I Love the Bones of You Read online

  To my mother Elsie, my son Albert

  and my daughter Esme. I love you.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Up the Dancers

  2 Salford

  3 Red Devil

  4 A Vision Denied

  5 Rage

  6 Fall and Rise

  7 Adventure

  8 Anorexia

  9 The Bones of Me

  10 Breakdown

  11 Balm of Hurt Minds

  12 Doctor Daddy 1

  13 Lots of Planets Have a North

  14 Doctor Daddy 2

  15 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

  16 Strangled at Birth

  17 The Truth

  18 My Friends in the North

  19 Man and Masculinity

  20 Macbeth

  21 A Mind Diseas’d

  22 The Ravell’d Sleave of Care

  23 The End

  24 I Have Thee Not, and Yet I See Thee Still

  Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I saw how the story ends.

  My dad was eating his dinner. Every mouthful, so slowly. A labour of disinterest and disengagement as he lifted the fork to his lips.

  Opposite him was an aged man of similar disposition. Like my dad he was wearing a baseball cap. Neither said a word. No acknowledgement of one another’s existence. It was the first time I’d seen Dad in the home. I walked over – ‘Hi, pal.’ He just mumbled. Nothing remotely coherent. I sat down and looked at him, my face no more than 12 inches from his. The nose, the brow, it was all still there, same as when he peered down at me from his chair, his throne, as I lay on the carpet playing with the toy Indians, Cochise, Chief Sitting Bull, Hiawatha – ‘Hiawortha’ as he said it – and Crazy Horse, which he’d given me, and so perfectly named, as a kid. That was the face of Ronnie Ecc: handsome, fearsome, an eagle. Except this eagle was no longer soaring. The eyes, no more sharp and searching. The lustre had gone. The last few downward spirals of a once strong, proud and vital being.

  I was struck by the sheer pathos of it. I could see that life can end like this. We lose our physical strength. Our mental capacity does diminish. What cut deeper, to the core in fact, was the absence of spirit. My dad had always been a grafter, a fighter, full of bonhomie and passion. Now he didn’t know who he was, where he was. A man once so full of vigour had been slowly drained of life, replaced by mere existence. I was seeing my dad reduced to a shell.

  His appearance said everything. Dad had always been so fastidious about the way he looked. Always immaculately clean. As a kid, it used to make me laugh. He’d wash his face so hard that his nose would shine, dry his hair so vigorously it stood up – the detail only a child sees. Coming in from work would be marked by a shave and a spruce-up. No way did he want to wear the factory when he wasn’t in it. Looking good was hugely important to him and, when the dementia came, my mum kept up the standard. When he lived with her, he was turned out fantastic. But he wasn’t getting that care in the home. And I don’t blame those people. They were understaffed. And they didn’t love him. You don’t get cared for the same as you do by people who love the bones of you.

  We used to drive past this place. ‘Shoot me,’ Dad would say. ‘I’m not ending up in there. I tell you, shoot me. If you won’t shoot me, I’ll shoot myself. Nobody is looking after me. Nobody.’ And now here he was.

  I sat in front of him and cried. I put my arm round him, hugging him, touching him. My dad and not my dad. I was seeing him away from my mum, away from the love and the care that he’d enjoyed. And I was seeing where he was in life, where his story was ending. Here, in this home, was where his life was ending. And it did end there. That was where he died.

  I’d been grieving for him for years.

  1

  UP THE DANCERS

  I lay in bed, and as the stories washed over me, I was blessed with an overwhelming feeling of ‘this is my dad’. He’d read me a chapter a night, and when the time came to finish he’d put his face on mine – a kiss and not a kiss – and we’d both be embarrassed. Other times, at the end of a long working day, he’d fall asleep on the bed next to me. The closeness was incredible. Me, my dad, and a book. Gentleness and intimacy. I saw a totally different side to this man. I don’t say that with hindsight. Absolutely I felt it at the time.

  Dad had to take over my bedtimes. Mum had started working too. She began her shift at 5 p.m. and Dad got in at six. It was up to him.

  At first, it seemed weird – this was what my mum did – but I quickly grew to love the new arrangement. It became a bit of a routine. Dad would make me two pieces of toast at about half past eight, we’d watch TV, preferably Hannibal Heyes and ‘Kid’ Curry in Alias Smith and Jones, and then that was it – ‘Come on, up the apples and pears. Up the dancers.’

