SUZY’S DIARY ENTRIES
ENTRY 1. WATCHING DAD DIE: 2008. Suzy. Age 42. Sitting by his deathbed I write:
I have had fantasies for years about the way my dad would die. Blowing off his head with the twelve bore. He still has the gun. Heart attack in his sleep- rotting for weeks before anyone finds him. Emphysema. What he is in reality dying of is complications from an amputated leg. That death has never crossed my mind.
I’m in Tolworth hospital, London. His stump looks like an uncooked leg of lamb. Isn’t there a better word for stump? I wonder, but apparently not. It’s a valid medical term. He has septicemia in the stump. When the doctors told us they were going to chop off his leg above the knee I had imagined just that. But his entire leg bone is gone. All that’s left is a fat, squashed piece of thigh. It’s covered in black bruises. It weeps pus. He wants me to massage it– his buttocks. He doesn’t care if I see his genitalia.
Michelle, my sister and I (we are Irish twins), take it in turns massaging his stump always wearing the latex gloves that are just inside the door of the hospital room. The days go on, the pain gets worse, I get used to it. I do it with my bare hands. It’s disgusting. Another inappropriate imposition, like having to tickle his feet or scratch his scalp when I was too young and scared to say no. I am forty-two-years old and I have a child of my own. I live three thousand miles away in America. Here I am, fondling his rotting flesh.
The hospital room is fucking freezing. It’s the middle of a blizzard and he wants all the windows open. No wonder the nurses won’t come in. We have to wear our New York winter coats, gloves, and woolly hats all day. The doctor is a twenty-five-year-old condescending git. He’s very good looking, which is annoying. I heard the weekend doctor complaining about how quickly this young doctor shoves people in the hospices. He actually took the elderly woman next-door off the list to be transported.
A happy, young woman from social services came in to talk to me and my sister about a wheelchair and whether his little cottage in the woods was wheelchair accessible. Why was she talking about wheelchairs when he was never going to leave the hospital? Condescending git told us that the antibiotics weren’t working. Septicemia. Emphysema. Heart disease. Did we want to continue with the antibiotics?
“No,” I said.
The doctor was standing in the room in a white coat looking concerned when I told Dad the prognosis. It’s an odd thing telling someone they are going to die. I stood a little away from him and delivered the fact of his upcoming death. I was resigned. Apologetic. His loneliness would end and with it my obligation to feel anything. I don’t want to be obliged to him anymore. Not to feel love. Dislike. Hate. Fear. Anger. And pity- the most damning feeling of them all.
“What, they gonna put me down like a dog?” Dad asked.
“This is a hospital, not a vet’s,” I replied.
He stopped trying to eat after that.
Michelle and I are going back to the States and my other two sisters, Julie and Sophie, are flying over to take care of him and watch him die. He’s getting moved to the hospice today.
He died today- December 11 2012, 8:30am eastern standard time; 3:30am London time. It’s Saturday and I’m at work at a lovely private school in Boca Raton, Florida. It’s the winter carnival and I have twelve hours of videotaping to do. The news of dad’s death is the moment I’ve fantasized about. But it’s all wrong. My boss doesn’t care. He’s actually annoyed that I’m crying. Wanker. Going home to grieve isn’t an option.
It’s the next day. I don’t feel like crying anymore. I hate my boss. I can’t cry. I can’t grieve. It’s time to plan his funeral, but none of us sisters want go back to England now that he is dead. Mum has offered to go for us. Poor mum. They have been divorced for over twenty years and she’s hardly seen him since. He wanted a wicker casket but no one will fork out the money.
He had already arranged our inheritance. With a letter titled “To my beautiful girls,” he provided eight credit cards with $900 limits, each with their own pin numbers, carefully written down on a scrap of paper. His instructions consisted of starting with the day of his death. We were to go to various ATMs and withdraw $300 a day (he had arranged for an overdraft). Michelle said that it was illegal- fraud given we were not intending to return the money. She’s a republican.
“Fuck off then and get nothing,” he told her. He give her cards to me and Sophie. Michelle locked herself in the bathroom, crying, muttering ludicrous, ludicrous again and again.
“You know Dad,” I had said. “ATMs have cameras these days.”
“Then wear disguises,” he replied.
We took the cards and promised him we would carry out the plan. Fake beards and all.
After the funeral my mom and her good friend took the urn of his ashes to Box Hill where he wanted to be scattered but it was pouring with rain and very cold. They tried to make it up the hill, they really did, but they didn’t get far. His ashes ended up in a ditch. The urn in a rubbish bin at a petrol station. Now, finally, Dad had an ending fit for my fantasies.
