At the age of seven my parents broke up. I knew that they couldn’t stay together, they fought too much. The fighting scared me. I would sit in my room and try to ignore the sounds of shouting and smashing glass. I became used to it after a while, I’d crouch in a corner of my room, bring my knees up to my chest and hug my legs to body, and I’d start daydreaming, zoning out completely of what was going on around me.

Then one day dad left, he went to stay at the stags head for the night. The stags head was a hotel/pub back then. He stayed a few more days. He came to get some of his things. A week had passed and then I came home from school all of his things were gone.

Dad lived in the hotel now. He had one room to himself. He had to get a job now so that he could pay the rent, but all he managed to get was a job at British gas, reading gas meters.

Mam had to quit work. She didn’t make enough money to pay the childminder anymore and Dad worked so I couldn’t stay at his after school either. So now she stayed at home and looked after me.

Later on that year we got a phone call from my grandma saying that my granddad was dead. He’d been dead for two weeks but she hadn’t told us because she didn’t want to upset us. Mam was angry at that, angry that she missed the funeral. Strange that, she couldn’t have gone anyway, she would have had to have flown over to Brazil.

My life after that was pretty boring, just a few problems with friends.

Nothing much happened until I became 11 and I started S.T. Leonard’s. It was strange; my old school had fewer pupils in the entire school than S.T. Leonard’s had in the entire year. I mean, year six at my primary school only had 7 pupils!

Anyway, I got to year 7, big school, and hurrah! My best friend made new friends. Then I started being friends with her friends and suddenly, wow, I had quite a lot more friends! Then at the end of February that year, my dad became ill. Really ill. At first it wasn’t too bad. He’d gone to see the local GP’s and they told him that all he had had was a fucking stomach ache!
A week later me and mam were sitting in his room, phoning an ambulance. It was scary, seeing my dad like that. He looked so weak and…old. He was 61 but it hadn’t hit me just yet, how old he was. And now all those cigarettes he’d smoked through life had come back around and hit him full force. There wasn’t anything the doctors could do, the cancer had spread too much and not only that but my dad had a weak heart, high blood pressure and blood clots all the way up his legs. I remember my mam sending me to get buy some slippers for him because he couldn’t even get his feet in his shoes, they were that swollen.

After about two weeks they sent him to a nursing home. The probably figured that there was no point keeping him in the hospital, he was going to die and there was nothing no one could do about it.
Me and mam went to visit him in the home. He was lying in the bed the whole time and told us off for ‘shouting’. We had to whisper throughout the whole visit.

Two of his sons came to visit him. You see I have four half brothers because my dad was married before my mam. But his sons had all wanted to stay loyal to their mam and so they never talked to him anymore.

At least two of them came to say goodbye. They brought their children. Dad met his grandson and daughter for the first time.

I remember the next scene exactly; I can paint it out in my head.
We were sitting on the sofa, me and mam. We were relatively happy, having a nice time watching Blind Date. Then the phone rang. Mam picked it up. She came over and sat down next to me. I knew what it was just from the look in her eyes. I didn’t cry.

That day was March 7th 2001.

At the funeral only one son showed up. I cried before the funeral. Then the coffin came and I stopped crying. It was in front of me. I didn’t feel sad at that precise moment all I could see in my mind was that that was my dad lying there in the coffin, he was just asleep. It wasn’t a corpse really. It was my dad. Just my dad. That’s all.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I’m not crying now, nor wasn’t I crying shortly after the funeral, and for weeks after that. I would be sitting somewhere and for no reason I’d get a little image in my head, a memory, of him. Nothing spectacular or life altering. Just little things. Like the way that there was always a new colouring book waiting for me when I went for a visit, along with my favourite biscuits and maybe a magazine or two. And he always had lots of iron brew and dandelion and burdock, even though he didn’t like them. I would remember the way his hair used to feel, it was all curly and soft and used to spring back up when I flattened it down. That memory always made me laugh a little.

I’ll tell you one thing I remember, two years after he was gone; I was on the school bus coming home. We went passed the stags and I saw my dad waving at me from the window like he always did. I waved back. When I looked again, he had gone and the faded curtains were closed. That was the day that I finally accepted that he was gone.