety-nine siblings, each a variation on him. But it is just me and Sebastian. For what it’s worth, I look more like our father. I have his dark complexion, his straight hair, his nose (which he used to call his ‘fly landing strip’ but my grandmother calls ‘the Kirby nose’). Sebastian is a paler version of me, his hands a little more delicate, his hair curly like my mother’s.

I’ve been told from a young age that I also have my father’s moods. As a six year old this meant I tended to brood rather than go into tantrums, that I didn’t like meeting new people, would prefer to hide behind my mother, and even showed disdain for my grandmother because, as she tells it, I associated her with my mother going back to work.

Although he exhibited only the five hundredth copy, my father would keep all the copies he made of an image. He intended to make animated shorts of the copies, showing them distort under the copier’s focus, just as soon as he could find a Super 8 movie camera in a decent condition at a police auction. Meanwhile, boxes and boxes of used copy
paper piled up around the Xerox.

When he began to tire of copying paintings, he started copying photos of his childhood.

He copied and copied his parents’ wedding photo until it looked like two people facing away from each other.

He copied and copied his fifth birthday party until it looked as if a mushroom cloud was exploding at the centre of the table where the cake had been, and tombstones were gathered around the edges instead of party guests.

After family photos, my father began to copy things that weren’t quite flat. His hand, a rock, my skateboard. The problem was everything became flat after only one copy. It became a game for him, I imagine, searching for new objects that would work best on a Xerox. Things that would tell the best story as they jumped into two dimensions, then fizzed off in unforeseen directions. This fixation meant the search for a Super 8 camera was neglected, though he continued to hoard the boxes of used copy paper in his workroom. Even if he decided never to use these intermediate copies, I don’t think he would have thrown them out. So much of the power of the five hundredth copy was derived from the knowledge that there were four hundred and ninety-nine copies somewhere else. That these copies could reconcile the original and the final copy.

His workroom became so full of copies that he had to step over boxes to get in. He sat on boxes while he copied. Sometimes he would climb atop the boxes to sleep in the gap that was too small for another box beneath the ceiling, but he could fit if he lay on his back and splayed his feet outwards.

To watch him copy at this time, he would have to lift me
over the boxes in the doorway and sit me on a stack of three boxes on the other side of the Xerox, even though I was tall enough now to see the bar of green light zip over another copy, which became another original. Sometimes I would flick through a ream and see a dead bird decompose into a murky T shape before my eyes, or a handwritten letter disintegrate until there was nothing but speckled grey.

Although he was achieving the greatest success of his career with his copies of copies, my father seemed to slip into his moods more frequently. Some nights he would eat dinner without talking, like it was an effort to be in our company. This is how it felt, or how I recall how it felt, because every time I pull up one of these memories, I run the green light over it again and it distorts a little more.

Sometimes my father would not make it to the dinner table, staying in his workroom for days with the door shut, but he wouldn’t be copying. I know this because I would wait until it was dark and sneak downstairs to look through the crack below the door and see there were no lights on, and no flash from the copier. But I could hear him in there, breathing heavily.

Now and then I notice the noise of my own breathing (
huffing
is more accurate), and I’m reminded of my father. The dark version. The sound of my own breathing always comes with the question: Why has this happened again? Why do I slip into the same moods as him, as impotently as he did, with the knowledge that I will probably pass this trait on to my son, and he to his son, and on and on? But I might as well ask: Why copy and copy the cover of the Beatles’ White Album? Or: Why do I dream about a wedding ring
appearing in a cabbage over and over and over?

Once, during one of my father’s lock-ins, I was sitting on the stairs that led down to his workroom and heard what sounded like an animal yelp coming from behind the door. It was short and high pitched, the sound a dog makes when you stand on its tail, before it whimpers, pleading with you not to step on anything else. My mother must have heard the yelp from the kitchen; she came down and offered me rhubarb crumble and ice cream to lure me away from the door.

