Breathing Space

My father made breakfast in a frying pan that looked older than I was.

Liver and bacon, usually. Greasy, salty, folded into pitta bread and handed to me before school. Sometimes I ate it in the old Land Rover as we drove.

That is one of the things I remember now.

Not an argument.

Breakfast.

He loved football. Played it, watched it, listened to it, worried about it, talked about it. Cricket perhaps even more. Cricket had weather and waiting in it. Football had Saturdays. We went to matches. We listened in cars. Aston Villa became part of the family architecture long before I was born.

There were holidays too. Beaches. Skiing. Driving enormous distances. Food. My father liked food. He liked movement. He liked taking us places.

He tried.

That sentence has taken me a long time to write without immediately adding another one.

He tried and was there.

He also probably had enough of me.

For years I treated 17 Grange Road as if it were still partly mine. In memory, perhaps it was. The stairs, kitchen, basement, garden, rooms, smells, voices. Childhood makes a territorial claim. This is my room, chair. This is my father. This is where things belong.

Then people move and rooms change.

A person who once carried you on his shoulders eventually wants to sit down without you sitting on top of him.

I think I overstayed my welcome with my father.

Not as a child. Children cannot overstay their welcome. That is the adults’ problem.

Later.

I kept wanting something from him. Recognition perhaps. Explanation. A final acknowledgement that would organise everything that had happened before it. I wanted him to enter my account of the past and sign it.

He did not. Perhaps he couldn’t.

Perhaps he simply wanted some space.

The phrase sounds brutal when you are the person outside the door.

I have been thinking about another room.

An old flat. Old appliances. Nothing particularly spectacular. Food cooked in a kitchen whose equipment had outlived several political systems and looked capable of surviving several more.

I loved that kitchen.

That may be the strangest thing.

Not because the food was extraordinary.

Because somebody cooked it.

There is recognition in being fed.

Then there was the room itself. Dark. Old. Dusty. Slightly uncomfortable. It acquired too much meaning.

I wanted things inside it.

Recognition.

Reassurance.

Touch.

Love.

Certainty.

An answer.

Perhaps this is what happens when a room becomes too small for what we ask it to contain.

Eventually every movement becomes significant. Someone moves closer. Someone moves away. A hand is placed somewhere. A hand is removed..

I blamed people for closing doors.

Sometimes rightly.

But I am beginning to wonder about the doors I held open after other people were trying to close them.

There is a difference between loving somebody and requiring continued access to the room in which love once happened.

We all need space.

Holding on does not only imprison the person trying to leave. It keeps the person holding on standing in exactly the same place.

My father is alive somewhere.

I do not see him. I miss him and I miss 17 Grange Road.

I miss greasy liver and bacon in pitta bread.

I miss the Land Rover.

I miss football being something that existed between us without needing explanation.

I miss cricket on television.

I miss Warsaw Old Town too.

I miss being fed.

I miss the particular recognition of another person saying, without saying it: yes, you are here.

But people are allowed to leave rooms and shut doors. People are allowed to become tired of us.

We are allowed to become tired too.

It does not erase what happened before.

Love does not always fail because somebody stops loving.

Sometimes the room simply becomes uninhabitable.

Then the decent thing may be to leave it.

Not because the room was false, but because there are other rooms.