caused serious structural damage and the roof was in danger of collapsing. This was the latest in a long series of water-based mishaps in the house, including a cracked pipe in 2011 which resulted in a large stain on the living-room ceiling resembling a short but bulbous penis.
‘Do you think this looks rude?’ asked my mum.
‘Not at all,’ I replied.
None of these events affected the wooden head. It continued to stare implacably away from them towards distant fields containing cattle, none of which were struck down during the same period with any significant or mysterious cases of murrain or cowpox. But after its fall from the porch during Christmas 2014 – the Christmas when I accompanied my dad to watch hunters set off to hunt a man dressed as a fox – the head began to get restless and embarked on several other excursions. None of these were very ambitious, usually ending with the head on the flagstones below and never straying beyond the porch’s threshold, but as 2014 became 2015 and 2015 wore on, the head’s tiny holidays became more frequent. My parents would replace it on its perch – always looking away from the house and the now-pollarded eucalyptus – but sometimes by the end of the day it would be back on the ground. A couple of times they found it inside the footwear on the rack below where it lived, including in one of the fateful loafers, which my dad still refused to throw away and continued to wear for lighter gardening tasks. More and more puzzled each time, my parents replaced the head again and again. Its tumbles to the ground were never witnessed by human eyes and occurred not just in high winds but in weather so still that the leaves on the trees in the garden barely vibrated.
My dad’s exercise regime had slowed down by now, marginally. A month after coming out of his back brace he dusted down his axe and began to chop wood again. Then, after going to see the consultant at the hospital and being told that the condition of his fracture had regressed due to his chopping, he stopped. Then, a few weeks after that, he started again and never stopped. He did cease running around the village cricket field but began swimming at the local public pool, making new friends from eclectic walks of life: architects and retired miners and library assistants and bikers and archaeology lecturers and policemen and billboard salesmen. Sometimes while naked and wet my dad would talk to his new friends at such length in the changing room that one of them would bring their towel over and begin to dry him. Just as my phone conversations with my dad would invariably end with him instructing me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ they would now tend to begin with ‘THIS WEEK AT SWIMMING…’ One week at swimming my dad was discussing a cashpoint in Nottingham which has the statistical reputation of being the scene of more muggings than any other cashpoint in the UK, and his policeman friend, also named Mick, told him that he had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged down the road from the cashpoint. Not having any cash on him, the student had offered to pay the muggers by cheque. The muggers declined and escorted him back to his flat, stripping it of its most valuable contents. Another week at swimming my dad hid Malcolm’s shoes. Another week at swimming, in late summer that year, when the wooden head’s kamikaze dives from the porch wall were becoming even more frequent, my dad was getting unchanged and noticed that he had a black toenail. He showed the black toenail to Malcolm, who agreed that it was a black toenail.
I winced when my dad showed me the black toenail, remembering the pain I’d experienced when the nail of my thumb turned black in 2008 after I slammed a car door on it. But my dad said he had experienced little to no pain from the black toenail. He couldn’t remember anything he had done to make it black and was told by his doctor not to worry about it and that the nail would fall off naturally when a new translucent one had finished growing beneath it. Presumably it was one of those minor injuries you sustain in the thick of strenuous exercise or physical labour and don’t notice at the time they occur. I get a lot of these myself and currently even had a very slightly bad toe of my own, probably sustained on a steep rocky crevice during a long walk in a thinly populated part of Devon. I have inherited my dad’s toes: long, thick and unintentionally violent. Because of this and the tiny unseen people who live in my house and steal socks in the dead of night, my sock drawer resembles a diverse but unsuccessful sock dating site: socks of every shape and colour, each of them alone, failing to find love. I stub my toes fairly regularly, and my dad stubs his a lot too, and toe length could quite feasibly be a factor in this regularity. Earlier in the year, many weeks before the black nail’s appearance, my dad had stubbed his toe on a table leg in his office then immediately replied to an unsolicited mass email from Boris Johnson with ‘FUCK OFF, BORIS.’ Afterwards he told my mum about the email and – although certainly no fan of Boris Johnson herself – she told him it hadn’t been a very nice thing to do. My dad immediately tramped back upstairs and sent a follow-up email: ‘SORRY ABOUT THAT, BORIS. I OVERREACTED. IT WAS BECAUSE I’D JUST STUBBED MY TOE.’
There was quite a bit of speculation among my dad’s mates at swimming about when the black toenail would fall off. Looking at how precariously it was hanging there on everyone’s last swim before Christmas, Pat and Malcolm suggested that today could be the big day. ‘What if it comes off in the water?’ asked Pat. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’
‘NO, IT WOULDN’T,’ replied my dad. ‘ESPECIALLY IF SOMEONE IS DOING BREASTSTROKE AND HAPPENS TO BE OPENING THEIR MOUTH JUST AS IT FLOATS INTO THEIR PATH.’
The nail, however, had been looking just as precarious for several weeks. I’d been getting little reports of it via text message from my mum. ‘Your dad’s black toenail is looking really bad now: I think it’s about to come off,’ she would tell me, but several days later there it would still be. My dad knew it would hold on for a bit longer still. He loves his early-morning swims and would, I am sure, have been reluctant to jeopardise his relationship with the authorities at the pool by defiling the water. Recently the pool had asked its regulars if they had any suggestions for things they’d like to change about the facilities. My dad came up with the following three:
1. A trompe l’œil panoramic landscape on the bottom of the pool to keep people amused when they were swimming with their heads down.
2. Mirrors on the ceiling, to enable swimmers doing backstroke to see where they were going and not crash into each other.
3. All-over-body airblade dryers for the changing rooms.
So far, there had been no response from the pool.
My parents and I spent that Christmas of 2015 at my house in Devon, where I was playing nurse to one of my cats, who was recovering from two large life-saving operations, having been attacked by a dog. My dad filled their car with several bags of firewood, which he’d very kindly collected for me. I felt bad taking this from him, as he stacked it in such beautiful formations, and I felt even worse when my mum explained the lengths he’d gone to in order to get some of it. ‘He lost a big branch in the river again, like last year,’ she told me. ‘He walked back across the field and asked me to come over and hold his legs for him while he reached over and got it. I’m sixty-five.’ Only just over a month had passed since the last time my dad had fallen into a large body of natural water: a lake in Lincolnshire into which he was dipping a jar in order to get goodies for his new garden wildlife pond.
‘I should have known he would never be a proper grown-up when he asked me to go sledging on our first date,’ said my mum.
After my dad and I had brought the logs in from the car, he went upstairs for a bath, taking the radio with him, and my mum and I attempted to catch up with each other over the booming sound of the Radio 4 News Quiz and my dad’s laughter. Half an hour later, I went upstairs to the toilet and found a trail of bubbles leading across the landing to the spare bedroom. ‘WATCH MY TOENAIL!’ my dad shouted, charging past me and down the stairs, barefoot. A few moments later he could be heard making loud quacking noises at my cats while throwing huge rolls of greasy cooked turkey at them:
