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  My parents are dead, and my dad, especially, has fucked me over because he died before he could teach me how to shave. This is what dads are supposed to do, but he has been dust for four years before puberty kicks in enough to sprinkle me with whispers of neck hair, a formative mustache, general testosterone, so I have to teach myself to do it when I am in my first year at uni. This, for whatever reason, causes me enough shame for me to entirely lose my mind about it: I go to an out-of-town pharmacy to buy a razor and shave gel in secret (for some reason I am obsessed with the idea that someone will see me perusing the shaving gel aisle and go “HA!” and point—there is a whole group of people I half know with them, in this fantasy, and they all come round the corner to point and laugh at me, “HA!” they are saying, “HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SHAVE!”), and I decide to discreetly do a practice shave—on my thigh, where, even in shorts, nobody will know I have done it—in my room.

  So here I am with a wad of printed-out “how to shave” instructions from wikiHow, and a jug of warm water for rinsing, and a towel, and the door is double-locked, and I have shaved my left thigh entirely, entirely nude. It’s horrible: eerie, actually, too smooth, weak and fragile to the touch, and so immediately after I am done, I have that sort of dark, grim, postorgasm feeling of dirty regret. I have a pink, nude thigh and a jug of lukewarm hair water and a hollow feeling inside my body. The warm hair water is a problem—I cannot sprint to the shared bathroom to dispose of it in case the same crowd is there, pointing and laughing, calling me “Jug Boy” or “Baby Thigh”—and so, in what is easily my third or fourth moment of sheer madness in this entire episode, I throw the water jug out of the window. The person in the flat below—a pathological smoker, who I think actually was probably smoking out of the window at the exact moment I threw a load of hair water out of it—starts immediately thumping on the ceiling, so I cower on the floor near my bed and stay there, still and silent, for fifteen minutes in case anyone comes to my room. It’s there—trouserless, afraid, silent, and with one perfectly shaved pink thigh—that I think: This is probably a low point in my life. I entirely blame my father for this happening.

  I don’t know: a small part of me feels cheated, I suppose. My parents were old when they had me—Dad, who already had my sister from a previous marriage, was forty-two; Mum, a first-timer at thirty-eight—but still, when you sign up to push a baby out of your body and nurture it to adulthood, you are in my opinion signing an invisible contract: I am going to live long enough to see this one through so it can learn to live without me before it has to. It would have been nice for someone to teach me how to shave, or what a savings account is, or how many carbohydrates I should be eating (as close to zero as possible!) before they died.

  My parents are dead, and the cats are going crazy about it, lost in what’s left of the house. The cats are brothers, Boz and Jez, big beefy thickset tabbies with loud mouths who lean into tickles ear-first, great cats, wonderful boys, starting to creak a little as we’ve had them since I was eleven but otherwise great, good boys. They are staying with some friends of my mum’s since the death thing happened to her, and the friends—a couple—are sending us mixed messages about them, about how happy the animals are and the humans, too. The husband is deeply in love with Boz and Jez: they sit on him, he tells us, they are very settled, they can stay as long as we need, if we are thinking of putting them up for adoption, he says, he is interested. The wife is calling us at odd times in the afternoon to tell us that actually the cats are deeply unhappy and we need to come get them, stat. Listen, I like being courtside on a slow-moving divorce just as much as anyone, but right now, while I’m trying to pick funeral flowers out, it’s less than ideal, so my sister decides to take the cats home to London to live the most luxe life a cat can possibly live in the two or so years they have left. When we take Jez, in a cat box, to the train station, it’s the most he’s ever traveled in his life. Do you know when a cat is really distressed—like, really, really freaked out—it pants? Honestly, it’s fucking crazy. It sounds like a werewolf-transformation scene in an especially bogus ’80s movie. This cat is panting and panting and panting. The noises coming out of this box, my god. Anyway, long story short: we get on the train, sit at a four-seater table, and then Jez just immediately panic-shits everywhere. Just everywhere. Jemma has to take him into a train bathroom and clean him up with wet wipes like a baby. Boz is chill throughout.

