Page 100 of Husband Material
Then Oliver straightened his spine, fixed his gaze squarely at the back of the room, and began to speak.
"DAVID BLACKWOOD," SAID OLIVER, "WASa loving husband, a devoted father, and an absolute demon on the golf course. We all remember him as…as.…”
He looked down at his cards.
“David Blackwood,” said Oliver, “was a loving husband, a devoted father, and…”
He looked down again. Then he looked up. And his eyes moved over the crowd, pausing just for a second on me before he fixed his attention back on a neutral point.
“David Blackwood,” he said, “was a complicated man, and the last words I said to him were ‘go fuck yourself.’”
The nice thing about Oliver’s family being incredibly British and middle class was that nobody had any way to react to that, so everyone stayed very still and very silent.
“I wish they had not been,” Oliver went on, “and I suppose that might seem obvious. After all, who wants their last words to their father to be ‘go fuck yourself’? But I think what’s not so obvious is that while I’m sorry he’s dead… I hope no one here would think that I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m a vegan criminal defence lawyer, for fuck’s sake, neither of which my father approved of, incidentally, but in general I don’t believe death ever solves anything. Another thing my father disapproved of… He was aproponent of bringing back hanging, which he apparently thought would fix knife crime; the economy; and, if I recall from at least one conversation, immigration.
“But my point is that although I’m sorry he’s dead—and this might be the part that surprises people, and Mother, in particular, I’m sorry if this surprises you—I’m inordinately glad I told him to go fuck himself. As I say, David Blackwood was a complicated man. And, indeed, one of the questions I find myself asking now is whether he, too, had he survived, would have been glad I told him to go fuck himself.
“I believe that if he lived by the principles he espoused, he would. After all, as well as hanging, he was also a great proponent of speaking your mind—when he did it, that is, not so much when other people did. And standing your ground—again, primarily his ground, not necessarily anybody else’s. But I hope that the double standard he applied to those virtues when it came to his employees, my schoolteachers, tradesman, waiters, most of his friends, and his sons’ various romantic partners might, at least, not apply to his own children. I like to imagine that maybe, one day, after perhaps a year or two had passed, he’d have shaken my hand and said, ‘You know what, Oliver, I had that coming.’
“Because I’m afraid from my perspective he did, indeed, have it coming.
“And again I don’t want to… I don’t want anyone to think that I hated my father. Or that I wanted anything bad to happen to him. When I say he was a complicated man, I mean it. He wasn’t good or bad, he wasn’t always right or always wrong—although he would personally have disagreed with you on that score—and I should also say that all I can really talk about now is the David Blackwood I knew, who won’t be the David Blackwood my mother knew or Uncle Jim knew. He’s probably fairly similarto the David Blackwood that Christopher knew, but he won’t be exactly the same.
“That’s the thing about people. I suppose…I suppose in a way we’re all complicated men, or women, or nonbinary people. And, thinking about it, if there’s one thing I’ve done today that would really, truly offend David Blackwood, it’s bothering to acknowledge that nonbinary people exist at his funeral. ‘Why do you have to be so bloody politically correct, Oliver,’ he might have said. ‘What about women’s bathrooms?’
“Where was I? My original draft of this speech opened with, as you might recall, ‘David Blackwood was a loving husband, a devoted husband, and a demon on the golf course,’ and all of those things were true. Well, except the thing about golf. He was actually quite bad at it. And so when I say he had it coming, with reference to—in case you’ve forgotten—my telling him to go fuck himself, I don’t think I really mean that. At least, not as it came out. I think what I mean was he needed to hear it and I needed to say it. Because my father provided for me and cared for me and supported me, but he also undermined me, made constant jokes about my sexuality while also being incredibly offended by any suggestion he might be even a little bit homophobic, and wielded his disapproval like—I’m sorry, normally when I’m speaking for work, I’m rather better prepared so I don’t have a good simile to hand. But I spent my entire life repulsed by his beliefs, terrified of his scorn, and desperate for him to think well of me.
“Although, strangely—or perhaps not, I can’t tell—I never once doubted that he loved us. I think that’s what made it so very difficult. Because everything he did, everything he said, every belittling remark about my career, every snide joke about anal sex—and I’m terribly sorry, I’ve now just saidanal sexat my father’s funeral; I suppose there’s no coming back from that, really, is there—all of it came from a place that felt to him like affection.And because he was proud and stubborn, and those are qualities I recognise in myself and value in myself and in some ways have to thank him for, it would never have occurred to him—could never have occurred to him—that if he’d just listen…for once just listen to a voice that wasn’t his own…he’d see that…
“And that’s where I run out of words. Because I’m not sure what it was I wanted him to see, not really. I suppose I wanted him to see that he was a complicated man. And that I, too, was a complicated man. That Christopher and I were both complicated men. That being me wasn’t just a failure state of being him.
