he’d made the surprise announcement that he would run in the London Marathon the following spring, dressed in the costume of a superhero directly from his own imagination. He began to train hard, doing circuits around the village cricket pitch, first in a pair of gym shoes three sizes too big for him that he had bought me for school PE eighteen years earlier from the Nottingham footwear seconds shop Jonathan James, then – after a bout of cajoling from my mum and me – in proper modern running shoes that wrapped themselves snugly around his feet. For motivation, he listened to Zairean and Senegalese pop music from the 1960s and Deliverance, the 2003 album by the redneck rapper Bubba Sparxxx. ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME AND WATCH ME RUN ROUND THE FIELD?’ he asked when I visited, standing at the door to the kitchen in tracksuit bottoms and a running shirt stained with brinjal pickle. Not quite sure what I would do to show support as I watched – Clap? Cheer? Fashion a makeshift pompom from some nearby meadow grass? – and feeling a little awkward about it, I declined but later regretted it. The only times I’d seen him run or even been aware of him running since the 1980s had been on the couple of occasions he’d jogged after my car and rapped his knuckles on the window to ask if I had adequately topped up my screenwash. Now, at fifty-eight years of age, he was covering fifteen miles a day, ignoring his doctor’s advice to wear a heart monitor and my mum’s to pace himself more gently.
‘He thinks he’s twenty-six,’ my mum told me. ‘He won’t listen to me. But you know what he’s like. All or nothing. He’s never done anything in moderation in his life.’
My dad’s personal brand of hedonism has never manifested itself in the obvious. His vices are more humdrum than those traditionally associated with high living. In this way he’s very clever. If you try to sit someone down and tell them they’ve got a chutney problem, you’re just going to look like a lunatic. Similarly, it’s unlikely that anyone has successfully staged a salt or orange juice intervention, and I doubt I’d have been the one to break the trend. The risks from excessive running were more obvious, but it seemed churlish to highlight them when he was enjoying himself so much and looking fitter than he had done in years.
My dad has always seemed a little invincible to me. He’s never been subject to the head and stomach aches from which my mum and I often suffered. To my knowledge he has only had two colds in his entire life – although, to be fair, they were also the loudest two I have ever witnessed. Still, twenty-six miles over hard ground was a long way in the sixtieth year of a life that had not been characterised by regular athleticism. I reminded him about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, who’d died following a heart attack on a treadmill, arguably because he’d thrust himself vigorously and heedlessly into exercise after a long hiatus. He’d been ten years younger than my dad was now. My dad waved me away. ‘DON’T WORRY. I’M AS FIT AS A FLEA. I DID EIGHTEEN MILES AROUND THE FIELD TODAY. I WAS LISTENING TO SOME TANZANIAN HIP HOP. IT WAS BRILLIANT.’
Our concerns escalated when, with the marathon only a few weeks away, my dad fell off a ladder in the garden while trimming the hedge with petrol-powered clippers. It was early March and he had been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The blades of the clippers continued to rotate as he bumped down through the cool air and he was lucky to escape with only a few bruises and two big cuts, neither of which were quite serious enough for stitches.
My dad is a heavy sleeper but also a lively, noisy one who, without warning, in the witching hours will often make an emphatic slumberous statement or break out into shout-mumbled song. During his marathon training his dreams also took on an energetic, high-risk flavour which, with the Big Day approaching, only intensified. A diving header in the FA Cup Final resulted in him bashing his temple on the bedside table and waking up sprawled and dazed on the bedroom floorboards. ‘I wonder if it might be best if I sleep somewhere else until he’s got it out of his system,’ my mum remarked after a high-pressure rugby union game during which she was drop-kicked from one side of the bed to the other. ‘I’M SORRY. I SCORED A TRY IN THAT ONE, AS WELL AS A DROP GOAL,’ he told her. ‘I NEVER USED TO SCORE A TRY IN REAL RUGBY AND NOW I HAVE!’ On the night of my last visit to my parents’ house before the marathon, my dad – tired from a morning of heavy training – fell asleep on the living-room floor part-way through telling two experimentally conjunctive stories about the time that someone cut the elastic off his mittens at primary school and why TV weathermen are nearly all fuckpigs and bastards. I headed in the direction of bed but, upon reaching the stairs, turned back and returned to the living room to move the coffee table a couple of feet further away from his snoring head.
As I drove away from my parents’ house for the final time as a son with a dad who had never run a marathon, my dad jogged after the car as if he had forgotten to give or tell me something important. I wound down the window. ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES,’ he said.
On the day of the marathon I decided not to join my dad for the start in Greenwich, feeling that, as an easily distracted man, he’d be better served by having as few objects and people as possible occupying his attention. Instead I met my mum on the north side of the Thames, near the Embankment, to watch the final stretch of the run. When I finally located her she admitted she was a little cross with him. Earlier, as they’d walked up the hill past Greenwich Observatory towards the place where the marathon would begin, my dad had spotted several people in bibs running across the grass, shouted, ‘OH NO! THEY’RE STARTING!’ and hoofed it away from her, not giving her time to hand him his water bottle, towel or banana. It later transpired that these competitors had been running towards the starting line, not away from it. Only by sheer luck did my mum manage to relocate my dad in the ever-thickening crowd of runners, ten minutes later. He was jogging on the spot and held an open can of the energy drink Red Bull.
‘HI,’ he said. ‘I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS STUFF BEFORE, BUT IT’S GREAT. THEY’RE GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE.’
‘How many of those have you had?’ my mum asked.
‘THIS IS MY FOURTH.’
‘You know what’s in it, don’t you?’
‘NO. WHAT?’
‘Well, lots of caffeine, for starters.’
‘OH.’
My dad, who operates like a permanently caffeinated person and delights in informing anyone from close family to complete strangers that he has ‘BEEN UP SINCE FIVE’, had experienced typically little difficulty rising on marathon morning. At just before 6 a.m. the fire alarm had gone off in the hotel where my parents were staying in north London, and my mum had opened her eyes to see him standing by the window, already fully dressed in his outfit for the day: bright orange cape, black tracksuit bottoms and grey lycra top emblazoned with the orange letters JC, the initials of Johnny Catbiscuit, the crime fighter central to a children’s book he had written recently called Johnny Catbiscuit and the Abominable Snotmen. ‘Oh God. What have you done!?’ my mum asked him.
‘I did feel bad about that,’ she told me later, ‘and I said sorry, but when I heard the alarm my first thought had been that it must have been his fault.’ The hotel’s guests and staff filed out into the car park. Many were still in various forms of nightwear, but my dad was the only one dressed in the uniform of a leftfield superhero.
Now he was in the thick of the action with his kind: other runners in superhero costumes, a couple of Spice Girls, a spavined Spiderman, a man in a gorilla suit with baffling comedy breasts. My mum caught up with him again around about the halfway mark, near Millwall. ‘How did he look?’ I asked. ‘Totally out of it,’ she said. He took longer than we expected to come past the Embankment, and when he did he looked more out of it still. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ spectators shouted, seeing the name on his cape, and he performed for them, spreading his arms wide beneath the fabric as if flying. Judging by his facial expression, it was very possible he believed he was genuinely aloft above the brutalist buildings next to the Thames. ‘Dad!’ I shouted. Realising
