This is how it was. We were in a restaurant. At the next table were three teenage lads. They were probably not so different to me and my mates at that age – although I don’t recall sitting around in family restaurants in my teens. And they were discussing the sister of one of the lads. ‘A right little slag’, apparently. ‘She was ready to give him a jump!’ This was said while gesturing at one of the group – presumably not her brother, though you never know.
I listened to this stuff for, oh, about four minutes, or possibly six, as my wife pretended to study the menu and our small daughter crayoned in her My Little Pony workbook.
Then I told them to shut the fuck up.
And I told them that I was only going to give them one fucking warning. And – red-faced with rage, ludicrously holding a knife and fork in my hand, as though I might eat them alive – I pointed at my daughter and said that she wasn’t going to listen to this fucking stuff about how your fucking sister was ready to fuck anybody, for fuck’s sake.
They were scared. They shut up and ate their happy meals as quiet as mice. And I know they could have beaten the living shit out of me with absolutely no problem. I would have had no chance whatsoever against multiple assailants of their age and size. But here’s the thing: it mattered more to me than it did to them. And I really meant it. If they had told me to go fuck myself, I would have happily kicked them through the buffet bar. Or attempted to.
As soon as I told them to shut up, they were not the problem. The problem was my wife. She pointed out – later, when we were alone, when that miserable meal was over – that our daughter had been so busy colouring in the My Little Pony characters that she had not heard a word they had said about the slutty sister. But – so my wife insisted – our daughter had heard every profanity spat out by her psychotic father.
When yobs swear, you sort of hope that your family will love you more if you make a stand. You hope they will be grateful that you are the kind of man who does not just turn his butt cheeks and say, Go ahead, world, fuck me up the arse.
You think they might even be proud of you.
Not a bit of it. Like Alma, the wife in Brokeback Mountain, my own wife was horrified by the level of rage I had to summon up before I could say anything. My wife was as appalled as Heath Ledger’s missus in Brokeback Mountain. And I am not even having a secret affair with Jake Gyllenhaal.
But the truth is, we do not do it for them. The brutal fact of the matter is that – if we are one of the fools who dares to speak up – we are doing it almost exclusively for ourselves.
Our women – those pragmatic girlfriends, those hard-headed wives – think that ultimately it is not worth it. Risking your life for a random bout of inappropriate behaviour? That’s the madness of the macho man. I personally think that men like Kevin Johnson are modern-day heroes and we could use a million more just like him. But his son will miss his father every day of his life, and at some point he will have the right to ask, But was it worth it, Dad?
Fight or flight? These two disparate instincts have the same function: to save your hide. But sometimes doing nothing, while saving your life, robs you of your soul.
Ultimately, the only argument that matters is about the kind of man you want to be. And when did we stop being the kind of men who want to protect the people we love? When did that go out of style? When did wanting to protect your family become old-fashioned?
My old martial arts teacher had a wonderful recipe for dealing with trouble. ‘Walk away,’ he would tell me, after hundreds of hours spent teaching me to kick and punch and block. ‘Walk away.’
Yeah but no but, I would say to him. But he had heard it all before, and he believed that none of it was worth killing or dying for. Someone spills your drink? Walk away. Someone bumps into you? Walk away. And it’s true – most trouble you can just walk away from. You can smile. You can apologise. You can put the pillow over your head.
But there comes a point when walking away means that you will think yourself less of a man. For most of us, that moment comes when some careless stranger is far too close to our women and our children. And I don’t walk away from that – whatever the wife wants. That’s where I stand and I draw the line and I get ready to roll around on the floor of the restaurant.
I don’t want any trouble. Honestly. Really. But it’s just like Ennis says in Brokeback Mountain:
‘You need to shut your slop-bucket mouths – you hear me?’
If you only see two dead bodies in your life, then make sure they are your parents.
The death of a mother or father cannot be grasped from a distance. The phone call, the sealed coffin – it’s not enough to comprehend that kind of loss – that twice-in-a-lifetime loss.
Inevitable it may be, but the death of a parent has an unimaginable quality to it. You need to see for yourself that they are truly gone, to understand that the ones who brought you into this world have gone from this world. So go look at the body. That is not the end of losing your father or mother. But that is where it begins.
Even as the numbing bureaucracy of death clamours for your attention – the funeral arrangements, deciding what to do with the leftovers of a lifetime, the surreal task of choosing a coffin-would Dad like the simple pine number, or the Napoleon job with the brass handles? – you have to force yourself to go and see.
To the hospital. To the undertaker’s back room. Or – if they died at home, as my mother did – then to the master bedroom of the house where you grew up.
It helps. More than this, it is necessary. Yet viewing the dead body of a parent is a curiously flat experience. You feel it should be charged with emotion. There should be hot tears, and some final embrace, and Katherine Jenkins singing, ‘Time to Say Goodbye’.
But the emotion comes earlier – in the cancer ward, in the hospital café, sitting by the death bed drinking endless cups of bad tea – and it comes later – at the funeral, or when you go through dusty cupboards, and your dead dad’s clothes, or your mother’s heartbreaking jewellery, or their photograph albums, and it takes you many strange hours to realise the obvious.
Everything must go.
Those are the moments for the spikes of emotion. But when you summon up the nerve to gaze upon your dead parent-as you have to, as you must – you hardly recognise them. You even feel a bit cheated. Mum? Dad? Where are you?
And it is not because the undertaker has weaved his crafty embalming magic, or that a mouth is set in a line that you never saw in life. It is simply because the spark has flown. The thing that made that woman your mother, or made that man your father, has gone forever. And you don’t know if they have gone to a better place, or into black oblivion.
But that is not he. And that is not she.
You must look at the face of your dead parent not because it gives you a chance to say some last farewell but because until you do you will never even begin to understand that they are dead, and that you are alone in this world as you have never been alone before.
And even then it is hard. Even then it is next to impossible. Last month my mother had been gone for ten years. Ten years since the cancer overwhelmed her. Ten years since I returned to my home from her home to search for a hospice, leaving her in the care of an elderly friend, an ex-nurse – lovely Nelly, now gone herself-and got the call in the middle of the night to say come as fast you can. And it still wasn’t fast enough. Ten years dead – and yet, here’s the funny thing: I recently tried to call her.
I actually reached for the phone to relate some news that I knew would make her smile, and then I stopped myself, thinking – mental or what?