LITMIR.BIZ

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to make things alright; times when I’d give anything to go for one pint with my dad, or drive around in his smoky old Volvo listening to Fleetwood Mac. It’s weird what you miss: every holiday we had, when I was a kid, was foreshadowed on the morning of travel by my dad getting the shits – every single time, without fail – and our journey to Cleethorpes or Scarborough or Whitby or Filey would be delayed by Dad, in the bathroom, making the air sharp and sour, groaning through the door, and Mum, on her tenth or eleventh furious cigarette, hissing, ‘Every. Bloody. Time. Tony! Every. Fucking. Time.’ through her teeth, and I don’t know. Holidays don’t seem the same without this consistent element of intestinal chaos beforehand.

      I picked up his camera, recently. I think a lot of people my age and of my generation get this delayed obsession with film – that gauzy, blurry, physical quality of it, haunted eyes reflected back from a flash bang, a fraction of a second of light that could have exploded – just for a moment – a day ago, or a week, a year, one hundred, more a frozen moment in time, somehow, than anything digital – and I asked my sister to dig out his old Nikon. I turn 30 this year, a moment that will be marked with me living more of my life without him than I ever did with, and it was curious, looking into that bag, reminding myself of a time left behind me: an old emergency pack of Rizlas, the gnarled old piece of tights material he used as a lens cleaner; the ephemera of a life left behind. The bag smelled of him. I held the camera up to my face, put the eye where his eye had been, nestled my nose where, years before, he would have squashed his. Click. You wonder what they would make of you, now. Click. How they might be proud of what you’ve become. Click.

      Dad taught me how to make a prison bomb once. I do not think my mum ever knew about this. This was not on the family curriculum. But we were playing cards one day when I was ten, and, ‘Oh,’ Dad said, as if recalling some vital lesson all fathers teach to their children that he had somehow neglected, ‘right: you know you can make a bomb out of this?’ And I said: I’m listening.

      You can make a prison bomb out of a pack of cards, Dad explained, if you cut all the little red pieces out – the hearts and the diamonds, and any red ink-like paste that might be smeared on the back – and mush them into a wet paste, which you cram down a radiator pipe or some such. When the pipe heats up – it’s an inelegant art, and results vary, so don’t, like, sleep close to it, especially not head-first – some chemical reaction will happen, which causes it to explode, dismantling the wall behind it and through which you – he motioned me in a very confident way, as if to say, ‘You, my sweet large son, are destined for prison’ – through which you escape. And that’s a prison bomb. And that’s rummy.

      I didn’t really question this at the time because dad was always talking about war stuff and cannons and stuff, and also because he went to prison once. This, again, was one of those strange things that was never explained to me as being abnormal – Dad got stopped for drink-driving once and given a warning, and then he was stopped again and given a fine, and seeing as we were poor and couldn’t pay the fine he did three weeks in prison, one week maximum security and then another fortnight – after they realised how truly meek and unthreatening he was – in an open prison somewhere near Leicester. ‘How was prison, Dad?’ I asked, when he came back again. He said: ‘Not bad.’ He genuinely looked quite healthy. Prison wore well on my father.

      We didn’t talk about prison much after that, mainly because it was such a pathetic stretch he did – I mean I never even had to draw a heartbreaking crayon-coloured picture of our family, labelled ‘MUMMY’, ‘DADDY?’, ‘ME’ about it – and also because Mum very strictly forbid us talking about it (she was really mad about that time he had to go to prison). But one day I answered the phone – one of my pathological childhood obsessions, for a while, was snatching the phone up and answering it in my politest sing-song – and a strange voice on the other end growled: ‘Is that Joel?’

      Yes, I said.

      ‘Hello Joel,’ he said (imagine the voice is more prison-y than that. You are not reading it prison-y enough, and I can tell). ‘Hello, Joel,’ the prison voice said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Is your dad there?’

      And I said sure, who is it.

      And he said, John.

      And so I yelled up the stairs, D–AAAA–D, JOHN’S ON THE PHONE.

      And my dad appeared before me like death had learned to shit his pants in fear.

      ‘Yeah,’ my Dad said, shakingly, as I watched. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yep. No I’ll— yeah. No I’ll come to you. Yeah. Yep. See you there.’ And then he hung up and turned and swivelled into a crouch down next to me and said, Don’t Tell Your Mother.

      I’m not saying who told her but she found out.

      It turns out Dad had made friends, in prison, as he was wont to do as he was a very mellow and agreeable man, especially friends with his bunkmate, John, who murdered someone. ‘Yeah come over,’ Dad said into the bunk above him, confident this man would never be released from prison ever in his life. ‘We’ll get a drink. Kip on the sofa until you sort yourself out.’ And then John fucking got parole, and instantly called the only phone number he had on his person, which was my Dad’s, and asked if he could stay with us, promising not to do a murder again. The row between my parents that night – the Red Corner fighting ‘can a murderer stay on our sofa’ and the Blue Corner fighting out of ‘absolutely fucking not’ – went on so long our neighbours kept flicking their bedroom lights on and off in a really passive–aggressive way, slamming their flat fists against the shared wall that ran over our alleyway.

      John never stayed, in the end – ‘Because of the murder,’ I imagine my dad saying, over the pint they eventually shared, at a pub far, far away from our house, and I like to think John was a gentlemanly murderer who waved his hand and said ‘I understand’ – but I always like that my dad even tried it: that he thought a murderer could stay with us, for anywhere between one day and six months, really says a lot about him, his gentle trusting nature and his inability to operate anywhere within the sensible laws of society.

      I often imagine how I would do, in prison. Quietly, I think I’d thrive. The Boys there would at first be suspicious of my smart mouth and bookish ways, and look to teach me a violent lesson, but I think after the first two or three beatings they would take a begrudging shine to me – ‘He does reading,’ they will say, proudly, to their bunkmates, ‘He’s helping me write a letter to my lawyer’ – and that, over time, would evolve into a quiet sort of respect. One day a young upstart would try and beat me with a metal pipe on his first day to prove some sort of point, and the more seasoned inmates would jump to my defence – ‘Leave him alone!’ they’d say, ‘He’s just a harmless little soft cunt!’ – and I would say Thank You, Lads, dusting my prison uniform off, going back to my eccentric little hobby of cutting all the red bits out of cards. And then one day, just like Daddy taught me, I’d blow every one of those fuckers up to kingdom come, and sprint off into the night, hooting and hollering with delirium, until the police shot me to death with Tasers. But I still wouldn’t fucking invite a murderer to dinner, would I? Because I’m not mad.

      #.

      I got to tell you that there is something singularly amusing about watching a Dutch teenager swear in a flurry of American slang. Fucking shit bro, fuck man. Jord is swearing. Fucking shit man, my mom. Jord just got down to the last five of the game – 100 players whittled down to a handful over a grinding 35 minutes – and the circle draws ever tighter, pushing those last few remaining players in, and they are all concentrated on this one small patch of bushgrass,

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