  What I loved most was that he read to me. I hear people say I’ve got a strong voice on stage and, without a doubt, Dad is where it came from. He had a beautiful tone and was very confident at reading. He coloured a story in and made it sing from the page. He read me The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, although I wasn’t actually that interested in the title character, and I don’t think he was either. We just wanted to hear about Huckleberry Finn, who was poor but extremely resourceful. I identified that character as being my dad, and I think he recognised the same – it came across in his reading. Dad liked a story about the lost, the marginalised. He also read me Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s novel about a horse that is badly treated, abused, an outsider, before eventually becoming treasured and loved. Both books are about being misunderstood and downtrodden and eventual triumph. Dad absolutely occupied those two books. He was a voracious reader and I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a child, he’d read them himself.

  One day my mum didn’t go to work. When it got to bedtime, Dad looked at me. That familiar cry of ‘Up the dancers!’ went up.

  ‘I want Mum to take me to bed.’

  ‘Right, OK.’ Off me and my mum went.

  Next day, after school, Dad was still at work. My mum had a word: ‘You know yesterday when you asked me to take you to bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your dad was a bit upset. He went to pieces.’

  Inside I was thinking, You can’t say that about my dad. You can’t say my dad went to pieces because of me. But actually it wasn’t her who had brought me up short; it was the notion of me having power over my dad. I was stunned. ‘He was hurt by me? He treasured that time together?’ In my head, I’d always thought he didn’t want to do bedtime. This, I now realised, was actually a man who felt very tenderly towards his child, and that child had hurt him. To understand that my dad loved me, and to witness my mum’s protectiveness and sensitivity to him, was a beautiful moment. It deepened my love for them both.

  I really admired Mum for unveiling my dad’s true feelings, and her own, and it wouldn’t be the last time she did so. On another occasion, me and my mate Dave were mucking about in the garden. My mum came out. ‘Eh, you two, be quiet! Chris, your dad’s in bed and he’s working nights.’

  It didn’t stop us. She came out again. ‘Come in here, you!’ she said to me. I stood in the kitchen. ‘Your dad’s in bed because he’s working nights, and he’s working nights to make money to look after you, so go and play somewhere else.’

  Again, I took in what she said. God, she loves him, I thought. She knows what he does for the family, and I’m being an idiot, and she’s told me.

  Those two incidents were just huge. Mum was telling me something important: ‘You understand who he is.’ I’m still not sure I do. I’ve been trying to work out my dad since my very first memory of him, lying on that living-
room carpet playing with my toy Indians as he sat in his chair. That memory, appropriately enough for a man whose character and personality I’m still trying to pin down, is ambiguous.

  We were in our front room in Little Hulton, the black-and-white TV was on, and he was slightly to my left, reading his paper. We were both absorbed.

  ‘Have you noticed anything?’ I turned my head and looked up at him on his throne. His voice had taken me by surprise.

  Why is he talking to me? I puzzled. He doesn’t talk much when he’s got his paper. I was always careful not to annoy Dad so I could simply have this time in his presence. Even at that age, I wanted him to be happy.

  I read his face to gauge his mood, too young to truly assess his tone and expression. Was he joking? Was he angry? Which way was this going to go?

  One thing I did know was I felt thrilled to be asked a direct question, like he would ask an adult. Trouble was, I didn’t have the answer. Would I disappoint him? Get in trouble? I didn’t want to spoil this moment. I was so happy to be in the same space.

  ‘No.’ (I had to say something.)

  ‘I’ve stopped smokin’.’

  He was desperate for a fag, craving nicotine, and wanted to share it with somebody, an urge born of the irritation of that need. My dad was, like me, a schizo-smoker. He’d not smoke for five years, puff through forty a day for a decade, and then stop again. Senior Service he smoked, and then Benson & Hedges, before jacking them in too. ‘I’m giving them up,’ he said. ‘I’m only smoking cigars.’ He’d smoke ten Hamlet a day and inhale them. When he slept, his chest sounded like a crying baby.

  As a young lad, when Dad paid me attention it felt so special. The toy Indians were a case in point. While I had toys, I was quite destructive, wouldn’t take proper care of them, but the Indians were different. They came alive because my dad was invested in them. He named them, and in so doing engaged in an imaginative game with me, so much more than just ‘Here you are, play with these.’ They were important.

