by Tony Spencer
know right here and now that I really couldn't stand the old coot, never had, but when it boiled down to it he was still my Da, after all. I hadn't seen him in years, never really wanted to, but he was always there, always, if I wanted him or not, whether he gave a damn about me or otherwise. I knew there would always be regrets on my side that we parted on such bad terms. I was also sure I'd miss him when he'd finally gone. I braced myself for the worst.
She was an angel, there was no doubt about it. A vision of loveliness in her crisp nurse's uniform. Petite, with golden hair, rather untidily tied into a bun under her little hat, with one long rebellious strand hanging down, like she had dressed hurriedly after leaving her boyfriend's bed, delaying the wrench of departure until the very last millisecond. Well, I certainly wouldn't have kicked her out of bed if it was me. I watched her from the doorway as she glided gracefully round Da's bed, tucking him in and smoothing the bed down. This was a proper nurse, the embodiment of perfection: calm, efficient, caring, as well as effortlessly beautiful. As I said, an angel. I cleared my throat to announce my presence.
She turned and looked at me, her eyebrows arched, her stare enquiring as if to ask what was I doing there at this late hour, daring to stop her from getting on with her essential life-saving work? She looked so familiar, yet different somehow, perhaps an echo of a memory of some Hollywood hospital drama I had seen once? If it was on a rig, no doubt it would have been dubbed into Spanish.
"Thank you for attending my father," I said, adopting my most disarmingly charming voice that I hide most of the time behind gruff four-lettered barks and snarls and only dusted off from time to time when it was useful to be at least temporarily engaging. I added my number one smile to the mix, too and hoped my teeth were at least a degree cleaner than they felt, "I didn't know what to do when the alarm went off and I tried to find someone."
She smiled back. Her fresh-complexioned face was elfin, a few brown freckles speckled the bridge of her button nose and upper cheeks, her even white teeth brilliant above a slightly pointed chin. Her eyes were as blue as the ocean, deep, unfathomably deep. Cute? Oh yes, cute as a button, reminding me of a Cork barmaid, who took me in hand once, must have been almost forty years since, but that's another story that I had never been able to get out of my head.
That beautiful Cork barmaid, who came to mind more and more often as I aged, would now be in her sixties or seventies, of course, and her even cuter daughter in her mid-forties, late-forties maybe. That fair-haired, blue-eyed barmaid had been a lot older than me and had a little girl, I remembered, that she carried half asleep from the one double bed in her single-room apartment and put down on the adjacent armchair.
I was only 17 then, accompanied by shipmates on a 48-hour pass having taken a ferry trip to Cork from Plymouth after completing our Navy basic training. I was the only virgin in the crew, reluctantly admitted by me through a tongue loosened by an unaccustomed consumption of alcohol. To the joy of my equally drunken shipmates I had been ceremoniously delivered to the dockside barmaid who willingly agreed to pop my cherry in exchange for a handful of crumpled fivers collected from a whip round of my amused crewmates.
She popped it well and truly, that Cork barmaid. I would never forget that night or the little girl with the big round blue eyes who watched me like a hawk when I left that single room in the morning, my face scarlet to my hair roots. It wasn't simply that I felt guilt, it was a lot more complicated than that. I couldn't believe how beautiful the woman was, why she was what she was when she could surely have had any man of her choosing. It couldn't all have been beer goggles on my part, I thought. I was confused, hovering between overwhelming elation and acute embarrassment.
And burned forever into my memory was the image of the tiny little girl who sat there looking at me with her pretty little blond head to one side as if to ask if that was as much fun as I thought it was going to be? I know my shipmates had paid for the night but I left more notes on the table as if to salve my guilty conscience as the mother slept on in the half-light of dawn.
Memories, some of them good, some bad, that is all we are left with at the end of the day. That particular memory will stay with me always.
"Frank's resting now," that angelic nurse interrupted my reminiscences in her soft voice with the very slightest hint of an accent. Perhaps I was right about the Cork barmaid? Well, forget it, that was not far short of 40 years ago, this nurse was barely half that age.