  My parents are dead, and my sister has gone back to London for the weekend because “this fucking shitheap fucking town is driving me deranged” (my words, not hers) (my sister did NOT say this), and so I am left alone here, with the echoing floors and the still-bristling ashtrays and my mum’s phonebook, carefully handwritten and overwritten and rewritten, years of house moves and name changes and marriages and divorces, with the names and numbers of all her families and friends. And it’s me, my turn—my sister did this when our dad died, it is my turn to do this now—it is my turn to call everyone and tell them she is dead. The first person I call is my mum’s best friend, Teresa, the best woman in the world, the woman who still even now sends me Christmas cards with “NOT 2B OPENED B4 24/12/2017” written on them, Mum’s one best friend throughout her life, the one friend she loved throughout it all, decades she has known her, Teresa, decades she has known me, she has seen my dick as a baby and seen me have tantrums as a teenager and seen me grow, sort of, into an adult, and she is driving when she picks up, it sounds like, on the hands-free, and briefly she is pleased to hear from me because I’ve literally never phoned her in my life, she says it so surprised, so genuine, “Oh, hi,” she says, and “How are you?” and then I have to tell her, and the words feel dry in my mouth because I haven’t ever said them yet. “Terri,” I say. “It’s Mum. She’s dead.” And Terri goes no, no.

  That’s all I remember: No, no.

  Sometimes when I try and sleep, I close my eyes and I can still hear it exactly how she said it: No, no.

  With her voice kind of breaking halfway through. And there’s a pause, and she says, “I’ll have to call you back,” and I say yes, and then I just sort of sit there, holding the phone, just sit in the armchair, looking.

  And that is definitely the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life.

  And for the rest of the friends we just announce it via a Facebook status, because who can do that, really. Who can do that to themselves.

  * * *

  —

  My parents are dead, and I am drunk, so much drunker than everyone else around me, so drunk for a Wednesday, and it’s so obvious, being that drunk, such an obvious way of coping, but here I am. My sister is in London still and the cats are at the friends’ house and all my mates are at work and so it’s just me in the house, going crazy at the way this place seems to have deformed and changed in the time I’ve been here, the very shape of the rooms seem different, too quiet, and I try and start the day normally—I have opened my laptop and started a game of Football Manager and I am convinced I can pull Queens Park Rangers up out of the championship and into the path of glory, and a lot of that glory depends on the form of a misfiring Bobby Zamora—but it’s 1 p.m. now and I’m bored and still not dressed yet and, long story short, lunch is one ham-and-coleslaw sandwich, one small bag of Mini Cheddars, and a fantastic amount of beer and bourbon drunk alone. I have just discovered the boilermaker—a greasy shot of bourbon chased with a bottle of American beer—and have decided it is excellent. By 5 p.m. QPR have been relegated, because I’m trying to play five men up front, and I am roaring.

  So we’re out tonight, everyone out tonight, even though it’s a Wednesday and not typically an out-tonight kind of night, but because I have requested it and because my mum is dead everyone is going along with it so whatever, and when I arrive at the same pub we all go to, Wetherspoons—shout out to!—everyone is there slowly sipping their first pints and someone turns to me with a note of surprise in their voice and says, Joel, th
ey say, you’re so drunk.

  And I say: Hell fuck shit fuck yeah I’m drunk! And I order another two boilermakers (two.). And I would say this activity continues for roughly three more years.

