I remember the smell of diesel before I remember my father’s face.
It clung to his jackets, his hands, even the steering wheel of the lorry he drove for twenty-three years. When I was small, I thought that smell was what made a man a man; oil, metal, long roads.
But that’s not where this begins.
It begins with a hospital room in March, curtains half drawn, machines humming like distant traffic. My father is smaller than I remember. Or maybe I am finally seeing him without the height I gave him as a child.
“Jimmy,” he says, voice paper-thin. He hasn’t called me that in years.
I hold his hand. It feels unfamiliar. Not weak, just… quieter.
Summer, 1998.
I am eight and furious because he missed my school play. I was Tree Number Three. Important role. I had one line: “Winter is coming.”
He promised he’d be there.
He wasn’t.
Mum said the delivery ran late. I didn’t understand deliveries. I understood empty seats. That night I told him I hated lorries.
He didn’t shout. He just nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. Like I’d made a reasonable point.
Back to the hospital.
The nurse asks if we need tea. I say yes, though I won’t drink it. My father’s eyes follow the ceiling tiles like they are maps.
“Did you ever like it?” I ask suddenly.
“Like what?”
“The road.”
He smiles, barely. “No one likes the road. They like what it feeds.”
I write that down later. I don’t know why. Maybe because it explains more than he meant it to.
Autumn, 2007.