Further to it's recent release, here is another exclusive excerpt from my book-of Dead/Ends:
My dad Joseph, was a demolition man. Liverpool was a dereliction of extinct tenements, waiting to be razed to a landfill.
Caked in the muck of a days toil, he would often return with some relic—a yellow paged book or a faded tin toy.
The empty buildings were embellished with a forgotten era -cornices or metal fireplaces, wooden doors or roof slates could be stripped and sold for extra subsidy.
That’s the way it was during the searing summer of 77, when my Dad had clamored through a window onto a two- story building to retrieve the slate. Except the slate wasn’t secure, and as it slipped from its battens, my father lost his footing, falling thirty feet to the pavement below.
His body was shattered, his back broken and he spent the next eight months in a hospital healing, forcing himself to walk again, though he never truly recovered.
My Dad was a demolished man.
Years later, he would recount that there had been no slideshow of life flashing before him, only the presence of mind to land on his feet.
People would thank God, and say it was a miracle my Dad survived.
At the time I wondered why any merciful God would set him on a path to fall in the first place. To my mind, my dads suffering made the almighty fallible, a brat petulantly toying with lives on a whim, all for the sake of being afforded some graciousness for abstaining his hand from an untimely end.
It wasn’t any God I wanted to revere.
Two fathers fell that day.
Dead/Ends is available to order from HERE
