My father always asked about quiche. It annoyed me, at the time.
He turned up, once, in the middle of the night. Unannounced, a confusion of amber lights from the breakdown recovery vehicle flashing in the hallway. “Hullo”, he said, as I stared out from behind the door.
The next day we went into town, this stranger and me. “What would you like?” At the counter. “Quiche.” I replied. He laughed, a proper Cockney belly laugh. “You like quiche do you?!” The smile creasing his eyes into wrinkles in the corners. I hated being laughed at. I didn't see what was funny. The laugh turned into a smoker’s cough, as all his laughs did.
Over the years, a few disjointed phone calls, the space between each longer than the space between the last.
I would stand awkwardly, the phone to my ear, squirming, while he persevered with questions. Always the same:
"So have you got a boyfriend"
I would scrunch my face up, breath held tight in my throat - annoyed by this stranger’s invasion into my privacy.
“No.”
A short silence.
“Do you still like quiche?” The sing-song of amusement in his voice.
It always came back to this question about quiche. I hadn't even liked it that much in the first place, and now, here it was, apparently forming some part of my identity. I would sigh a breath of indignation down the phone as my answer.
A decade passed, the calls stopped. The next time his number flashed up on my phone, there was someone else’s voice at the end, a message delivered, and I found myself arranging a funeral for this man, who would now be a stranger forever.
At the service I was piled high with stories by his friends: told tales of a maverick, a sharp-dressing ladies’ man with a mischievous sense of humour and roguish disregard for rules. An “anarchist with a good heart” said the eulogy, with a trilby hat and silk scarf as his signature style.
I was told of legendary bar brawls, weeks-long disappearances, and short stints in prison for petty crimes - mostly refusal to pay speeding fines. Sure enough, there in his briefcase, while closing his accounts, we found an unpaid speeding fine - the grainy photo on the court order just about showing the outline of his trilby hat in the car as it sped past the camera. This court order a keepsake, a memory, in the briefcase that I now owned.
After snapping the briefcase clasps closed for the last time, I found myself on the floor, scribbling down all the things I could remember about this person, my dad. Every memory I could muster filled less than two sides of a page. Not much. That's not much.
And I realised, then, that he would have known as little about me as I did about him. He didn’t know if I did have a boyfriend. He didn’t know where I worked, what I did. Where I had travelled, what books I had read, what music I liked. He didn’t know where I lived, what I looked like, whether or not I still had his eyes.
One of the few things he had known, back then, was that I liked quiche. And that, he held on to, and remembered, and asked, every time we spoke.