A cherished suede jacket from a father's rock'n'roll past becomes a teenager's prized possession. The jacket's lining disintegrates and the father retires it, prompting a thirteen-year-old to claim and restore it. The narrator and mother reline the jacket with bright blue fabric, reviving its feel and transforming it into a symbol of inherited identity. The jacket endures heavy wear until suede fragments dangle into tea and it is discarded. The narrator routinely takes the father's garments—checked shirt, suit jacket, childhood kilt—and repurposes them into adolescent looks, collecting badges and a provocative Playboy bunny pin as markers of emerging womanhood and subversion.
I loved Dad's old suede jacket. He'd had it for as long as I could remember, an artefact from his more rock'n'roll days, and it had been worn into buttery softness. When the lining finally disintegrated, and the suede thinned to imminent oblivion, he decided to retire it. But I couldn't bear to see it go. I tried it on and felt great like a chip off the old block.
Mum and I picked out some blue fabric, which was incongruously bright, in hindsight. After she relined the jacket for me (a woman of many talents, she papered that wall behind me in the picture, too) it felt as good as new, if not better. What had been part of my dad's identity became mine and I wore it until sections of suede had broken free and started dangling skankily into my tea at which point it was unquestionably deceased.
I had a habit of nicking Dad's clothes, and they often became some of my favourite adolescent looks. The threadbare checked shirt I used as a nightshirt (and decorated by sewing tiny novelty buttons all over it toadstools, pineapples and what-have-you); the suit jacket I took when I got a bit older, and wore as a coat (it wasn't very warm, but who cares when you're a teenager?); the pleated, heavy-wool kilt from when he was a small boy that I wore as a miniskirt.
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