Eulogy to a life only lately missed

I didn’t mourn you. But I’ve brought you back to life many times, with the technicolour morality of fairy tale. You were the bogeyman of my childhood. An ogre who dismantled my dreams, and the bunk bed I’d been so excited to sleep in that first night you turned up, fierce and determined to show us who was boss, just as I was on the cusp of sleep: innocence fading like a dream.

I don’t doubt I wanted you dead, at times, with the vengeance of youth. I thought I hated you, but it turns out that too passes, now it’s too late to apologise and shake hands, for all your good one was, in the end, no good. I left you a shambles, already a shadow of your former, petulant self. Little did I know, when I left that last time, it would be the last time I’d wished for so long. I would have defended you better if I’d known – perhaps in the end, you weren’t so much the baddie of the piece.

Yet you lingered on, shuffling and slurring, much more so than in your prime, when you roared like a lion, or lolled like seal, eating sardines on a Portuguese beachfront. Mostly you were a shark. When you swam after me in the swimming pool, the fear tingled in my toes, and when you splashed me or dropped me in the pool you meant it to hurt just a bit. Perhaps I liked the attention; even when it seemed cruelty-tinged. 

Mostly, we were an inconvenience, and we also made it plain we didn’t like you – not much; you weren’t too fond of us. But sometimes you came alive, playing white king on the chequerboard, or opera just a bit too loud in the car; growing rambunctious on gin and tonic, and by turns petulant, or unreasonable, or sometimes just plain vile.

But there was humour too, plenty of it. It was all a game after all: the power play, the robust wines and three alarm chillis; the B & H Superkings were just outward symptoms of almost comic insecurity that would teeter just to the right of violence. It was the side of you that died, leaving behind a shell that still shuffled and roared, now just noise and fury; and a silvery mane no one dared stroke.

You were a convenient figure of torment, a receptacle of blame, and I don’t suppose, when I goaded you to turn on me, I minded so very much that I had someone at whose feet I could lay all my anger – I realise now you allowed me that. And it was, after all, me who got my own back in the end. All of us, whose lives you reshuffled, holding all the best cards, did. You became the joker, tossed aside and discarded, reclaimed, reluctantly or victoriously by your own pack. The rest of us, regrouped, preferring to let the memories grow dogeared while we all rebuilt our own. It would be too late by the time we learned you had us in checkmate.

I expect you knew I’d forgive you, eventually, and learn to be grateful for what you did: broadened my horizons, gave me something to fight against, sharpened my wit with a dark humour: the hulking shade that clouded my childish light. You were, after all, a kind of anti-hero, and now that I see you in sepia tones, rather than the vivid texture of childhood, I realise how much I miss the dangerous magnetism and comic bluster with which you once ruled the roost.