My parents met and married in Hove, England in the early 70s. They lived there for six years before my mum fell pregnant with my sister. I knew little about that time. Growing up, our father was not spoken of and I had not felt encouraged to ask. Occasionally my mother might say, ‘You’re just like your father you…’ but she said it to my sister, it was not said to me. To the extent that I thought he was her father alone and when people asked me about my father, I told them I didn’t have one, because, as a child, I believed that to be the truth.
A lone parent in a rural Irish town in the 80s was the exception, not the norm. I was the only child in my primary school class from a single parent family. When I did not draw a picture of Galway winning the All-Ireland hurling final, the class assignment for the day, the teacher brought me into the corridor to ask why.
‘But Miss,’ I told her, ‘I don’t know what a hurling match looks like, I don’t have a father.’
Then I started to cry. She cried too.
I cried because I was a being unjustly admonished for my failure to complete an impossible task. She cried because she pitied me. Her compassion scared me so I cried harder. What was the big deal, what was I missing out on?
Secondary school presented more problems. My father, his occupation, appearance, his likes and dislikes were the fodder of French and German oral work. I grew weary of answering questions on my family. My lack of basic paternal knowledge was an annoyance, a nuisance. I invented different versions of a father for each class and no one challenged me on them. My father was a series of petty peeves and irritations, a question on a medical form I couldn’t answer, a missing signature on a homework journal, a spare seat at a school concert. When I hit that inevitable patch of adolescent angst I had no fantasies of him coming to save me. My heart was a walled garden.
There were terrible inferences, none of which had ever been confirmed. That he had abused my mother in some way to cause her to flee. He must be a bully, he must be violent. I didn’t dwell on it, it wasn’t spoken of and it didn’t affect me. After my initial outright rejection of his existence, when I discovered its biological impetus, my next assumption was that I wasn’t his child. Who could casually abandon their own children, would he not at the very least have been curious to see what I looked like? No, there must have been some question over my parentage that my mother was keeping schtum on.
What had I picked up about him over the years? That he was tall with blond hair. That he was a plumber. That my mother ran away to Ireland when she was eight months pregnant with me, on the ferry, with the help of her brother. That he chased after her. There was a reconciliation. I was two weeks overdue. He re-plastered the ceiling of my grandparent’s sitting room. Then, growing restless awaiting my birth, he borrowed money off my grandfather to go to the Netherlands to find a new job but the next time he was seen or heard of again was by my mother’s friend, at a bus stop in Hove with another woman.
My mother kept contact with my fathers’ parents. They were his adopted parents, and his adoption was often cited as the reason he had a ‘chip on his shoulder’. We knew we had a half-brother named Rock because when my English grandmother died, my mother went over to the funeral and met my father and his new family there. Despite wanting to, we were not allowed to go to the funeral. Your father has a ton of other children now, she reported back, with names like Rock and Brent. How many, we asked? She couldn’t say, four or five. What were the other ones called? She didn’t remember. Did they look like us? A bit, not really.
My sister searched our half-brother’s name on Facebook, and a dark-haired, stern-faced, hoodied youth who bore her more than a passing resemblance showed near the top of the list. She sent him a private message.
Is your father Richard?
wot of it?
Were his parents Seb and Bella?
yeh
Does he have two daughters from a previous marriage?
Rock confirmed this to be the case. My sister rang me, I was on my way home from work, it was Friday and a sunny evening.
‘No way!’
‘Way.’
‘Send me the messages, what does he look like in his profile picture? I’m going to add him!’
Blithely I sent him a friend request and less than an hour later he accepted it. I had already been to the off-licence, I sat at my laptop with my glass of wine and I typed.
Hi
We got to chatting. I went from being the younger of two children to being the second eldest of nine children my father sired. Nine, an obscene number, an irresponsible number, he wasn’t even Catholic. No wonder he could afford to let one or two drift by the wayside. I felt reckless and surreal so I rolled out the banter.
Your mother must be in bits, mine got off easy.
lol
He listed his other siblings.
Dan is adopted
Okay right
Why would someone with multiple children adopt another? Turns out it was family joke I failed to get. Where were they living, still in Hove? No, they’d been brought up in Luton , the rest were scattered but Lexus and Brandon were living in Letterkenny with their parents. Letterkenny, in Ireland? Letterkenny?