“Of course, maybe he knew all that already. Maybe I just didn’t know that he knew it. And he didn’t know that I didn’t know so we just missed each other for thirty years. Or maybe he just didn’t give a fuck. Maybe he went to his grave genuinely disappointed that his eldest son was a fairy.
“The thing is, I have no way of telling. And I suppose that’s why I say he had it coming. I suppose what I really mean iswehad it coming. That we would at some point in our lives have to reconcile ourselves either to gradually and politely becoming strangers, or to me telling him to go fuck himself. Because I’d hoped that—and I’ll never know if I was right, and perhaps I’m just projecting this retrospectively onto something I said in the heat of the moment—that there was no looking away from a go-fuck-yourself. David Blackwood was a complicated man, and he was the kind of man who only ever heard what he wanted to hear. But a loud, clear go-fuck-yourself…I thought that would get through to him. Or, if it didn’t, then at least I would know.
“Anyone who knew David—that’s the kind of thing you say at a funeral isn’t it, ‘anyone who knew David’—anyone who knew him would know that he was a man of statements. In his world, things were as they were and there was no interrogating that or changing it or denying it. I suppose that explains why he was sothreatened by the idea of nonbinary people, even though he never met one. He believed what he believed and, like Thomas Jefferson, he considered those beliefs to be self-evident truths. He was a complicated man, but he was, at heart, a man of certainties.
“Which is why it’s so strange to me, strange and more than a little painful, that here, at the end, he has left, for me at least, only questions. Had he not, in his typically contrarian fashion, collapsed of a heart attack a few short weeks after I’d finally taken his advice—advice, Uncle Jim, you will be pleased that I remembered well from the halibut story—and stood up for myself, I might have known if we could perhaps…if he would have…
“But I won’t. I’ll never know.
“And that’s what death is really, isn’t it? A lot of things you’ll never know.
“Although, the truth is, I can’t help but feel that if I’d just told my father to go fuck himself ten years ago, we might have been in a much better place today. And I might have been able to stand here and join all of you in pretending my father was simple. Even though he wasn’t. Because none of us is.
“Also, I can’t help but notice that I’ve ended this long and—I freely admit—unfortunately rambling speech about my difficult relationship with David Blackwood by questioning, yet again, whether the problem was me all along.
“I’m like my father, I think, in several ways. But that isn’t one of them. He would never once ask that question. It would be straightforward to him: ‘Oliver, you need to pull your socks up and stop making excuses.’ I suppose that’s another irony, that a man so obsessed with personal responsibility was so insistent on everything being somebody else’s fault. Even the halibut. But then I suppose he saw no contradiction in that.Don’t do as I do, do as I sayand so on.
“And in a way…didn’t it work? Because perhaps the end ofall this is that I like who I am. I like that I am, at last, the sort of person who can tell his father to go fuck himself and also the kind of person who can accept that perhaps I should have said it earlier or not said it at all. My father was a man of certainties, but I think I am happy being a man of questions.
“So often, I think, when a person dies—when acomplicatedperson dies, even when an unambiguouslyawfulperson dies, not that I believe there are any truly unambiguously awful people—it’s for those of us left behind to pick over ourselves and ask, ‘Am I this way inspiteof this person orbecauseof them?’ And so often the answer is simplyyes.
“I am sorry that my father is dead. I am sorry that we will never get to finish the conversation that began when I told him to go fuck himself. I will miss him, as I know we all will. But for all that I will miss him, for all that I loved him and for all that I believed, without question, that he loved me, I still find myself standing in front of you now and this is the only thing I feel able to say with confidence. The only thing I know to be true and fair about someone who is no longer able to speak for himself: David Blackwood was a complicated man.
“Now, assuming there is still time, I rather mean-spiritly assigned Christopher to read ‘If.’ It was Dad’s favourite poem because of fucking course it was.”
Stepping away from the lectern, Oliver walked slightly unsteadily back to his seat. Then he put his head in his hands and, very quietly, started to cry. I wrapped my arms around him and drew him close while Christopher took his place.
