The Fragments of my Father

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Sam Mills 2020

Image © Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

Sam Mills asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008300623

Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008300609

Version: 2021-02-24

Author’s Note

This is a true story, but I have altered some names and other details to protect the privacy, and conceal the identities, of certain individuals.

Dedication

For L.K.

And in loving memory of my mother.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part II

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part III

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Permissions

Select Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART I

This world of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it – perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually.

Virginia Woolf to Emma Vaughan, 23 April 1901

1

It’s a Friday night in early 2016 and I am staring at the streaky paintwork of a toilet door. It is locked. It has been locked for the past two hours. The skin on my knuckles is pink from repeated banging.

I call out, ‘Dad, are you okay?’

There is a long silence.

Then, eventually, comes a reply:

‘I’m … okay … I’ll come out … in … a …’

I go downstairs, but the moment I reach the hallway, I feel I should venture back up, though it will only lead to a dead-end: the blank face of the toilet door again. By now, I have become familiar with its streaky whiteness, the thick and fine delineations of brushwork preserved in the white gloss, my brother’s DIY job. Through the hall window the sky is filled with the blue smoke of twilight. There is that sparkle in the air as people leave work and head for the pub or home. If they saw our house, what assumptions would they make? It’s a semi-detached in a little cul-de-sac, with a neat garden: I would have assumed it was a house where conventional people lived out happy, boring lives.

I suffer the vertigo of uncertainty. Over the past six months, I’ve spoken to several people on the phone for advice about my father. They’ve all asked the same question: ‘Are you his carer?’ And I’ve always replied: ‘No, I’m his daughter.’ The term ‘carer’ feels too clinical. I help my dad because he is my dad. But I’m also nervous of the term because it implies I am in possession of wisdom and medical knowledge and that I know what I am doing.

On the table in the living room is a card with ‘Emergency Mental Health Support Line’ printed on it in red letters. I dial the number. The man at the end of the line introduces himself as Joe. It isn’t until I tell him that my dad has been locked in a toilet for two hours that I realise how panicked I am; I hear it lacerate my voice. Often, in the present tense of a shocking situation, we can only feel numbness; it is in the aftermath that emotions take shape.

Joe is clearly a little confused by what I am telling him. In his line of work, the story of a man who is ill and locked in a toilet nearly always follows the same plot arc: he is making a threat; he intends to take his life. But my father’s condition is so odd and rare and complex – one that doctors have not come across in decades – that I’m not able to explain it on the phone. I just want someone to tell me what to do, even if they are ignorant of the context. I want instruction; I want a friend.

Joe tells me: stay on the phone, go back upstairs and speak to him. ‘Tell your dad he has to come out.’

Even though I’ve already tried this, I obey.

‘Dad, you have to come out,’ I recite.

Silence.

‘You have to put some force into the words,’ Joe tells me, and I suppress an urge to laugh hysterically; I feel as though I am auditioning for a part. ‘You need to say it with authority.’

I bellow the words. No reply. My dad has stopped speaking altogether: this is a bad sign. The echo of my voice makes it seem as though the tiny room has expanded into a vast space. I picture my dad sitting on the toilet in a state of zombie suspension. Or, perhaps he is standing on the seat, wobbling precariously – a rotund seventy-two-year-old, trying to escape through the toilet window.

‘I don’t think he can help it,’ I say. ‘I think it’s probably got out of control now.’

‘You’re doing very well,’ says Joe.

Joe tells me to ring for an ambulance. And then he tells me he is sitting in his office and he’ll be there all night. I can phone him any time. I can update him and let him know my dad is safe. And, if I feel afraid, I can just call and talk to him. In that instant, I fall in love with Joe. It is something that has happened a few times over the past six months. Someone shines a light into the dark storm of crisis and we bond in the intimacy of that moment; it feels as though we have known each other all our lives, even though we are strangers.

Why did Edward choose the toilet? Does he have a weapon? Do you think he is suicidal? These were the questions the woman fired at me when I called 999.

I answered: don’t know, no, and no.

They wanted his rejection of life to be defined as an absolute; but it was far more shadowy and ambiguous. The woman told me that the ambulance would take an hour to come. They were having a busy evening. I sensed a subtext in her tone: austerity and cuts were the cause.

