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My sister told me afterwards that when she rushed out of the church at our father's funeral she was not, as everybody thought at the time, overwhelmed with grief. It was just that she couldn't sit still in her pew any longer, and what she was yelling in the churchyard (so loud we could hear it in the church, even above the organ belting out the hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind) was Fuck Foolish Ways.

"Don't you foolish-way me," she told anyone who would listen afterwards, when our plates were piled up with white bread sandwiches in our mother's immaculate front room and she'd had a skinful of mother's cream sherry. "I need my sins. He," she meant our late father, "needed his too. All that about playing his favourite hymn at his funeral! His favourite hymn my arse,” she said.

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive our Foolish Ways. What our mother had particularly loved as she sat there in the front pew at the church, what had particularly moved her as her daughter, quite unknown to her, stormed out (and the red haired woman in the black trouser suit had slipped in late at the back, also quite unknown to her) was the delicious little run of flute notes on the organ after “foolish ways” that segue so gently into “reclothe us in our rightful mind.” And what a lovely idea that was, reclothe us, put everything right, and if only it could be as simple as that, like putting on a new white dress in the summer.

“John Greenleaf Whittier,” said my sister, looking up the hymn under
author in mother’s Methodist Hymn Book next to a plate of blancmange. “New England Quaker. Late nineteenth century. We have outgrown fathers, John,” she said to me. I winced slightly at the John. “We don’t need some smug patronising bastard in the sky to tell us that our sins, the worst we can do – murder, adultery, disrespect for parents – are merely foolish ways, giving us a heavenly pat on the head like we’re kids. They’re sins for chrissake, sins. We need our sins! When do we want ‘em? Now!”

“And remind me,” said my sister as she left the following morning,
getting into her yellow Mustang, “if I ever give birth to a boy not to call him Greenleaf.”

Names! My sister’s name is judy. Yes I know, but she always spells it like that, with a lower case j. She’s had a problem with her name ever since she discovered our father named her after a show he’d seen in Skegness. That’s her story anyway. She insists on writing it judy, she signs herself judy. Like people who call themselves queer, reclaiming the word as their own. I’m a ditsy doll she asserts (it was a Punch ‘n judy show my father saw) I don’t even deserve a capital letter not even at twenty-seven years old! She drives them mad at the bank. Any fraudster could imitate that they tell her, just j with a careless flourish and they ask her to sign again on her cheques. She gives them that look that she has, the one that says so? Or she darts her eyes sideways, as if there is some little genius sitting on her shoulder and she checks with him from time to time to see what
she should say. Don’t give way says the genius, and she doesn’t.

According to family legend when mother was first pregnant she and
my father came across this Punch ‘n judy show on the beach at Skegness. Punch was beating up on his wife, and the kids in the crowd were going wild, cheering him on, that’s the way to do it and all that, and our parents were watching and our dad thought that’s a great idea Mother, we’ll call her jooo-o-oooo-dy, after the show. Thank god I wasn’t born till five years later. Would I have been stuck with a girl’s name or would I have been Punch, or Toby or Sausages? I said to j, lucky they didn’t call you Pretty Polly after Punch’s mistress, but she said she could have coped with that, she’d have liked that, all black hair and cleavage and sultry looks, the
other-woman stuff. Like that woman in the trouser suit at the funeral.

My father came from a line of first name Johns, all commonly known
by their second, if you see what I mean, like he was John Terry but everybody knew him as Terry. So me, I’m Mike and it’s only on state occasions, like visits to hospitals and signing on for benefit, that I get to be John. Or when my sister is being ironic. On my BA diploma I was John. But you learn don’t you. When I enrolled for a masters I was Michael, and if I ever complete my PhD I’ll be Mike. You learn. You learn to be yourself.

When my father was dying in hospital with oesophagus cancer, the nurses called him John. I said, you want to tell them your proper name’s Terry but he said no, he liked it like that, he liked it when they called him John, it meant they didn’t really know who he was. What he really meant of course was it wasn’t really him lying there in hospital, dying of cancer. He had this double you see, a different name he could go by. Like he had this other double, this cancer growing inside him and another double as well — courting his mistress. He was a man of doubles. I watched him from a distance.

