SH*T STAINS IMMORTAL - Memory of 1996

 

After my parents split I used to visit my Dad thrice a year during summer, Christmas, and Easter. He lived the frugal life of a Yorkshire artist forced to live in Essex. His house smelt funny. He used a certain spice in his cooking that got into the walls of the kitchen. He used cheap bicarbonate toothpaste that tasted weird. He wasn’t a messy person but his art studio was the little bit of paint-dripped chaos he refused to tame. There were piles of old tapes with strange music that nobody listened to except artists. Like obscure blues from the twenties and thirties, all types of jazz, classical, fairground organ instrumentals, and Fats Waller. He painted pictures that not even he understood. They weren’t very saleable. I remember a giant canvas he painted in 1996 with loads of naked men from different angles. The naked figures had an uncanny resemblance to his best friend. He had some success early on in his career. He got commissioned to paint murals that have either been painted over or have peeled off with age.

He was so mean when it came to money he used to take me over to his friends’ houses so I could get a free meal. His main meal providing friend was this big Essex man who was always telling jokes. He was a funny man and my Dad would sit with him in the kitchen talking and listening to his jokes.

Their house smelt of sweet air-freshened filth. The big man’s children always had snot running and minor medical problems like Eczema and ear infections. You could smell the snot in the air when you entered. I liked the boys. They had loads of expensive toys and games consoles. They had Sega, Nintendo and Playstation. They had a computer with Worms Armageddon. Their Dad was fun. He was always making something or coming up with something interesting to do. 

I remember wild smoky banger hot dogs at their beech hut and bullet hunting at an abandoned army range.

I thought it was normal to visit people’s houses and linger during dinner to get a free meal. That’s what my Dad taught me. He knew that he could save a pound here and there if I was given a bowl of tinned soup and a slice of buttered bread every couple of days.

I would smell the bolognaise cooking from the kitchen below. Their mother was getting ready to put the spaghetti on. It was the time when most people go, “Well you're about to have your dinner, we best be getting off.” Not my Dad, he would start up a new more interesting line of conversation with the big man just when dinner was ready. And their mum would feel obliged to plate me up some. After all, my Dad was an artist, a struggling artist. And struggling artists don’t have enough money to feed their children.

He played the struggling artist very well. But it went deeper. Sometimes I stayed the night at the big man’s house. I was fed breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My Dad was very happy with that saving.

 

I remember staring at these shit stains that lined their toilet. The big man had left them for his wife to clean long ago and she had refused. As a child I wondered why other toilets didn’t have these stains. The stains were still there when I visited them the year after and the year after that. Those stains were immoveable and they’re probably still there today. The stains didn’t fit with the lower middle class idle they had built. I thought they were just one of those strange idiosyncrasies that all families have. 

However, the stains in the toilet bowl were an omen of things to come.                                                                

The big man had a strange relationship with his wife. He expected her -a young middle class woman- to do all the cooking and cleaning, even though he had been on the sick for stress for well over five years. She had refused to clean his shit stains and they had become the brown reminder of an argument unresolved. The shit was long gone. The lime scale had browned and crystallised. The stains were the fossilised remains of a humungous turd that was never cleaned away. Every time you looked into the bowl you were reminded of his un-flushable shits from long ago.

 

Those stains outlived their marriage. Eventually she left him for a younger man who hadn’t given up. She was a beautiful woman and a lifetime of money and yoga slowed her aging significantly. She probably still looks thirty-seven even though she is sixty-seven.

I felt sorry for the big man at first. Later on I changed my opinion. I decided that she was right to leave him. He treated her like a skivvy slave after she gave birth to the boys. She put up with it for a long time before she decided to leave. When they were together I envied them. I loved them. I was too young to see how my Dad scrounged my meals by playing on their good will.

 

The strangest part of this was the knowledge that my Dad and the big man could have been engaged in a latent homosexual relationship without the sex. It fits when you think about it. The big man had a plutonic love for my Dad which was reciprocated. And after my Dad moved away from the big man, he began a homosexual relationship which has lasted over two decades all the way to today. The nature of the relationship between my Dad and the big man remains a secret. My Dad has had many relationships with men and women over the decades, and he has always managed to scrounge free meals out of them.

I look back on the visits to the big man with my Dad with a mix of resentment and joy. I used to love spending time at their house with the fossilised shit stains. The big man was great at telling jokes. He could make a BBQ out of a couple bricks, drift wood, and some mesh. I was welcomed and fed. They treated me like family. I used to ask my Dad if I could go there every day when he was looking after me during summer.

The problem came when he actually did take me to their house every day. He had no shame in cadging meals off them for five days running. They had to tell me -the seven-year-old- not to come over anymore. My Dad waited until we had exhausted their good will. They broke their silence and told me not to come back. My Dad waited for them to have a talk with me rather than taking responsibility for overstepping the mark. That’s why I started to resent the memories of them. I had to take the fall for my Dad’s scrounging.

All the strange smells and stains of that time still rattle round my noggin. I can’t seem to let it go when those memories enter my mind. I see through the good memories. I see my scrounging Dad. I see the strange plutonic love my used as leverage for a free meal. I see the drudgery of their mother, and I see shit stains. The shit stains that outlived his marriage.