Dad Died and Everyone Is Buying Me Shots
An excerpt from No Such Thing as Monday by Siân Hughes
I walked into the back room at Dad’s house about midday with his dinner on a plate covered in cling film in one hand and a bowl of crumble and custard in the other, and he was dead in his chair. His dog Lester was still tied to the leg of the chair, pulling at his lead and snarling and growling at me. I had a bag of clean laundry over one arm and the front door key balanced in the same hand as the crumble, so I sort of dithered about in the doorway, half in and half out of the hall, not knowing what to put down where or which direction to move in, forward or backward.
For some reason I felt a bit wrong turning my back on him, so I reversed a few steps into the hallway like he was royalty or something, then put the plate and bowl down on the chair by the door where he sat to take off his shoes and put on his slippers. I hung the laundry on one of the coat hooks and went back in. I swear that dog has no short-term memory. When I went back in the room it was like he’d never seen me before, and in his fury he pulled right out of his collar, across the room in one shot, diving straight at the back of my left ankle and digging his rotten old stumps of teeth into the heel of my trainer.
I approached the chair with the damn dog still attached to my heel. Maybe Dad wasn’t dead after all. Maybe he was only napping. Maybe if I held on to his hand to feel for a pulse he would wake up and take the piss out of me. He’d say, “Silly cow thought I’d kicked the bucket!” I rubbed my hands on the back of my jeans to warm them up before touching him, but I needn’t have worried. He was stone cold.
I sat down in the other chair, the one I always sat in, and tried to shake the dog off my foot. This is something I often had to do when I got to the house, so it didn’t bother me a lot. Suddenly the dog stopped what he was doing and ran into the hall. He must have sniffed out the plates of food, because I heard him ripping into the cling film and snaffling and sneezing into the custard. I folded my arms and sat back in the chair. I was still walking through the usual routine, even with him sitting there dead. I couldn’t seem to shake out of it.
“Never mind, Dad,” I said, “you’re not missing much. It was that tinned potato salad you don’t like. And I got the ham from the Co-op instead of queueing at the butcher’s because, well, I really couldn’t be arsed.” The dog was choking and gulping. Perhaps this would be his last meal. That would save me a trip to the vet. And how much would that even cost? Lethal injections must cost something. Whatever it was, I’d pay it. God help me, I’d always hated that dog. Dad once said to me, “When I go, that dog will have to go with me. I’m the only one can handle him.” It was the kind of thing he would say. All he meant was, what a great guard dog he had, and what a brilliant dog handler he was. But I took it as permission to get rid of the vicious mutt.
I left the dog to his dinner and went out the back door to call the doctor from the yard. I rolled myself a cigarette while I was on hold with the phone tucked under my ear. I didn’t feel any hurry to get the next things done, whatever they were. Nothing was going to make a difference to Dad now. The dog noticed I was outside the kitchen door and started throwing himself at the door and barking. As soon as you stepped outside and closed a door he forgot who you were again and tried to attack you as an intruder. He really was the world’s stupidest animal. I wondered if I ought to try and restrain the dog before the medics got here. It was going to be difficult enough getting back inside the house myself. I canceled the call to the doctor. There was no point calling someone to the house to declare Dad officially dead if it wasn’t safe for them to enter the building.
When Dad said he was the only one who could handle the dog he was mostly right. But there was one other person who scared the dog shitless. He scared every one shitless, come to that. Trog. I’d say he was a friend of my dad’s, but that is an exaggeration. They drank in the same club and they had not been known to hit each other. Well, not recently. It was after midday now, so the bar would be open, and chances were I’d find Trog in the club. If I fetched him over to put the dog in his crate, I could safely call in the doctor or whoever it is they send to say someone is dead.
I headed along the back lane to the main road and over to the club. Women aren’t allowed in the club. I know that’s not legal anymore, but it’s never been written down anywhere so there’s nothing to change. Not that you’d want to go there anyway. I walked right into the snooker room and Trog was on the far table with a couple of other men I half recognized, maybe from the shop. Every one stopped playing and stood staring at me walking through. It felt appropriate, is what I thought. Yes, you should all stand and hold the cue like a rifle, like I’m a hearse going along the High Street. Stand in silence. Here comes Stan’s girl. She’s got a nerve.
Yes, you should all stand and hold the cue like a rifle, like I’m a hearse going along the High Street.
“Trog,” I said, “I need you to go and get that horrible dog of my dad’s and put it somewhere safe cos he’s dead in his chair and I need the doctor to come and do the certificate and it won’t let anyone in.”
“The dog’s dead? Why do you need me to tidy up a dead dog?”
“Not the dog. The dog’s doing fine, more’s the pity. It’s Dad.”
“Stan’s dead?”
“Looks dead to me, yeah. I should wait for the doctor. I’m no expert.”
