Faded. Worn around the edges. Yellowed. Creased with the constant open and close of the years. I suppose your lop-sided smile could be seen as beautiful, or arrogant. There’s a small hamster curled up in your hand, peeking out at the camera with an inquisitive confusion. Enor-mouse, you told me. His name was Enor-mouse. So you did have a sense of humour once, Dad. It makes me wonder who took the photograph. A woman, obviously, by the flirt in your eye and the lift of your chin. But my mother hates rodents, you know that. She always has. Plus, she couldn’t work a camera if her life depended on it now, never mind twenty years ago.
Who then? Whose red, taloned nails stain the corner of the picture, with a defiant blur that invades into this snatch of another era? I daren’t ask you, and doubt you would answer anyway. I can feel the hugeness of time in your life that happened before I even had a place on this earth dawning on me. You have lived three times the life that I have. A university fling maybe? I know you went to uni later than most, a consequence of that dreaded brown envelope that carried three heavy Ds when you we’re eighteen. Would never have guessed someone could turn their life inside out so fast. You picked yourself up, I know, went to college to do applied business. Was that where you met her? Did she sit next to you in that first lecture? Ask to borrow your pen? Was she the typically hot girl that all the lads hit on within a week? Just by her red nails I can tell she’s nothing like the dark blonde bookworm you will marry in the years to come. Someone more glamorous. Someone more dangerous. Who were you, Dad, to choose this woman?
Your t-shirt is emblazoned with some triathlon I’ve never heard of. I never knew you used to swim, Dad. You hate water. You always tilt your head to the side when I used to beg you to come to the swimming pool with me as a child, you would shrug, and squeeze my fingers. Don’t worry, you’d say to me, I’ll be right here. The water brings back bad memories for me. After a while I gave up asking. Was she there, when those memories were formed? I don’t think the red-woman would have gone to watch you in the triathlon. Too busy painting her nails for when you came home. She didn’t care for you, Dad. I hope you didn’t love her.
She wasn’t the only one was she? Your head’s too big in this photo, Dad. Where is the selfless father whose fingers are pinching the edges of this photo? Here you’re invincible; the world is your oyster. You can do anything, get any girl, go any place and it won’t have consequences. I can see your biking leathers and helmet hanging up behind you. You’re positive you will never take a fall. Did you let the red woman hold on to your waist, as you sped down the backstreets at 90mph on a Suzuki GS125 that you’d remodelled with racing handlebars? I’ll bet you never even considered you’d have to tell your daughter the countless stories of roundabouts in the rain, skipped red lights and turning the throttle that little bit too far.
I raise my eyes, to meet yours; half expect to see that person I don’t know.
Dad, are you there?
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