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Authors: Craig Cliff

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BOOK: A Man Melting
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Slowly, the quests to track him down wore away and all that was left was my father reappearing of his own accord and apologising for faking his death. Then, the faking his death was cut away and he would just return to the house we had lived in when he died, and there would be this unspoken apology. A sheepish look.

The time spent searching for my father in dreams was replaced by my dream-self stewing in my bedroom, fantasising about confronting my father and asking what the bloody hell he had been up to in the years since he left us. Was he still an artist? Did he have any more children? He was back, but I was still missing him, still angry.

Eventually, all my dreams took place in this universe where my father had faked his death only to reappear and move back home — except he didn’t have to appear in every dream, they could be about something else.

In one of these other dreams I’m watering the veggie garden and the cabbages are the size of fishbowls so I decide to take one in for my mother to make coleslaw. Sebastian and I are there, staring over her shoulder, when she cuts it
open — and there, in the heart of the cabbage, is my father’s wedding ring. It isn’t shiny and golden like in a fairy story. It’s dull and grimy, like a washer that needs replacing. But when my mother pulls it from the cabbage, which has moulded its leaves around the ring like swaddling around a baby, and holds it up to the light, I can see that it is thinner on one side than the other. It is definitely my father’s ring. The original has returned. But because my father is still alive in this dream, my mother just puts the ring aside and Sebastian and I go back to doing our homework until he gets home from his part-time job — we will tell him the story then. We will see his face, surprised. We will consider how the ring ended up in the heart of a cabbage — its journey from the ice-cream container of scraps by the kitchen sink, to the compost heap, to the soil …

While my dreams were repeating imperfectly, evolving, my mother remarried. The first time was to one of my father’s high school friends, who’d lost contact over the years but reappeared for the funeral and took it upon himself to help my mother through her grief. He was like my father in many ways: quiet, determined to the point of neglect, quick-tempered. My mother divorced him because he was neglectful and quick-tempered — she only gained the courage to do something like this after my father’s death.

She has recently married again (I have never worked up the courage to ask her if she sees the irony in her procession of husbands), this time to a man who sells fish from the back of a truck but is surprisingly well off.

Each time she marries, my mother moves into the new husband’s house. It was hard moving the first time, leaving
my childhood home, the last home my father lived in, wallpapered with memories of him — but all my dreams were set in this house, so I never really left. Then I moved to Hamilton to go to university, and my mother got divorced and moved into a new house, briefly, before moving in with the fishmonger.

My mother carries my father’s replacement wedding ring with her wherever she moves. Whatever the house, I know I could find this ring in the top drawer of her bedside cabinet in a pink clamshell earring case. But this is just the copy. It never had time to taper on the underside before it was plucked from my father’s finger and returned to my mother with the rest of his personal effects. The ring I dream about is the original, the one that will not return — or worse, that I believe
will
return, but I will not be there to find it.

Sometimes it feels like I have spent so much time dreaming of the alternate universe where my father is still alive that it is merging with my real life, making it harder to distinguish between dreams and memories. My father getting paper cuts looking for his wedding ring and me finding the ring inside a cabbage both feel as if they come from the same place. But one happened, the other will not. It’s as if my brain has torn down the walls between real and imagined, and gone open plan.

And then, two days ago, Sarah told me I am to become a father.

It still feels like a rumour to me. The only proof I have is Sarah’s assurance that she read the pregnancy test correctly and that she
knows
. Proof will come — her belly will grow and there will be ultrasounds and I will be able to feel the
baby kick — but right now the existence of a foetus in my first and only long-term relationship feels the same to me as the fact that my father does not exist.

Even while Sarah was telling me we were going to have a baby, I felt as if this wasn’t about me. As if it was another scene in the story of my father. The story I am writing without him. This is why I trawl my memories and dreams for him. Why I am missing him more now than any time in the last five, ten years. Why I stand before the mirror and look for my father’s face as it was in my childhood photos. I feel closer to him now than at any time since his death. Closer than when I carried his casket or when I’ve dreamt of him or looked through photo albums. I feel like he is within me. That the last of my childhood husk will shortly flake off to reveal my father, like a backwards Russian doll.

I have had two days to get used to the idea of becoming a father, and in those brief moments where I feel I have my head around it, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for my child’s sake that I will become too perfect a copy of my father. That my depressive bouts will become more frequent, each a copy of the last, distorting, darkening, losing detail, making it harder and harder to pull myself back each time until I cannot return. I fear this more than anything. But he was also the father who caught stick insects and put them in empty Nutella jars with holes punched in the lid and gave them to me, but only for an hour, after which the stick insect was put back on the same branch it had come from. The father who could play any song off the radio on the harmonica, but refused to play anything by Dire Straits because he said all their songs sounded alike. The father who lifted me over
boxes of photocopies and let me be his assistant.

