'Dad Gets His Throat Cut' Acrylic on canvas board 40 x 30cm
This is the fifth in the painting of my ‘Strange and Sometimes Troubled Memories’ series. The series begins with the blog post 'Broken Man (rewrite) if you'd like to read the others just scroll down the blog feed and start there.
It's funny, but when I was starting this series, I trawled through my mind, jotting down ideas in a notebook, thinking of things that had impacted my life in some way and yet this peculiar event had eluded me.
It was only when I was working on the previous painting, ‘School Schmool’, which was set in the same bedsit, that this memory skulked out of the fog in my mind, and I thought to myself 'how, the heck, did I forget that'.
My dad used to hang out with all sorts of misfits, you only ended up living in the area he lived in, if your life hadn’t gone to plan. His bedsit was a watering hole where the down and out, strange and often unsavoury folk congregated. They came and went throughout the day, stopping by for drinks or a smoke, some would stay all night.
I remember, I’d been over at a friend’s house, getting wasted myself, when on returning to my sisters, a bunch of animated people were talking over each other, with only the most aggressive voices getting to finish their sentences. To listen in on the conversations at my sisters place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a row had broken out, when in fact, that’s just how they talked, all of the time.
She looked towards me as I entered the room. I perched on a sofa arm as all the seats were occupied. She could hardly contain her excitement and said ‘You’ll never guess what.’
I just looked at her, detached with my mouth slightly open, the way a stoned person tends to look at things.
‘Dads’ only ‘ad ‘is throat cut!’ she said, as if she took great pride in telling me, wobbling her head as she spoke to add unnecessary drama.
This news, although startling, didn’t affect me in the way she desired, it piqued my interest but provoked no emotion.
‘Okay... ‘ I said ‘...Is he dead?’
He wasn’t, it was a close call but he’d survived the assault.
Out of morbid curiosity I pushed for more information. It turned out, no-one present, knew any details at all, apart from, he’d had his throat cut, he was in hospital, and he was in a stable condition (that’s a first). They really did love speculating though, they’d probably been at it for hours already and showed no signs of stopping, like a cackle of hyenas tearing strips off a tit-bit of news which bore no flesh.
When he got out of hospital, not long after, I paid him a visit.
Selina, his girlfriend, was nowhere to be found, I think the situation must have freaked her the fuck out because I never saw her again after that. He sat stiff and upright, wearing tracksuit bottoms and nothing else. When he turned to speak, he had to twist his whole torso, keeping his straight-forward head aligned with his shoulders. I walked around the coffee table so I could stand in front of him and get a better look, it wasn’t a pretty sight.
He had indeed been cut from ear to ear in a thick smiling inverted arc across his neck.
The gouge had a series of large metal staples clamped across it’s length.
Unusually pale-pink florets of flesh, bubbled through the healing wound between the staples.
‘You look like Frankenstein’ I said.
He sniggered and said ‘He tried to take my head off.’
From the gash, up to his jaw and creeping onto his face were significant inky bruises. They also spread downwards covering his whole chest and each of his upper arms. The vivid black, blue, yellow and green blotches washed into each other tattooing an ugly abstract.
He was in good spirits though, making jokes and playing down the situation, like Yorkshire folk tend to do.
‘So’, I said, ‘What exactly happened?’
He took a long drag of a cig, blew it out of his nose and told me what went on.
His usual ragged pals had been around drinking, it was a particularly jolly affair because it had been someone’s birthday, so they were celebrating even more than usual. He always referred to his acquaintances by Mr followed by the first initial of their last name as if they were in some kind of secret society.
So for instance he’d say ‘Mr C came round early, we started proper hitting the bottle about noon’ All the ‘hair of the dog’ before this point in the days’ proceedings wouldn’t have counted.
He’d carry on ‘Then Mr G turned up with some speed.’
The odd acquaintance would be referred to by a nick name, like ‘Mad Mick’ or ‘spike’.
They’d been at it all day, all evening, and all night. The revellers had gradually diminished, as they waned, staggering disorientated out of his hovel, their innate homing instincts kicking in.