  * * *

  —

  My parents are dead, and the fridge is, too. I cannot believe this. The day my mother died, the fridge in her house also decided to expire, so it’s just this lifeless white box and we have to keep milk for tea in this foil-lined freezer bag on the side, and let’s be honest about this system: it does not actually work. Already, my health has deteriorated drastically as a result of my mother’s death—two weeks alone in a house with no fridge and no store-cupboard reserves has left me stringing meals together from whatever I can buy that day from the nearest decent supermarket a mile away, microwave-friendly a plus, or whatever I can muster in desperation at whatever time I wake up from the local corner shop (one dreary gray Sunday, with no other shops open and nowhere to turn, I end up going to the corner store and my dietary intake for the day was 1 x entire thing of fromage frais, 1 x entire packet of Cheestrings, 1 x apple, 1 x pack of popular prawn-and-maize snack Skips, no other vitamins or minerals). I am eating in pubs, a lot. I am eating a lot of sugared cereals. I feel like hell. I feel like garbage. I would pay up to £1,000 for someone else’s mum to cook me a meal and tell me it’s okay.

  * * *

  —

  My parents are dead, and I don’t know what my dad’s face looks like anymore. I know what my mum’s face looks like: I can look directly in a mirror for that, imagine myself with a gray chin-length bob and a cigarette on the go, yelling at the tennis, by which I mean to say I have my mother’s exact face (my sister, too, has her mother’s exact face—our shared dad had weak genes, clearly). But his face…not so much. Every early January I am vaguely reminded of his death—he died on the fourth, early in the year, which obviously made it double sad because that was so close to Christmas (see ibid., re: already being very marred), which marred the occasion somewhat. The last Christmas present he ever got me, since you ask, was a Dreamcast console, which I discovered ten years later when we were clearing out Mum’s house, and when I found it I just squatted on the floor and held it and looked into the middle distance and Thought a Lot About Stuff, which you do a fair amount of when both your parents are dead—and I realized with a jolt this year that this January marks fifteen Januaries without him, equal in number to the fifteen Januaries I had with, meaning I have now spent more of my life without a father than with. And those memories are becoming blurry now—the things he did, the way his voice sounded, gentle but melodic, sort of, the way he smelled so bad because he was a smoker, and the way the car smelled so, so bad because he was a smoker, and all the smoke—but his face. His face. I just can’t picture it. Sometimes I go to my sister’s house and idly flick my eyes over at a bookshelf and there, buried among knickknacks and shells and Asian-looking scrolls from her time in Malaysia and in among all that crap, boom: there’s a perfect sharp photo portrait of my dad, the one I took when I was about eight, when, after school, I went with him to the local college nearby, where he knew the photography lecturer who let him use the dark room there; and there, in the empty hours of the evening, he’d sit and make a shallow pool of chemicals slowly splash, and, alchemy-like, black-and-white photos would emerge; and I would spend most of these times bored out of my mind, or playing with something—a Game Boy, an off-brand single-note Thunderbirds-themed electronic game, a Pog—until, once, he set the camera up for me, steadied it on the tripod, gauged the aperture and ISO, stood me on a box and trailed a shutter release wire down to me, then sat in front of the camera, click. And then he went to the back and developed it—out of the canister, into the pool, slick paper pushed into the bath with tongs—and then, what seemed like hours later, there: the last photo of him ever taken. I had just eaten a Kinder Egg and had chocolatey fingers, and there, in my excitement, I grabbed the photo, smudging the back—my tiny fingerprints still mark the back of it—and I remember the photo. I remember the chemical smell. I remember the Kinder Egg and the slow, short walk home, pink sun setting in a red sky. I remember the Hoover repair shop we always had to walk past on the way there, and the name of the photography lecturer who gave Dad a key to his studio, and I remember the winding cast-iron staircase I used to sit on and play with. But I do not remember his face.

