A month since my father died. Sometimes the sour-salt smell of his dead body will float to the top of my brain, or the sight of his half-open eyes, and I’ll remember how his skin felt in that close room, in that last bed. In my dreams, he visits with greater frequency than he ever visited my home in life: at first, he was standing behind me while my daughter shouted, Look! Look!; in another, he had just left the room, and the corner of my eye; last night he was at a party one of us was throwing, and he was like his old self, his years-ago self, and it was an enormous pleasure to see him, unlaced with the sick dread of later on.
I spoke about his sense of humour at his funeral, how that was the most defining part of our relationship. And it was, and continues to be, true. It’s been a gift, and shaped the very best of me. For my work, I’m asked to come up with some ad lines for the memoir of a comic actor who’s always reminded me of my father, and it’s only spending the afternoon googling clips - many of which I’d watched with my dad - that it hits me again, dizzyingly, not overwhelmingly, but vertiginously. I cry a bit and get on with it.
At a car boot yesterday, we unpack the car and I see almost all the books we’re selling are ones from his shelves, donated many months ago, Jeffrey Archers and Boris Johnsons and Jeremy Clarksons. Not my onions in the slightest. But one is the William Langewiesche that I sent him after I’d worked on the back cover copy, complete with the note from me tucked two-thirds of the way through, as far as he’d got before moving on to something else. At the previous car boot, before he’d died, I would have given the whole pile away for a round pound. Laid out on the picnic rug this time, it feels like a cheat, a spitefulness, and I hope the buyers know the value of what they’re getting.
I don’t regret not telling him that I loved him, because I did. But I wish I could have understood when I was saying it that it was true, that he’d made my life better more than he’d made it worse. But not one ounce of that is going to make me any more willing to have leftover Clarksons, Johnsons and Archers in my own home for a single second longer than is necessary.