Trog put his cue very slowly onto the green then came and stood right in front of me and opened his huge sweaty arms. Middle of January and the man is in a sleeveless top. His tattoos have faded and slumped now he’s running to fat in old age, and the faces of the Virgin Mary and various angels are all smudged around his upper arm. I couldn’t help wishing he would wear sleeves when he wrapped me up like that. I would have appreciated more of a barrier between me and his armpits.
Trog squeezed all the air out of my lungs and made a sound like a train putting on its brakes. I realized it must be what he sounded like when he cried. When he let me go there was a circle of men all round me holding out their hands solemnly to shake my hand. Some of them already had a drink for me in the other hand. They must have been quick at the bar. Shots, as well. Doubles, it looks like. On an empty stomach. I am only allowed forty minutes for lunch. But a free drink’s a free drink.
I called in to work to say I wouldn’t be back after lunch break because my dad had died. I got Andrew.
“Hang on, you were in this morning. Now suddenly your dad is dead. Are you having a laugh?”
“Well, he might have been dead all morning. I don’t know. Only I just found him ten minutes ago when I took him his dinner.”
“What? Are you for real? You take your dad his lunch on a thirty-minute break?”
“Forty minutes. Yeah.”
“Thirty. I keep telling you, thirty. No wonder you’re always late.”
“Well, I guess I won’t have such a good excuse in future.”
“Shit. I’ll have to get Sue to cover. And she’s half asleep, the dozy cow.”
“Do that, then. And thanks for the compassion. I think you’ll find there’s a policy for that. Compassionate leave. The clue is in the name. I’ll look up my entitlement.” I just about managed to switch the call off before I said, “Twat.”
There was a deadly silence. Swearing is fine in the club. But not certain words. You can fuck and bugger and shit and arse all day, but twat and cunt are out of bounds. Don’t ask me where the rules come from. Like I said, no one has ever written them down. I only know because of working in the bar for years. That’s the one exception to the no-women rule. You can work behind the bar, but you can’t go into the snooker room to collect dirty glasses. But also, you are not allowed to run out of glasses if they are all dirty in the snooker room. There is no recognition that these two rules are impossible to follow at the same time. No one cares.
Trog put his huge meaty arm around my shoulder and said, “It’s all right, lads. On a day like today. It hasn’t hit her yet.”
Everyone in the club came to shake my hand, and Trog took charge of bringing people up to me in groups, all of them offering me free drinks. I kept knocking them back and nodding. Trog said the same thing each time. “It hasn’t hit her yet,” he said. That was his way of making an excuse for me not crying. One thing that was hitting me was the whiskey. Trog said what a great lad my dad had been, one of the old school, they don’t make them like that no more. What I was thinking was, brace yourself, there’s going to be lots of this. Lots of people you don’t recognize talking a lot of bollocks.
This is some of the stuff I remember them saying. I might as well put it down. I have no idea if half of it was true. I don’t even know who said what.
Here’s one: when the old club burned down they were all out the front with the fire engines when they looked around. Where was Stan? And he was round the back rolling barrels up the ramp out of the cellar, and those barrels they’re made for rolling down, you know. You try shifting one of them up a ramp when it’s full. No joke. They rolled them all the way down the road behind the allotments and kept them in Arthur’s shed cos, you know, they would get them all on insurance anyway, it made no difference to them. Kept them going for weeks.
Most of the stories were about his fighting days. That was what he did for a living. He made money by fighting in pubs. Sometimes he trained a cock for fighting, or a dog. When these things got illegal he kept doing them anyway. When I say he made money, I mean that money changed hands. Drinks were bought. The money went round, and quite a lot of it passed through his hands. But none of it ever went home. Sorry, I said I was going to stick to what they told me.
Here’s another one. Everyone knows this one, about the cockerel called Dave. So, he had this cockerel he called Dave, jet black, but with one white streak on a tail feather, very distinctive. Well, this cock had a winning streak a mile long, and no one could believe how fast he came back fighting after he’d been in a scrap. Then one of the people who’d bet against him followed Dad up to the chicken sheds and there were three cocks, all black. He was painting a flash of white paint on one of the tail feathers every time he had a fight. Different cockerel each time, fresh for it. Genius thing was, none of the cocks had a white flash. Not really. None of them were in disguise, and all of them were. He said he called them Dave because there’s always a bloke called Dave, everywhere you go, you can’t see them for looking.
None of them were in disguise, and all of them were.
He went away when he was younger (went away is what you say if you go to prison) when a fight went wrong (which is what you say if someone gets badly hurt) and when he walked back up the High Street every one knew who he was, even the kids who were so little they’d never seen him before, he was so famous for his blue eyes and dark brown hair, and the lucky gap between his front teeth. Stanley Cartwright. Back in town.
