6. Josiah’s Smoking Dad

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN THINGS (6)

“Do you want to stay for lunch?” asked Professor Dingle, “you’d be most welcome. I’m ordering a small fish and chips for myself from the local chippie, to be delivered around twelve, and I’d willingly add a second fish. There’s always too many chips for me anyway, quite enough in one portion for the two of us unless you’re a gannet.”

“I’ll pay for mine,” i said, not liking the idea of thinking I might find myself drifting into the professor’s debt.

“If you like, but it isn’t necessary,” he smiled, “and as we’re waiting until the delivery comes I wonder if you’re interested in a sombre story from my own back catalogue of near-forgotten memories?”

“Say on,” I invited him.

“Well, as an intro I’ll tell you I was quite young, in my early twenties, when my father died. He’d been a smoker since his childhood, or so he told me, and in his adult life he smoked untipped cigarettes in copious quantities, as if they might go out of fashion if he didn’t. The house was always filled with the reek of it, which is probably why I never started myself.”

“There was a lot of the smell of smoke back then,” I agreed, working out that it would have been the sixties when he, like myself, was in his early twenties.

“Too true. They say that people didn’t know the health hazards in a packet of twenty Senior Service, but I reckon they must have because I made a note of it in a little book I carried with me everywhere when I was still a teenager.”

“I did that sort of thing, writing interesting snippets in a notebook, too,” I told him, “and yes, I’m pretty sure I knew that people died from smoking before I reached the end of my teens, which made the fact that I smoked for a few years rather stupid on my part.”

He frowned at me. “Quite so,” he said, “anyway, my dad started coughing too much, and he went to the doctor’s and after tests and so on was told that he had lung cancer and that, at the time, there was no treatment that would cure him. So there was my mother and me with a terminally ill father in the house. They were dark days, believe you me, and at the same time I was showing a great deal of interest in Jennifer.”

He paused thoughtfully. “Ah, Jennifer Golightly. I’d finished Uni and had time to do a bit of courting before I started my first job at the County University, where I’d trained in astrophysics. She was lovely, but doesn’t enter this story much.

“Dad went downhill rapidly, and his coughing and spitting up blood got worse and worse. It was painful to watch. One day mum, I was till at home of course, it’s before Jennifer and I decided to be really wicked and live in sin, and it was a sin back then, believe it or not when you see so many young things these days hopping from bed to bed, anyway, mum told me that she didn’t expect him to last much longer and that he wanted to die at home. His argument, silly as it was, consisted of his certainty that people went to hospital to die, yet he was almost happy to put my dear mother through the anguish iof having him dying at home.

“I remember the day he died. It was uncanny, really, almost as if he’d planned it! I was in his room because he was in bed all the time towards the end, the doctor had been for the millionth time during that illness, and there was a period of almost uncanny quiet in the room. I was even hoping that his cancer had gone away and he would perk up. But there was no chance of that!”

“It’s all very sad,” I put in.

“It was,” he whispered. “Anyway, the memory was like most memories get to be, all faded and incomplete, so much so in fact that I could barely remember the look of him lying in his bed, so I took a turn in my memory chair.”

“A wonderful contraption,” I told him.

“The image did its thing, like you know from experience, and suddenly I could see him, pale, looking the picture of near death, and I found the me of today speaking to him via the strange things the chair does to recollection. I just had to. There was one very important thing I had to say before he died.

“’I love you, dad’ I whispered. I saw my lips move. I heard my voice uttering the words, and I saw his face.

“The grey features broke into a smile. I’d forgotten that smile, and the humour that had once lain behind it. Then he whispered, barely audible, ‘best not it you don’t learn to smoke, lad,’ he said, ‘look what it’s done to me.’

“And that was the very last thing he said to me because he closed his eyes, coughed again, filling the bedroom with the sound of his broken lungs, and then sank back. I knew he was dead, and at that point withdrew from the old memory. I didn’t want to remember him like that, in bed and dead, but I did want to be sure that he knew that I’d always loved the hale and hearty man he’d been before the illness struck him down.”

“I’m so sorry,” was all I could think of saying.

“Oh, no matter! It was half a century ago and it’s ninety nine percent certain he wouldn’t have lasted to be alive today anyway, cancer or no cancer. But that’s not the point, at least I hope it’s not. But the whole purpose, in my head anyway, of me refreshing that memory is to make sure he knew that I loved him and that he had a chance, albeit in the last few seconds of his life, to guide me along a path that would never lead to me lighting a cigarette. And I never have, even though those around me used to puff the bitter toxic smoke of their cigarettes everywhere they went.”

“You mentioned a Jennifer,” I reminded him, wanting to lighten the conversation.

He knew what I was thinking. “Ah, yes,” he said, “Jennifer Golightly, the angel of that age. After a while, with my dad dead and me spreading my wings, my mum went to live with her sister, who was also a widow and Jennifer and I found a poky flat and moved in together.”

“I found the first real love of my life not long before that time too,” I told him. “Amanda had already married Perry, though I don’t think it bothered me at all. They were nineteen when they met at the altar, and if they hadn’t gone a head and got hitched I would never have met Katie, their chief bridesmaid. The other girls in their frilly frocks were a bit young for a bloke of my age, being kids! But Katie was everything a man could want in a woman. She had the most beautiful eyes and the sort of face that was made for smiling. We struck it off straight away, both of us about to pass out of our teens and into our adult lives, so to speak.”

“Magical days,” he sighed, as if associating my account with his own life with Jennifer.

I nodded. “They were,” I agreed, “and I wanted no more than for them to last for ever. But we never got to get married, though we’d planned it. We never even moved in together like you did with your Jennifer. As if there hadn’t been enough tragedy in my few years there had to be some more. She had a love of horses and rode out on Sundays from the local farm where they had stables for a few horses for the leisure of the not so rich and idle! Anyway, the horse she was riding threw her when a car raced past them on a narrow road, and she never regained consciousness.”

“I’ve opened a pool of tears here, then,” he said, “I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s all right,” I told him, “things happen but life goes on. I was at college at the time, doing a course that turned me into a librarian! But I remember Katie so well, even now. Her eyes … it was her eyes, when she’d been alive. I know it may sound hard, but I never got to see her in hospital even though she battled on for several days before finally giving up the battle. It was her parents. They didn’t know we’d been lovers in the proper sense of the word, and they cut me out. Completely. I don’t think they liked me because I was hoping to vanish into the future with their precious daughter. When it came to her funeral I had to lurk at the back and, sad to say, shed a few tears on my own.”

There was a knock at his door at almost exactly noon.

“This’ll be lunch,” he said, “and if we find ourselves reminiscing again we’d better choose more frivolous memories!”

© Peter Rogerson.