gathering was a particularly quiet one, as my other cousins, my uncle Paul and my auntie Jayne and Chris’s daughters from his first marriage were all otherwise engaged. The plan was to go on a short walk, for which my dad would be the guide, pointing out landmarks and bringing in stories from his past as a teacher in inner-city Nottingham: the one, for example, about the time he broke up a brawl in the playground and discovered that one of the youths he had separated and now held by the collar was in fact Mike, the head of English, who was not very tall. My dad nipped to the loo before we embarked on the walk. I noticed as he came back through the door that he was holding a piece of toast liberally coated with pesto and salt. I looked at him questioningly. ‘DON’T WORRY,’ he said. ‘I ALREADY HAD IT WHEN I WENT IN THERE.’
When my dad goes on walks or days out, he likes to incorporate a rest into his itinerary, during which he will find a patch of grass on which to lie ritualistically in a starfish position with his eyes closed. Those closest to him are accustomed to this now, but it can be a troubling image for people witnessing it for the first time. This summer Chris and Mal told me about a trip they’d been on with my mum and dad to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, during which some Japanese tourists found my dad lying in a starfish position with his eyes closed and prodded him to check he wasn’t dead. He was probably more tired than usual, having earlier air-boxed with a twelve-foot-tall statue made by the sculptor Tom Price. My mum took a photo of the boxing, on my dad’s request, so it could be added to our family collection of pics of my dad pretending to fight with exhibits on days out, alongside such classics as the time he pretended to wrestle a stuffed hyena at Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre near Worksop. It was unlikely there would be any exhibits with which to stage quasi fights on today’s walk, and, although it provided no absolute guarantee, the icy ground made a starfish sleeping break improbable.
At the back door my dad took off Chris’s coat and returned it to him, enabling Chris to put it on over his sweater, which was thick, fuzzy and light green. ‘YOU LOOK LIKE SOME MOSS,’ my dad told Chris.
As we passed through the porch I noticed that the small African wooden head that usually lived there had fallen to the ground. I had always been nervous around the wooden head, which my mum had purchased from a car boot sale a few years previously. I picked it up and returned it to its perch in the manner of someone holding a segment of something very recently deceased.
I enjoy going to car boot sales with my mum, but because I don’t have her amazing vision, my experience at them often ends up tarred by the brush of anticlimax. When I arrive at a boot sale, full of foolish hope, what I inevitably see is an impenetrable wall of 1990s computer parts and grubby children’s toys. When my mum looks at the same scene, she is able to home in instantly on the one exotic and interesting artefact amid the worthless garbage. ‘I got this for you,’ she said a couple of summers ago, fresh from a boot sale in Lincolnshire, handing me a sharp-ended varnished stick about a foot in length. ‘I don’t like it, but I know you’re quite into weird stuff like that so I thought you might.’
I inspected the stick more closely and realised it was a letter opener, probably made in the early-to-mid-part of the last century. On the blunt end a double-sided Devil’s head had been carved. To be totally honest, I wasn’t sure I liked it either, but it intrigued me all the same, and I thanked my mum and carted it back home to Devon.
Over the next few months I tried to find a comfortable place for the Devil’s head letter opener, but wherever I put it never seemed quite right. I certainly didn’t want it staring at me from on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom at night as I slept, and when I placed it near my work desk it seemed to send negative messages from its screwed-up wooden eyes. Like all writers, I already have at least one invisible demon telling me that what I do is a load of crud, and I certainly didn’t need a corporeal one joining in and doing the same. By the following year I’d realised that the letter opener had crossed the line separating ‘occult artefact you keep purely due to historical interest’ from ‘seriously freaks me out and needs to leave’. Also, I could argue that its influence had not been a positive one: in the twelve months since I’d got it, I’d contracted a lengthy illness and broken up with my partner. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly superstitious person but whatever move I made next with the letter opener now seemed crucial to my future. However, the process of getting rid of the letter opener wasn’t as easy as you might think. I’m very careful about recycling and I certainly wasn’t just going to shove it in the kitchen bin, while the idea of throwing it into the flames of the fire in my living room gave me visions of vaporous ghouls materialising out of the smoke. I could have just gone and placed it in a field, but what if the crops caught fire the following day, the flames subsequently licking their way up to the associated farmhouse and reducing it to cinders? Lives would be wrecked and I would feel responsible.
Next to my mum’s wooden head though, even the Satanic letter opener seemed of a fairly frivolous and easy-going nature. The wooden head had a monobrow frown that made the countenances of its larger spiritual ancestors on Easter Island look like those of Blue Peter presenters pumped on a home-crafting adrenaline rush. ‘Like’ does not sum up my mum’s initial feelings towards it; she bought it because she found it intriguing and is interested in sculpture and the different historical approaches to it around the globe. For years the head’s home was a crevice between the branches of a willow in the garden, and it lived there for some time in an apparently innocuous and peace-loving way, but in late 2009 my dad fell out of a eucalyptus tree opposite the willow and broke his spine. Upon her return home from the hospital, where the future of my dad as an independently mobile person hung in the balance, my mum noticed that the head’s dark gaze was directed at the exact spot from which he’d fallen.
The years 2008 and 2009 were especially energetic for my dad. In late 2007, after over two decades of doing almost no exercise of a conventionally athletic or sporting nature, he’d made the surprise announcement that he would run in the London Marathon the following spring, dressed in the costume of a superhero directly from his own imagination. He began to train hard, doing circuits around the village cricket pitch, first in a pair of gym shoes three sizes too big for him that he had bought me for school PE eighteen years earlier from the Nottingham footwear seconds shop Jonathan James, then – after a bout of cajoling from my mum and me – in proper modern running shoes that wrapped themselves snugly around his feet. For motivation, he listened to Zairean and Senegalese pop music from the 1960s and Deliverance, the 2003 album by the redneck rapper Bubba Sparxxx. ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME AND WATCH ME RUN ROUND THE FIELD?’ he asked when I visited, standing at the door to the kitchen in tracksuit bottoms and a running shirt stained with brinjal pickle. Not quite sure what I would do to show support as I watched – Clap? Cheer? Fashion a makeshift pompom from some nearby meadow grass? – and feeling a little awkward about it, I declined but later regretted it. The only times I’d seen him run or even been aware of him running since the 1980s had been on the couple of occasions he’d jogged after my car and rapped his knuckles on the window to ask if I had adequately topped up my screenwash. Now, at fifty-eight years of age, he was covering fifteen miles a day, ignoring his doctor’s advice to wear a heart monitor and my mum’s to pace himself more gently.
‘He thinks he’s twenty-six,’ my mum told me. ‘He won’t listen to me. But you know what he’s like. All or nothing. He’s never done anything in moderation in his life.’
My dad’s personal brand of hedonism has never manifested itself in the obvious. His vices are more humdrum than those traditionally associated with high living. In this way he’s very clever. If you try to sit someone down and tell them they’ve got a chutney problem, you’re just going to look like a lunatic. Similarly, it’s unlikely that anyone has successfully staged a salt or orange juice intervention, and I doubt I’d have been the one to break the trend. The risks from excessive running were more obvious, but it seemed churlish to highlight them when he was enjoying himself so much and looking fitter than he had done in years.
My dad has always seemed a little invincible to me. He’s never been subject to the head and stomach aches from which my mum and I often suffered. To my knowledge he has only had two colds in his entire life – although, to be fair, they were also the loudest two I have ever witnessed. Still, twenty-six miles over hard ground was a long way in the sixtieth year of a life that had not