Shortly after this, my father lost his wedding ring. He wasn’t in a dark mood at the time: he had been copying with the door open, enthusiastic again about the limitless originals he could copy. When he joined the rest of us at the dinner table, he smiled and started dishing up mashed potatoes for everyone. He was eating corn on the cob from our garden when my mother asked where his wedding ring was. He looked at his left hand as though he expected the ring to be there, his mouth still full of corn kernels, his lips glowing with butter.

My mother started to cry before he could finish his mouthful. I had never seen her cry before. My father said the ring was probably in his workroom — he might have taken it off for a second while he changed the toner and forgotten about it. This made her cry even more. Then he told her it was okay, that he would look through his boxes, it had surely just been knocked into the one that was last open. He left his corn cob half-eaten and went downstairs, but when he looked through his boxes, there were only copies of copies. While flicking through the newest box of copies — these were of things from his garden: runner
beans, yellow zucchinis, cabbage leaves — he let out a yelp. I was sitting on the stairs, as I was the last time I heard him yelp, but this time the door was open and the sound was deeper and easier to explain.

‘I got a paper cut,’ my father said, half to me and half to himself. He sucked the blood from his index finger and added, ‘I never get paper cuts.’

When he opened another box — this one contained copies of my GI Joes — and dug his hand down the side of the copies, he grunted as he was cut again, and pushed the box over and opened a new one. I’m not sure if he was becoming frantic because his fingers were suddenly getting cut or if it was because he had made my mother cry and couldn’t fix it.

He didn’t find his ring in any of the boxes and he got so many paper cuts that he was forced to stop making copies for a week while his hands healed. When the cuts on his ring finger were gone, he went to the jeweller’s and got a replacement wedding band. It looked just like the old one, except it was the same width all the way around. The original had tapered on the underside after years of wear. Years of clapping hands, clenching fists, thrusting into pockets. I wonder sometimes where this lost gold went. Was it absorbed by my father’s ring finger? Or did he leave a tiny, imperceptible trail of gold behind him?

When my father died, I never saw the body. The story goes that he slipped out of bed one night without waking my mother and walked into town in his pyjamas. It was a windy night, but he managed to climb to the top of an eight-storey
construction site. I imagine most people think he was there to jump, or at least to think about jumping. To rehearse it. All I have are the snippets of testimony I can recall from the inquest, which ruled that it was an accident. The facts are that when a security guard shone his torch up to where my father was, he fell down a lift shaft and died. I woke up the next morning and my father was dead, though it was left to a young police officer — who sniffed a lot, though he didn’t seem to have a cold — to relate a primitive version of this story to my mother, Sebastian and I. Five days later I held one of the six handles of a coffin that definitely had a body inside, but whose? It was a closed casket due to the state of my father’s body after the fall, but it could have been any body inside.

Though my father’s death felt unreal to me as I carried the coffin out to the hearse, for some reason I still felt like crying. Instead, I smiled at the people on the end of the rows because one of the other pallbearers had told me that was the best way to keep from crying. Everyone smiled back at me. It was a confusing time.

And this is where I must slip into dreams. I know you’re not supposed to talk about your dreams, that they seem contrived when you try to recount them, but to me dreams are just copies of copies of copies of your waking life. And besides, dreams are all I have for this part of the story.

Within a few months of the funeral I was having dreams in which my father resurfaced in my life. At first these dreams functioned like a bad made-for-TV movie: I would catch glimpses of him in the street, maybe on holiday somewhere, and then I would set about tracking him down. When I
found him, he would be married to someone else, be part of another family. Sometimes he denied being my father, but I would tear off his shirt (which became easier to tear — more and more like tissue paper — with every dream) and turn him around and point to the tattoo between his shoulder blades and say, ‘You are. You are.’ If I was lucky, in the last few moments before waking, I would manage to have a conversation with him, but only about trivial things, like my cricket game on the weekend, or that I did well in a maths test.