Wood - A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

for Nick

SIDE ONE

U ntil that dismal week in August, when every plan he made was an attempt to cancel out another and every word he spoke was a diversion or a lie, I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share. Its easy to say now that I was wrong about him, just as its easy to dismiss his prior accomplishments in light of what occurred. But I was twelve years old that summeras callow a boy as you could find, raised in a quiet street, pillowed by itand I couldnt tell a grown mans imperfections from his fatal flaws. Maybe this naivety of mine was wilful. Maybe Id already fathomed the extent of his deficiencies, seen it in a glitter-smear of lipstick on his cheek one night when he came home, and decided to ignore it. The truth is, everything I know about his life is altered with each explanation of it, gets magnified to such a scale that I glimpse meanings in the grain that are not there. This isnt my attempt to rationalise him, only to account for what he made me. I can give you honesty, if little else.

That wretched week still slants the parts of me that should be upright, turns thoughts that should be clear and bright to murk. Im not the Daniel Hardesty I was back then (by law, in fact: I changed my name when I was twenty) and yet Ive been unable to erase the residue of him. How is it possible that a few short days of misery can corrupt a lifetime? How is it that we let ourselves be so defined by other peoples sins? All I know is, from the moment I was old enough to recognise his absence, my father had the most peculiar hold on me.

He always had two ways of beingtwo weathers, my mother used to say of himand he could switch between them without warning, without reason. There was gentle Francis Hardesty who stood too close to me in pictures, who hooked his arm around my shoulder everywhere we went, clung to me as though afraid that Id forget the colour of his eyes if they werent near. And there was the distant other, who vanished into upstairs rooms without me, who leaned in doorways with young women, pretending that he couldnt hear me as they giggled at his whispers; the Fran Hardesty who planted me on barstools to play fruit machines with pocket change while he attended to his own affairs, who let me have only the outermost of his attention, his perfunctory concern.

I loved him, and it shames me that I loved him, though everything he claimed to feel for me was just an affectation or a gesture of persuasion. I accept that this is not enough to vindicate my part in things. Still, when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every forward step I try to make. His mistakes are my inheritance. The rotten blood he gave me is the blood I will pass on.

I cant pretend to have been blessed with a prodigious memory for details, but I remember more than I care to, and theres one period of my childhood I dont need to recollect because its documented for me. Here, for instance, are the items that were in my fathers glovebox, catalogued the day his car was found by the police:

One half-eaten pack of Foxs Glacier Mints, the wrapper torn back in a coil. Wooden golf tees of assorted colour, all unused. Three black Grundig cassette tapes bearing his careful handwriting in green biro: Blue Bell Knoll , Treasure , Louder than Bombs. A pair of nail scissors, bent. A 275ml tub of Swarfega. One rumpled envelope containing a receipt from Bryants Coachworks for repairs to rear side door, dated 19th July 1993. A Volvo 240 owners manual in a faux-leather case. A box of Anadin in which every capsule had been thumbed out of the blister-pack. Thirty-four pence in change: a twenty, a ten, and two coppers. What else? The red wax belt from a Babybel cheese, gone hard. A broken pen from the Hotel Metropole, Leeds. An empty cigarillo tin.

These objects were not introduced as evidence, but their images still pad out his case file like expired coupons in a drawer. They are all inconsequential now, and yet by virtue of their placement in his glovebox at a certain point in time theyve come to bear significance. So much of the fine print of our lives goes disregarded until one unlawful action makes it all portentous, worthy of examining for clues, and I cant help but scrutinise my past in the same way. As though the truth rests somewhere in these incidentals. As though what happened was a gradual accretion of small, ordinary things that no one thought to notice.

Our village had a life before my father, too, of course. Little Missenden was the kind of place that people still referred to as a parish. It was a pleasant rest stop in the Chiltern hills, known best for its Saxon church and manor houses: sites of niche historical interest that drew occasional visitors from London and beyond. Flannel-shirted men would often stop by to paint watercolours, and I would stand behind their easels while they sketched, numbing them with questions. They never seemed to capture the same landscape that I saw. They drew trees with bold distinctive shapes, birds of no velocity, cottages with characterful faces, country lanes mottled with shade. The Little Missenden I knew was harder to convey, a picture of entangled spaces. It was a rutted loop of track on which I rode my bike, the crawl space Id spent years working underneath our garden hedge, the coin spout in the public phone box where my figurines camped out on recon missions, the flagpole on the belfry of the church that I could see from every upstairs window of our house, the perfect sleighing camber of the fields I prayed for snow to cover every Christmas. Things like these are how you separate a home from its location. If I had the courage to return to them today, I know Id find them changedand changed is just another word for gone.

The first change happened on a quiet Thursday morning, 17th August 1995, when I saw his old blue Volvo coming down our road like some dark clot inside a vein. I had woken early to look out for him, kneeling on the hardwood bench that spanned our guestroom window. For so long, the empty lane outside our house was just a dewy trail of bitumen, a parade ground for the crows, and I felt deflated every time I heard an engine revving in the distance that didnt materialise on our driveway.

My mother had spent weeks preparing me for disappointment: she wanted me to understand that Francis Hardesty, despite his many pledges and assurances, might not appear at all. Your father does whatever suits him, shed warned me. If he lets you down, it wont be personal. Youll just have slipped his mind completely. I never liked it when she spoke of him this way. The more she levelled at my father in his absence, the easier it was to close my ears. He became less faulty in our separations. I believed that he would prove her wrong someday, demonstrate his true efficiency.

That morning, she was waiting to receive him in the hallway. Perhaps she had been standing there for hours. When the bell rang, she was staring at the gilded clock over the door. Seven thirty on the dot, she said to me, as I came downstairs. It cant actually be him. We mustnt be awake yet. But we both saw the looming smudge of his body through the door glass, the pale disc of his face above the fabric of his shirt, the blackness of his hair. I had never listened so intently to the sound of our own doorbell before; it seemed to ring inside my head longer than usualnow and then, I come across another with the same artificial chime and its quaint music rattles through me.