Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

A short tale beached in the concept of SonsBecomeFathers.

WealthBecomesArt is a multi-form exploration of all that drifts through the ether {and my brain} ; life, art, science, technology, music, heart, head, mood and the simple or complex way in which all things become something else. In short, it is conceptually focused writing. If you like what you see, consider supporting the work in whatever way you wish {Share, Subscribe, Like}. Feel free to leave a comment also, I may be willing to share what is going on in my brain. Thank you for your support and most importantly thanks for reading!

Credit: Mickell Sillito - Behance

I didn’t have enough time to hate my father. He died too soon and he deceived the truth all too often.

Died. Taken. What’s the difference… Tragic murder. Fall from cliff edge. Car Accident. What’s the point… Salesman. Delivery driver. Player. Who cares. Kick stones. Walk on.

I heard that in all great stories there is an important point in a protagonist’s life where he wisens to the corrupting nature of familial love, friendship and lust; each only brings a sense of loss. Their will is either strengthened, renewed or their resolve compromised, weakened, so they can overcome. But neither, nothing came to me, just a continuation of I, the widowed son’s hatred.

Walk. Kick. We never grow too far from childhood. Memory works as a slingshot loaded with a boomerang.

There’s a child firing that slingshot every time I walk down here. The boomerang circles. And Tendrils of my father’s suffocating ideals accompany the action so that his words choke my mind. You will become what you can become if you etc. If you allow failure to come into your day it will etc etc. You must find a purpose in etc etc etc. Dad said it all, dad, yeah he was dad sometimes, but the words became captions strangled by their own hypocrisy and fade repetitively.

Kick. Kick. Walk. I, I’ve been free of the incessant call to be a cockroach under his extinct boot and pushed away the Samson-esque pillars that held and preserved his presence aloft. Those pillars crumbled sure, but his presence reforms its structure every step along here. I can’t tell you why this happens or why I continue to come here allowing the eclipsing moon of his shadow to hang.

That boy just continues to fire, catching the boomerang, while I simultaneously kick rocks by the same canal of our slow sloping city, within an older shell. We used to come here, dad and I. He convinced me he could stand on water once. I believed him. The rock revealed itself at low tide.

Boomerang boy fires the slingshot. The boomerang slaps me with a recurring memory while the stones I kick disappear over the bank. Maybe this is why I walk down here so often. Daily. Weekly. To replay it, so he can show me something more than just...

Reasons. You should have a reason as to why I have this hatred, it’s not something easily explained, there is no explanation and you’d have to know him or me.

Well, my father was no-one, a part-speaker, time-salesman, a middleman, amateur negotiator, a RADA affiliate; the rest I couldn’t guess… I don’t know…

How can no-one alight earth and dump so much weight. Accomplishing nothing.

I couldn’t tell you what he spoke about or negotiated truly but what he sold; these things cluttered our home, and I heard his rehearsed sales pitches. The devices he sold I never understood. They were extras, things that people didn’t need but he prayed for prey to deceive each day. His God answered most days. These things were gadgets for doorbells, lights for greenhouses, adhesive stained-glass pieces for All windows, gps watches for the children, each peculiar and needless. There was a time when people would open their door to strange authoritative jovial fellows and allow them in. This was his prime; a sales person that would sell you a hoover from a suitcase, speak pleasantries into your dirty home, while vacuuming impossible amounts of dirt into a neat obscure machine no family on the street could afford. Those streets were his walk of fame, his adoring fooled audiences. He would always invite the fooled to our home after a successful sale. Why? You’ll see.

Our family, interestingly or not, lived on those streets too, my mother and I at least, but we could afford the hoover, we just never let another salesman in, because he preferred to be the only deceiver in the house.

My father was a jealous man. He spat on the postman for leaning in our doorway. My mother however is an effortless warm human being; she had those leaning effortless chats with everyone she came across. Everyone who could lean would. They’d lean against a wall, gate, a bush, comfortably uncomfortable but warm with undulating conversation. The Avon woman, the Waste Clothes Collector, the multiple Bin Men that gathered and collected and returned our bin to its alcove adjacent to our dying evergreen. The Milk Man, the new Post Woman. They occupied the leaning spaces of our half-caked gated wall; It was hacked from large stones but chipped and tepid, pretending to support our tilted iron gate.

My father wasn’t discreet either, he wanted to be the man that rose from - fill in lowly status blank -, to become a prestigious person. From roots and dirt of weeds to blessed nutrient rich soil, and he, a strong oak that allowed others to plant their feet and grow beneath his protective shade of vain leaves.

Walk. Slingshot. Boomerang.

I cant kick this memory, so here it is.

And my father, and my father, and my father! I silently uttered while swigging a ginger beer before the appointed time. Noise scaled from one direction, I didn’t need to look through too many heads to see him.

I watched him. He was articulate for a rogue. A chameleon greeting all into our home while mum visited a family member he declined to meet after her late shift. He’d direct all, each guest, by arm and subtle hand, to the space beside the expensive mirror; the sofa patch beneath it. I’d moved the sofa to a corner. He needed the space. I knew which performance was coming this evening, I’d learned to read his moods.

He often reeled off speeches, ‘from my RADA days’ he would say. He never went to RADA. Macbeth’s speech following the death of Lady Macbeth was his favourite. If you knew it, he would appreciate you; If you didn’t he wouldn’t listen to you. I sipped the bitterness and watched his heedless self-chauvinistic chauvinism. Too often more females than males attended.