I switched off the phone. The streaky white door stared back at me.

I called out to my dad once more. Once more, there was no reply.

For the third time that day I telephoned my younger brother Stefan. He worked long hours in the City, but I figured he’d be home by now; his flat was just a few streets away from Dad’s. When he appeared on the doorstep ten minutes later, he was carrying a half-drunk bottle of beer. Stefan was in his mid-thirties. Our interactions usually followed the same pattern: we took the piss out of each other as though we were kids again. But this time we were both panicked.

The hour stretched out before us. We argued about solutions. In the end, we surfed the net and picked out a locksmith. Not available, we kept being told. It’s a Friday night, we don’t have anyone …

While I kept calling out to Dad, Stefan found a screwdriver in a toolbox under the stairs and slotted it between door and lock, trying to force it open. A presence by my legs made me jump: my cat Leo was purring and gazing up at me quizzically. Most of the time, she possessed the haughty, wilful air of a cat who regarded her owners as her butlers. In a crisis, however, she seemed to soften and do her best to offer purry support, to play her role as part of the family. I knelt down and stroked her, watching anxiously as my brother jiggled, flecks of white paint flying to the floor. The lock, which my father had screwed on himself, began to rattle as it bent away from the door. And then – snap! – the door swung open and I saw a look of shock on my brother’s face.

Dad was wearing his pyjamas. He was standing upright, facing us, but he couldn’t see us. His body was locked into a strange repetitive loop, like a machine programmed to do an assembly-line task: his left arm would raise, jerk above his head, and then his right foot would lift. His scarlet face was screwed into a fist of agony.

I flew to him. Negotiating past the jerks, I gave him a hug. I whispered in his ear that he would be alright. He was unable to reply. It was as though his mind and body had said goodbye to each other. His body was doing its own strange thing and he was trapped in it, helpless. I tried to take his arm and smooth out the spasms, but it ignored me and carried on. Stepping back, I thought I should let him be: to interfere any more might hurt him.

The doorbell shrilled. The ambulance – early? But when I hurtled down to open the door, I found a locksmith waiting, ready to assist. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, giving him the bundle of notes my brother had passed me.

When the ambulance did arrive, the crew were wonderful. Like Joe, they exuded warmth; they genuinely cared. My father’s state baffled them. They fired questions at us, and we did our best to explain his tendency to slip into catatonia. In the end they moved Dad into a wheelchair and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they eyed the stairs nervously. My father is five feet-five and weighs sixteen stone. One of my friends once remarked to me that he looked like Father Christmas, with white hair and a benign, round face that people found instantly endearing. How to carry him? They hummed and hawed. They brought up a transfer chair, a bit like a sack barrow, and strapped him in. The final turn of the stairs was tricky. Eventually, they got him to the bottom. They looked as though they wanted to cheer.

The house felt lonely and empty after they had gone; night rain was freckling the windows. I pictured my dad and Stefan at the hospital, stuck in some side room in A&E. My brother would be there until at least two or three in the morning, whilst nurses spirited in and out doing tests, asking questions.

In the living room, I gazed over at Dad’s armchair, tucked away in the corner. The seat was hollowed from use and the arm on which he rested his head to nap, curled up like a big cat, was frayed to strings of cloth. Next to the chair was a wooden cabinet on which he’d placed a pair of chunky black reading glasses, his newspaper tokens, his Bible, a list of things to do and to remember, and his pocket diary. I picked it up and opened the front page. It contained that line that all diaries have and few people ever bother to fill out: who to contact in the event of an emergency. Perhaps those who do are the ones who are vulnerable, aware of the hairline cracks in their lives, the threat of fracture. I was touched to see my name and number written on this line, and then felt shadowed by fear: I thought of my father in the toilet and imagined what might have been if I hadn’t been there.

I wandered into the spare bedroom. Once this room had belonged to my mother. Her presence was there still, in the pleats and shadows. A basket of make-up at the back of the desk gathering a thick layer of dust. Her dressing gown, a long leopard-print affair, hung on the back of the door. On her bookshelf sat a row of spine-cracked favourites: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a textbook about Freud, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha. Today, 19 February – the day Dad had spent locked in the toilet – was her birthday. She would have been seventy.