At the end of the night, only two people apart from himself remained, sweet Selina, who’d passed out in his bed in the corner of the room an hour or so before, and Mr P who was slunk down, mouth agape, in an armchair, his long arms draped over the sides, his neck arched backwards so that his long nose pointed at the ceiling. Dad had slid sideways, lifted his feet up and passed out on his back on the sofa.
The next thing he remembered was a rude awakening by the sickening pain of having his neck opened up with a kitchen knife. Mr P was completely naked, on top of my him and had done the deed with a knife from the kitchen drawer. Before dad had fully apprehended what was occurring, he’d stabbed him up through the underside of his chin too. My dad grabbed the knife and was struggling against the attack, trying to pull it out and nearly sliced three of his fingers off in the process.
At this point he related to me that Mr P, all of a sudden, looked like he’d come to his senses, as if jolting free of a trance, and became aware of what he was doing. He looked into dads’ eyes, winced at the gaping throat, dropped the knife from his sticky red fingers and let out a blood curdling scream. ‘He screamed like a woman’ is how he put it.
Mr P scrambled off my dad and scuttled out of the door. It turns out he’d gone straight to the phone box on the opposite corner of street and rang 999 for an ambulance and to confess his unconscious crime.
My dad said the funny thing was, is that none of Mr P’s clothes were in the bedsit, which meant he had gone home, undressed completely, then walked naked down the street, returning to complete his mission.
It turns out that special brew with vodka chasers didn’t agree with this fellas’ constitution, the resulting black-out had triggered something in his sodden brain and he’d taken leave of his senses.
‘My snoring was probably doing his head in’ dad joked.
I can’t remember what was happening in my life at the time but I didn’t end up visiting him again until about eight months later.
Usually when I rang the bell, the window would open and my dad would throw the keys down. Something felt off, as instead, I heard someone slowly trudging down the stairs inside. The door rattled a bit and opened a few inches. I saw Mr P’s serious face in the gap then the door opened wider and his expression turned into a manic smile.
‘Awright yer decadent student’ he said as he always did, in his Brummie accent, the phrase always confusing me because I wasn’t a student.
‘A’righ’ I said, a little stunned, and added ‘How are you?’
‘Much better thanks, yer dads upstairs, come up’
This lanky forlorn man, who’s head always bowed a bit, walked slowly up the stairs in front of me without moving his hanging arms. There was never a light in the hallway, except the for dim glow from the two rectangle windows in the front door. The gloom grew into almost darkness as we ascended the stairs.
My brain fluttered, assessing what was going on. Thoughts ran through my mind in milliseconds, I wondered if he’d returned to finish the job. I wondered why my dad hadn’t opened the window. I imagined him dead in his room, was Mr P luring me up to my own demise. I decided, if need be, I’d throw my rucksack in his face, kick him in the knackers and run.
When he pushed the door open, light flooded into the hallway and I heard my dad say ‘Who’s that’
I was relieved but still confused.
‘It’s your current bun’ Mr P said, mimicking my dad with his use of slang.
I said ‘Hiya’ and we all sat on the couch and cigarettes were passed around.
I sat smoking laid back resting against the arm of the couch and watched them talk, the tone and demeanour between them was congenial and strangely tender.
After a short while, Mr P, got up and said ‘Royte, oive got to gow and see a man about a dog’ again using my dads’ own turn of phrase as a form of flattery, they hugged and he left.
‘ok... What the fuck dad?’ was my reasonable question.
‘What?’ was his unreasonable response.
‘I don’t get it, how come he’s out of prison so quick, what’s he doing here?’
My dad just laughed and said ‘He never went to prison, they took him straight to the loony bin, then I suppose he got better and got out’
He paused, took a drag on his cig and blew smoke out of the corners of his mouth, and said ‘When he got out, I got the lads to bring him round, then they were all kicking the fuck out of him in the middle of the room, and he was wailing, and I felt sorry for him and so I stopped it’.
I was taking this in and he said ‘Well, it’s not like he meant to do it... he went completely doolally’.
I squinted at him through beams of smoke as he poured me a drink, I took a drag of a cig and said ‘Fair enough’ nodding my head slowly.
As the day progressed, the usual rabble re-assembled to continue the perpetual piss up. By the time I left Mr P was there too, looking at dad like an oversized puppy, and apart from that whole throat cutting anomaly, he always made a decent friend.
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