2 stop d 2 yung uns getting into trouble Lol
They had moved to Ireland a few years previously but Rock hadn’t wanted to go, nothing to do there, no mates, nothing but fields. He worked occasionally in hotels and mainly at trying to stay out of trouble. His interests were alcohol, women and weed. He liked hanging around causing trouble with his brothers, I might have heard of them they were (in)famous, but not with Dan because he was a junkie.
Are they on Facebook?
They don’t get much internet access at the moment I was told. What was it like growing up with such a big family, I asked? His mother was a saint but his father ran the house like a boot camp. It was becoming clear they didn’t get on.
U find out urself wen u met him lol
He didn’t have a number for the house in Letterkenny or a mobile number for his father. He might have a mobile number for his mother somewhere. I was giddy and lightheaded with my bottle of wine. I had been keeping my sister up-to-date on the progress of our chat. I trawled Facebook for the accounts of the other siblings he’d named. The photos I had access to were few and far between, the shots were too blurry and of bad quality. Still I scoured them for resemblances. I logged onto Bebo to find my youngest half-brother’s account. There was a nice photo of him in Letterkenny with a dog. There were no photos of my father.
I dialled my father’s second wife’s number. She didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail, my words were garbled, my voice was squeaky, I spoke at a fast-pace. I sent her a text in case she didn’t listen to the voicemail.
Is your mother’s name Vivian?
She replied to my text.
Yes
Your dad is out walking the dog. I’ll get him to call you when he gets back
Boom! Nearly 30 years of nothing, no contact, no correspondence, such an anodyne response. I was jittery, terrified, what would he think of me and what would I think of him? He rang the next morning. His voice was deep, gravelly and very English. We had difficulty understanding each other. He wanted my mother’s number to get her permission before speaking with either me or my sister. I was angry, I couldn’t give him my mother’s number, I couldn’t land that on her doorstep without warning her first. Why did he need her permission? I was an adult capable of making decisions in my own right. As a compromise I gave her his number, she called him and then he rang me back and we spoke. He filled me in on ‘my brothers and sisters.’
‘Two of your brothers are at her majesty’s leisure.’
But what did that mean? I was confused, the omens had been there since my conversation with Rock, I knew without being able to seize the meaning. I brushed over it. They’d moved to Letterkenny for the good of the younger kids, to keep them out of trouble, but only the very youngest Brandon at fifteen was living there. His sister Lexus 16 had stayed one year before running back to the UK to live with her sister. I only retained snippets of that first conversation, impressions. He was exceptionally fond of his dogs.
I didn’t say much about myself. There was a worm of doubt in my mind - this man has no interest in you, you are strangers with nothing in common; I didn’t want to bore him. He asked after my mother, he was very interested in what she had been doing with herself and particularly in her love affairs since his departure. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to contact us you see, he had heard a rumour she was shacked up with a man in Dublin and had started a new life there. How long had he been living in Letterkenny. A few years, he had driven past our house once with work and thought about popping in. Why didn’t he? He didn’t know, he thought our mother didn’t want us to have anything to do with him. I quizzed him on his health, heart disease and congenital illnesses.
I wanted to meet him. I had only a sketchy idea from a handful of photos what he looked like. He was someone to poke with a stick, to regard with curiosity and wonder, a circus freak. The sooner we met the better as far as I was concerned. Get it over with, like ripping off a plaster. I chatted more to Rock, who had also been inside, the extent of the schism between him and our father became apparent. He was suggestive of things like ritual beatings, sadism, a highly dysfunctional household.
I am not sayin he wer a nonce or ne ting
Another word whose meaning I had difficulty grasping. I resolved to avoid further Facebook chat with Rock. My perspective of my father was being coloured. I read Steven Pinker books to assess the genetic implications of my discoveries. Nature or nurture, should I be concerned about my genes? How closely related were these half siblings to me?
‘Your father always said he wanted enough children for a football team,’ said my mother.
Would she have provided him with one if they had stayed together? Alternate history versions of my life streamed through my head, like movies in which the Nazis win the war.
Then my 16 year old half-sister contacted me via Facebook. A second perspective assuaged my fears on the brutality of their upbringing. She lol-led away Rock’s insinuations.
It weren’t dat bad lol
U’ll see wen you met him u shud meet him lol
We met on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Athlone. Athlone, the heroin capital of the midlands, I thought on the train there. My sister was coming from home, me from Dublin and our father from Letterkenny. It had seemed convenient. What could I wear that said fuck-you-I-never-needed-you, yet showcased how slim, attractive and blazingly intelligent I was, while indicating my availability to take any money he might want to compensate me with. Topshop. I was on the train and we three were to meet in the train station car park.