I grew up in this house, the neat semi in a cul-de-sac in a quiet town in Surrey, and stayed here until my university years. Mum was well then, and Dad – Dad was still stable. After graduating I headed north to a little place between Manchester and Liverpool called Appley Bridge, where I rented a room and wrote.

I had expected to reach my late thirties and suddenly metamorphose into Someone Sensible who wanted to put down roots and buy a property. It hadn’t quite happened. I was still self-employed, a writer with a bank balance that hovered perilously close to the line; I had no family of my own; I was uncertain whether I wanted to be a mother. I was, however, in a long-term relationship. My boyfriend, Thom, was eight years younger than me, a book reviewer and a fellow book-lover. Our favourite thing was to wander around second-hand bookshops, rummaging the shelves for gems and stealing kisses in dusty corners. He lived in the north too, anchored there by a young daughter from a previous relationship.

At New Year, Thom had come down to stay with me. We’d had a party in the dining room, pushing the table to one side, taking it in turns to pick tracks on YouTube. His dancing style involved swaying on the spot, whereas I resembled a manic hare. He’d stayed in the spare room, and we’d made love quietly, self-conscious as teenagers, giggling and stopping halfway through if we heard my dad’s heavy footfall on the stairs as he got up for a midnight snack. Thom had infused the house with energy, and when he’d left it had slumped back to flatness.

Since September 2015 I’d been living out of a suitcase, zigzagging between north and south, boyfriend and father, happiness and duty, pleasure and sacrifice. I’d grown out of the habit of hanging my clothes up. I washed them, folded them, put them back in the suitcase, which served as an improvised chest of drawers. For Valentine’s Day, Thom and I had celebrated with a meal out in Manchester. I’d been looking forward to another trip to his place in Buxton, a town of grand green hills, ancient buildings, icy winds and clear spring water. Now it would have to be cancelled.

Thom would be sympathetic, I assured myself. But I felt the itch of worry: I was seeing less and less of him. I recalled how hard it had been last September, when Dad had fallen sick, and those strange catatonic symptoms had first made themselves known. He’d been taken to A&E at St Helier hospital, then transferred to a geriatric wing in Tolworth Hospital. During those autumn months when he’d been hospitalised, life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and I was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I’d found that nearly every email I sent began with the words I’m sorry for the slow reply, that I’d begged for work deadlines to be pushed into the week after next, and set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. That night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would.

2

My first memory: I am four years old and sitting in our cosy living room with my parents and older brother, John. Our faces are reflected and superimposed onto the TV set as we watch The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. One family sitting in suburbia looking at another version of suburbia. Suburbs were once a place for the poor, for those who overflowed from the cities. Then, as the rural poor migrated to industrial cities, the wealthy middle classes moved out to the fringes. Gradually, suburbia came to be associated with neat gardens, neighbours twitching at curtains, 2.4 children and nine-to-five jobs. In the late seventies, Reginald Perrin satirised the sheer boredom of it all; Reggie seeks to escape it by faking his suicide, leaving his clothes and belongings on a beach to be erased by the waves.

Suburbia was a place my parents had escaped to. My mother, Glesney, had grown up on a council estate in south London, at the Elephant and Castle; my father, Edward, came from a large working-class family in New Malden. My mum had been denied a good education by a chauvinistic father who said that university was a waste of time for a woman; my dad’s education had been meagre, but he managed to get a good job at the local factory. When they’d bought our semi-detached house, the estate agent had looked bewildered and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to buy this place?’ It was a house on a fine street, but inside it was a mess of loose wires, crumbling brickwork and walls painted in those lurid colours that were inexplicably fashionable in the sixties, avocado green and bright orange. The last owner had been an old man whose eccentricity had intensified into madness. His fingerprints were still on the walls, black smudges of wrinkled digits that looked eerie in their muddling of the elderly and the juvenile. There seems something prophetic about them now. My parents were thrilled, however. They had nearly achieved social mobility. The scene we watched together on TV was aspirational, for Perrin’s house showed how our place might look, his middle-class boredom the luxury my parents longed for.