ENTRY 2. BREAKFAST WITH DAD
It was breakfast time and we were all young. The kitchen had a large window overlooking a beautiful garden. Can’t remember why but dad was outside with his shot gun shooting magpies and squirrels. We had obviously done something to annoy him as each time he killed something he strung it up on a line he had constructed outside the window. I remember the blood dripping onto the concrete. I think we all laughed – “dad’s at it again!”
ENTRY 3. DON’T KILL HIM!
I was about 14 when mum got a phone call from Gatwick airport from a man called Jon asking to stay the night on his way to see his ailing mother. Jon was a friend of a friend of my dads so he was invited. Jon had heard of my dad’s reputation as a “hard nut” and being similar himself (only about three times the size of my dad) wanted to confront my dad in some way. I don’t know why. Jon arrived with a bottle of whisky which he had already opened. It was very bizarre because my dad was trying to be very civil to Jon who definitely had a motive for coming to our house. He said to Michelle, my sister, that I had “nice titties” and other strange things, all out of ear shot of Dad. My dad took Jon down the pub where he proceeded to get even more drunk and verbally abusive with sexual innuendos about us and mum.
Surprisingly dad put up with it until it was closing time. As soon as they got back to the house Dad told Jon he was going to bed and showed him to his bedroom. I went to bed too. After about 15 minutes Michelle came into my room. She had been watching tv when Jon came in and said to her, “if you put your cunt in front of my face I wouldn’t fuck it.” She came to my room because she was frightened to sleep downstairs where her bedroom was next to his. Then we heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Jon’s voice: “Graham come on you bastard you think your so fucking hard I’ll show you!”
By the time we went out on the landing Dad was standing at the top of the stairs and Jon was half way up. Dad told him to go to bed but Jon said, “Come on you bastard!” and within a split second my dad went for him. Jon fell back and dad just kept kicking and stamping on his head as he was trying to protect himself. Then Dad stopped and walked to the kitchen and returned with a huge carving knife which he used to take a slice out of Jon’s scalp. There was blood everywhere. Jon’s face was life a football and he kept saying, “please don’t kill me” and “I want my wife.”
My mum was saying very calmly “Graham, Graham,” trying to bring Dad back. You could always tell by his eyes whether he was in psychopathic mode or not. I remember distinctly dropping to my knees and saying a prayer (I think for the first time ever) but I didn’t pray for this man’s life but for dad not to kill him because I didn’t want him to go to prison. Then dad just stopped and went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
Mum started wiping Jon up and got him up to take him to hospital. She dropped him off saying she had found him on the street and left. But before this Dad took some photos of him as he was lying there. I remember us girls had an enlarged photocopy of this photo which we pinned to our bedroom wall and threw darts or something at -it seems a really strange thing to do now and I have no idea why we did that.
When mum took Jon to the hospital I remember going into the lounge where dad was calmly sipping his tea and asking, “What happens – why do you do that?” and he said, “It’s a black thing. It comes up through my toes and comes up through my whole body and I just want to kill the person in front of me.”
“Oh” I said, that explains it, like I understood. He then phoned Jon’s wife in France and told her that Jon had gotten into a fight at the local pub but was ok and in hospital. I remember how nice he was on the phone, like a concerned friend. She must have hated him when she found out it was him.
The next day mum and I took Jon’s stuff to the hospital. Mum waited outside the entrance for a quick get-away and I was to take the cases to his ward, drop them off and leave – no questions asked. When I got there and I said these are for Jon and started walking away. The nurse stopped me and said the police would want to talk to me. I just kept walking and I heard her call someone else and they started following me and calling after me to stop so I started running. More and more people joined in the chase. I could hear them behind me as I ran down the stairs. I got to the entrance and mum saw me coming with this group of people chasing me so she opened the car door and I literally jumped in as the car pulled off. I looked round to see all the doctors and nursed staring after us. We really laughed. It was just like a movie – a comedy.
Later that day I was at home with dad and Sophie, the youngest sister. Dad was sleeping on the couch and I was in my school uniform and looking after Sophie when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to a couple of plain clothed police men. They flashed their badges and asked if my dad was home. I let them in and asked them to wait which they didn’t and followed me into the lounge where Dad was waking up.
Then 2 or 3 policemen came in through the back door. My dad said to me, “Don’t tell them nothin.” I was very aware of having to pretend everything was normal because I didn’t want to upset Sophie. The police took us into one of the bedrooms and started asking questions to which I replied, and a slight cocky tone, “No comment, no comment.” Finally, they left with dad and I remember him saying to me, “It’s okay, I’ve got my own cell with a telly and everything.” I was very relieved that he be comfortable. As soon as they left I remember very clearly checking the gate to make sure everything was clear, then I went to the kitchen and got the carving knife Dad had used to cut Jon’s head, took it up to the attic and hit it behind the wall parentheses where I hid my cigarettes. John went back to France and didn’t turn up to court. Dad got off on self defense.
