The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Read Free Book Online Page A

kind of solution.
    My father scraped the ceiling of his life, a life he thought he was too big for. But he wasn’t too big: it had simply contracted around him from lack of use. My mother was his slave, and as the little she settled for subsided into the even less she got, he paid her in resentment and with violence that was all the more frightening for being rare and premeditated. When she broke down that day she just stopped. It was as if she had died already but left us the body to help us acclimatise to her loss. That was typical of her – the gentleness of her going.
    Him I grew to hate, and it energised me. But I couldn’t make a life out of it, or not a life that was my own. So I discovered forgiveness, and the secret malice of it: people forgive not out of grandeur of spirit but as a way of freeing themselves. The forgiver always floats free, the forgiven slides a little further down the soft shute to hell. Maybe that’s why so many religions use forgiveness as a secret weapon. Thus I forgave him, and made sure he knew it. Throughout his cancer I was there. I dropped out of college for him, left my student bedsit with three carrier bags of books and clothes, and took the train back to Wapping, back to the house, back to the front room where he sat in his favourite armchair, a black sun around whom everything revolved. At the hospice I came in every day; I held his hand and read the newspapers to him while he squinted at the spaces between the letters, measured the print size, scanned the indentations and margins with his failing expert’s eye. I showed him how we could have been.
It’s not every day you bury your father
… I had been burying mine a little every day.
    During the Wapping riots the year after her death, I came home from school and helped my classmates collect the police-horse shit for their grandfathers’ docklands allotments. The bags steamed in the cold and the manure juice seeped down our backs as we hobbled under their weight, dodging the bricks and broken glass, the water-cannon puddles and abandoned placards. The harvests of ’86 and ’87 were miraculous, the allotments bright with vegetables, the old men guarding their patches as the bulldozers moved in to develop the docklands around them, parcelling it up and renaming it in the new language of service-industry English: ‘Enterprise Quay’, ‘Atlantic Projects’, ‘Sterling Wharf’. And then the jokes: the cucumbers were tough as policemen’s batons, the cabbage rows lined up like riot shields, the winter greens sharp as tear gas.
    ‘It all connects up,’ my father would say, unboarding the window of his front room as he did every day regardless of the weather. It had been broken so many times he now just nailed a screen of chipboard across the pane. Before his first drink I might catch him philosophising – not wrongly, never that, just helplessly. I might catch sight too, somewhere between the unscrewing of the bottle and the first splash of whisky on glass, of the man who had once told me that thinking about how the world worked gave you the tools to change it. ‘It all connects up: from a row of Paddy’s allotment carrots up to 10 Downing Street through the crack of a police horse’s arse.’
    Yes: family life had been a good enough schooling in totalitarianism, eking out small permissions, learning to live under the radar of his vengefulness and failure. There can’t have been many people who came to Ceauşescu’s Romania for their first taste of freedom.
    Leo stared at me as I told him all this. I had not meant to say it. I had never said it to anyone, or not like that, shaking as I spoke, horrified as much by my coldness as by my fragility. For a moment I thought he would tell me his story, the story of how he came to be here. Instead all he said was, ‘Christ, we hoped you’d be… I don’t know, a little more of a blank slate.’

Four

    In his spare hours, between days of teaching and nights of deal-cutting,