I first encountered this short story when DW (Dave) Wilson read it at The London Short Story Festival in 2015, where it evoked more audience laughter than many others that day. Yet the story is about grief, the difficulties of parenthood and of attempting human communication in a challenging emotional landscape – the impossibility of protecting someone else from the emotional pitfalls of life, even though you can’t stop yourself from trying.
The set-up is simple: a narrating Canadian father, addressing himself in second person, is on a trip to England with his 18-year-old daughter. But she had originally planned to take the trip with her boyfriend, who had since taken his own life. It’s the daughter who found the body. The humour here – which plays out in their interaction, but very much not in the interior life of the father – Is not the main ingredient, the lamb shank for the reader to gnaw on. Rather it’s deployed as the twist of lemon or the pinch of sea salt that heightens the flavour and makes their careful small talk so potent, as we are aware of what they are not saying, not discussing. That the father is aware of all the potential darkness of a human life, but knows that his daughter needs to be spared too keen a reminder just at this point. Knows that he can play to the disdain a teenager will always have for their dumb, ageing Dad, but that his love is both unbreakable and unspoken. (There may be more than one epiphany in this story, but the characters shake them off admirably.) And knows that laughter, playfulness and what the English call ‘banter’ is a previous normality that it would soothe both of them to return to if and when they can.
For such a short piece, it’s a remarkably rich portrait of a parent-child relationship. One of Wilson’s signature strengths as a writer is to show the fragility and apprehension behind gruff masculine exteriors: this is one of his finest examples, although all of his collection Once You Break a Knuckle is well worth reading. With Wilson, there is always a heart beating somewhere under the callouses.
Winner of the 2015 CBC Short Story Prize, and available to read online
A Personal Anthology 