She continued insistently, breaking into my continuing thoughts again, "He's been waiting for you to come, Roger. Frank doesn't have very long left."
Roger, she called me Roger, damn it, she had been speaking to Da and knew exactly who I was. She probably knew our history as well as I did but only from his perspective, his slant on why we couldn't stand being in the same room together. That's why she is being so short with me.
"I'm here now, Nurse ...?" I said, looking for a nameplate, she knew my name but I didn't know hers and she didn't appear to be wearing any identification badge.
I held out my hand, she hesitated momentarily before she shook it, her hand was cold. Not surprising really now that the heating had been switched off. It was trying to snow outside as icy sleet rattled against the window, it was absolutely freezing in that unheated hospital and nurses wear such skimpy sleeveless uniforms nowadays.
"Mary," she smiled, "I prefer - just call me Mary. I must go now, I'll be back later if I am needed."
"Thank you."
She left with a quiet swirl of her skirts.
I settled down in the chair, Da was sleeping peacefully and looked like he was set like that for the night, so I snuggled down under a spare blanket left folded at the bottom of Da's bed, and as a result I soon felt snug and warm again and dozed off until dawn. If Mary had looked in during the rest of the night, I wasn't aware of it, but the bag of saline drip looked much fuller than it had been, so she must've quietly changed it without disturbing me.
Hospitals are noisy places at the best of times but they are particularly so first thing in the morning. Shifts change, new nurses appear as if by magic, checking charts and seeing who was still about and assessing any new admissions. Then the processes of washing, changing, feeding and drug administration before the doctors did their rounds. Then it all starts again. I found it exhausting simply sitting watching.
Da stirred when the bustle started and I arose, stretched out the kinks in my back and we shook hands formally, sword arm to sword arm like old adversaries, which we were, and we barely exchanged more than a few terse words before I was bustled out of the door while the nursing staff did whatever private functions they were charged to perform.
I asked to speak to sister Maureen Curran at the nurses' station, but apparently she had come in for most of the night to help with the emergency in A&E and as a consequence wouldn't be back in until much later. The nurses who were present appeared to be short-handed and pre-occupied. I had hoped to thank Maureen for sorting out my pass, but it could wait until I saw her later.
I visited a bathroom to freshen up and then grabbed some breakfast in the hospital coffee bar in the reception area. I didn't really have much of an appetite, I was rather washed out and tired, weary of the life I had been leading and wanting a change but not sure what I wanted or could do, I had been drilling too long and thought I wasn't fit for much else. I was alone and lonely, too. I didn't really have what you could call much of a life, I existed at best.
Coffee, I definitely needed that coffee.
I popped into the nurses' station again on my way back. Both nurses smiled at me, but they were very sad smiles. Just then a porter wheeled a bed past us with an occupant covered by a sheet. For just a moment I thought the worst, then realised the bed came from the opposite end of the corridor from Da's side ward. As the bed passed, the younger of the two young nurses suddenly burst into tears and ran off towards presumably the nurses' toilets. I could understand how attached they must become to their charges. I still wanted to thank the day sis
ter for arranging my pass so efficiently, but neither of them were called Maureen, which I remembered from our conversation only yesterday. Was it only yesterday? It seemed longer ago than that. I asked the remaining nurse and she told me Maureen wouldn't be in today or possibly even the rest of the week. It must've been quite an emergency last night, I thought. Oh well.
When I returned to his ward, Da was sitting up and looking comfortable and alert. We danced around one another, neither of us remotely touching the subject of our relationship. He soon wearied and lapsed into a fitful doze. I relegated myself to the chair again and sat there listening to him breathing and the relentless noises and flashing of the instruments. Sleep wouldn't come for me, though, my body clock was all over the place.
Eventually I rose and got some pretty basic lunch in the café. I sent a text to Ma via my mobile phone, knowing she was asleep and wouldn't read it until tomorrow, tonight, I couldn't really think what time it was right now in Western Australia. At least she would know I was with Da and left it at that. I didn't like to tell her that the end was so close but I knew it was. Then I sent another text to Bobby without expecting an answer, our exchanges of emails were few and far between.