MEMOIR

I shared the living room with my father’s body, thinking that we both enjoyed the cosy silence, both deep inside the world of our books until he entered mine; he walked across the page and waved up at me. Everything blurred for a moment and I had to blink a few times to clear my eyes. I peered at the page, caught his smile and the glimmer of tears in his eyes; he looked so sorry for me. My head was stuffed with characters and it took me a while to sift through the confusion, to actually see him and hear his voice calling my name.

‘Mahri. Mahri.’

‘How weird is this?’ I asked him and glanced across at him slumped in his armchair. He’d fallen asleep, I thought, so I did what he often did to us and slammed my book shut to wake him with a start. But he didn’t move.

Those moments are background to my life; he’s there like wallpaper but unlike the templates of this digital wifi world it can’t be changed. I live with the fact of this but it’s buffered by other living room memories, of him playing mad jokes on us, of him grinding his teeth as he slept alcohol off in his armchair. In a funny way I’m glad he managed to interrupt my reading like that – he set me up for a career I could never have imagined.