Our concerns escalated when, with the marathon only a few weeks away, my dad fell off a ladder in the garden while trimming the hedge with petrol-powered clippers. It was early March and he had been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The blades of the clippers continued to rotate as he bumped down through the cool air and he was lucky to escape with only a few bruises and two big cuts, neither of which were quite serious enough for stitches.
My dad is a heavy sleeper but also a lively, noisy one who, without warning, in the witching hours will often make an emphatic slumberous statement or break out into shout-mumbled song. During his marathon training his dreams also took on an energetic, high-risk flavour which, with the Big Day approaching, only intensified. A diving header in the FA Cup Final resulted in him bashing his temple on the bedside table and waking up sprawled and dazed on the bedroom floorboards. ‘I wonder if it might be best if I sleep somewhere else until he’s got it out of his system,’ my mum remarked after a high-pressure rugby union game during which she was drop-kicked from one side of the bed to the other. ‘I’M SORRY. I SCORED A TRY IN THAT ONE, AS WELL AS A DROP GOAL,’ he told her. ‘I NEVER USED TO SCORE A TRY IN REAL RUGBY AND NOW I HAVE!’ On the night of my last visit to my parents’ house before the marathon, my dad – tired from a morning of heavy training – fell asleep on the living-room floor part-way through telling two experimentally conjunctive stories about the time that someone cut the elastic off his mittens at primary school and why TV weathermen are nearly all fuckpigs and bastards. I headed in the direction of bed but, upon reaching the stairs, turned back and returned to the living room to move the coffee table a couple of feet further away from his snoring head.
As I drove away from my parents’ house for the final time as a son with a dad who had never run a marathon, my dad jogged after the car as if he had forgotten to give or tell me something important. I wound down the window. ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES,’ he said.
On the day of the marathon I decided not to join my dad for the start in Greenwich, feeling that, as an easily distracted man, he’d be better served by having as few objects and people as possible occupying his attention. Instead I met my mum on the north side of the Thames, near the Embankment, to watch the final stretch of the run. When I finally located her she admitted she was a little cross with him. Earlier, as they’d walked up the hill past Greenwich Observatory towards the place where the marathon would begin, my dad had spotted several people in bibs running across the grass, shouted, ‘OH NO! THEY’RE STARTING!’ and hoofed it away from her, not giving her time to hand him his water bottle, towel or banana. It later transpired that these competitors had been running towards the starting line, not away from it. Only by sheer luck did my mum manage to relocate my dad in the ever-thickening crowd of runners, ten minutes later. He was jogging on the spot and held an open can of the energy drink Red Bull.
‘HI,’ he said. ‘I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS STUFF BEFORE, BUT IT’S GREAT. THEY’RE GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE.’
‘How many of those have you had?’ my mum asked.
‘THIS IS MY FOURTH.’
‘You know what’s in it, don’t you?’
‘NO. WHAT?’
‘Well, lots of caffeine, for starters.’
‘OH.’
My dad, who operates like a permanently caffeinated person and delights in informing anyone from close family to complete strangers that he has ‘BEEN UP SINCE FIVE’, had experienced typically little difficulty rising on marathon morning. At just before 6 a.m. the fire alarm had gone off in the hotel where my parents were staying in north London, and my mum had opened her eyes to see him standing by the window, already fully dressed in his outfit for the day: bright orange cape, black tracksuit bottoms and grey lycra top emblazoned with the orange letters JC, the initials of Johnny Catbiscuit, the crime fighter central to a children’s book he had written recently called Johnny Catbiscuit and the Abominable Snotmen. ‘Oh God. What have you done!?’ my mum asked him.
‘I did feel bad about that,’ she told me later, ‘and I said sorry, but when I heard the alarm my first thought had been that it must have been his fault.’ The hotel’s guests and staff filed out into the car park. Many were still in various forms of nightwear, but my dad was the only one dressed in the uniform of a leftfield superhero.
Now he was in the thick of the action with his kind: other runners in superhero costumes, a couple of Spice Girls, a spavined Spiderman, a man in a gorilla suit with baffling comedy breasts. My mum caught up with him again around about the halfway mark, near Millwall. ‘How did he look?’ I asked. ‘Totally out of it,’ she said. He took longer than we expected to come past the Embankment, and when he did he looked more out of it still. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ spectators shouted, seeing the name on his cape, and he performed for them, spreading his arms wide beneath the fabric as if flying. Judging by his facial expression, it was very possible he believed he was genuinely aloft above the brutalist buildings next to the Thames. ‘Dad!’ I shouted. Realising that there were lots of other dads running too, I modified this to ‘Mick!’ but he could not hear me. In the end I joined in with the masses. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ I hollered, realising that the finishing line was not much more than a mile away, and what had seemed impossible six months ago was going to happen: he was really going to do this.
While my mum and I were waiting for my dad at the Embankment, I’d heard a woman standing to my rear who’d watched a lot of marathons talking about the state competitors get into afterwards. ‘You’d think they’d want to be quiet when they’re that tired,’ she said. ‘But they usually don’t. They talk and talk. They’re on such a high, they can’t stop.’ Sure enough, my dad talked a lot when he’d completed the marathon and, almost nine years later, has still not stopped. In the months directly after his run he discussed his intention of competing again the following year but, heeding my mum’s reservations, eventually decided against it. Nonetheless, he retained his fitness levels with a new zest for horticultural activity, both in his own garden and in the space that my parents’ next-door neighbour Edna had allowed him to use in her garden to grow vegetables. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he said to me during one of my visits to Nottinghamshire. I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a large basket of potatoes he had grown. ‘SEE THESE? YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME OF YOUR OWN WHEN IT ALL FALLS TO BITS.’
Benefiting from a new arrangement with the local farmer that allowed him and his friend Phillip to gather wood from much of the nearby land, my dad chopped vast amounts of logs, stacking them in artful circular Holzhaufen formations which allowed the logs at the centre of the pile to cure and dry. Towards the end of the following year, when a eucalyptus – a tree infamous for its rapid growth spurts – began to rocket towards the clouds in can-do fashion and block out the light in the house, my mum suggested that it might be wise to employ a tree surgeon to prune or remove it. ‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,’ said my dad, fetching his bowsaw. ‘I’LL DO IT.’ My mum held the ladder as my dad climbed it then the tree itself in old loafers with very little grip to them. The sky filled with rain and my mum said that they should stop and seek shelter. She went back into the house but my dad stayed outside, busying himself with other tasks. ‘You won’t go back up the tree, will you?’ she asked him.
‘NO,’ said my dad.
‘Do you promise?’
‘OF COURSE I WON’T. WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE ME? IT’S NOT FAIR. YOU’RE ALWAYS TELLING ME OFF.’
Five minutes later my mum glanced out of the bedroom window and saw my dad back up the eucalyptus, balancing on its highest branches in the same smooth-soled loafers, saw in hand, rain streaking against his squinting, determined face. ‘And then I saw him go,’ she told me. ‘I knew it was bad from the moment he hit the ground.’
My