As good as it got

In the summer of 1991, on the night before I travelled to the US for the first time, my father expressed his regret that we hadn't managed to have a drink together. By that time the pubs were closed so it was too late to go, but it was a major concession on my father's part.

You see, we drank in very different bars, my father and I. He had abandoned his favourite drinking spot, the County Bar in Rialto, after it was desecrated by the addition of carpets. My father, being a socialist, a trade unionist and a fan of horse racing, had an ingrained suspicion of public houses with carpet on the floor. I, on the other hand, had no difficulty with carpets, or comfortable stools, or toilet floors that didn't soak my suede boots or the ends of my jeans with overflow. Our paths, therefore, tended not to cross in bars.

That was in June, and we never did get to have that drink together. I went away to the US and when I came back in September my father was dying. The illness that was taking his life had altered his appearance so dramatically that I had to check the names on the ends of the beds in the ward before I could find him.

I had brought him back a cardigan, which he never got to wear, and a book, which he never got to read. (It was The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew and had no writing in it, but I thought he might appreciate the joke.) I used to wheel him down to the toilets so he could smoke a crafty cigarette after it was explained to him that lighting up beside his oxygen tank was not something with which the hospital authorities, or his fellow patients, were entirely comfortable. I think I had about three weeks with him before he died, during which he was lucid for no more than a few days.

But all of that came later. That evening, it didn't bother me so much that my father and I had missed an opportunity for a drink together, because I was 23, I could drink as much as I wanted in an American bar, and I was leaving for Delaware the next morning.

I didn't stay in Delaware for very long. (Anybody who has ever been to Delaware, proud home of the du Pont chemical corporation, will probably understand why.) I departed my place of employment after my boss, a 70-year-old woman, stabbed me in the arm with a fruit knife. I think she'd just forgotten that she was holding the knife, as some 70-year-olds will do, but I still decided that it was time to leave before I became a statistic, my grave an object of gruesome pilgrimage for fans of homicide.

I fled north to a luxury hotel called the Black Point Inn at Prouts Neck, an area formerly home to the painter Winslow Homer and part of the coastal region of Scarborough, Maine. Eight years after my first visit, I would publish the first of a series of books inspired, at least in part, by Scarborough. I grew to love its salt marshes, its coastline and, within cycling distance to the north, the small city of Portland. I even grew to love - in a strictly non-sexual way, of course - the policemen who lurked by the roadside in an effort to apprehend speeding motorists and unwelcome poor people, poor people having no place in Prouts Neck unless they were being paid by the hour. (I still return to Maine each year, but I have never yet stayed in the Black Point Inn. I can't afford it. If I ever have children, I don't want to have to tell them that daddy blew their inheritance on a couple of nights in a hotel.)

That summer in Prouts Neck I learned, among other things, that the rich really are different. In August, the governor of the state announced the evacuation of the coast because of an impending hurricane. Buses were laid on to take away the evacuees, but the guests at the Black Point Inn were made of sterner stuff. The majority insisted on staying and the only real concession made to the elements was the application of black adhesive tape to the windows, so that we would not be shredded by flying glass when they eventually caved in.

In addition the waiting staff were permitted, for one night only, to dispense with their usual bow ties. How this might assist us in the event of the building being torn apart by the hurricane was unclear, unless the management was concerned that our bow ties might catch on a piece of hotel property as the high winds swept us away, thereby causing us to choke and leaving the hotel open to potentially ruinous lawsuits by our next-of-kin.

That night, I sat on the edge of the cliffs at Prouts Neck and watched the waves pummel Crescent Beach and Old Orchard. I wasn't afraid of being swept away. I was immortal, as all young men are.

Meanwhile, my father was having difficulty sleeping because of pains in his back. He was being treated for a trapped nerve, despite the fact that he was dying of cancer. This might explain why he didn't seem to get any better.

Actually, I suspect my father already knew that he had cancer; I don't believe that the body allows rogue cells to colonise its lungs, its spine and its brain without sending a message to the mind that something is terribly wrong. Still, my father elected not to tell anybody, partly because he didn't want people worrying but also, I think, because if he chose not to admit it then it might not be true. Unfortunately, this ranked alongside soluble painkillers, my father's other preferred treatment option, as an effective way of combating the disease.

I was in New York, walking with a friend in Central Park, on the day I finally learned that he was dying. I made the call home from a bank of pay phones close by the statue of Alice in Wonderland. Afterwards, instead of raging and tearing my hair out, I went to a performance by the magicians Penn and Teller, who specialised in undermining other magicians by explaining to the audience how their illusions were performed. In essence, they took the mystery out of magic: there was no enigma, just sleight of hand, trickery, and people's desire to believe that, somehow, miracles beyond nature might be possible. It seemed kind of apt. That night I lost my jacket, but I found it again. As far as miracles went, that was as good as it got for the next few weeks. I went home the next day.

A few nights before he died, my father spent an hour drawing a map of the hospital on the back of a cigarette packet, so he'd know where he was going when they eventually let him out of the ward. The irony of attempting to plot his escape on materials salvaged from the very things that were killing him escaped him, but you had to admire him for trying.

My father passed away on October 8th, 1991, at the age of 62. I have only visited his grave once since then, because I don't get any sense of him there. He is somewhere else, probably complaining about the new carpets and trying to find out the winner of the 3.30 at Kempton.

I think my father would be surprised that I am making a living from writing fiction; not unhappy, and certainly proud, but just a little taken aback. He was a clever, educated man, an idealistic realist (or realistic idealist) who worked for Dublin Corporation all his life, but for him writing fiction would have been on a par with pavement art and busking as a reliable way of earning a crust. He always hated being proved wrong, so maybe it was for that reason that I dedicated a book to him.

I did it partly because I loved him.

But, mostly, I did it to annoy him.

John Connolly's second novel, Dark Hollow, will be published in paperback in September by Hodder & Stoughton (£5.99). His third novel, The Killing Kind, will be published early next year