  My playing with Indians fitted in with his own love of the cowboy films. He would always side with the Native Americans, so much so that I look at his nose, and mine, and think about how those very people came to Salford in the early 1900s in a travelling Wild West show, setting up their wigwams at Trafford Park on the docks. These were Sioux Indians, otherworldly, mysterious, and, inevitably, some of the local women took a shine. There is definitely Sioux Indian blood in Salford, totally befitting the radical history of the place. The Sioux Indians were about as radical as they come. While at the docks, a Native American chief was taken seriously ill because of the cold. Eventually, he died in Hope Hospital, at which point several other Sioux broke in, carted him away, and buried him according to their own rituals. The site is now a car park, the Sioux version of Richard III in Leicester.

  Are we Native Americans? I’d wonder as I looked at mine and Dad’s noses. Why not? The DNA will be all across Salford. I expect, just like my dad, there were, and still are, lots of blokes in Salford deconstructing the American myth of the cowboys and Indians film. ‘What’s all this about? It’s their bloody land. The cruel bastards, leave them alone.’

  Dad was just the same with the spaghetti westerns. He loved Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name, an outsider, on the side of the Mexicans. Again, that suited Dad because, if he was going to side with anyone, it would be the oppressed. If we went to the cinema, it would often be to see a spaghetti western. Often, he’d blag me in on the door. I loved those films, and love them to this day, but more than that I loved being with my dad. It felt rare. My mum was always there. I knew she would always have time for me, that I could be emotional with her and she would be emotional with me. The cinema was something I could share with my dad, to the extent I would watch him as much as I watched the film. I’d sit next to him in the darkness and, like a flower in the daylight, sense him opening up. Going to the cinema was massive. I loved it. I loved, loved, loved being with my dad.

  I’d create games that would give me, and him, a chance to show our affection. With my son Albert I give him a big hug and a kiss and tell him I love him. My dad didn’t do that and so, instead, when he came in from work, I’d run into the kitchen, slide on the oilcloth, and snatch his Daily Express from the tool pocket of his blue overalls. It’s nice to walk through a door and your son to run at you. I knew he loved it.

  Sometimes I’d ask, ‘Dad, can we have a silly half-hour?’ He did it more with my twin brothers, Alan and Keith, eight years older than me, but on occasion he’d wrestle with me and teach me a bit of boxing, lightning fast. He’d get me on the floor and rub his bristles on my face, which was just heaven. I’d be laughing and giggling. The very fact it was my dad, and his face was so close to mine, and I loved that face so much. And I loved him so much. I could feel that he was getting pleasure out of it. Just nothing like it. Even talking about it now, I get emotional. Other times my brothers would watch Kung Fu with John Carradine and then go upstairs and start karate-kicking each other, with my 7-year-old self joining in. We had woodchip wallpaper and as we careered around, it would get under our nails, so painful. My dad, meanwhile, would be stood at the bottom of the stairs – ‘Eh, down here now!’ We’d all come down, light fittings swinging behind us. Alan and Keith would get a light clip on the head. I’d cower slightly, but he’d never hit me.

  ‘Bloody nearly had the ceiling down!’ I think actually he found it amusing.

  Dad used to have this trick where he’d put his finger under my chin – ‘Get out of that without moving.’ Master Kan, a character in Kung Fu, had something similar. ‘When you can take the pebble from my hand,’ he would tell a young protagonist, ‘it will be time for you to leave.’ My dad would do the same with me, except instead of a pebble he would have one of those little stubby pens from Ladbrokes. I’d grab for it, but his fist would always close before I got there. In all those exchanges, there was every bit as much love as him bear-hugging and kissing me. They touch me now as they did then, always in the back of my mind.

  At home, there was a quirky individuality about Dad. He was the master of memes in the original sense of the word. Radio, or the wireless as he referred to it, had been massive for him growing up, as it was for that entire generation. It had enormous potency, not just in the gravity of the news it brought, but in the escapism it delivered. Dad revelled in that little box and it had a seismic impact on his love of language. His big thing was Dick Barton – Special Agent, which again he carried through life, especially the ‘Da-da-da!’ of its theme tune. Whenever a key moment happened in a film, such as the Indians appearing over the hill in a western, he’d be straight in there – ‘Da-da-da!’ References from old shows peppered his language. I’d ask him how he knew something and he’d say, ‘I know because I am The Whistler,’ and start whistling, a reference to the American radio show of the same name. He loved Frank Randle, the Lancashire comic – ‘I’ve supped some ale toneet’.

