Daddy

DADDY

“The black telephone’s off the root, The voices just can’t worm through”

It’s sad.
Tragic, even.
The thing is, I just stumbled upon another verse that reminds me of you. I understand how romantic self-destruction is, but for God’s sake, you don’t even have an audience.
I remember the times when I told you I had to get off the phone right now because Mum was having a fit and she needed me. Her grey eyes panned the charming little room in terror; she wasn’t witty and fun and sharp as a poisoned tongue any more: she wasn’t there. Cold as anything, you replied in a flat, unsympathetic tone: “Oh, did she forget to take her pills again?” I remember that feeling, one that comes too often, the raw, bitter instinct that takes all the love of my mother to repress. I would give anything for you to be in the room right now – to have my teeth in your neck and my nails in your eyes and your tar-black heart on the floor. I would sell my soul to be able to kill you. It’s the eighty-five-mile sprint between us that keeps you alive. There’s enough anger in me to burn out the world. Twice, three times perhaps. You have no idea how I can hate.
But I love her, and the line falls dead. She needs me more than I need to relish in the sight of your mangled corpse.
I remember being young, maybe seven or eight, being in the kitchen and staring down the two full bottles of forty-seven-percent vodka carelessly tucked behind the Pepsi. Later, the hiding places became more adventurous: the cupboard under the sink, the shed, even inside the cistern in the downstairs toilet. The unfinished play-house you promised us filled with empty, glaring glass that built up as fast as the wall between us. “He’s my father, but he’s not my dad,” I remember saying to someone. At the time I wanted to sound dismissive, but I ended up creating a crap play on words that barely passed as one. I remember your repeated mumbles down the phone, the attitude. It was the only time you cared to say whatever the hell you were thinking. “Why the hell d’you wanna do that for a living. Can’t you be a dentist or something useful?” Use. God, you’re such a waste of guts sometimes.
I remember the day, sometime in March if I recall correctly, in a careless tone as if it had no impact on me at all, that you were quitting. Unable to word just how relieved and in love with that promise I was, I began to cry. You had no idea. All those years.
I remember realising after only a short while that, of course, sometimes some wounds are so big they never heal. For ten years you’d tormented me, and in that time I’d grown and lived, yet all the while, the fortress of hate you’d built around yourself through the drinking had allowed you to preserve the innocent, five-year-old me. The me you’d last seen me as. You don’t know me. The worst part is you don’t make an effort to.
Fuck you, I’ll be whatever the hell I want to. Thank you for destroying your own life – it keeps my own burning bright and so very alive. I will never be you. In fact, I am and will be everything you destroyed in yourself. I will be magnificent. I will prove you wrong. I will prove you all wrong.
And, for the record, I’m not five. I can swear without blushing, and I can’t ever remember a time when I called you “Daddy”.