Free Life Goes On by Alan Sillitoe

reason many women found him attractive because he also, presumably, had a certain amount of what passed for charm. He had dead grey fish eyes, rubbery lips and a shapeless nose, but he was tall, energetic, talented (I supposed), and incredibly randy. As my mother, who knew him well, once said to me (though she hardly ever really knew him well for more than a few minutes at a time), ‘Even a man has to stand with his back to the wall when that bastard comes into the room.’
    â€˜Well, Michael – it is Michael, isn’t it? – what brings you here so early in the morning?’
    I stood up, not wanting to act in any unusual way when I knew that Bill Straw was sobbing disconsolately in his upstairs prison. ‘It’s afternoon. I just thought I’d come and see you. Is it strange that I should want to visit my father now and again?’
    He came back from the kitchen with two raw eggs in the bottom of a tall glass, poured in whisky to halfway, beat it to pulp with a fork, and slid it down. ‘Breakfast. It isn’t strange at all. It’s positively perverse. How’s Bridgitte?’
    â€˜She’s left me. She’s gone to Holland with the kids. I’m devastated. I’m lost without the kids around. I don’t know which way to turn.’ I encased my head in my hands, acting the hackneyed bereft husband in the hope of giving him some material for one of his novels.
    â€˜Good,’ he said. ‘I never liked the bitch for giving me what, with a proud simper, she called grandchildren. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the thought of grandchildren. Even if I die at a hundred-and-two I’ll be too young to be a grandfather and I’m only fifty-eight. Or is it forty-six?’ He poured another whisky. ‘No matter. At least not after last night.’
    He wasn’t even good to me, so I didn’t have fair reason to hate him, but I knew one way of making him jump. ‘How’s work, these days?’
    He belched. ‘Don’t use that word. I’ve never worked in my life. A gentleman never works. I write, not work.’ His eyes took on sufficient life for someone who wasn’t in the know to imagine not only that he was alive, but that he was a normal human being. ‘The worst thing I ever did was marry your mother so that I had no further right, in the technical sense, to call you a bastard. But you are a bastard, all the same. I never did like your insulting insinuations that I might be capable of the cardinal sin of work. All I do is write, and fuck. And never you forget it.’
    â€˜It’s hardly possible,’ I said, ‘since you begat me.’
    â€˜So your mother said. But you’re rotten enough, so it might well have been me.’
    I poured another tot for myself. ‘In my view the greatest disaster of modern times was when you first got blind drunk on the power of words.’
    He threw his great cock-head back and laughed. ‘You’re right, Michael. I’ve vomited over many a sofa in a dowager’s salon. There aren’t many decent homes I can visit anymore, but then, who wants to visit a decent home?’
    We had something in common at least. ‘All I wanted to know, in my clumsy fashion, is how the writing is getting on?’
    â€˜Why didn’t you say so? If I have any love for you at all it’s only because you’re so ineradicably working-class – hell’s prole, and second to none. Just like the lovely lads I had under me during the war. I’d acknowledge you much less if you came from within sniffing distance of the Thames Valley and had been to Eton – like me. The writing’s getting on very well, since you ask. I’ve got so much to do I don’t know which way to turn. I can’t keep off it. Just a minute.’ He went into his study, and I heard the clack of a single key on the typewriter. He came back, smiling. ‘I wrote a