– Autofiction by Jack Barrie–
Featured in Issue 22 of Dreamers Magazine.
“Keep calm and.. CARRY ON!“
Uncle Dave had come upstairs to get my dad. There was much more drinking to be had, and to be fair to Dave (not really an uncle), my dad did have a habit of falling asleep in my room while his night was still young. Not this time, though.
Dad had come in as discreetly as his pissed legs would let him. He’d have woken me, but I was up reading a comic, having retired the idea of sleeping. The ceaseless middle-aged laughs from downstairs were loud enough to shake my walls, so I’d stopped trying.
I imagined that on his way up the two flights of thin stairs to my room and my sister’s room, the man had some profound truth to impart, cooked up mid-evening and ready to be served in an elegant lecture to his only son. It seemed each time he ascended, that he was preparing to open up – to, for the first time in his life, show a bit of fucking vulnerability, maybe even show his son that that’s an okay thing for a man to do. But each time, he’d arrive out of breath, stumped for something to say, standing centre stage under my room’s big light, which would be off at 1am of course. No enlightenment.
And he’d linger like a newly spawned thing in some nowhere place. He had no reason, and could not conjure a reason, to be there, like my bedroom was the dentist’s reception and he was contentedly toothless.
He glanced around, eyeing my things, taking in what sort of boy he had here, gathering pieces of a collage that told him who I was — comics, books, a little dusty statue of Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings, a partially deflated blow-up chair with vinyl flames across the armrests, a desk with felt-tip marks across the wood, a messy stack of CDs. Ah, he pegged that as his in with me, I imagined: music. But after a ten-second riffle through, I guess he realised that we must be very different people musically, and by proxy, in most other ways too.
He’s dead now, but these moments have clung to me the way that things left unfinished cling to the mind. An itch remains. I wish I knew what thoughts he’d concocted and laid in order on similar nights to this one, on the way up the stairs. What would he have thought on the way down once he’d failed to deliver his fatherly wisdom?
He was a quiet man in the daytime. I’m wondering now if that was a choice like I always thought, or whether the man had a clogged pipe somewhere in there, a blockage that wouldn’t let those kindnesses and honest feelings out into the world, and onto those of us that could really have used them. I saw as a kid that a drink would dislodge that blockage now and again, which comforts me in a blue way now, for at least those feelings were in there; he wasn’t meat all the way through, void of that little soul pocket I assume at least most of us possess. This particular night I’m describing was the most I’d seen and would see out of him. I don’t know what made this night special. It wasn’t.
Mum and Dad had the neighbours round, some of the mums from the playground and a few of Dad’s army mates too. It sounded like a good time from two flights up. Like I said, I would accept that I wouldn’t be sleeping if there was ever a party, but that was fine; it was the summer holidays, and at eleven years old, I had nowhere to be early the next day. Every time they had a night, he’d come up around 1am, and this night was no different. Up came Billy (or Bullyboy! as it was being pronounced then through the bannisters up towards my room by the hulking Uncle Dave).
After his CD rummage and once his breathing was back to normal, he paced up and down a bit. My room was only about four or five adult steps long.
“Y’alright, Dad?” I asked, polite, sterile.
“Aye. Tip top, lad. Tip.. Top..”
Then a filler, “Hhhooa dear.” If he had a soundboard, that button would have worn away, I heard it so much.
He looked around some more, then went to my window, continuing to keep whatever he wanted to say swallowed.
“D’you need something?” I asked, which I feel bad about now, as I was really saying please leave if there’s nothing you need from me, and I’d wager he knew I meant that.
He shook his head quickly – one twitch of the neck – and swung my window open clumsily, clattering it against the brick outside. The swimming voices of the party’s smokers echoed off our neighbours’ houses and around my room.
“I never told you this..” he said to the moon. And I realised that maybe tonight, maybe this night, he’d get it out, whatever it was, whatever it looked like.
“What?”
And a queasiness festered in me. Half of me, now spooked, hoped for a soppy whiskey-gush of ‘I do love ya’s‘ and ‘I know a’ve not been about a lot but…‘, but the other half of me, the wiser half, the often rightly paranoid half expected a family-rattling secret to finally spill onto my carpet, where its stain would linger as a reminder for as long as we lived in that house. Maybe I’m adopted. Maybe Dad’s got another family in Majorca. I’d suspected both before.
I was half right, but wrong about him – his character, I mean. He was faithful to us, and I’d doubted that, and I felt guilty for thinking so. But this was still a night of spillage; I just didn’t foresee what he’d spill.
“You had a brother, y’know?”
The queasiness caught alight, petrol in my stomach, and now my efforts went to extinguishing it before he could notice any emotion on my face. No weakness here, hard as fuck, me.
“An older one… Should’a told you ages ago like.. but.. y’know..”
The floor was his, despite his stagger. I gripped my covers with one hand, and the bear that he’d have said I was too old for in the other. He wouldn’t see it, his trailing gaze was aimed out at the night sky, which then was perfectly clear. The stars were bright and sharp.