He always had a fighting dog, dogs no one else could control, the ones no one else wanted. Dogs who ended up with torn ligaments or ripped-off ears, missing tails, jaws that never went back together right, most of them named for a Wolves player, past or present. Then one year he was walking back from midnight mass and he found a sweet little collie bitch, just about to pup, and carried her home, kept her in a box by the fire, called her Holly, for the season. He had the eye for which dog to put to which bitch for the perfect fighter. No one would have guessed Holly would be the grandmother of his best fighters. He said she had staying power. Gameness. That’s the word for when a dog can go on fighting after it’s exhausted. It’s more important than muscle strength, and it’s the hardest thing to breed into them. And you can’t test it until they’re right near the end of a fight, when it’s too late to do anything about it. He saw how she guarded those pups. Decided it was what the dogs needed: resilience.
When Nutter Bradley got sent down one time, Dad won the meat raffle and took it all to Nutter’s missis to help her out. There was stewing steak, and pies, and sausages, and mince, even a roasting chicken. The thing was, while Nutter was away his missis had decided to pass her driving test so she could get around without him, the car was just sitting there in the garage and he was in for four, maybe five, and she did pass it, though God knows how. She could get into town and back, but there was no way she could get that car into the garage. It was one of those prefab plastic garages, and she’d run into it that often it was shoved all the way up the backyard. It was practically resting against the back window, she’d pushed it that far along.
When Dad got there with the tray of meat from the raffle, he saw the garage pushed over to one side blocking the back door. He had to carry the tray all the way round to the front, and they were right down the bottom of the row. And while he was going back up along the row and through to the front gardens, he thought, how were Lou and the children getting to the outside toilet? Back then all the toilets were in the back garden. Lou and the children would be going out the front door and along the terrace to the alleyway then back along just to do their business. She’d be carrying pots full of it from all those kids. After he dropped off the meat, Dad decided to move the garage back where it belonged, dragged it back up the garden. Then he thought, if she can’t get the car in it, she’ll only go and shove it over again, so he took it to pieces and rebuilt it twice as wide. Took him two weeks.
When Nutter came back, Lou was like, “Look what Stan did, rebuilt the garage for me, and brought me his meat raffle.” Nutter wasn’t called that for nothing. He came round and punched Dad in the mouth. No one would give away the meat raffle and rebuild a garage if they weren’t getting something in return. I don’t think he was, in case you wondered, getting something in return. That Lou was a right bitch and a half. She probably did it on purpose, made it sound like she’d had something going on, just for the hell of it. Still, Dad took the punch in the mouth like he should, and no one said another word about it. When he lost one of his front teeth he said it made his lucky gap a bit wider. He used to tell me, if you can pass a coin between your front teeth it means you’re going to be lucky with money. After that run-in with Nutter he could get a pound coin in sideways, but I never saw any evidence of the luck with money. I’ve got the gap too, or I did before I had false ones, and I’ve never had any money either.
One way and another it was well into the afternoon by now, and I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Things were getting a bit woolly round the edges while I sat there drinking my free drinks and listening to all the stories about Dad. They’ve got this old carpet in there with green and brown diamonds on it, and they’ve carpeted right up off the floor onto the front of the benches round the sides. I was watching those green and brown diamonds floating up and down from the floor to the bench and back, wondering how drunk I might be.
I thought, this is what a wake is supposed to be like. Loads of free drinks and hearing the old stories over and over and no one telling the bad ones against him. But round about five o’clock I remembered I still hadn’t called the doctors, and I had a sudden chill through me, thinking maybe he wasn’t really dead at all, and here I was drinking and all the while Dad needed some urgent help. I stood up suddenly, which is never a good idea with a belly full of shots and no lunch, and had to sit down again a bit sharpish.
“I never called the doctors,” I said. Or that was what I meant to say. God knows what came out of my mouth. I was numb from the nose to the chest. Then someone said, “Never mind about that. Trog’s took care of all that for you.” Then in walked Trog with that bastard dog Lester on a lead trotting at his heel like Crufts. Trog goes, “It’s all sorted, Stef, I’ve met the undertakers at the house and they were there in no time. Took him away all decent.” And I realized then I’d be the talk of the street for not being there for him getting carried out, and all the neighbors standing with their heads down crossing themselves.
“Did he say what it was? The doctor?”
“Nah. They’ll have to do one of them things off the telly. Where they look and see. Probably his heart.” Everyone agreed it was probably his heart, without any idea what it could have been, never having seen the body and not knowing the first thing about medicine. I guess they were right. Whatever the reason for it, his heart was definitely not working any more.
I don’t remember much else, but someone called me a taxi and I woke up about three in the morning fully dressed on my bed with my trainers hanging on by the laces and my false front teeth hanging out. I put my head under the tap and let the water run in and out of my mouth, bouncing off my back fillings and spilling all over the floor. So, I thought, this is what it feels like being an orphan. And that was the first time it crossed my mind: fucking hell, this means I’ve got to find my sister.
