. . . . in which i am with jessie on an old british railways train. the seating is absurd like a restaurant booth and jessie is sat in the corner. she is pregnant and wearing dungarees and i am helping her in and out of them as we can’t decide if they are the right way round or not. a passerby asks us about them but we are unable to say anything about them until we have decided. they appear to be made out of some silly material like black vinyl and they want to stay flat, like they are padded or filled with some kind of foam. jessie asks me to take a picture of her with her phone and i oblige. it is awkward because she wants it to look coupley like i am taking the place of her husband. she urges me to pose her in this way and i decide to rest her feet on my knee and arrange my legs at an angle that seems pleasing, especially with my socks which i think are striped. reminds me of baby reindeer. i start taking photos but getting the right composition feels impossible, i move around in the space available but something always seems to be in the way, notably the head of wickie, a sickly parrot. there is the suggestion of some repressed sexual abuse but i can’t name it.. . . .

it is hard to make scrambled egg these days because it reminds me of sitting down as if to breakfast with my dad on the other end of eight time zones away who would routinely comment, ooh that looks nice, what you having, and wishing i could share it with him, knowing he would get nothing like that at home, wouldn’t have had a decent breakfast in years

. . . . in which lucy is cradling dad, who is still alive, in his room and kissing his forehead and telling him how much she loves him . . . .

there was a sort of whisper in the forest, an amalgam of winds that thrashed this way and that, whistled down corridors, roared in the canopy, of limbs outstretched, trying to overcome their shyness, of the transfer of nutrients between intertwined roots, of inosculating trunks, branches, of fluctuations in the habits of networks of penetrating mycelia, of the fading and flourishing of mosses and lichen, of creeks forging new paths, enthused with the surge of snowmelt in higher altitudes, of the changes in atmospheric pressure, of the unrelenting certainty of downpours, the influx of positively charged ions, of the size and weight and frequency and distribution of rain droplets, of their paths both well-worn and infinitely varied towards the tender earth, of the subterranean activities of beetles on the rotting deadwood, of the tendril perversion of vining plants, of the arboreal locomotion of small animals, of twigs that small birds assembled here, set up camp, a cornucopia of the remotest extremities of all the other trees in the area, of the murmuration of swallows, of birdsong, the cascading patterns of which, undulating, propagating from tree to tree, of the movements of birds and pollinators rudely probing us, of the rhythmic pulse of fireflies and the soft persistent glow of bioluminescent fungi, of the tickling of swordferns, of the tightening grips of epiphytic plants, of the whirring of twirling samaras, of the shafts of light softly filtered through leaves, through the dusty, amber forest haze, of softly dappled light fairies, that Jimmy, who I had not seen since we were mere saplings really, was stricken with another infected canker, from which he would this time most likely not recover, would not have long before being delivered most finally to the forest floor, and I, forever fixed to this point now, entertained no hope of seeing my brother again, or any of them really, no notion of family now save for these memories, save for this innumerable collection of trees all clinging to this green earth I suppose, recalling afresh the agony of the first time we were separated, back in the nursery, my baby brother, a mere sapling, too young then to join me and Albert and Mary, hearing, when we were reunited, of the ghastly destruction brought by the storm of ‘39 to greenhouse 4B, a terror from which he never fully recovered, would continue to shake his leaves in a manner, though almost imperceptible, most unnatural, felt so dead inside for so long, which is funny because I am mostly dead inside, and that dream I always had, the one where I uprooted myself and could move around freely, where I seemed to know where Jimmy was and took myself on a little trip over there, paid him a visit, he made me tea and fried up some eggs, eggs in a basket, nice little nestegg, and we sat in the little garden that he tended, talked about mom and dad, which was strange because i knew that mom took many lovers, in a sense, birds and the bees, but in the dream

when dad died it was like a quiet bomb had been detonated that made mum take his phone not forty-eight hours after to get it wiped and swapped out for a free upgrade and made mum gaslight lucy about the fact that dad had ever given her the epitaph that he wanted and made up her own with mary and made lucy tell my aunt all the family secrets and then worry that she had said too much and that she’d tell my other aunt and that maybe she’d even take legal action against her for things that happened thirty seven years ago and made lucy worry that mum and mary were conspiring against her and that dad was really the only thing that was standing in the way of her becoming destitute and made mum and mary’s actions not entirely inconsistent with that and made mum ring lucy using dad’s phone the day after he died and she thought for a second that he was calling her and made mum ring me not once and when i rang her only spoke about the fact that the internet was broken and how she wiped his phone less than forty-eight hours after and how she had already given away some precious things and did a spring clean of his room and gave ross the pillows that he died on and made mum text me to say that the turkish delight i got her for christmas was shit and that i should get my money back from harrods because mary had exhausted attempts to get some free shit out of them directly without my knowing and made mum decide that dad was a catholic after all and made mum decide along with mary and matthew that dad would like to come to his own funeral in jeans because that’s how he felt about mary and matthew’s wedding and didn’t realize that dad took enormous pride in his appearance for things that actually mattered and made mum scold my aunt for being too ill to come but not ill enough to be dead and made mum go out shopping for a new coat the very next day and lie to marks and spencer about the king charles spaniel with a bladder infection and congestion that she was wheeling around in a child’s perambulator being in fact a service animal of all things and made my mum insist that she could honestly look my dead dad in the eye and tell him unflinchingly that she did not would not sign the dnr in spite of the fact that she delayed calling the doctor for sixteen hours because she’d have to wait on the phone or they’d send someone she hadn’t seen before and that would be annoying for some reason and when the paramedics did finally come prevented him from going to hospital in spite of the fact that it was his wish to go to still be alive

The first time I fucked up my face by falling off my bike and getting my horn rims embedded in my right eyebrow, over fifteen years ago now, I spoke to my dad from the hospital and the first thing he asked me was whether the bike was alright. It put a rift between us that neither one of us was able to repair.

The last time I spoke, and will ever speak, to my dad I told him, in a euphemistic way, how I had got so high the night before that I passed out and landed on my glasses again and put a gash in my face, in the exact same spot, on the other eyebrow. I was struck this time by his gentle humanity, even in his own frailty. And I wish now that I had had the vulnerability back then to confront him, to talk about how hurt, betrayed, abandoned I felt. Because I know now that he would not have stood for that, that he did care deeply, only ever wanted me to be safe, but didn’t always know what to say or how to act. And I wish it hadn’t taken me all of that time to fully appreciate that. I love you, Dad.

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