I drank too much coffee and tapped my fingers on the table top in time to some blasting techno. My sister promised she would come alone, she had three children and a husband, I had no one, but when the train pulled into the station her car was full. This wrong-footed me, I had wanted it to be about us three, myself and my sister and our relationship with our father. Not about grandchildren, they could be relegated to some future date, our primary relationship should take precedence. They had just driven down for moral support she assured me. They wouldn’t interfere.
Her husband was concerned about her safety; he wanted to ensure he wasn’t a psycho before she got into a car with him. The car was some make of SUV and Lily Allen was playing through the speakers. First impressions, he seemed fine. His hair was too long and he was wearing jewellery, ‘Never trust a man who wears jewellery,’ my grandmother always said. His clothes were a bit Jack and Jones, mutton dressed as a lamb, for my tastes but that is hardly a capital offence.
I sat in the back. We were tongue tied and awkward. Presumably we agreed to go from the train station to the town to find somewhere to have a coffee and chat because off he drove with my sister’s husband and their kids tailing him. Once he was out of the car I saw my father was very tall. Nearly 6’4’’ in his heyday, he remained an impressive height and build. He laughed because myself and my sister are so short, the runts of the litter and I’m 5’6’’. All his other daughters tipped 6’’.
I picked a pub, not a café, and ordered a Bulmer’s to suit the weather. We sat on a hard wooden bench around a cramped wooden table in a dark corner of the pub while the sun blazed on outside. He talked more about his dogs, about breeding them and showing them competitively.
‘So you’re into breeding?’ I said.
I do a line in abandonment humour. He liked music too; he’d seen T-Rex before they were T- Rex. He had to repeat a lot of what he said, his English accent was so thick. Great, my father is Jim Broadmoor, I snorted into my pint. There were breaks in the conversation. He mostly questioned us about our mother. He told us some anecdotes from their youth involving sexual exploits, he was not embarrassed to share them with us.
Everyone went outside for a cigarette.
‘Fancy meeting you here!’ said my sister’s husband, as he strolled past with the kids.
There were handshakes and introductions, we piled back inside for King Crisps and Coca-Cola. I zoned out, the conversation was dominated by grandkids, babies, he’d never seen Rock’s baby girl. Rock’s fault of course. He hadn’t contacted us because he’d assumed my mother didn’t want him to. He’d shown up at the divorce proceedings, she had not. Somehow this was the irrefutable evidence he’d needed that she’d wanted nothing more to do with him and as such that he should have nothing more to do with us either. Our English grandparents, they were no saints, they’d had his dog put down when he was a teenager.
He left hurriedly. The train trip had been longer than the meeting. His wife didn’t want him to meet us. Why? I asked. She needed time to adjust, to get her head around it, he said. She seemed okay in the text messages, I said. Did he want me to talk to her? It wasn’t a good time he said, the youngest daughter back in Britain, she missed her company. Why did you let her go her go if she is only 16, I asked? Couldn’t stop her, anyway what was the worst that could happen with her older sister looking out for her. He was there by stealth - he’d lied to his wife, as far as she knew he was out doing the shopping. He had a shopping list he was in Athlone to fill. Brandon, the youngest, was waiting for him at home. This last remark, piqued me, fuck Brandon, I’d been waiting by whole damn life.
The monster Rock’s words conjured was not the man who appeared in the flesh.
Life went on with the odd text message exchanged between my father and I. Things weren’t going well for him at home. His wife was agitated. She’d threatened to kick him out of the house, he was sleeping in the car. I was perplexed, was their marital disharmony my fault?
One evening I saw I had a missed call from my father as I left my creative writing class. ‘Your brother Brett is out of prison today,’ he said, when I rang him back, ‘we’re celebrating.’ Fantastic news. Great to hear. I cycled home and on to the Tesco up the road past my house. Inside, as I walked up and down the aisles, I began to cry. I couldn’t find the tuna fish. It wasn’t where it usually was. The supermarket had been rearranged. Things weren’t where they were meant to be. Everything was wrong.
I found it difficult to motivate myself to do things. Walking to work one morning I felt an intractable pull towards the train station. Before I knew it I was chugging my way down the coast. Playing hookie, on the mitch, skiving, what did it matter, nothing seemed important any more, everything was absurd, ridiculous. I wrote a poem about it.