But then I wonder about the story of his death — the great mundanity at the centre of all of this. What was he doing on the eighth floor of a construction site in his pyjamas? The inquest cannot be trusted: the security guard was the husband of Sebastian’s teacher, and the coroner overseeing the inquest was a friend of my grandparents. Nothing could ever be clear cut with my father.

When I am in a certain mood, there is an endless supply of things to be angry at him for. The things he will never do for me and the things I will never understand because I am both too close and too far from him. I can’t read
What mortal coil?
without the knowledge of his death, knowledge he did not have when he got those words inked on his back. But still it lingers, like a taunt from the returned father in my dreams.

Without answers, I am destined to oscillate between anger and affection. There is no ending here — how could there be with another copy on the way? — but I still want to treat all these unresolved mysteries, these burrs, as clues I can organise and make sense of as a whole. I want to say my father’s life was a series of imperfect repetitions, and the tattoo and his death are just different copies of the same thing. Different pearls on the necklace. I want to prove that Life — the course of existence of an entire species — is also a series of imperfect repetitions. I want to be stopped on the street and mistaken for my father. I want to be the natural continuation of his unnaturally shortened life. I want a tattoo in the same place he had. I want to place my child on my back and let it read the same message I read. I want to
wear my father’s second wedding ring — the copy — and let it taper under my finger. Leave the trail of gold he should have left, but leave it for my child.

Because when I echo my father, I feel closest to him.

Embracing these echoes is the only way I can express my love for him, and the only hope I have of knowing him again. 

Penny marched back into the GameStation on Princes Street. It had been so long since someone had made a joke about her name when handing back change that it wasn’t until she stepped outside that it fully registered. ‘A penny for a Penny,’ the shop assistant had said. He’d helped her find a copy of the game Leo had been dropping hints about; he knew her name because he’d asked in that ambiguous way, halfway between flirting and good service. His name was Shaun; she’d read his name badge.

Back in the store, there was a queue at the counter. Shaun was ringing up another customer’s purchase. She stood at the end of the line for a moment, long enough to look around, see the empty display boxes: a fitting metaphor for all the wasted hours spent playing these games. With this thought, she stepped out of line and up to the corner of the counter, then had to stand there, jiggling on the spot,
trying to catch Shaun’s eye.

‘Thanking you,’ he said to the middle-aged man who had just purchased a stack of games.

‘I don’t appreciate being made fun of,’ Penny said.

‘Sorry, I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Shaun, Shaun, Shaun, Shaun, Shaun,’ she said. He looked down at his own name badge, then back at Penny’s reddening face. ‘The sheep has been Shaun, Shaun of the Dead, Shauning has broken, Shaun to be wild …’

The other shop assistant and the line of customers were looking at her. Shaun dipped his head again towards his name badge.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That was wrong of me. I fear we’ve both been blinded now.’

‘What?’ asked the other shop assistant.

‘An eye for an eye. Forget it. Forget it forget it.’

It had become a mantra of hers.
Forget it forget it
. The way she said it sounded like a car driving too fast over a judder bar, with bumps for the front and the back wheels.
Forget it forget it
. But there was no magic in this mantra. No ancient breathing technique hidden in the words.

She was back in Edinburgh as autumn was cracking its knuckles and people couldn’t help talking about the weather with phrases like
another dreich one
and
dead of the
year
, phrases you’d never hear on Zanzibar where, in the middle of winter, she and Leo had sat on the beach sipping pina coladas from coconut halves.

‘This is the life, eh?’ he had said, but she was thinking about the sand.

‘It’s only Kande Beach that has those worms, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’

I think so.
What Africa had in sunshine, it lacked in certainty.

 

It had been Penny’s idea to go to Africa — to celebrate once she had finished her thesis — but Leo was the one who latched on to it with vigour. Africa became his project. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had a proper holiday since he graduated two years earlier. Or maybe it was something to do with his name: the way the McDonalds of the world must feel when they come to Scotland and leave with bags full of tartan, crest-emblazoned tankards and clan history booklets, secure in the knowledge that their heritage precedes the Golden Arches. Lions had always been Leo’s favourite animal, and now he would see them in the wild.