When I was eleven I came downstairs into the kitchen for a glass of
water one night and I heard him crying at the kitchen table. I nearly went up to him and said what’s the matter but something told me not to, just stay there and watch. So I stood in the kitchen doorway and forgot about the water and watched his shoulders heave up and down as he sobbed, and then he’d sip his whisky, neat, like he did.

How that little blue flame must have danced and burned and scalded
its way down his throat.

Do you drink much John? said Mr Brown the specialist when he had
his first laryngoscope, the tube with a camera on the end, down his throat. He showed him the picture on a monitor — the lower sphincter of the oesophagus all red and inflamed like a very sore anus. Do you drink much John? I wonder how he replied to that. Maybe he denied his name was John, said it was somebody else’s oesophagus, or pretended he couldn’t speak properly because of the tube down his throat. Do you drink much John?... Aaaaaargh...

“It’s work. He’s worried about work.” I’d asked my mother next morning why he’d been crying. I’d mentioned it to j and she said no way was it work, you don’t sob your heart out about work, not with your shoulders heaving in the way I’d described, and drinking the whisky. No it had to be something else. She was a very wise fifteen year-old at the time.

What is it then?

There’d been this phone call, and when j had answered the person at the other end hung up. j could have sworn it was a woman. How did she know? She could tell by the silence.

And then there was the incident when dad had been on a course, so
called, in Leeds and Mr Blenkinsop had phoned from work to ask where he was. Mother said in Leeds with you Mr Blenkinsop, but apparently he wasn’t.

And then there was the hotel bill for two that j had found behind his
socks pushed right at the back of his bedside drawer. That proved it she said, he was carrying on. The bastard, she said. All the time he was supposed to be with us, at Skegness on our holidays, on day trips to Cleethorpes, he was somewhere else inside, he was with her, he was shagging her the bastard, all that time we walked up and down the front at Cleethorpes looking for fish and chips and tea and bread and butter he was shagging her inside his head in a hotel bedroom in Leeds.

They told him he had Barrett’s Oesophagus. In other words, they told him, years of bad dietary habits and drinking neat spirits had led to reflux, the contents of his stomach and upper intestine being flushed back up his gullet and into his throat. Over time the lining of his oesophagus had been affected, the DNA had been partially destroyed and it was now unstable. They’d have to keep an eye on him, give him regular ‘scopes, and check some snips they’d taken to check for malignancy.

It got worse after that. There were times in the middle of the night
when we’d suddenly hear him and he’d frighten us, he’d leap out of bed like he was going to be sick, then cough and choke, then he’d wheeze asthmatically and have to sleep downstairs on the sofa. Mother said it was working too late, getting home too late and eating too late. He’s been doing that for a long time she said. j and I knew the truth of course. He’d been out for posh suppers in places like Leeds. While we made do with boiled eggs and bread, he was out wining and dining with her. It was all coming back on him, quite literally, he was being punished, punishment by reflux.

It got to the stage when he couldn’t swallow properly and they had
him back in hospital. “Unfortunately John, one of your snips,” they use such lovely words don’t they, homely lovely words, biopsy is so clinical, “one of your snips looks a bit nasty so we’re going to have a proper look.” The proper look turned out to be abdominal surgery. When he went back three months later for a so called post operative check Mr Brown said no need to take your shirt off John — he was half undressed so the rest of the conversation took place with him struggling to put his shirt back on, doing up the buttons; in the end he got them wrong and a nurse fixed him up in outpatients — and he just told him, there’s nothing I can do, you’ve got three months, go home and tell your wife and make your arrangements. Take it a day at a time, John.

Go home and tell the wife and make my arrangements. What did he
mean? Work out what sort of funeral I want? What hymns I want? He brooded on this in the ambulance going home and when they passed a corner shop half a mile from home he suddenly said Stop, I want to get out.

After the funeral Mother wanted us to get rid of a lot of his clothes. It was then, when taking his suits to the Oxfam shop I found the letter to her. It said about the diagnosis, how he’d got three months, how he hadn’t been able to go home straight away, how he’d called off at a corner shop in Westbury Street and told them there (“I think I made a bit of a commotion, ” he said), how he wanted her to know. It was a letter he’d never posted. It had her address on the envelope — a street in Skegness.