  * * *

  —

  My parents are dead, and all I can think back to is the Christmas I figured Santa wasn’t real. Because I kind of knew—you always know before you know; children are obsessed with Santa, entirely, and strive to solve the puzzle of him even though they don’t truly want the answer, and as a result are constantly searching for clues as to his existence or nonexistence; and plus, also a bigger boy two years above me in school called Daniel told me, and I mostly believed him—but it is cold and the night is sharp and jet-black, and I’m sitting huddled on a bench at the train station with my dad, hands both in our pockets, waiting on Christmas Eve for my sister. She’d been off living in London, ’90s London, which I can only assume meant taking acid before cutting your own hair a lot and literally nothing else, and the train is delayed or we are early or whatever and my dad is making small talk asking me what I want for Christmas. He was always very clear-eyed when my sister was coming to stay: rare half-yearly trips, just a weekend here or there, and he would always be on his A-game for it, make sure he was sober and sparkling, and he nestled in near and said, And So What Do You Want Santa to Bring You for Christmas.

  And I don’t really know, I say.

  What If He Brought You a Camera? my dad asks. And I say—

  —and this haunts me, every time i think of it, in the many years since; if i could take back one moment and swallow it away, push it all in my mouth like a piece of paper and chomp it down and swallow it, take it all back, i would, but i am stuck with the scar instead; and it will come to me, in dark blue-gray nights when i can’t sleep and when i’m walking thru supermarkets and when i’m on my commute and when i’m just minding my own business on the sofa, and it will come to me in the high moments as well as the low, and it will knock all the air out of me all over again, and i go:—

  —“Ugh. No.” And my dad turns to look away and says, Okay.

  And so of course the next day I open a carefully wrapped shoebox with, inside it, a small, pristine secondhand camera. And the note from Santa is in my dad’s handwriting. And he says he hopes I like my present. And that is how I learned that Santa wasn’t real.

  (I just wanted a Genesis, that’s all. I just wanted a Sega Genesis.)

  * * *

  —

  My parents are dead, and do you ever think about the moment of death? The actual moment of death? Not your physical body collapsing beneath you, or your liver finally failing in its liver hole, or anything biological, physical, like that: Do you ever think of that last second of life, as the air eases out of your lungs? Do you ever think what it is like to be in that moment, and know it is the end? There is no peace there. That is a moment of sheer horror. You know that your body has failed you and you are trapped, for the rest of your life, in the prison of it. And then the edges grow blurry, and the words begin to fade, and the light grows pale and the darkness comes to replace it. And then—just as you never knew you were born. You die.

  My dad is dead, and we are at his flat, clearing out his things. It’s a small flat, a stubby hallway that opens out into a sort of double room and, behind it, an equally sized living area; off that, a box-shaped kitchen, and from the hallway, a small bathroom. I am telling you this because I know the flat inside out, as I did then and I do now, because I used to stay here every other Friday until I didn’t, and since I’ve been here last it has filled with another layer of accoutrements. In the last couple of years since my parents split and he moved here, my dad mainly preoccupied himself with drinking, and with stumbling into town a couple miles to do a loop of a
ll the charity shops, on the search for geegaws and trinkets on a rhyme and reason known only to himself. You look at this flat, and any interior designer will tell you there’s no overarching theme here, no through line to the knickknacks—here, for some reason, is a brass bugle; here a small tin car; some wooden owls; a tiny pot statue of an elephant; here is a deck of cards inside a decorative box; here is a toby jug with a monstrous face. We pick through the crap (an awful lot thereof) and chuck it; the few items worth keeping are distributed amongst us, for memory’s sake. All I have to remember my dad by is a cowboy coffee pot, a fist-sized wooden ball studded with faux ivory, a pair of binoculars with an honest-to-god swastika on it, and a cast-iron skillet.

  And then a curious thing happens, which is: Dad’s best friend turns up. Only none of us have ever met this best friend, ever. And he says it—“I was your dad’s best friend”—and he explains, through the tears, this old wizened toothless man in a flat cap and a wrinkled face contorting with emotion, that he used to come over, with the dog—the dog he gestures to, straining on its leash—and they would talk about things, about the wind and the day and the lay of the land, and then he—and this man is gulping, crying, with an emotion none of us, dead at the nerves, have felt for days—and he just wanted to say—I—found—him—gesturing to the hallway where he was found back-down and gray—and—he—was—a—good—man—and all I am thinking here is: