‘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 that there were lots of other dads running too, I modified this to ‘Mick!’ but he could not hear me. In the end I joined in with the masses. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ I hollered, realising that the finishing line was not much more than a mile away, and what had seemed impossible six months ago was going to happen: he was really going to do this.
While my mum and I were waiting for my dad at the Embankment, I’d heard a woman standing to my rear who’d watched a lot of marathons talking about the state competitors get into afterwards. ‘You’d think they’d want to be quiet when they’re that tired,’ she said. ‘But they usually don’t. They talk and talk. They’re on such a high, they can’t stop.’ Sure enough, my dad talked a lot when he’d completed the marathon and, almost nine years later, has still not stopped. In the months directly after his run he discussed his intention of competing again the following year but, heeding my mum’s reservations, eventually decided against it. Nonetheless, he retained his fitness levels with a new zest for horticultural activity, both in his own garden and in the space that my parents’ next-door neighbour Edna had allowed him to use in her garden to grow vegetables. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he said to me during one of my visits to Nottinghamshire. I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a large basket of potatoes he had grown. ‘SEE THESE? YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME OF YOUR OWN WHEN IT ALL FALLS TO BITS.’
Benefiting from a new arrangement with the local farmer that allowed him and his friend Phillip to gather wood from much of the nearby land, my dad chopped vast amounts of logs, stacking them in artful circular Holzhaufen formations which allowed the logs at the centre of the pile to cure and dry. Towards the end of the following year, when a eucalyptus – a tree infamous for its rapid growth spurts – began to rocket towards the clouds in can-do fashion and block out the light in the house, my mum suggested that it might be wise to employ a tree surgeon to prune or remove it. ‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,’ said my dad, fetching his bowsaw. ‘I’LL DO IT.’ My mum held the ladder as my dad climbed it then the tree itself in old loafers with very little grip to them. The sky filled with rain and my mum said that they should stop and seek shelter. She went back into the house but my dad stayed outside, busying himself with other tasks. ‘You won’t go back up the tree, will you?’ she asked him.
‘NO,’ said my dad.
‘Do you promise?’
‘OF COURSE I WON’T. WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE ME? IT’S NOT FAIR. YOU’RE ALWAYS TELLING ME OFF.’
Five minutes later my mum glanced out of the bedroom window and saw my dad back up the eucalyptus, balancing on its highest branches in the same smooth-soled loafers, saw in hand, rain streaking against his squinting, determined face. ‘And then I saw him go,’ she told me. ‘I knew it was bad from the moment he hit the ground.’
My dad might have fallen on his front had it not been for the fact that during his descent he was trying to avoid the blade of the falling bowsaw. This caused him to flip over in the air and land hard on his spine. It was half an hour before the paramedics arrived, and during that period he and my mum made a major mistake. Due to the vast amount of pain he was in, he could not stand or crawl properly, but he tried to edge along the ground in tiny increments towards the back door, encouraged by my mum, in order to escape the rain. When you’ve fractured your vertebrae, as my dad had, the one thing you should not try to do is move, as this can sever the spinal column irreparably.
‘I was such an idiot,’ my mum told me. ‘But in my defence it’s very difficult to know when someone is really hurt when they’re as melodramatic as he
