Looking back now on all those times Dad died, I’d have to say the first one remains my favourite.
When he was twenty-nine, Dad was working as an in-house solicitor for a now defunct telecommunications firm. He lived alone in Peckham, and clocked in long, unsociable hours. One hot July evening, a little past nine o’clock, he got home and found a dead man lying at the foot of his stairs.
My father stared at that body for a long time. Just stared and stared and stared because the longer he did the less the corpse looked like him. But when he blinked or glanced away even for a second, there was no mistaking it. It was his body: his face, his chubby physique, even his clothes.
Eventually, he approached and prodded it. The body was solid and cold. When he rolled the wrist over, he matched an identical scar on his own forearm, an old childhood injury.
He called the police and then sat down on the stairs, dumbfounded but feeling a protective urge over the body. Several police officers arrived, asked my father about the dead man – about himself, effectively, yet these were questions Dad just couldn’t answer. Once they ascertained it wasn’t a twin brother lying dead there, they shared a knowing glance. As they left, one of them told Dad that what had happened was extremely unfortunate, extremely unlucky, but thankfully very rare.
A handful of reporters showed up over the next few days, and Dad tried to explain as best he could. They left unsatisfied, and the few who did write about it invariably came up with grammatically confusing headlines such as “Man’s body found by man.”
A coroner’s inquiry ruled out foul play and the body was released. Dad felt a duty to it, to himself, to arrange a funeral. Confused friends and family showed up, and a drunken cousin accused him of an attention-seeking stunt.
But by all accounts, it was a low-key affair.
Life admin wise, there were surprisingly few bureaucratic hurdles. He didn’t lose his job, or his national insurance number or even his bank account. I don’t think there was much appetite, even in places which delight in Kafkaesque paperwork, to go down the existential rabbit hole that was my father’s first death.
He visited the grave frequently, and finally came to a conclusion, or part of one anyway: this could have been me. I should live my life better.
Like many people who want to change things, he made a list. Things he’d wanted to do but hadn’t yet. Things he feared, things he desired. Places to go, friends to get back in touch with. The list was long, but not in any order of preference or importance.
Which is why the top item was “take up salsa lessons”. There was a class which took place in a nearby hall. Usually, it was already in progress by the time he passed by on his way home from work. It always looked fun, so why not start there?
He left work at a reasonable time and went to his first class. It turned out he had a knack for it, certainly good enough to attract the curiosity of the teacher, a Colombian woman named Beatrice. After a few weeks, they arranged to meet outside of class time for a tentative drink.
Salsa was only meant to be the first step. There was so much else on the list: crazy experiences crisscrossing the world. But instead, he found his world expanding in pubs and bedrooms, in late night conversations, long walks and passionate kisses like beautiful fractal patterns.
A year later, he and Beatrice were married, and not long after that I was born: a big, lumpy baby who looked the spitting image of my father from day one.
He was a good father, I think. Involved, authoritative but not authoritarian. Kind and funny. He was sweet to my mother, they danced often in our sitting room, and for a long time our house was a happy home.
But there were also strange times, when I’d find him staring into the distance, his face a maze of concentration. He would snap out of it eventually, but if interrupted he would become very disorientated and confused. I found that an incredibly disturbing and upsetting experience, like he was someone else entirely, and I learned not to bother him during those times.
Strangers visited him every now and again, and most of them even seemed relatively normal. They came to talk about their theories about what happened to him: aliens, alternative realities, a prank gone wrong… Dad was unfailingly polite to these people who often showed up unannounced. But he was always disappointed with what they had to say. He would wave them goodbye and turn to me (because I was always there, trying to listen at the door).
‘Didn’t feel right,’ he would say, shaking his head.
When I was twelve Mum found him dead. Again.
She screamed when she saw his body lying in the open doorway of our garden shed at about eleven-thirty in the morning. Her scream could be heard across the whole neighbourhood. I was at school when this happened, and one of the teaching assistants walked me home quietly, solemnly. There was such a feeling of dread in my stomach.
Almost an hour later, while Mum was crying in the kitchen and hugging me so tightly, Dad walked in through the front door. Surveying the scene he seemed to guess immediately what had happened.
‘Not again,’ he said, to me and Mum. Rolling his eyes. Grinning, as if it was all a bit of a joke.
Mum never forgave him for that. For coming in like it was nothing. For not understanding that, for a brief period of time, her world had ended.
In the months that followed, she began to grow suspicious of him. Questioning his behaviour. She became obsessed with the idea that he was an imposter, that her true love had died that day and a stranger had taken his place in our lives, in our house.
At that age and stage in my life, all adults were beginning to seem inconsistent and prone to contradictory behaviour, so who am I to say she wasn’t right?
The strain was finally too much, and they separated. Mum was ultimately unable to reconcile the face she saw daily, the same but not. Not in her head.
A second gravestone for my father, paid for and organised by my father. This time he didn’t bother with the memorial service.
I lived most of the time with Mum, but saw Dad at weekends. I was saddened by my broken home, angry about it, at Dad for what had happened. That was unfair of me but at the time I was also a teenager trying to impose myself on the world and, of all things in my life, Dad made the least sense. I was driven to pull him apart and figure him out. I probably wanted to fix him in some way, but I didn’t know what I was doing.
Not that he noticed. Without a solid family unit surrounding him, he spent more and more time reflecting on what had happened to him twice. He was let go from his job. He allowed his friendships and human connections to drift and erode. If he still danced, I never saw him do it.
To him, those dead doubles of himself were harbingers, heralding new chapters in his life. After all, love (Mum) and life (me) sprang from the first time, or so he thought. The second death was equally disruptive and it also changed the course of his life, though in less positive ways.
It was bound to happen again, he thought, so he waited for the next body to show up. For the third death and rebirth as it were. While he waited, I lived my life. But isn’t that how most children feel about their parents?
It never occurred to him that there might be no more versions of himself to sacrifice.
One day, I called around to his flat and found his body cold in his favourite armchair.
I didn’t do anything for a while. I finally bought into his myth and expected him to walk in any minute and complain how it had happened yet again. So I sat across from his body and stared at his face. I thought about how he looked so much like me, just older. I waited and I waited but, finally, I accepted that there was not going to be a live version of him to refute this passing.
It was quieter and made less of an impact than the other deaths. He barely knew anyone at the end and barely anyone knew him either.
Over the years since he died, I’ve had a reoccurring fantasy that he came home that day before me. He saw the body and took the opportunity to disappear into an entirely new life. A good life, where he became a new man, revived and happy, even if I never knew.
I wish that was what happened. But at the end, he just wasn’t that type of person.
And that is why there are a trinity of gravestones in the cemetery for my father, but no more than that.
Robin Maginn is an Irish writer, living in London. His stories have been published in print and online, including with Albedo One, ParAbnormal Digest, Idle Ink, Syntax & Salt, Cosmic Horror Monthly, BFS Horizons (forthcoming) as well as in the anthology 21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume 2. He was shortlisted for the 2010 Aeon Award (placing third) and runner up in the Fall 2018 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award.
Instagram: @maginnr
Idle Ink 