He chose never to perform Othello, it’s too obvious a piece to play he often told me. I had no ambition to lie for a living anyway.

Lifting his Cheshire grin, people waited for his words, whether he was about to perform or not. I placed the beer-less drink down. The feigned impromptu speech was coming, albeit out-of-character, out-of-mood and out-of-meaning, here, before his audience.

“And Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow!” He began, surprising many.

Each word bellowed louder than the other, insisting upon quiet, despite the stillness of those in our tall living room; his stage. The party, gathering, fellowship - paused. Anticipating. His voice silenced all and drew over each inelegant lump of our DIY wallpapered living space. His voice rose and fell as a blanket, subtlety suffocating all within it. He peddled his head back with a slow arch of his neck and called into the room, “Someone say the words!” I found myself volunteering, automated, Hey Siri, Okay Google, Speak Son.

He licked his eyelids with his fingers after they’d brushed his tongue.

“Yes, son, serve as Seyton.” Son? This was the only time he named me son, in front of an audience. Satan.

“Where?” He bellowed air and sound from his whiskered face. “Wherefore was that cry?”

I step, the crowded room turns, piqued, he looks on morose, a poor McKellen copy from ’79. “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” I enunciate my only words but remain Seyton. A glint in his eye shakes my soul, I know what he wished, I saw through his maniacal charm.

“She should… have died hereafter!” His voice spoke the words pointedly, spitefully, he was no actor.

“There would have been a time for such a word.” Lungs. Breath. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

Each tomorrow longer than the initial beginning. The crowd at this point settled, their eyes became ears and their ears fell to the sight of the silence between each word. He turned to the light and whispered.

“Creeps in this petty pace, from day, to day.. to…” A breath with eyes closed. “To the last syllable of recorded time;”

Squinting, he peaked for an attractive woman in the room, usually Ronald’s wife, a friend of hers or one of his newly invited prey. I’m sure he wished he were the Buddha of Subrurbia, only his religion was all wrong. He never failed to catch a keen eye. He did, I didn't recognise her. Men, women, cats and children were often bewildered by his voice.

“All our yesterdays have lighted fools!” He looked at his Seyton and I, my satan, fools we both were, assuming we could carry our rebuke for one another without at least one beady ear seeing through the charade.

“The way to dusty death. Out. Out. Brief Candle!” Spit. Anger.

“LIFE!” He would repeat ‘life’ here, as though it were part of Macbeth’s speech. Always.

“LIFE. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts…”

Stand. Tip toe around Seyton, losing all sense of the piece.

“And frets his hour upon the stage, And then…”

Fall to knees. Hands press temples. Express. Love. Grace. Guilt. Longing. Heartache. Elements he failed to emit in life.

“Is heard no more: it is a tale… Told by an ID.I.OT.”

Here. A piece of me is nailed to the moment I realised he hated me. Just a singular moment. A moment where human nature should have reached out a hand. It was at Rother Valley. Canoeing. I’d flipped canoes before but he was in this one, this happens when a juvenile is showing off for his dad. Upside down we were, bleary with Rother’s grey water in our eyes, but his stare was ice as he yelled at me soundlessly while I panicked unable to lever free. He freed himself, I reached for him; his hands, arms, became invisible. He allowed me to sink against gravity as he swam to the bank. Canoes always float when you’re upside down in them and life jackets merely assist. If I died there, I’d have no need for a funeral, he would bless me there and then; but I survived.

“Full of sound and fury,”

Seyton. Satan. We acknowledged one another for the final words. He would stand. He stood, not tall but wide.

“Signifying… Nothing!”

His foot would come down, it did, his hand to his chest the other to his brow, a pirouette in his step yet he stood still, still, silent silent, silent, until anyone that had an idea of the speech’s end would cheer. And I could slump back to my ginger beer hoping it had been spiked. He despised alcohol.

Then he’d laugh. He laughed, loud! All celebrated some victory of prose. Patted backs, clapped shoulders. He winked at me. For the first time.

How I miss that laugh, I used to hate the ringing nascence of it as if it were a younger man’s laugh, full of promise and exuberance. Of life. A love of life. When it was all too clear he adored life away from his kin and despised mine. And yet, I forever longed for a father’s love, long dead.

I know he seems a hard man to hate, they usually are.

But more than anything else, I remember him winking at me, a decade later, this is what I see clearest, it repeats and repeats, rolls out of view and repeats. I never found out what it meant, what he meant. Only a couple of days later, he fell, it doesn’t matter how.

I wonder, what if he played the role of father and considered me an audience worth playing for, instead of needing multiple feet on our carpet. I'd be different. Feel different.

That wink. It signified something. Accomplishment? Is that what boomerang boy is trying to show me? I used to receive the memory differently, it used to just hit me in the neck and I’d fight it away. But maybe this is it. I said he was nothing, and accomplished nothing earlier. But that wink. That one time. It was the one time he seemed to be proud of what we’d accomplished… I’d accomplished nothing then, maybe I’m yet to accomplish anything. What was he trying to accomplish? What am I trying to accomplish coming here? I have everything I want now.

Anyway, maybe I’m the one that deceives truth. Maybe it’s not him I hate. And maybe, I’ll learn to hate us less; tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Kick.

Walk.

Kick.

---

For those that come to this end, as ever there will be an accompanying piece. This piece emerged from a place which I’ll cover in the next post. Also, for the delay, I am continually adjusting the schedule to fit in a weekly/bi-weekly post, more adjusting to be done.

Alas, Thank you and Adieu.