  He’d throw phrases around all the time, all lodged in his head from time spent in front of the speaker. ‘A shot rang out, the lights went out, the cat ran out, I ran out . . . I’m not staying in there it’s bloody dangerous.’ ‘Stand and deliver, your money or your life.’ ‘The Lord said to Moses “Come forth!”, and he came fifth and won a teapot.’ ‘If a fella met a fella in a field of fitches, could a fella tell a fella if his belly itches.’ ‘Spring is sprung, the grass is ris. I wonders where the birdies is.’ ‘I see no ships, only fish and chips.’

  He had another one that only came out when Mum wasn’t there. ‘Sergeant Major, is the soup ready?’ ‘Fuck the soup. Right, marker, steady!’ That wasn’t a radio meme but a hangover from his National Service days, driving a tank carrier over Salisbury Plain chasing rabbits and foxes.

  Those things are amazing as a child, an instant insight into a parent’s more playful side, a hint that actually they are more like yourself than you might ever have imagined. When Dad came up with those limericks and phrases he’d heard on the ra
dio, he was softening, and it allowed me to get closer to him. I’d then go off and expand those words and images in my own imagination, to the extent it’s not too big a stretch to say Dad’s relationship with radio fed into me going to drama school. Maybe one day they’ll do the same with someone else. Dad may be gone but those favourite sayings, plucked from the airwaves, have travelled through the family. His grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren are now familiar with some of his verbal tropes.

  Clearly, there was fun and stability in the house and yet all the time I had a nagging insecurity about the twins’ relationship. My brothers were patient, loving and generous with me. Alan, the slightly more demonstrative of the pair, bought me a yellow shovel-nosed car once, which I still think of, and we would play with cap and spud guns. In fact, Alan once gave Keith a detached retina with a dried pea fired from a Gat gun – he’d stuck his head round a corner at an inopportune moment. I dogged them terribly to play with me and, where they could, they would do just that – but I envied what they’d got, what they shared, to the extent I even split them up. They shared the larger bedroom while I was in the box room. Eventually, by sheer virtue of moaning, nagging and making a fuss, they gave into my selfishness and babyishness and Alan had the box room while I went in with Keith. It didn’t last long. It was obvious they should share the bigger room and Mum reversed the decision. This was about more than rooms, though. It was me trying to create a symbolic relationship as a twin. But I wasn’t a twin and there was no use pretending otherwise. The situation was indicative of a general paranoia about Alan and Keith. I was needy and there were periods when I felt left out. Often that was simply because they were older than me so they could do stuff like stay up later watching telly. But a good deal of it was the pop psychology of ‘Where’s my twin?’ My brothers had a special bond, my mum and dad had a special bond – what did I have?

  To be fair, Mum and Dad never made a special thing of my brothers being twins. For instance, they only ever dressed my brothers the same out of necessity. There was too much common sense in them for it to be any other way. Their clothes did affect me, though. I’d get all their hand-me-downs, which, because eight years had elapsed until they fitted me, were totally out of sync with the times. I was profoundly self-conscious about this. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, boys at junior school were starting to wear long pants all the time, but my mum would insist that I wore shorts, always shorts that our kid had worn, that were, thanks to changing fashions, by now ridiculously long. There was a kids’ programme on the telly at the time called Sam. It was set in the ’30s and Sam was an old-fashioned kid with old-fashioned shorts – long shorts. It caused me issues at Bridgewater Primary School, where other kids would make comments. It made me profoundly self-conscious, not because I was scruffy – Mum would have never had me scruffy – but because I looked different. I was bullied in the infants by one girl in particular. Looking back, I can see she probably had issues of her own. She looked unwashed, was bigger than her age, and was bullying a male child, so who knows what was going on? Whatever the underlying reasons, I was absolutely petrified. I cannot claim virtuousness on this count. I bullied a lad when I moved up into the juniors. I used to make him give me his crisps. I’ll carry the absolute shame of that to my grave. I picked on the weakest, most vulnerable kid, and I bullied him. There’s no excuse for it. I’d like to find him and say sorry, but what’s the use of apologising now?