My father has his own people around him.

I walked out of the family house when I was 17. I slammed the door, as a petulant young man will when he thinks he’s acting out of principle. I went to work as a psychiatric nurse, and when I realised I wasn’t on the side of the hospital I quit and worked on odd jobs in factories and on the roads, to get enough money to go to university. My father and I didn’t speak.

It was me that mended it, when I was near to finishing the degree. It wasn’t out of love that I reached out and made peace. It was out of the feeling that it was stupid to have a quarrel with my father in an adult life. The feud with my father was like an accessory – a pendant or a lip ring, maybe – that can suit an adolescent, but is embarrassing on an adult. It was like still reading Hermann Hesse novels.

I’d thought he was a racist and an authoritarian, and since he’ll never read this I’ll say that that was true: he was. But he’s a human being, born in time. He is a good man, and he has never been a promoter of anything bad. That’s a pathetically small thing to say about a good man, but it’s a true thing. 

When I contacted my father again, and started visiting and offering invitations, I opened up some conversations, about family members, the weather, and so on, but we never talked about things that might be important. If we did we’d fight. So I chose safe topics and I listened more than spoke. I didn’t really enjoy his company. Repairing the relationship seemed like a proper thing to do, and I didn’t actually feel that there was much in it for me.

It was as he got older and weakened that he mattered more.

There was nothing to rebel against. He was a man of his time, in most of his attitudes, and he was in advance of his time in many ways.

And it doesn’t really matter what you think about races, for example, in the abstract. It matters a lot how you treat people. I saw that I’d have to work hard to be as kind and considerate to people as he was. I’d done some of that work on being kind before, because I’m naturally arrogant and selfish and I had to consciously try to be kind, and that’s mostly from his example. But after re-establishing contact I put in much more work on kindness. And patience.

Letting go my anger with him meant learning to let go of other anger.

Here’s a poem by James K Baxter, from New Zealand.

Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow mountain shine.

Along the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

There’s some calm in those last two lines. Anyway, I’m around my father right now. He needs people, including me. I’m one of his own people, around him.  

The funeral is tomorrow morning. I’ve written a eulogy, which was hard because I’d thought I couldn’t say anything at all. 

My father is grief-stricken and pretending not to be. He is brave in front of people, but his shoulders slump and his face falls when he thinks no-one’s looking. 

He was asleep on the couch this afternoon. He was reaching for her hand while he slept. But it wasn’t there. He suddenly woke up, panicked, and called out, “Where’s Sophie?”

My poor sister had to say, “I’m sorry, Dad; Sophie’s gone. She died on Friday.”

Dad lifted his hands up and brought them down together, to show that his moment of panic hadn’t been important. “Of course. I’m sorry. Sorry, of course. She’s dead, I know.”  

He’s a brave man, and his first instinct, always, is the feelings of others. 

My poor father.

I just got a call from my sister. My mother died this morning. 

All plans are suspended for a while, and there’s nothing to say.

Watching a woman you own, whose body may be marked, but she sleeps in the aftermath and afterglow, breathing calm, happy and peaceful. 

Once I took a girl to the top floor of the Rex Tranh hotel in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. There are topiary animals there: deer, bears, cocks, dogs. It was before Vietnam became a tourist destination, and we had the roofgarden to ourselves. Vietnam was still closed. Only East Germans and Russians visited. There were no street lights, cars or motorbikes. 

I took off the girl’s teeshirt. She pressed into the side of the deer, her nipples seeking the hardened ends of the stubs cut by the topiarist. It was cold. I took off my belt and doubled it. She arched her back and raised her arms, so she would fall, a little, into the stubs and spikes of the bush each time my belt landed. She had small breasts, mouth-sized, with very hard pointed nipples. I whipped her.

She was gasping with lust and hurt by the twentieth stroke.

Then there was a small man with perfect black hair and a dancer’s waist at the top of the roof-garden stairwell. This was a waiter she liked, a young man who worshipped her. He followed her everywhere, and his patience had finally won him a glimpse of her bare back.

And he’d gained some other intimate knowledge about her. The girl had very white skin but she was petite, unlike most Western women the Vietnamese had seen. He thought she was a princess, a goddess, an opera star.

I gave the young man cigarettes and francs, and ordered lobster for our room, in thirty minutes.  

By that time we were in our room and the girl was tied over a beautiful laquered cabinet with dragons and herons, and her buttocks and upper thighs had been belted and welted as blazing red as the soft skin between her shoulderblades. She’d put her tee-shirt back on to get back to our room, but there’d been specks of blood on the front when I lifted it off her again. Her breasts had bled. 

She’d wondered, when the waiter knocked, if I’d leave her naked and exposed when he brought in the trolley with the lobster, plates and the awful Russian champagne. 

At the last second I’d thrown a sheet over her. He could tell she was there, but not see her.  When he’d gone, I stood between her spread tied legs and mounted her. And while we moved together, I fed her lobster with my fingers. 

A man wrote to ask if I’d train his wife while he watched. It just wouldn’t work, for me. Actually, the request was a one-liner, unaccompanied by any information about him or his wife, or even, since I’m a shallow soul, a picture of this trainable wife of his. So this wouldn’t be tempting in the specific case even if the idea was tempting in general.

But even if his wife looked like Scarlett Johansson and he’d written a letter as charming and voluble as Cary Grant, it still wouldn’t be tempting.   

It’s that bdsm has to be personal, for me anyway. Even when it’s casual and between me and a woman I’ve never met before and may well never meet again, it’s still personal. The focus and the energy has to be between the dominant and the submissive or it’s not really there. 

Traditionally, your pornographic tawsing goes something like this:

“After supper came those terrible two dozen with the tawse. the tawse is a Scottish instrument of punishment, made of a hard and seasoned piece of leather about two feet long, narrow in the handle and at the other end about four inches broad, cut into narrow strips from about six to nine inches in length.

Alice had never seen, much less felt one.

She was commanded to bring it to her uncle, and had to go for it naked – not even a fan was allowed! How could she conceal the least of her emotions? Oh, this nakedness was an awful, awful thing!

She brought it, and opened her book and knelt down and said:

“Please give me two dozen with the tawse for being ashamed and trying to cover my nakedness, and for my disobedience.”

“Across my knee.”

“Across – your – knee.”

“Very well! Get up. Stand sideways close up to me. Now,” taking the tawse in his right hand and putting his left arm round her waist, “lean right down, your head on the carpet, miss,” and holding her legs with his left leg, he slowly and deliberately laid on her sore bottom two dozen well-applied stripes. Then he let her go and she rolled sprawling on the carpet with pain and exhaustion.”

The first time I used a tawse, on a 21st century girl, it was quite a bit less efficient than that. Story for next time, I guess.