My Boy!

This essay first appeared in Metro magazine back in 2002. On Labour Weekend 2017, it was given a second run when Radio New Zealand featured it as one of their ‘Good reads for the long weekend’. To hear Dad talked of again (between 06:30-12:30 in the clip) was magical and made him feel very present again. I loved that. But back to the story of My Boy.

What happens when you learn your father is dying of cancer. Peter Malcouronne went on a voyage of discovery with his remarkable father, Brian.

June 1998

Dad wanted to meet me at university. There was nothing noteworthy about this: he liked to hang out with his sons on their turf, coming in on his 450cc Honda, often in his leathers, sometimes with a spare crash helmet strapped to the seat. Once, when a funeral service he’d taken ran late, he turned up in his cassock.

We’d usually meet in the Lower Café, a dark, smoke-choked grotto I didn’t like much. But Dad didn’t see the mountains of Marlboro butts, the abandoned nachos caught in curdled cheese, the coffee dribbling out of split styrofoam cups, mopped up with a discarded Craccum editorial. “Atmosphere, my boy,” he used to say. “This place has soul!”

He’d been a student here in the late seventies, completed a history degree…