“Yer mum… y’know,” he hiccupped through his aching reveal, “obviously had it worse than me… ‘specially ‘cuz I was away a lot at the time, y’know? Over in Ireland I was… pissin’ it up most nights ‘n’ all.”
He blinked slowly.
“Din’t see her much, ‘n’ even less when we lost him, a’m ashamed t’ say.”
“Lost him?”
At this time in my life, my eleven-year-old self was doing everything he could to be a man, to shed any expression or temperament that he or others might see as juvenile. But that night I was an infant again, and so was he. Two grown or growing infants, alone in a room, no adults watching, judging. It was freeing, oddly. I felt light, despite the turmoil.
“Aye. Died not long before he were s’posed to be born.”
Cold air from outside reached my toes.
“Should’ve told ye when you ‘n’ yer sister were younger. Dunno why we didn’t, but yeah. His name was William.”
His name. I wonder now if he was Billy because William had a sting to it. His own name, a scar.
“William,” I said to no one. “William Barrie.”
“William Robert Barrie,” he added, seemingly focused on a single star now.
Robert was my grandfather’s name. He was an equally cold man in the daytime. I wonder if he was ever uncorked like my father was this night.
“Wouldn’t mention it t’yer mum, still a bit raw init.”
“Can I not?” I asked, prodding what I knew would be a sensitive nerve, but I was eager to prove myself mature enough for such a conversation, despite me being under an England football duvet, half-hugging a baby blue teddy bear.
He frowned at first out into the aether, so I rephrased.
“I… I mean you two can talk to me… if you like… about things like that. You don’t need to like, hide anything like…”
After a little consideration, to my surprise he nodded. It had been a stony and quiet upbringing under that roof. Who’d have known he’d receive that without barking at me? Without calling me wet or sneering me away? Not me. No. He just nodded.
After another silence, “If a’m honest I thought we’d be past it b’now, might sound bad that.” His lip quivered, as did mine at that sight. “But a drink still feels… like… like a wake. Parties are still… goodbye parties. We ‘aven’t stepped back into the day to day yet, ‘n’ it’s been years. Over a decade even, bloody ‘ell.”
I ignored a punctuating belch of his.
“I can’t imagine,” I said, the quiver making it to my throat. “I’m… really, very sorry, Dad.”
I cried a bit but hid it well.
He looked away from the stars, to me.
“I used to be a laugh,” he said, with wet red eyes and a smile that broke my heart, as the painting I held of my upbringing changed colour. “You’d’ve liked me.”
He approached and put his hand on my England duvet. Then up came Uncle Dave like a wrecking ball on stilts, and my dad reaffixed his rock face, stern and unwavering.
“Oi-oi Jacky-boy!”
Dave ripped a deep burp and thumped my door open with a limp wrist. The stairs had taxed his breath too, no doubt; he wasn’t the fittest of men.
“Hiya, Dave.”
Dad was a heavy-jawed idol again, capable of only boozing and snoozing – the living, feeling person in him tucked away. It was nice to meet him though.
“Hhhooa dear.”
Dave talked some shite about a punchbowl and some clothes pegs. I don’t know; drunk speeches aren’t worth remembering, or at least that’s what I had thought.
“Keep calm and.. CARRY ON!” he bellowed once my dad failed to return his serve of drunken drivel. He’d read it from a poster on my wall.
He tapped it in acknowledgement, like you would the chest of a friend that had bought you a drink in a loud club where anything verbal would be lost. But Dave needed stimulation, and our silence wasn’t cutting it. So off my dad went, arm in arm with that globe of a man, oozing down the stairs and back into the kitchen, into the loud cloud of laughs and yelps of whatever the fuck.
“Keep calm and carry on!” Dave repeated. That was the evening’s slogan now. I thought of how my parents would hear those words amongst the mess. Did they eye each other across the counter? Did they think of him?
William Robert.
I just hope they took comfort in sharing that secret together, even though they’d undoubtedly be better off if they talked about it.
And my room was cold. The window was still open. I left it that way and fell asleep in the end.
I hope he remembered that night, but we never spoke of it again.
How thick of me. That silence didn’t have to be hereditary. But I have a boy now, and I make that same pilgrimage. The stairs knacker me. And I’m always stumped for something to say. I know I want to say something to him, to bond somehow, to show him that I lived a life and gathered some wisdom before he came along.
Did my grandfather do the same thing with my dad?
Maybe I’ll have a drink. That might clarify things a bit, loosen me up.
“Hhhooa dear.”
About the Author – Jack Barrie
Jack Barrie (He/Him) is from the UK but lives in Canada now. He is in love with his housemate’s border collie. His writing has won two Royal Television Society Awards and been nominated for Best of the Net 2025. He’s published in Split Lip Magazine (where he now serves as a reader), The New Flash Fiction Review, Beyond Words Magazine, The Blood Pudding Magazine, others. His novel, Sundown: An Other World Fairytale, is available on amazon. Say hi at @jackstrynawrite on Instagram.
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