My father rang me last Tuesday, for no reason at all, for the first time in roughly seven months.
Nothing was wrong. Nobody had died, no message needed passing on, no logistics required sorting out. He’d called, it turned out, because he had finally cracked the speaker setting on his phone and fancied trying it out on somebody. I was, apparently, the somebody. For eleven minutes we talked about almost nothing, the weather his end, the football, a neighbour’s loft extension, and somewhere in the middle of that pleasant, pointless conversation I felt something shift in my chest that I couldn’t immediately put a name to. It took me the rest of the evening to work out what it had been. I’d been waiting most of my adult life for my father to ring me without a reason, and I’d given up on it so completely, so long before, that I had forgotten the waiting was ever there at all.
His calls always came with a reason attached
My dad is not a man who phones for a chat. In his entire vocabulary of fatherhood there’s simply no such entry as ringing to hear your voice. When he calls, which is rare, there is always a purpose bolted on, a thing to arrange, a fact to relay, a question that needs an answer. The call is a delivery vehicle. Once the cargo’s dropped off, the call ends, usually with almost comic haste. Years ago I filed all this under the simple shape of him, the way he came built. Dad rings when there’s something to say. Dad does not ring to say nothing.
Calling to say nothing is, of course, the whole of intimacy. The reasonless call is the one that means I was thinking about you, with no errand to justify it, you on your own account, for no cause beyond the fact that you exist and I felt like hearing you. That was the call I never once got, across about thirty years of being his son.
I lowered the bar without ever noticing
The strange truth about an expectation that goes unmet for long enough is that you don’t consciously give it up. There’s no decision, no afternoon where you sit down and resolve to stop hoping your father might call you out of the blue. It erodes instead, by tiny increments, each small disappointment filed away, the bar dropped a single notch at a time, until one day, without your ever having clocked the journey, the hope is just gone. Not grieved. Not mourned. Simply deleted from the list of things you count as possible, so smoothly that you forget it was ever on the list to begin with.
That was the part that got me, sitting there afterwards. Not that he’d never called just to talk. I’d made my peace with that long ago, or believed I had. It was that I’d forgotten I had ever wanted him to. The want had been buried so deep and so long that I’d lost even the memory of burying it, and it took eleven accidental minutes to turn the whole lot back over, still intact, still mine, lying exactly where I’d left it as a boy.
The reason was a phone setting, and I’ve decided that’s fine
There’s a joke buried in this that I keep turning over. The call I’d waited my entire life for, the one with no reason, turned out to have a reason after all, and the reason was a speaker button. He hadn’t undergone some late-life softening. He hadn’t lain awake missing his son. He’d discovered a feature on his handset and required a test subject. By the strictest accounting it wasn’t even truly the call I’d been waiting for, because it came with a cause firmly attached. It just happened to be a reason so gloriously trivial that it amounted to the same as having none.
For about a day I let that sour it a little. Then I chose not to. Because the eleven minutes were real, whatever set them in motion. We did talk about nothing. He did stay on the line far longer than any errand could have warranted. And for a man like my father, who owns no phrase for I miss you and no register at all for I just wanted to hear you, “I’ve sorted the speaker out and thought I’d give you a ring” may be about as close as he is ever going to come to saying it. The love, if that’s what it was, arrived dressed up as a technology demonstration, because a technology demonstration is the only kind of parcel he knows how to post. I’ve stopped needing it wrapped correctly. The contents were what I’d always wanted.
What do you do with a want you’d buried?
The bother with having a forgotten hope dug back up is that you then have to decide what to do with it, and neither option is comfortable. I could rebury it, fast, before it costs me anything, go back to expecting nothing, which is safe and which I am extremely well practised at. Or I could leave it where it now sits, up on the surface, awake, which makes me once again a man who’d like his father to call him just because, and who can therefore once again be let down when he doesn’t.
Wanting things from your parents is the most exposed wanting there is, because they’re the people whose response you can least steer and whose withholding lands in the oldest, deepest part of you. It is honestly far easier to want nothing. I spent the better part of my adult life wanting nothing whatsoever from my dad, and I can see now that it was a kind of armour I’d been mistaking, all along, for being grown up.
I don’t know whether he’ll ring again like that. The speaker’s mastered now, the novelty will wear off, and we may well slide back to seven-month silences broken only by errands. He’s in his late sixties and unlikely to reinvent himself this far in. But something has shifted on my side, even if nothing ever shifts on his. I’ve remembered that I wanted this, which I’d somehow managed to forget. And I’ve half a mind to start doing the very thing I spent three decades waiting for him to do, and ring him for no reason at all, partly because one of us ought to, and partly because I’ve begun to suspect he has been waiting just as long as I have for a call that comes with no cargo, and was simply never going to be the one brave enough to place it first. Last Tuesday he rang to test his speaker. This week I think I’ll ring him back to test nothing whatsoever, and find out whether a man who can only send love disguised as an errand might learn, late in the day, to receive it wearing the same disguise.
