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Father

Julian Matthews

    I remember I was 9 or 10 the first time I witnessed my father’s integrity shatter in front of my eyes.

    We were in his Morris Minor headed for my braces appointment at University Hospital.

    For some reason the police stopped us. I didn’t think we had done anything illegal. It’s not as if we just robbed the Central Bank and this was the getaway car.

    I remember now, even as the pictures flash in my mind’s eye as I watched through the windscreen, two Keystone Kops were animatedly questioning my dad like in a Chaplin movie.

    My dad emptied his pockets and put his wallet and keys on the hood of the car, his hands gesturing, appealing. He looked nervous, sweating in the noon heat. The cops were pointing accusingly, stabbing the air between them.

    I remember now why my mum was annoyed when he showed up from work to pick me up for the weekly appointment. I thought it was because he was late. She twitched her nose like Samantha in Bewitched and could tell, without casting a spell, that he already had a few — one or three, one never knew.

    My mum wanted so badly to fix my bucked teeth, the same way she pulled at my nose all through my childhood to make it straight unlike her flat, typically Chinese nose. She was adopted by an Indian family as a baby and spoke Tamil and wore sarees and a pottu but looked as “Oriental” as only dead, white, Western writers would describe. She wanted my nose to be angular, straight, and my teeth not bent or crooked.

    Through the windscreen, I saw my father lift his wallet, pull out a note then discreetly looking over his shoulders — like this was a scene in the 1970s Hawaii Five-0 episode and we were in a darkened car park — he palmed the money into the first policeman’s hand.

    I remember how hurt I was to see this. All the maxims: “Honesty is the best policy!”, “Money is the root of all evil!”, “Thou shalt not steal!” popped up in speech bubbles around his head.

    A scowling Archangel Michael, white wings spread out, hovered over his shoulder, eyes blazing, his index finger wagging: “No!”

    Steve McGarrett suddenly appeared next to my father and said “Book him, Dano!”

    But no booking was going to happen this time. The cops smirked and shuffled away. My father lowered his gaze and hung his head in shame — as I did mine in the car.

    When he came back in the car, I was so angry but afraid to tell him my displeasure for fear of reprisal. But I told my mum later — in disgust.

    A few months later, I flushed the braces down the toilet and refused to go to see the orthodontist ever again.

    My teeth are still crooked. My nose is bulbous, neither straight like my dad’s nor flat like my mum’s.

    I know now I am a reflection of both of them, my tiny mother, steadfast, righteous, brave and strong, and my father, gregarious, alcoholic, weak, not always present, sometimes not always honest.

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