Another memory: I am gazing out of the window and see a man walking up and down naked. His clothes have been discarded, like Perrin’s on the beach, trailing down the hallway. (Or have the two merged together in my mind?) My mother takes me, my older brother and my new baby brother to visit Dad. The place he is staying in is a large, white building, with cranky radiators that gurgle. People are wandering about as though they are in the middle of some imaginary maze, seeking the centre. One woman has the cackling laugh of a fairy-tale witch. My dad has always been a playful parent, indulging me in my favourite game whereby he would grab me by the ankles, swing me like a pendulum and cry, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock!’ as my long hair brushed his shoes. This new version of my father is sitting in a chair in his green dressing gown. When he finally raises his eyes to look at us, I see sadness fossilised in his pupils.

With my dad missing, the planned transformation of our home failed. The house sighed and slumped its shoulders, the paint peeled, and the fingerprints remained on the walls.

I never asked my mum what had happened to my father. I felt too afraid, and perhaps she felt afraid of how she might frame that story. She looked tired and had a habit of biting her nails to the pink. She had started to take on various cleaning jobs. On one occasion a letter landed on the mat that brought her to tears. The local tax inspector had demanded a meeting, unable to believe that we lived off so little. My brother and I were taken along with her to see him. The man was kind, but he looked shocked when he asked, ‘Don’t you ever go out to dinner?’ and she replied in the negative.

Dad returned home some months later. But he did not go back to work and, a year on, he disappeared again. Once more, he became a mysterious figure in a dressing gown in that strange white institution that seemed to me a place somewhere between a hospital and a school for the anguished.

By now, I had started primary school, which made me conscious that I was different from the other kids. They were dropped off at school by parents who had swish cars; they lived in comfortable houses; their clothes were crisp and their shoes shiny. My shoes had holes in and when I changed out of uniform into my day clothes, they had a whiff of oddity about them. Someone once asked me why I wore clothes from jumble sales. Dressed in a ragged ra-ra skirt of mauve and lemon layers, which clashed with an off-white Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I wasn’t entirely sure how to reply.

The solution arrived with books. My mother had learnt the art of living off very little. She returned from jumble sales with bags bursting with tatty, dog-eared novels which cost a penny each. I read at night in bed and in the garden in the summer days, lying on the overgrown daisy-studded lawn and under the shade of a lilac bush, before breakfast and during breaks at primary school. Everything was wrong in theory. But in practice I was happy. I had Enid Blyton, Anne Digby, E. S. Nesbitt and Roald Dahl. In Matilda, Dahl describes how his heroine escapes from the unhappiness of her childhood through a visit to the local library:

‘The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.’

I couldn’t necessarily look to my parents for wisdom anymore. My father was hidden and my mother, though loving, was preoccupied with trying to keep us fed and not lose the house. My brothers were no help, either. My older brother was distant; my younger brother was still a toddler, though fun to tease.

Books became my glorious escape. Their invented narratives were coherent, where every detail of the plot contributed to a whole and all made sense in the inevitable happy ending. By contrast, the real world was puzzling in its chaos. I was acquiring a sense of how stories were shaped but my own family’s narrative remained a confusion, a tale seemingly without logic.

‘What happened to your dad?’ was a question I was asked in the playground. Not knowing what to say, I made up a story. I was learning from my favourite authors the art of spinning a tale, of how to build anticipation and end with a cliffhanger. As Dickens advised, ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’. The story of my father was a serialisation that I embellished day by day. It was Worzel Gummidge with a macabre slant; he had been unexpectedly kidnapped by a band of savage tramps who had invaded the bottom of our garden. This had evolved into a hostage crisis. My father was trapped in a garden shed: would he ever return? At one point, I became so engrossed in my story that I forgot it wasn’t real. I was taken to the sick room because I was crying. When I told the nurse my tale, I could see that she was trying not to laugh; she gave me a biscuit, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.

Even if I had known the term for my father’s illness, it would have meant nothing to me. Children survive without science the way ancient societies did – making up stories which explained why sometimes the rain fell and sometimes there was a drought, where the stars came from and why humans were put on earth. When we are children we view our parents as our gods, and so they need grand narratives. To say that my dad was ‘mad’ felt simplistic and would have rendered him too fragile, too human. He needed to be a hero in a tragedy – and importantly, at the mercy of external forces rather than internal ones.