Work Text:
The thing I remember most about him was his hands. They were big and strong, with wide flat nails, always neatly cut short, but rough and calloused. A working man’s hands. The only time I ever remember seeing them totally clean of oil was when he and my mum rented a caravan in Wales for two weeks, which I guess meant there was time for the stain to wash clean. He owned a garage on the edge of town, which meant he was always working and always filthy.
He was a good man, my dad. The sort with broad shoulders and strong arms who could fix anything. I mean, I think he was a good man, but I was ten when it all happened. When you’re ten you don’t have a sense of your parents as anything more than gods with strange whims. They’re not people. Not fully realised human beings like you and me. Realising that your parents are people is something you unpack twenty years later, with a therapist who’s willing to accept that your specific interpretation of your dad is going to stay where it is and you just need to work on your feelings around that.
He and my mum had divorced the year before. No one’s fault. Some things just aren’t meant to work out. I stayed at his place every other weekend. It was a shitty little one bedroom flat in the shit end of town, something he said was just while he got himself sorted out. I believed him (what kid wouldn’t), but looking back on it I think he was just helpless without my mum to organise stuff for him.
He had to work saturdays so I’d hang around town for a bit - he gave me money for a maccy d’s and maybe a cinema ticket, so I’d go hang out with friends at the mall for a bit, then some of us would go to a matinee showing of whatever american blockbuster was big that week. It was twenty years ago, not like it is now, when pre-teens moved in feral packs across the shopping centres, completely unmonitored, not even a mobile phone to tether them to an adult.
When it turned five I was allowed to go meet him at the garage, then we’d walk home. We usually stopped at one of the rental shops to pick out a movie to watch together, then the chinese takeaway to pick up something greasy and glutinous to eat in front of it. It was always the highlight of my week, spending time with my dad like that.
A few weeks before my dad disappeared, I went back to the garage a bit earlier then normal. I’d had an argument with one of my mates - I barely remember what over now, maybe over whether the Terminator could fight a t-rex. I think I’d seen Terminator 2 at a friend’s house a few weeks earlier. It was something unimportant, juvenile, anyway. There were raised voices in the garage, and I, who by the time my parents got divorced was practically allergic to raised voices, skulked outside waiting to see what happened. One of the voices was very clearly my dad’s, but I didn’t recognise the other one.
“You need to fix it” he said, very clearly. He had a deep voice, but muffled, like if you rang a bell really far underwater and just listened for it from the surface. Weird and metallic, but definitely posh. Like, RP posh. “If the cars don’t run, the flags don’t fly. If the flags don’t fly -“
“I’m trying” my dad snapped back - actually snapped. “It’s not as easy as it looks. I’m waiting on replacement parts”
“We don’t have time for replacement parts” the man snarled “Get it done, Mack”
He stalked out of the garage past me - a big man wearing a fancy suit. I disliked him instantly. Not just because he’d shouted at my dad, but because he was wearing a fancy suit. Nothing good has ever come out of a posh bloke in a fancy suit calling on your family. Nothing.
My dad followed him half-way out, then sighed when he saw me. “Alright, puffin?” he leaned over and ruffled my hair, which he hadn’t done since I was six and which I immediately, instinctively hated and vehemently protested. Whether he meant to or not, that broke the tense atmosphere immediately. On the way home, I asked him who the man was.
“Just a customer” he said, with a slight shrug. “Come on duck. Mr Chan’s no. 5 waits for no man”
I didn’t think he was just a customer - he was too posh, too weird - but I let it go. We watched Mulan that night - he always insisted on really kiddy films, when the ones I saw at the multiplex like Gladiator were bigger and messier. I think I appreciate that more now I’m a parent myself. There’s some shit you don’t want to expose your kids to. You want them to have as long as they can to be kids, and not to have to think about the big things.
I didn’t see my dad again for a couple of weeks after that, just because of the alternate weekends thing. I rolled up at the garage saturday morning, expecting him to be there. He wasn’t. It was like a little thread pulled out of the weave of my world. My dad worked at the garage on saturdays. He gave me cash for lunch and the cinema. That was just how things worked, a reliable narrative that ruled my weeks.
I don’t know now why I didn’t find a payphone and call my mum - I’m sure I had 50p for it. It didn’t occur to me I guess, or I didn’t want to get my dad in trouble. Probably the second one. I didn’t want there to be an argument about him not being where he was supposed to be outside the garage while I sat in my mum’s car waiting for her to drive me home. Instead I cadged some french fries off of my friends for lunch and wandered around the mall - no film - until the time I was supposed to go and meet him.
