My life was very ordinary, very simple and very quiet until I was thirty. I had left school, 'gone away' to university and by away, I mean like one hundred and fifty miles away from home. Like many other university students, I settled into the town that I had studied in, so I remained a hundred and fifty miles away from home, my parents and all of my old friends.
I went through several boyfriends in the twelve years from leaving home but none of them ever lasted long enough for me to want to take them home. My friends all said that I was too busy looking for a man that was the image of my father or a man who could replace my father. I didn't see it myself but several of my friends pointed out that each man I hooked up with looked like they could be my father's twin brother.
I made a point of returning home for special days, my birthday, naturally, my parent's birthdays and Christmas but apart from that, I was very happy to be living that far away from my old home. Things changed slightly just after my thirtieth birthday, my mother passed away suddenly, she was only forty-eight years old, fit and well one day and dead with just a week's warning. I had taken the call from my father while I was at work, my mother had taken herself off to the doctors because she felt under the weather and the doctor phoned my father as well as an ambulance to take my mother into hospital.
My boss was great; I was given immediate leave on compassionate grounds and headed straight for the hospital. Even after a three hour drive I was still in the hospital before my mother had finished going through the admission process, she was still laying in a passageway on a trolley bed waiting for a bed on a wad to be found for her.
Something was definitely out of place, I had never been in my parent's company without them holding hands, kissing and cuddling, in fact, as I sat there, tears streaming down my face, watching my father pacing up and down as my mother lay almost comatose on the trolley, I rationalised that the reason that I wanted to live so far away was because my parents were far too loving as I was growing up.
Memories came flooding back to me of the sights and sounds of my childhood, the days where they sat on the sofa cuddling and kissing while I watched the TV or did my homework from school and at night, I heard them having sex together almost every night of my life up to the point that I left home. I have to say that I had been successful over the years in hiding the memories from myself, my friends who had done the 'trick cyclists' training at university would have said that I was suffering from a classic Oedipus complex and running away from my parents' house so that I wouldn't see my mother making love to my father (in the non-fucking way of course) and I could erase their lovemaking from my mind as I looked for men over and over again that would measure up to my father.
I stayed around for the week until after my mother passed away and then I helped my father to arrange the funeral, one last act of love from my father towards my mother. My dad held it together until after the funeral and then he aged twenty years overnight. He was definitely suffering from depression but I had work commitments and had to return to my own life.
I promised myself that I would pop down to see my father in a few weeks to see how he was coping on his own. I sadly missed that planned visit and before I knew it, it was Christmas and I had to take extra holidays to sort out his Christmas, just the way my mother always did it for us before she passed away.
I didn't enjoy Christmas, for the first time in my life I had to work and work hard to make Christmas happen, for the most part my father was grateful that I had gone to all that trouble but he was still seriously depressed, he looked more like a seventy year old man than a fifty year old.
I have to say that I was really glad to be back at work in the New Year, I was given a surprise job swap at work, from selling manuscripts and books to shops and suppliers, putting authors biographies out in the right places, like newspapers and the movers and shakers in the publishing world and the new job I was given was E-publishing. I needed a similar range of skills, did the same kind of work but in my new job I could sit anywhere in the world, the raw manuscript would come to me electronically and I'd convert it into an E-book and not just one format, there were at least six different formats for E-publications.
I had broken up with my last boyfriend in November just before Christmas and was once again making the rounds of all the places that I had picked up men in the past, by February, I had three disastrous one night stands and was about to allow a fourth man to fuck me when I saw him imitate one of my father's little quirks. The guy must have been totally confused, there I was a dead cert, a confused and vulnerable woman who three of his friends had already fucked and just as he took his trousers off, I bolted for the door.
The end of February brought me another surprise, an email from my father, he had joined in a computer course, 'Computing for the terrified' run by the local library service and adult education, I have no idea where he got my email address from so it really did come out of the blue. The message was simple, "Forcing myself to get off of my arse and out of the house, trying to get my shit together one step at a time."
I got at least one email a week from my father, each time he was in his computing lesson, probably more contact than we had in the whole of the ten years before. In June he asked me what I was doing for my summer holiday. I hadn't actually taken my summer holiday in four years, my colouring made summer sun holidays a painful and risky business, I burned so easily, had all the pain and within days my skin was back to being its usual alabaster colour.
"I need to get away, please come with me, let me take you on holiday like I did when you were a child."
I wanted to reply that my mother did most of the planning, booking and organising for our family holidays but my dad seemed to be trying really hard, fighting to get over the death of the woman he had loved since he was fourteen and she was twelve years old.
"Okay, you book the holiday but give me as much notice of dates as you can so I can arrange things with work."