At work I looked around the office floor and giggled. I was in a hyper-surreal stare, peeling away from reality, detaching from what was going on. Where did I fit between the people in the suits and my new family? The 16 year old was pregnant. Her boyfriend was older than me. Aligning the columns of my excel sheets seemed trivial. Was my baby brother really a junkie?
My father text my mother. Odd sporadic texts. Reminiscing about their time together, versions of stories she strongly disputed. The deviation between their remembrances of a shared history was extreme. They each doctored the past, sanitised it so it fit in line with their individual narratives. Revisionists, truth was eroded or lost, telescoped against the subsequent events that occurred in their lives.
I was sad, that I had stirred this to the surface, that the past meant more to them than the future, that one day this would happen me too.
We met our father for a second time. He came to my home town and the three of us went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. He talked more about his house, the décor, the dogs, his love of cooking but most of all he spoke about my mother. The great sex they’d had on their honeymoon, what a goer she’d been. I drank too much. He was drinking too; but it had little effect. In the smoking area of a local pub he told me I was hard, my defences were up, I wasn’t letting him in. He wanted to hold my hand walking down the main street when we left the pub. I let him. In the same spirit as a child who holds their hand over a flame to see how long they can keep it there.
He had nowhere organised to stay. He wanted to stay in my mother’s house. She was away at the time but I could not allow it, plus I did not want to stay with him alone in the house. He ended up staying on my sister’s couch and driving away before breakfast the next morning. I haven’t seen him since.
He continued to text my mother, frequently and intensely, despite her ignoring him, then despite her asking him to stop. He still loved her. He’d never loved anyone else. She was his real wife because she was his first wife and any other wives after that didn’t count. We were his only real children, not the children he had brought up and was still bringing up, but me, who he had met twice, and my sister who he’d abandoned at eighteen months. A man only has one wife and therefore his children by her are the ones that count.
My youngest half-brother sent me a message on Bebo, hate mail. I was destroying his life, tearing his family apart, why had I ever made contact, and what did I want from them? He despised me and he hadn’t even met me. I text my father. He didn’t reply. I rang him, he didn’t answer. He text me back later, he was watching Michael Jackson’s funeral with his wife. He was busy.
Later that summer my mother called me at work. He was hounding her, insisting they meet. He had left his wife for her. He wanted them to be together. To pick up where they’d left off 30 years later. I paced outside the office listening to more tales of their marriage that I had never heard before. Things she was prompted to tell me by his persistent calls and text messages.
Then work threw me a curve ball. I was being deployed to a role in the UK, to Hove to be exact.
‘Did I know it?’
‘Yes, I had family there.’
‘Lovely,’ the HR representative replied.
I deleted my Facebook account.
I thought about places that may have been relevant to my parents but I did not seek them out. Where they had married, the first house they’d bought. I’d received a present of Hove Rock which I read. Was there a criminal undertow to the town? My bones were tired as I watched the grey waves smash against the stony shore.
The day I finished for Christmas the south coast of England was covered in snow. In January I was re-deployed to London. My walk to work in the morning took me from St Paul’s over Southwark Bridge at the Tate modern and along the bank side to my office near London Bridge. Squinting as the early morning light bounced up from the bleak concrete streets, I should have found the view edifying. But I was worn out, bleached by the light, faded and hollow.
I wasn’t thinking about my father or his family anymore, but in a way I was. The structures of the universe had altered. The discoveries that I had so casually made had underwritten my identity, what I thought I knew about myself, what I thought I knew about the world. The disclosures of the past year did not have an immediate effect on me but a powerful one. I’d opened a Pandora’s Box for everyone including me, I’d engendered needs I’d spent a lifetime supressing and received a second rejection – it was my mother he wanted not me.
In March I took to my bed. I decided not to go back to London any more. I decided not to do most things anymore. It wasn’t a decision so much as a physical inability to force myself to do them. I had atrophied.
My Dad reappeared. I had not been in contact with him. He showed up at my sister’s house demanding to know why our mother had not shown up at the divorce proceedings thirty years previous. My sister, losing patience, told him to ask her himself. He went to batter down my mother’s door. She hid by a window in the upstairs landing pretending not to be at home to have a good view of him shouting his demands and questions up at her. He left a large candle in a candle holder, like something from an altar, outside the front door. And though she says she wants nothing to do with him it sits in pride of place in her hall.
also see: poem
