Ghost Story

The year was 2004.

I'd been thinking about my dad quite a lot.

What with the struggle of keeping a roof over our heads, and the cost of living being hard enough as it was, I was growing more retroactively angry.

The effort I was having to put in, day after day, week after week, just to put food on the table for the kids, really made me angry about how little effort my "parents" had put in before giving up altogether and leaving me to starve and embrace the chaos until it almost killed me.

Before Haringey Council had to step in and take the reins from the useless bastards.

I felt like my dad had a few harsh questions due his way.

And now I'd spent years working at keeping our heads above the water and giving everything to my own family, I felt qualified to ask him.

So I took Ben down in the car to King's Cross and set about looking for the miserable old bastard.

First stop was his old flat.

The last known address I had for him, over in Angel, Islington.

When we got there, we knocked on the door.

Shouted through the letterbox.

All the usual things I'd do back in the day when trying to rouse my dad from a drunken stupor when I was much younger.

We spent around twenty minutes knocking, shouting and generally making a fuss.

Nothing.

So we moved on.

We tried the parks.

The pubs.

Even the library.

No sign of him.

I thought I'd give it one last try.

Go back to the flat and leave a letter with my address and phone number on it before calling it a day.

Anyway, there was no sign of him anywhere.

So that's what we did.

We went home.

I put it to the back of my mind and got on with the rest of the weekend.

Then Monday came.

I'll never forget the news Alison gave me late that morning.

She phoned to say she'd had a call from a man claiming to be a friend of my dad's.

Could I ring him as soon as possible?

He'd told Alison that my dad was dead.

It was a proper bolt from the blue.

Yes, I knew he'd been ill for a number of years.

Yes, I'd witnessed his physical and mental decline a few years earlier.

But dead?

Dead forever?

That was something I never expected to hear.

I phoned the guy as soon as I arrived home that night.

He explained that he'd lived in the same block as my dad for a number of years and how they'd become quite good friends.

He told me how the old man had always talked about me and my brother.

How proud he was of me right up until he died of liver failure and pancreatic cancer in 2003.

It was him who told me about my dad's pauper's funeral.

I found it hard to process.

Of course I thanked the guy and was nice to him on the phone.

But if I'm honest with myself, I just wanted to scream at the bloke and take out my bitter sadness and rage on him.

Talk about shooting the messenger.

It wasn't his fault my dad was a piss head who didn't care a single jot about anything except drink.

It wasn't my fault that I couldn't afford to mix my clean, tidy world with his drink and drug-addled version of existence without compromising my own beautiful little family.

The truth of the matter is that nobody was to blame.

And everybody was to blame.

The whole relationship was a mess from start to finish.

A few months later, Alison and I went to a spiritualist church one Saturday night.

To hear the mediums bang on about the afterlife and give "readings" and messages from beyond the grave.

Something I didn't believe in much back then.

And certainly don't now.

I just went for entertainment purposes.

However...

What I'm about to tell you is the truth.

The whole truth.

And nothing but the truth.

About halfway through the night, the medium pointed me out.

"To the young man in the back row."

"Yes, you sir."

She was looking straight at me.

"I see a shabbily dressed man standing behind you."

"He's telling me he's your dad."

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

Over the next twenty minutes she recounted the whole sorry story.

She got absolutely everything spot on.

Dad was a tramp who'd lived in the park for a number of years.

She told me he'd seen me and Ben looking for him.

How we'd checked the pubs.

The park.

Even the library he used to frequent just to keep warm.

She revealed the last four of the six digits in my home phone number accurately.

That was a private joke between me and the old man.

Literally nobody knew about it.

She told me how proud he'd become of me since he'd passed away and was able to see and understand all the mistakes he'd made while on this earth.

From the other side of life.

She recounted how violent a man he was.

How sorry he was for hurting the people around him.

But also, and this is very telling, how much he enjoyed the chaos and mayhem his life was all about.

Then she left me with one final message.

From beyond the grave.

"Phil, stop being so angry."

"Let up a little."

"The war is over."

"You won."

"You lived."

"You're doing great just how you are."

"Stop fighting."

"And relax a little."

I won't lie to you.

I shed a tear in that church that night.

And when I got home and had a couple of glasses of my favourite whisky, I cried like a baby.

I'm still not a convert to that kind of thing.

But on the other hand, I can't offer you any reasonable explanation of how she could possibly have known any of it.

These days, sitting here writing late at night, if I feel the old familiar anger rising, I don't rise to it as quickly as I once would have.

Perhaps the medium was right.

Who knows?

I still don't know who my dad was meant to be.

Or who he thought I was.

And I've stopped interrogating that.

Some questions don't open doors.

They just keep you standing in the doorway.

I wish this medium thing was a two-way conversation.

.

I would have asked him one question.

Why didn't you love us?

I don't talk about that night very often.

I don't need to.

It sits where it sits.

It is what it is.

I just hope Dad don't fuck the afterlife up as much as he did this one.