When j came over the next week to help pack up more of his things
I showed her the letter and she said straightaway, “We’re going to the seaside.”

“But why?”

“Just to settle things. I want to see where she lives, that’s all.”

“We’ll knock at the door and say what? ‘Excuse me, I think you knew my father.’ Honestly j, she’s probably got a husband and kids, she probably doesn’t even know he’s dead - he never posted that letter.”

But she insisted. “I just want to see the house,” she said.

“You want to look at it and say that’s where he shagged her. Why?” She looked again for the genius over her shoulder and as usual it agreed with her.

But first she said, “We’ll call off at that corner shop on Westbury
Street. It’s on the way. Besides I’ve run out of rizlas.”

And that’s how we met the woman in the trouser suit, over j’s purchase of a packet of rizla cigarette papers at the Westbury Street shop. It was a bit of a shock. Of course she wasn’t in the black trouser suit and it was she who recognised us. She apologised for not coming back to the house after the service. “I didn’t like to,” she said. “I didn’t know anybody. And your mother would probably have wondered who on earth I was, a mysterious friend of your father’s.”

I remember the way j licked the gum on the rizla and looked at the
woman, and the woman looked at j to see if she should carry on, and me, I just watched.

“‘I’ve got three months,’ he told the girls. They’re not much older than schoolgirls, you know, who work in here. ‘I’m going home to tell the wife. What do I tell her? Look it’s me, a dead man, walked in at the door. I’ve got three months. Is that what I say?’

“Sophie, she’s on her lunch break at the moment, got the giggles poor thing, she just couldn’t cope. Jessica, the one over there stacking shelves, she came running through and found me out at the back checking invoices. ‘There’s this bloke,’ she said, ‘just walked in, says he’s got three months, what hymn should he have?’

“I came through and found him. Jessica was right. What he wanted to know was what hymn he should have at his funeral.

“I talked to him of course. He told me everything. I think he told me
everything there was to know about his life, secrets and all. And at the end he looked up and smiled and said ‘I still haven’t chosen a hymn.’ That’s when I suggested Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. It seemed right somehow. ”

I watched the two of them talking and j blowing out the smoke sideways, frowning slightly as she does when she’s thinking, nodding rapidly. It’s the tune that gets to you, the woman said, and j said, yes, and how the words, the woman continued, take the earthquake, wind and fire and turn them into something else, and they said together, “the still small voice of calm.”

“But you see why I couldn’t come back to the house. Another thing,
he told me first, not your mother. She’d have been quite upset if she’d known he told me, a complete stranger”’

“That woman’s wasted in a corner shop,” said j as she drove and we didn’t speak again until we reached the sign that brought back all our childhood memories, Welcome to Skegness. It was a bright day and the colours were as they always are in Skeggy, bracing. I know bracing is an unflattering word, often applied to the Lincolnshire coast, describing the way the winds sweep in, but there’s something about the colours at Skeggy, the light is good. And if I were an artist I’d paint in Skegness. The sand is a particular crisp shade of brown, the sea a sharp shade of grey and the sky on this occasion was as clear as gin. And there, stark and striped on the sand, was the red and white awning of the Punch ‘n judy booth.

“So this is why I’m a judy,” said judy. I thought she’d say let’s not waste time here, let’s go and find her. But she didn’t. We stood and watched.

There wasn’t much of an audience. “It doesn’t attract like it used to,” said a bystander. “Kids have got computer games now.”

Punch kissed Pretty Polly his mistress then clubbed his wife and baby to death, like he does. Then he was on his own. There seemed a gap in the story. The thing is, once he’s murdered his family Polly doesn’t reappear. The story went on to his further encounters with the hangman and the devil He hanged the hangman, he outwitted the devil. Then he was on his own again. “That’s the way to do it!” he swazzled. “That’s the way to do it!”

We watched in silence. “He’s such a sad little man,” said j.

We went home after that and never got to find her. In fact we didn’t
even go and look for her. We had candyfloss after the show and then drove home, j talking about earthquake wind and fire all the way — elemental she said, earth air and fire, subsumed  metaphysically to the still small voice of calm — and that woman, working in a corner shop, wasted in a corner shop! Me, I was thinking about Punch n’ judy. Like j said, he was such a sad little man.