LITMIR.BIZ

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People appeared. They were the silhouettes of four or five grown-ups who would materialise in the curtains to have silent conversations about what kind of bad dream I was going to have that night. Leaving a gap deterred them for some reason, and some of the worst nightmares could be avoided. But the real problem was not avoiding the night-time imaginings but the daytime reality. Not the Phantom, but the Menace. And he was unavoidable.

      A classic of this sci-fi/horror genre was the episode called ‘Do an eight, do a two’. This family favourite has me, aged five, sat in the living room with a pencil and paper, being yelled at by Dad to ‘DO AN EIGHT! DO A TWO!’ It had come to his attention that I wasn’t doing very well in my first year at primary school and that, in particular, I was unable to write the numbers ‘8’ or ‘2’. Actually, I could write an ‘8’, but I did it by drawing two circles, a habit which Mrs Morse of St Andrew’s Church of England Primary School found to be lacking calligraphic rigour. Anyway, the rough transcript of ‘Do an eight, do a two’ goes like this.

      Dad: DO AN EIGHT! DO A TWO!

      Mum: He’s trying! There’s no point shouting!

      Dad: JUST DO AN EIGHT!

      (Five-year-old, sobbing, does an eight with two circles)

      Dad: NOT LIKE THAT! DO A PROPER ONE!

      (Five-year-old dribbles snot onto the paper and does some kind of weird triangle)

      Dad: WHAT’S THAT MEANT TO BE? DO AN EIGHT!

      Mark: Or a two!

      (Eleven-year-old Mark, desperate for any rare sign of approval from Dad, has joined in)

      Dad: WHY CAN’T YOU DO ONE? JUST DO AN EIGHT!

      Mark: Or a two if you like, Robbie! Why not do a two, probably?

      (Mum takes five-year-old on her lap. Five-year-old thinks it’s over)

      (Comedy pause, titters from the studio audience)

      Mum: Try and do a two, darling.

      (Five-year-old freaks out. Then somehow manages a wobbly two)

      Dad: DO A TWO!

      Mum: HE’S DONE A BLOODY TWO!

      Dad: DO ANOTHER ONE!

      Mark: Or an eight!

      Next week on At Home with the Pillocks, Daddy Pillock cuts his own thumb off by going out to work with a chainsaw following an afternoon session in the pub. He gets most of it sewn back on. Mind that light sabre, Darth!

      Where Andrew was during this fun-packed interlude, I don’t know. Probably upstairs listening to Abba. I don’t blame either Mum or Mark, by the way. You might be thinking ‘this is nothing’ compared to your own experiences with a domestic hard-case. Or maybe you’re wondering how my mother put up with it for an instant. The truth is, we were all terribly afraid of him. In any case, Mum was probably just biding her time at that point. She had already made her plans. Before the end of that first school year, she divorced him and he moved out.

      Hell hath no fury like an angry son with a book deal. Actually, I’m trying to be fair. I come not to bury Darth, but to understand him. If this account of my father’s mistakes is starting to look sadistic, then I suppose the make-over had better begin with my saying that Paul was no sadist. He laughed when I fell down the stairs because he was trying to teach me to treat pain lightly. It’s a hard world and what you do with pain – if you’re a man like Paul – is shrug it off. He was trying – ineptly and far too early – to ‘toughen me up’. At a stretch I could even say that he was trying to protect me.

      Poor old Dad: there he is with his three small boys and his insufficiently compliant wife; with his dangerous job and his lonely role as breadwinner (a role he insists on, is expected to insist on) and his drink problem which, by the standards of the day, is no problem at all. He is doing what he’s supposed to do. He works hard, he drinks like it’s going out of fashion (he has a point) and he keeps his boys in line. He can’t quite keep his wife in line: when he puts up a Conservative election poster in their bedroom window in 1974, Mum puts a Labour one in the window of the room next door (my bedroom).

      What a disappointment. Did she not promise in that church to ‘obey’ him? It’s not a promise she can keep. Especially when he’s broken a few promises of his own.

      ‘It would be in the seventies, I’d say. And I told him I was going to Woodhall Spa and the bloke said, “Well, if you’re going to Woodhall, look up Paul Webb. You won’t find anyone better for drinking, fucking and fighting.”’

      This is said to me in 1992, when I’m nineteen and living with Dad again; when I’ve put my suitcase down and the purple stairs have turned blue. I’m in a local pub and I’ve been chatting to a random bloke of Dad’s age who is pleased to tell me about Paul’s reputation in the seventies. The man knows I’m Paul’s son – everyone knows I’m Paul’s son – and he doesn’t seem to mind that Paul’s ‘reputation’ signals to me a world of terrible shit. I listen, nodding. He offers to buy me a drink: ‘Anything for the son of Paul Webb!’ I accept. And nod, and listen.

      Dad’s reputation for living the pub life in the high style was one with which I’d been acquainted for years before I met this guy. It was – at the risk of tabloid overkill – ‘legendary’. And even the most dubious legends are seductive (see ‘religion’). Listening to this idiot in the pub, drinking his booze, I feel strangely proud of Dad. At least he’s famous. Famous for being a brawl-magnet, tit-prospector and piss-artist, but, y’know, at least he’s . . . well, he’s really made that his own, hasn’t he? I mean, that’s what all his friends and contemporaries were licensed to do, that’s what many of them tried to do, but my dad did it best! So that, I suppose to myself, aged nineteen – four pints down, looking for a connection with my living parent – is sort of good, really, isn’t it?

      It’s April. She died two years ago this week.

      Dad was in a different pub tonight. I guess I’ll mention this bloke to him as a funny story when I have another lager in front of the telly. As I wobble home, I find that I’m quite looking forward to that. And then, as I get closer to Slieve Moyne, I start to wonder. I don’t wonder about telling him what I heard. I wonder about whether this is really going to be the father–son bonding exercise that I’m looking for. There’s no doubt that he’ll like it. We get on best when we’re both drunk. Why wouldn’t he like it? That was his whole fucking thing, wasn’t it? Starting (and finishing) fights, cheating on Mum . . . Ooh, mind that drain in the pavement, it sticks out a bit. Hic. Here comes another car in the dark; oh, he’s dipped his lights because he didn’t want to dazzle a pedestrian. People are nice, really, aren’t they? Some people. Wobble.

      And there he is when I get in, watching the boxing on the TV.

      ‘All right, Rob? Just watching a bit of boxing on the box. D’you ’ave a good night?’

      ‘Yes thanks, mate!’ I say this loudly and confidently: you have to be loud because years spent cutting down trees with no ear protection has rendered him half deaf. I say it confidently because that’s how he wants me to be. It’s how I want to be, too. Especially tonight.

      ‘Who d’you see in the pub, boy?’

      I help myself to a beer from his fridge and come into the living room, the ‘do an eight, do a two’ room, the Woody Woodpecker room. This is the room where Mum tried to protect us from him; the room where we weren’t big enough to protect her from him. Our lovely Mum . . . it seems now that I’m moving quite slowly and deliberately. Vaguely, I wonder why this might be. And why is my heart thumping so hard? Probably the walk home.

      He sits with one leg crossed over the other on one of the straight-backed dining-room chairs, an elbow resting on the table where we eat. (I see you’ve got your elbows on the table; didn’t you used to have quite strong views about elbows and tables?) I move round him, looking at the neatly combed brown hair on his head, and take a seat opposite. He’s forty-eight

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