He began by reading
Lonely Planets
and travel blogs while Penny worked on her thesis. From time to time he would announce interesting tidbits from the bed. At first she enjoyed the interruptions, but as he delved deeper into the stories, deeper into the continent, his outbursts became almost indecipherable.

‘Did you know all but five of the four hundred species of cichlid are endemic to Lake Malawi?’

She learnt that ‘Wow’ was always the best response.

 

After gaining a double major in business studies and linguistics as an undergrad in New Zealand, Penny had joined the Diaspora of Privilege, as her sister called it (though the capitals were Penny’s addition), and washed up at Edinburgh University. Thanks to the unfaltering
encouragement of a certain faculty member over the past five years, she was completing her PhD in Corporation Taxonomy as Leo planned for Africa. Her thesis explored the naming conventions of listed companies in the nineties and noughties, and had found significant (and mildly persuasive) evidence that the names of companies not only affected external investors’ decisions but also affected merger and acquisition activity. Apparently, whether or not the merger of two companies made a pleasing acronym was now an important decision in the real world. That’s what people called business: the Real World. As opposed to academia, which was, by implication, somehow unreal. Of course, Penny had participated in the workforce — waiting tables and answering phones for years until the grant money came (and Leo quietly made up the difference) — but she found it hard to believe the world the decision-makers of these corporations inhabited was the real one. The encouraging faculty member often told Penny she would be snapped up by these very corporations after she published, but she had stopped believing him. And not because he had made advances of a sexual nature, but because the real world seemed so far away. Getting a job from her thesis felt as likely as getting a phone call from a character in a novel she was reading.

If Leo was any indication, maybe the real world was what she needed. Since starting work for the Royal Bank of Scotland he had blossomed, though she knew not to use this word with him. He was more confident. He dressed better and kept his hair short. His face had slimmed, perhaps because he ate better and drank less as a professional than a
student, or perhaps this toning was imprinted in his genes from the beginning. When Penny looked at herself with such scrutiny, she felt embarrassed. She hadn’t let herself go exactly, but she hadn’t matured like Leo. She was still the same sketchy girl she was in high school, perpetually sweeping the blonde hair from her eyes. God, she would think from time to time, I really should dye my hair another colour — though she never did.

But, when faced with a faculty member with a wife and kids, the keys to a hotel room and promises of champagne and strawberries, Penny realised two things. One: she was not unattractive. Two: it was love she had with Leo, or at least an inexpressible emotion that could stand in for ‘love’ for eternity and no one would ever be hurt or made unhappy if they found out the tiny difference.

Whatever the case, she began to use the word ‘love’ more often.
I love your chin.
I love the way you make fried rice. I love watching
Top Gear
with you
.

Penny ‘loved’ Leo, and he said ‘I love you’ back.

 

Once Leo had established what they absolutely must see in Africa, he rang around the travel shops to find an agent who had been on a similar trip.

‘This girl at Flight Centre, Jane, has just come back from a forty-five day overland tour. Cape Town to Nairobi.’

‘That long?’

‘Everyone says it flies by.’

‘But you’re in tents the whole time?’

‘Pretty much. On Zanzibar you stay in chalets.’

‘Zanzibar,’ she said. ‘That’s an island, right?’

After Leo’s second meeting with Jane the travel agent, Penny tried to suggest a shorter tour. ‘Surely twenty-nine nights is long enough?’

‘And miss Namibia and the Okavango?’

‘Do you really want to be around twenty-two other strangers for one and a half menstrual cycles? They don’t even sell sanitary pads in some of these countries.’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘No, I read it. Yes, I too have done some reading. They say that if you want to take gifts for the locals, take pens, pencils and sanitary pads because they are hard to come by.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘Oxfam, or something.’

‘And what do they suggest we take the lions? Dental floss?’

Leo took her along for his third meeting with Jane. She had the tanned and freckled complexion of a frequent traveller. Even on the undersides of her forearms. Penny looked at her own milky forearms, but consoled herself that, though she and Jane were about the same age now, in twenty years Jane would look much, much older.

‘Leo tells me you’re unsure about the Ultimate Africa tour?’

‘I just think a month is long enough.’

‘It probably seems that way now, but you won’t think so on your thirtieth day. If given the option of going to the airport or sandboarding in the Namib, everyone would choose to stay.’

‘Yes, but if we love it so much, we can go back, right?’

‘I guess,’ Jane said, ‘but Africa changes so quickly. Five years ago, everyone was going to Zimbabwe …’

Leo looked at Penny. Clearly this point would have had more impact if she knew what Zimbabwe had in store for tourists besides first-hand experience of Mugabe’s impersonation of Colonel Kurtz.

