Father

If you had smelled my father’s fingers, they smelled of ash, but also a hint of musty sweetness. I smelled his fingers when he pinned me down and tried to squeeze blackheads from my cheek or nose. But long before that I was aware of this smell on his fingers and on his breath. I smelled his breath when he gave me a “chin pie”, which is when he rubbed his stubbly chin on my face and laughed. This smell was the smell of the world of Men. It was not simply a human smell but a smell of dirt, matter, compost, smoke, metal as well. Men in general and my father in particular are characterised by their commerce with such things. Harsh substances, I might call them. Men have ingested or besmeared themselves with such harsh substances in order to harden themselves. To ally themselves with what is harsh. They themselves become amalgams, party made from tobacco smoke, wood shavings, nails, oil and so forth. As they ingest more, as they smoke more, hammer more, as they place nails or tacks in their mouth whilst fitting a cupboard, or chew a match, so do they assume more and more the carapace of harshness.  As grey blue smoke exits their mouth and nostrils, as they scrub the dried paint off their arms, as the movements of chiselling and shovelling - brute, precise, relentless - become second nature, so are their bodies remade. So do they advertise their alliance with matter and poison. You must understand that each of these gestures has an affective lining, as I call it. A low-level brutal enjoyment, an indifferent violence, in hammering a nail, in splitting the earth with a spade, even if the earth or the wood are not sentient of course. There is still a cold pleasure in subduing, splitting, compressing, which potentially can be carried over onto flesh, so that these actions are always preparations for brutality.  

All of this was true of my father. One thing I do remember though is the smell of tobacco in the tobacco tin, dark and soft and loamy and almost edible, a smell that bore no resemblance to the smell of a cigarette, a smell that I would steal every now and then when he wasn’t looking even though he wouldn’t have minded perhaps.

My father placed maggots under his tongue to warm them up before using them as bait. Or I remember him placing a brandling worm on a fishhook and the worm writhing as yellow fluid came out of its side. Then he invited me to do it. I pricked my finger and it bled. “Never mind that”. This is how it’s passed on. Your body becomes a body capable of such gestures, and the indifference to pain, one’s own or the pain of others. A kind of discipline whereby the boy’s body with its softness and sensitivities is subdued and silenced and remade as an instrument, an accessory to hammers and chisels and spanners, honed or reduced to the mechanics of bone and muscle.

It is true I have refused all these things and more: cigarettes, nails, paint and plaster, fishhooks and WD40, pint glasses and greenhouses, beading and spirit levels. I have refused DIY and car engines, nor do I have a dank hut at the garden’s end full of tools and rust and an ashtray full of buts.

I stay with my glass of wine. I stay with the aroma of coffee that forever quells and suppresses the smell of strong tea and the sight of wet tea bags and tab-ends.

But I have in my pocket his unremarkable silver lighter. Which I always carry with me. There are still a few orange sparks left in it. It is the sole surviving remnant of him. The hard metal implacable remnant. And which I cannot throw away.