Breaking
by Zack Wilson
My father used to take me to the pub when I was about 16. The main reason for this was that he had no friends. I didn’t really have anything better to do either. I’d just started at college for my “A” Levels and we’d moved from a different town, so I was just finding my feet. He didn’t really have this excuse. He’d worked in the town for years, and my mum and he had socialised there often. But the only people he knew seemed to be pub regulars, and he would be friendly to their faces and then disparage them to me.
I used to enjoy the first couple of pints. After that I became unhappy and would listen to my father ramble on in a strange tone of voice, full of hatred and latent anger. He used to say strange things that disturbed me, especially about race and religion. I used to put a lot of it down to his Belfast Loyalist upbringing, but that was just another excuse.
I told him about a mixed race girl at college I liked. I used to spend my lunchtimes in the canteen with her talking about Twin Peaks and David Lynch, and I thought we were starting to get somewhere. He told me, in a breathy tone of forced reason through the Stella haze that hung around his beard, that he didn’t want me to breed with any coons, that your Czechs or your Poles or even Italians were okay, but would I promise never to go out with any coons. I thought he was going to cry.
Then he said that David Lynch must be a fenian, with a name like that. He’d left Ulster when he was 5.
Another time he punched square on the nose as we left. There was considerable blood. He made me promise not to tell my mother by choking me with his right hand until I agreed. I forget why he did it.
There was an alleyway that was the last stage of the walk home. It ran slightly uphill and led to our estate. One time when we were walking back he suddenly started walking quickly, very quickly. I adjusted my pace and kept up. He raised his pace again. I did the same.
This went on until he was actually racing me. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his ugly leather jacket, his shoulders moved and thrashed like the stumps of a drowning amputee as he tried to propel himself faster along the alley and ahead of me.
His face was full of hate; lips pulled back, eyes staring like a killer fish. I think he won. I don’t know if it made him happy.
I’m at his funeral and I’m taking a photograph of his coffin on my mobile phone. His cousins from Belfast are giving me evil looks but they can fuck off. They wanted to bury him in Ulster and wanted to have an argument about it. I said they could do what they liked, I didn’t care.
So my grandfather decided to have him cremated here and then we could take the ashes where we liked. As I’ve said, I didn’t care. The coffin’s lying at the front of the crematorium, on a kind of stage. It rests on some kind of plinth, but it’s at an angle and looks like someone dropped it. Maybe the undertaker was pissed.
Some clown form Belfast has draped an Ulster flag over it, but it’s all creased, so you can’t see the Red Hand properly.
It just looks like another St. George’s cross.
I’m on my own. My two sisters didn’t want to come, even though they both saw him intermittently. My mother left him years ago, just after I left university. I can’t stand his second wife and she’s come with all her idiot family, so I stand on my own in two empty rows near the front.
I take my photos and I send them via MMS to my best friend. I want this finality witnessed, documented.
Three months ago my father’s doctor told him to stop drinking. He was complaining of pains in his side. My father said that only drinking spirits could hurt you, the wine he drank now was good for him. A fortnight ago a biopsy revealed inoperable liver cancer.
A week later, he was dead. His father, my grandfather, had to switch the machine off.
I leave as they’re singing the final hymn. I don’t want to stay and shake anybody’s hand.
Rachel’s in the kitchen when I get back. She’s reading some magazine article about IVF. She tells me about Louisa at work who’s just had twins and I don’t listen. I open a cupboard, reach up for the bottle of Famous Grouse. I half fill a half-pint glass with whisky and top it up with tap water.
I take the bottle with me and go and sit in the living room. I drink half the glass and replenish it with whisky.
I just want to break the cycle. Man, I just want to break the cycle.