When I got there, the garage was dark - all the windows blacked out and the front pulled won - but I thought I saw a spot of light like a torch waving in there. I knew that if you went around the back and pushed one of the windows in just the right way, you could get it open from the outside, catch or no catch. Again: I could have stopped and called my mum to pick me up any time. I should have called my mum. Instead, I went around the back. It took a bit of effort to pull myself in through the window - it was a little bit higher then I was tall, and I had to really haul myself up there - but I made it.
The very back of the garage was the office, where a nice lady called Linda worked. The office was dark, but I thought I could still see the light of the torch coming through the half-cracked door into the main garage.
I really should have called my mum, but I wanted my dad. I’d been getting very slowly more and more wound up through the day, like a sort of creeping dread. I didn’t know what to do about it (again, I was ten), but every kid’s book had taught me the same thing: you got to face that fear head on, and you’ll come out smarter, braver, and maybe if you’re really lucky with a talking animal friend. I was wrong, but I try to be gentle to myself about that.
I edged forward and nudged the door open, half-prepared to bolt. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out a dark silhouette near the middle of the garage. It was hunched over what looked like an engine. I say silhouette because there was a weird glow about it - like a light in the very centre of the darkness, like it had gotten so dark it became light. I think that must have been what I thought was the torch.
“Dad?” I asked, and the shape - the thing - turned and I could see it was my dad, now that the light shone on his face. You’re smart people, I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley. There’s a point when you make things that look like people where they’re close enough to fool the eye, but not the brain. You look at it and you think ‘yeah, that’s a person!’ and then it moves and it moves wrong and it’s utterly terrifying. I’ve heard a lot of theories about why that is, including fear of rabies, but I don’t think anyone has a definitive answer. Well. This was my dad who’d walked into the uncanny valley. His face was pale and sweaty, and I couldn’t tell you what about him wasn’t moving right, except it wasn’t. I thought at the time it was just because I was freaking myself out, but now? Now, I think it was my brain trying to warn me.
“Hello… puffin?” he said, like he was trying out speaking for the first time. “What’re you doing here then?”
“It’s saturday,” I said, my heart in my mouth, “We’re supposed to get a movie and chinese. We do it every other week, dad”
“Chinese” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. Give me a minute, duck, and I’ll be with you”
Then he gagged and hunched over, his shoulders trembling.
“Dad?” I asked, and I was really afraid now. I didn’t want my dad to be sick. My grandpa had died the year before in a shitty ICU bed and the paper fragility of his skin had nearly broken me all by itself.
“Just a minute” he said, holding a hand up, and gagged again. He held a hand up to his mouth and pulled it away, and I saw that he had pulled out a little checkered flag. There’s a magic trick where the man pulls a whole string of flags out of his mouth, and it looked just like that, only not funny (was it ever funny?). There was a strange fevered compulsion in his face as he pulled out one after another, like he just couldn’t stop.
“Dad?”
He kept going. Flag after flag. Red and white and blue, each of them slick and shiny. The only thing I’ve ever seen that even came close was a baby born with a thick membranous caul - the sort you have to cut away carefully or it will leave scars. These were more like sacs though, encasing the sort of flag you’d usually see at a race course. I used to love formula one. Can’t bear it anymore.
“Dad, stop!”
I wept, I begged, I pleaded. He didn’t stop. I don’t think he could stop. The light inside his belly was getting darker as he pulled each one out, and each one made the room a little bit darker. It was like the tunnel vision I get now when I have a panic attack, a narrowing down of the world to a single point of focus, except I knew it wasn’t just me.
“I can’t” he croaked out around the tenth flag, a bright green and white thing that inexplicably reminded me of the Welsh flag. “I just. I just gotta get this one out and I’ll be done. I’m sorry for scaring you” Then he heaved, puking out what I think must have been the eleventh.
They came out darker and darker, and the string between them got bloodier and thicker until I swear he was pulling out his own guts. My dad was a big man, but every flag that came out of him seemed to diminish him. He got smaller and smaller, and the flags just kept coming out of him like some horrible birth, and at the end there was nothing but a pile of soggy membranous flags.
There’s a certain sort of parasitoid wasp that lays its eggs on - or in - the bodies of other insects. Some of them paralyse the host immediately, and some of them don’t. The ones that don’t usually prey on younger animals - the bigger they can get the better - that grow, feed, molt, go through all the motions. Eventually, the wasp larvae get big enough that they fill up the host’s body and kill them, then chew their way out. I don’t know if that’s what happened to my dad, but if it did… if it did, I’d hate to see the wasp.
It took me ten minutes after that final awful convulsion that turned my father inside out for me to move. I very slowly, very carefully, got the key out of his desk and let myself outside. Then I went down the road and called my mum to pick me up.
I’ve had various people across the years try to convince me that this was a nightmare, or a way for my child’s brain to explain why my dad left - that he didn’t leave on purpose - but I tell you that this story is as true as I am able to tell it.
Like I said, my dad was a good man.
End recording.