I Had to Kill My Father

I had to kill my father.

I pulled the little black notebook from my bag, and turned it around in my hands. He’d left it to me in his will, along with everything he owned. 20 Thousand dollars he’d saved just for me, a few old beaten up psychology textbooks, and a little black note book cruelly filled with his words.

They say there are two ways to die, the day you breath your last breath, and the day you’re forgotten. I think there’s a third way. The last time you’re able to do something new. You die, in a way, with your novelty. When all the ways you impacted the world become memories. When you’re doomed to become nothing but repeated.

For most people it’s a little note scrawled on a receipt; a half-written grocery list; a picture nobody knew you took. But my father had ensured to psychologically torture me with a book full a new words for me to read, and finish.

I’d taped up the pages. I didn’t want it to fall open. For me to read accidentally.

“You right, love?”

I realised I’d been standing in the middle of the Fish and Chip shop, lost in my thoughts for what must have been too long. I looked up, meeting the red face of Mrs. Hayworth, a plump woman with a kind smile that felt safe. She volunteered on the council.

“It’s alright”, she said, offering me a sad sort sympathetic half-smile, “Come to see your old dad off, hey?”

She patted me gently on the shoulder.

“We’re all missin’ him”

I sighed.

My father lived in a little coastal town named after an old explorer long forgotten. Bagwell’s Cove.

I’d lived there too. Grew up there in fact. Much of my childhood had been filled with lazy warm days making muddy cakes out of orange-red sand and fishing for bream off a Jetty in a constant state of disrepair.

It seemed like the proper place. Towns like this tended take a lackadaisical approach to the passage of time. The Fish and Chip shop was exactly the same as had been on my first visit in 1987. A glowing neon sign reading “O en” since the “P” had been broken since before anyone could remember. Still the same fishing posters on the wall, and metal chairs with newspapers and magazines laid out next to it, like a doctor’s waiting room for fish. Regulars peered over outdated copies of the Sunday Times and offered me several different iterations of the sympathetic half-smile. Mr Simpson, who had opened it on a whim forty years ago, stoically continued to fry chips in same way, in same frier as if the years hadn’t passed and his hair hadn’t greyed. Smelling of old cooking oil and cigarettes surreptitiously smoked on milk cartons out the back. It felt appropriate. Now that my father had trapped himself in time, and let me unravel him like thread on a spool. It felt right to be in a place where time didn’t touch, to choose the moment I would end him.

I bought 10 dollars of chips, just as he and I used to every Friday evening around six. Mrs Hayworth gave me a little nod as I left, but I didn’t reply. What was there to say?

A group of kids sat cross-legged on the metal chairs out front. They were fighting over the remainder of a potato scallop and a carton of chocolate milk. But the fighting fell silent as soon as I walked outside.

I was wraith.

The cool sting of death followed me everywhere. They knew the truth too. They all did.

I hadn’t spoke to him in 15 years. More than 5 Thousand wasted days, and now all I had left of him was this little book. My father’s final words to me. All those words, and all those years, he could have had spoken directly to me. I could’ve replied to them. But now they were all written down in a little book and I knew exactly where it was going to end. All that time wasted over a fight I didn’t remember, to protect an ego I’d outgrown.

How do choose? Do you read it quickly? Do devour as much of him as possible while the pain is still fresh? Like ripping off a bandaid?

Or do you savour him? Hold onto him as long as possible? Tape up the pages and never read it?

I picked at the tape. I’d decided to do both. Take him - that little black book that represented everything he was - and take him back to the tiny town where time never touched. I could sit and read him forever there. And pretend it was still a normal lazy summer afternoon, eating chips and catching bream.

I walked from the Fish and Chip shop, down onto that little orange-red beach, and across to the end the salty grey Jetty that stank of fish and mud. A good smell. A smell full of memories.

I’d decided I’d stay here. A year. Maybe more. I’d traded this place for friends and a job and a life that seemed so small now. 20 thousand dollars and a good dash of sympathy would be enough to rent a room at the old Salty Oaks Hotel for as long as I needed.

I sat and the end of the old Jetty and stared for a while into the water. The soft splish-splish of brown brine, almost hypnotic. I felt a presence next to me.

Michael Bower. Uncle Mike. Dad’s best friend, and the worst fishermen I’d ever met. We sat in silence for a while, because sometimes silence was all that was needed.

“He never blamed you for leaving, Kiddo” the soft husky growl was a strange sort of comfort.

“That’s special gift ye- got there…”, he said, “He never gave up trying to talk to you”

I cried at that. A large hairy hand was placed on my back, and he let me dispense my pain into the ocean.

It felt like we might have been there for hours, or minutes. That was the nature of time in a town like this.

But eventually he quietly stood and left me to work through my grief. I was alone again, except for a curious seagull, eying my chips. I fed one to him and smiled.

And with deep breath. I ripped off the tape. And began to read…