This piece was first published in issue twenty-eight. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

I can safely say, without bias or delusion, that Derek Abraham is The Greatest Storyteller That Ever Lived, but I rarely address him with that title. He just so happens to be my grandfather and, for the most part, he is ‘Bamp.’

Every overnight stay was the same. Like clockwork, Bamp would tuck me in and bring fictional worlds to life with the ease of a magician. Removing a North American map from beneath the bed, he’d describe the types of wolves that can be found on different mountain ranges, or tell me which Greyhound bus route was the most efficient, or recommend a certain New York pizza parlour in case I ever found myself in the neighbourhood. I never tired of hearing about that single slice, wrapped in sugar paper and shared with a beautiful woman, because he described it with such technicolour wonder.

There were darker stories too, told in whispers over the hiss of the kettle. There’s the pair of dark hands presenting vending machine food through a slot in the wall before retreating into darkness, with Jim Crow laws only recently abolished. There’s the dinner he threw in the bin when JFK’s head shattered on the six o’clock news, and then there’s Bamp’s refusal to sit through MTV reruns of Michael Jackson’s Earth Song. He could never watch the part where the seal gets clubbed to death, staining the white snow red. He claims to have known the man with the bat once on an Alaskan winter. I have no way of verifying this, but I find pictures of men draped in carcasses in boxes under the bed. He shudders at the sight.

I brought figurines carved for him by members of an Inuit community to every primary school show-and-tell, and as a teenager I referred to him as my very own Kerouac. Yet in some ways I took his tales for granted. I appreciated them, but saw them as a constant in my life. I never expected them to vanish.

. . .

One day, as we were sitting across from each other at the dining room table, Bamp’s face dropped on one side. Everything changed, and The Greatest Storyteller Who Ever Lived could no longer formulate sentences. I buried myself in the medical literature on vascular dementia, but no clinical explanation could lessen the blow of watching his armchair grow vacant. With each visit, he sinks further into himself, and when I am alone I sit on the floor and stare at his suits, standing tauntingly upright in the wardrobe. They are waiting patiently to be filled with limbs and taken dancing. I am waiting for a miracle.

I so often used to find him concealed in unexpected places, a patient pawn in my endless rounds of hide and seek. When I close my eyes, I see him crouched behind trees or cocooned in curtains. I long to find him in the folds again.

When I visit, my hands shake in retaliation. The nurse pours lukewarm milk into beakers made for toddlers’ mouths and this angers me because he deserves a chalice.

. . .

There are things I will never know, but I am grateful for the things I do.

I know that Bamp survived the Second World War on feet that were bloodied and bare. I know he trudged to school in the snow in a tattered coat passed down via several brothers. When his father clutched his chest and fell to the floor with a thud that shook the whole house, Derek grew resourceful quickly. He diluted the cabbage broth thrice and gulped it down like holy water, and he never turned down a job.

I know he decided that life is a series of beautiful coincidences while swimming in the Suez Canal on army duty in Egypt, when he recognised a friend from primary school on the other side of the water. I know he left the army because he was a pacifist to the bone, and that he later boarded a bus from South Wales to Seattle with just a few dollars in his pocket. I know he worked as a carpet cleaner in the Empire State building, as a TV salesman, and as a miner in Alaska.

I know that one of his fellow miners took a shotgun and blew a hole in their roof one night. Immortalised in a grainy shot, the man wears nothing but soiled underpants and a maniacal grin. The mine later collapsed, and Bamp was airlifted to a hospital after six hours in darkness. I know he lost a friend that day, but I will never know which man in the photo it was, because I never asked. Perhaps he is smiling in the foreground, or hidden at the back. Perhaps he’s not in the picture at all.

I know Bamp was a womaniser who lost entire afternoons to skinny-dipping sessions. I know he was engaged to a Cypriot woman with the only pair of eyes to come close to rivalling my grandmother’s baby blues. I know he grew into a family man, that he never strayed from Diane after stealing her away from a man called David Sweet, whose temperament was as saccharine as his surname. I know they were entwined as if nothing had changed on their anniversary fifty years later, sharing cake with a plastic fork.

I know he lives on in my boundless curiosity. He’s there in the urge to stick my head out of a moving car and scream at the top of my lungs. He was there when I decided that flinging myself off a cliff was a good idea, because his legs can no longer bend and I intend to use mine in every way I can. He was there when I limped through an education that meant nothing to me towards the end, because he once received twenty lashes for being late.

I am still waiting for my own Greyhound bus to arrive, and I know the Greatest Storyteller That Ever Lived will be sat beside me for the entire journey when it does.

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