Warm Orange Aid and Sausage Rolls

When I think warm orange aid, I think of you, and how your car boot stood as a testament to every lost screw and loose page torn from engine manuals. How the half used bottle of tomato ketchup was a god send to the man who lived off dry pastries.

Our relationship was only ever built on short phrases like ‘gotta go’ and puzzled frowns as our heads bent towards each other over rusted bike frames and broken planks. To me, you were a man of few words, sighs and grunts that fuelled my desire to understand you. But when you did speak, my attention was held firmly. Like every word you spoke gave the comfort a soft blanket would to a baby and how in the winter months you’d wear a shirt, because the weather was only ever trying to look busy.

I remember you liked to talk with your hands. Not everything could be fixed, but you were going to find a way. We fixed things together the way lizards grow their tales, they were never the same, and they were hardly ever perfect. But perfect didn’t matter to you, because through ripped jeans, bloody knees, tire swings and bike rides, you did your best to pin a smile on my face.

Your heaven was overalls, a six pack of sausage rolls, a pencil that you would sharpen with a Stanley knife that you used to cut shapes into my skin, phrases like ‘sticks and stones’. Because you thought if I could just remember that, school wouldn’t be as bad as it was. And through the night terrors and bad dreams, late night Sudoku. I found my refuge under your tin roof. I remember the shed well, sprinting the length of the garden path dressed in bin bags and tin foil, I was your sidekick. You were always the hero. One day you emerged, covered in oil and a sorry look on your face, as if a bit of wood looked at you the wrong way and you were just about to give it a piece of your mind. But through all your frustration, I stood there, in the one clear patch, studying you. My arms were always tightened round me in constant fear that a spider may fall on my left shoulder. The day it did, you looked me dead in the eye and began to chuckle, in all my confusion you simply asked, ‘pass me that’. Maybe because you thought there was always something to learn in our own fears, or maybe you simply enjoyed watching me run as fast as I could back to the house, waving my arms and screaming.

I would have loved to make you laugh more, and I get the feeling you didn’t get to very much. Before it began, you worked all week. On Friday nights I sat at the window, every car that drove past that wasn’t you became a sheep as I counted and my tired eyes fell heavy. When lock met key my eyes were no longer tired and I know the reason I talk as if my mouth runs a marathon with each breath, it’s because, by Sunday, you were gone again.

My words were useless as you embarked on your gentle warfare with grandma. We formed small pranks in your kitchen like mad scientists taking over the world one formula at a time. This one time your poured half a pot of salt in her coffee. When she took the first sip we could hardly contain our laughter as her face formed that of a new born child biting into a fresh lemon for the first time. And if I had to describe your relationship with grandma, I would say it was bitter. The sour tang of small battles as I sat in your armchair. But her form of revenge was simply finishing the coffee and grinning at me, because she never knew it was my idea in the first place.

Your job took you everywhere, and I remember the railroad that ran behind your house sparking me to life in the night, at first you were angry, you didn’t understand. But after the tense look faded you knelt by my bedside. It was in these moments I finally learnt who you were, a life time of stories on the back of a lorry that travelled the lengths of different countries, always returning by Friday night.

I remember when it first started to take you. It started with your chest, each breath tightened your throat, and then it took your mind. The stories leaked into my ears as a child I tried to pour out back to you. I tried to tell them wrong, I wanted you to correct me, but you didn’t remember. And I remember the stale air, sanitizer and thin sheets, and how for every miracle there is a bird born without wings, and right now, no birds are flying. I half expected you to jump up from the hospital bed and say ‘just kidding’. You lived instance to instance and how the word ‘instantly’ no longer reminds me of coffee, but instead describes how you were gone. Gone as in never coming back. Gone as in I no longer sat at the window ledge counting cars. And how when they told me, I missed you instantly. There was nothing I could do, because in our stories, you were always the hero.