My father rang in the April.
Eleven minutes, about nothing at all. He asked whether the boiler was still playing up, which means he remembers that boiler, which means he lived in that house once as a boy.
He has rung four times since. Always about the house. Never about his father, and never about 1963, and I have not raised either.
I have not forgiven him.
He has not asked me to, which I give him some credit for, because the asking would have been for his benefit and he appears to know that.
We talk about the boiler. Eleven minutes at a time, four times a year.
That may be the whole of it for the rest of our lives and I have decided that is an acceptable outcome.
That is where we are and I am not going to pretend it is more.
I live in that house.
I am rebuilding the porch badly. The neighbours are being extremely polite about it and one of them keeps appearing with the right tool at the right moment and then leaving.
I have his shed. I am not good in it yet. I have made two things and both of them are wrong in the same way, which apparently is how it starts.
The quilt is on my bed.
The pipe smell is going, slowly, out of the hall first and then the study. I have mixed feelings about that and I have not aired the study once in eleven months, which I am aware is not rational.
His coat is on the hook by the door. It is going to stay there.
And there was one more line in the letter he left me, which I have not quoted to anybody until now.
He wrote: don’t keep them out on the doorstep.
And then: people are only really themselves once they think they’ve already won.
That is the sentence. That is the whole of what that man understood about human beings, written in biro, by somebody who left school at fifteen.
He did not need them to be caught doing something hidden. There was nothing hidden; they were not sneaking. He needed them to be caught doing exactly what they intended to do, openly, confidently, in front of witnesses, in the belief that there was nobody left who could stop it.
You cannot get that out of people by confronting them. You can only get it by opening the door.
