Your Father's Only Friend

It was afternoon and I got a call from my mother. The line was bad so I asked where she was.

‘China!’ she said indignantly. Then I remembered my parents were in the habit of taking extravagant holidays.

They had been gone almost a week and had asked me to check in once in a while to water the plants. I hadn’t been yet. It’s a good job they hadn’t trusted me enough to feed the cat. They had asked a neighbour to do that.

‘How is it?’ I asked.

‘Terrible!’ she said. ‘Your father’s only friend is dead!’

My father has always smoked. Cigars mostly, the way middle aged men do. But cigarettes whenever they were on offer and probably a fair bit of weed in his day.

He used to make a joke of it. As kids, if we were sat in a restaurant, he would go outside for a smoke after eating. He would look back in the window at us and mime that he was freezing or that he was in a canoe or a fish tank or walking downstairs. One of those dad jokes that you love as a kid but get tired of the older you get. When we were older he used to mime that he hated smoking and wished that he didn’t do it. Which was probably true. He’d look disdainfully at his cigar, shake his head and not look back in at us.

‘He’ll be a social pariah!’ my mother wailed when she considered how his smoking would be received in China. To her, the Chinese were not a race of smokers. How true this is I have no idea, never having visited the place.

As it happened, my father was one of only two smokers in their hotel. The other was a second generation Chinese guy who had been born and raised in Slough. His name was Paul.

After dinner each night, the two men would retire to the bar for a smoke. The first couple of nights it had been pure chance. But they got on quite well and my father said he looked forward to their meetings. They would sit at the bar smoking and chatting while everyone else in the hotel socialised at their smoke free tables.

Then, this night, the night my mother rang me for moral support, my father returned from the toilet to find his only friend slumped over the bar. Assuming he had drunk himself into a stupour, my father gave him a gentle dig to the ribs. There was no reaction. He felt for a pulse and quickly snapped his hand away when he didn’t find one. Straight away, he alerted a member of staff. An ambulance was called and the police came too. Paul was pronounced dead at the scene.

Several witnesses, Paul’s wife and my mother included, cited my father as Paul’s only friend. Some even mentioned the gentle dig in the ribs he had delivered to the corpse.

My father was hauled in for questioning by Beijing police and spent a night in the cells. By morning the hospital reported that the official cause of death was a heart attack.

My father was released without charge and celebrated his freedom with a cigar.