Jane told them both to sleep on it and come to a compromise in the morning; the next day they booked the final two seats on a thirty-day tour from Johannesburg to Nairobi in three months’ time.

 

The day Penny handed in her thesis — three weeks before they left for Africa — she cried a little on the bus home, even though she wasn’t that kind of person. When she was fifteen her grandfather had died two weeks after her grandmother and she made it through this second funeral without shedding a tear. It felt like a small victory over grief at the time — though the disproportionate appearance of her grandfather in her dreams since then suggested otherwise. But as she sat upstairs on the bus back to Marchmont, she cried into her palms, as if she was playing the world’s saddest game of hide-and-seek.

When she got home she checked her emails but there was only a cardholders’ newsletter from Waterstone’s. Nothing from her mother, her big sister in Dublin, or her best friend, who now lived in Kuala Lumpur. This was her big day, the passing of the dreaded deadline, the day she would finally be free to watch TV without guilt and, after Africa, get a job. She logged out but found herself staring at the flashing cursor in the username box and thinking horrible thoughts
about the women in her life. She typed Leo’s username, having never done so before and not knowing quite why. Perhaps it was the hunger for conversation. Perhaps it was to see another stagnant inbox and feel better about her own. She didn’t know his password — she had never needed to — but guessed it on her first attempt.

Later, as they argued, he’d stopped suddenly and asked, ‘How?’

‘What?’

‘How did you get into my emails?’

‘It doesn’t take a genius, Leo Jones. Or should I say Senojoel?’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh, what? Oh, so careless? Or: Oh, what a fool I’ve been?’

He started to rub his eyes. They looked moist. She wasn’t sure if he was making himself cry or trying to stop the tears.

Like all serious fights, this one had rounds, though without the benefit of a bell, Penny never realised it was time to regather until it was too late and they were off again.

‘I’m sorry, Pen,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Right.’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Do you ever?’

‘I had a moment of doubt.’

‘You’ve been emailing her for two months. I’ve read everything.’

‘I was confused.’

‘You emailed her today! Stop using the past tense.’

‘I
was
confused. I’m not anymore.’

‘That’s convenient, isn’t it?’

‘I want to go to Africa with you. With
you
! I see that now.’

‘That’s not what you told Jane. You told me her head was too small.’

‘It is!’

‘And yet you want her more than me? Thanks, Leo.’

‘Penny, god. I’m sorry.’

In the end, she had to settle for a points decision rather than a knockout. He slept on the couch, she in their double bed. Around two a.m., she awoke to find him standing above her. In the light from the hallway his face looked more chiselled than ever.

‘Penny,’ he said.

‘Just —’ she said. ‘Just give me tonight.’

He stroked her hair. ‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

When she was alone, things seemed clear enough. Leo had been emailing Jane the travel agent for two months, talking about things only a boyfriend and girlfriend should talk about. Even before the emails got raunchy, when they were just friendly, it was more of a relationship than Penny and Leo had been having for months. She knew it wasn’t all Leo’s fault. That it was her thesis, and her, and possibly something she had never believed in, like the proximity of Venus or her misdeeds in a past life. Leo’s project had simply shifted from Africa to Jane. But the emails … they
did
get raunchy, then wistful. They both started talking about Penny like an inconvenience. Like an unruly integer in an algebra problem.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, when Leo was
with her, she couldn’t find the anger, just the sadness. A sadness they both seemed to share. They were both suffering, which made it all the more confusing.

A week passed and they were still sleeping apart but still living together. She hadn’t told anyone, and neither had he. Even Jane didn’t know that Penny knew. It took that first week of silence from Leo for Jane to twig. Her emails became brusque, full of hidden threats.

Are you messing me around? I don’t like being messed around
.

‘Can I just email her once?’ Leo asked. ‘Explain that I was stupid and that I’m sorry for leading her on and that I want you and I’ve always wanted you …’

‘No.’

‘I understand.’

‘No, you don’t.
I
don’t understand. I don’t know why it makes me feel better to see her suffer, to read as she gets angry. This is all fucked up, Leo.’

‘I know, babe, I know.’ He put his hand to her cheek and she leant in and they ended up sleeping together and staying wrapped in each other all night and it was beautiful and sad and probably sick, she wasn’t sure.

In the morning, still entwined, he said, ‘Come to Africa with me. That was always the plan. Just give me Africa, then decide.’

The night before their departure they made love again. This time Penny initiated it. As Leo thrust, slow and hard strokes, she shut her eyes tight and thought,
forget it forget it
.

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