Engineered: Chapter 8

A dialogue with Pater Realis, not Pater Economicus.

I spoke to Dad the other day. As per usual, he didn’t speak back. So I guessed it was like praying, except it was to something I knew existed at least once. I was brought up to believe that a guy wearing a tablecloth and saying spells in Latin was your ticket to the afterlife. But man, what a shit salesman the guy in the gawd poncho was. Is. He didn’t even know if the end resort had a pool. My eternity needs a pool, or nothing at all. I’ll settle for either, really.

But I walked, piss-stained and broken, along the canal, my dad walking with me in silent contemplation. I think he looked like he had something to say. But his dead lips sank no ships. And we walked the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 miles to the big bridge across the smelly river. We rounded its ramparts and fell in lockstep, climbing higher and higher towards the mirky clouds. Below, you could kick a ship through the concrete goalposts that held up the road. Me and Dad, we saw em kick oil rig feet under here once. And I find I’m smiling and crying. He is, too. Cars nipped past at varying speeds: big German vroom-vrooms, elegant French frolic-wagons and Japanese jousters with mean faces and 100,000 mile-no-worries guarantees.

To be that reliable.

That was not my trajectory, though. Instead, mines arched out over the anti-kill yourself railings and down, down, down to the river Clyde. Dad started talking to me then. Yeah, the high dive caught his attention.