by Tony Spencer
We didn't get on, never had, never even lived together. Bobby was too much like his mother and I didn't have a clue what I ever saw in her in the first place. Well, OK I did initially I guess, she was once a very attractive woman. Whatever the attraction was it wore off pretty damn quick but by then Bobby was on his way and I was trapped like petroleum under an anticline. I was still in the Royal Navy at the time we married and the long separations that entailed did little to maintain any semblance of a normal marriage to Jeanie.
Da was asleep by the time I got back to his bedside. I sat with him for a few hours until early afternoon, then got up again and went outside for a walk in the fresh air. It was more than fresh, it was bitterly cold out, with a stiff breeze running and trying hard to snow once more. I wasn't really dressed to be outside in England in late winter, but I couldn't stay cooped up in that hospital one minute longer. Still the cold made me walk briskly and I did warm up, eventually.
Da was awake and they were serving up his evening meal when I got back. It actually smelt good, it was a long time since I'd had a traditional British meat-and-two-veg dinner, with treacle sponge pudding and custard for afters. I was accustomed to one-pot meals on my current job, usually heavily over-spiced and with ingredients best described as anonymous.
He needed help with eating the meal, the last stroke had paralysed him down his left side and he needed his meat and veg cut up, just like he used to do for me when I was a toddler. Well, he may have done it once or twice, Ma did it most of the time while he was at work, as usual, then she was gone for good and I pretty well looked after myself.
He actually smiled, rather lopsidedly due to his stroke, while I cut his food up. Maybe he was thinking the same thoughts as I was but we hardly exchanged a word during his meal. We had nothing we had ready prepared to say to one another, even to make a start to cross those tentative thread-thin rope-walk bridges which had kept us apart for so long. To express in words what had been repressed for so many decades would have contained too much invective, inflicting too much agony. So we each lapsed into uneasy silence. He didn't eat much, just played around with it. I remembered but didn't say anything about how he used to chide me for playing fork-hockey with my sprouts when I was a kid.
After his tray was removed Da slept again. Shifts changed and the big black nurse who could hardly speak or understand a word of English popped her huge head in and looked at the charts. I tried to engage her in conversation to find out what she thought and asked if Mary was on tonight but couldn't get through to her and she couldn't reciprocate either, so we both gave up the pointless exercise.
Communicating with women clearly wasn't my forte, I discovered long ago. A spectacularly failed marriage does that to you.
I went off site with my luggage during the evening and found a pretty basic hotel room within easy walking distance and booked it for a week. I left my light travelling case there and had a shower, changed into clean clothes and enjoyed a half decent meal before heading back to the hospital. It was really bitterly cold outside and I desperately needed to buy a winter coat, I would do that in the morning when the stores were open again. They knew me in the hospital Reception by now without me needing to wave my temporary pass and welcomed me in with a smile.
Da was comfortably sleeping. I dozed too in the stifling warmth as the heating hadn't gone off yet. I had bought a hardback book to read from a help-yourself charity bookshelf in the lobby, but it failed to hold my interest for long.
I heard the rustle and there she was again, Mary the beautiful night nurse, quietly ministering to Da, checking him over. I didn't think she knew I was even there because when she had finished all her checks she stood by the bed looking down on him, a loving smile on her face in profile as she gently stroked his cheek with the tips of her delicate fingers.
I closed my eyes and twitched, then stretched with a groan and reopened my eyes, pretending to see Mary for the first time this evening. She had turned her head and was looking at me with a stern look on her face. Bloody hell, I thought as I tossed the blanket to one side and got up, it must be gone midnight already and the damn heating's gone off again!
"Hello, Mary," I said, "How is he?"
"As well as could be expected in the circumstances," she replied frostily, the temperature in the room had certainly gone down more than a touch and I was certain it wasn't all down to the timing switch and virtually non-existent thermal insulation of the building. She continued, "You haven't spoken to Frank yet, have you, Roger?"
"No, not yet," I admitted lamely, chastened by her justified admonishment, "I was waiting for the right time."
"There is no time to wait for your convenience, you must talk to him now or it'll be too late for either of you to get the peace of mind that you both need. You owe this to each other,” she shook her head in frustration. “You're both so stubborn, both to blame for this."
"I know, I know," I protested, I never reacted well to criticism, even more so when I knew I was completely in the wrong and she was so correct. Whenever I stayed with Ma and Cliff, she used to tell me off the very same way. I could live with it when I was thousands of miles away from Da and felt Ma could take her share of the blame for the state of the relationship between my father and I. Here and now, though, with Da lying right there and on his last legs and this dedicated angel telling me what I clearly already knew, I felt backed into a corner with nowhere else to go.
"Well, it's time you turned that knowledge into action."
"As soon as he wakes," I promised. I really meant it.
She actually smiled, beautifully. "I've just given him something to help him sleep, so you might as well go home and get some sleep yourself. Come back in the morning, Roger, and speak to him, please make a peace between you."
Well, long story short, I did and Da did. It was after I got back to his ward in the morning after a restful night in the hotel, at least they had the options of air conditioning or heating, which I kept on as high a temperature as possible all night. I slept surprisingly soundly. We spoke all morning, Da and me. I apologised to him for being such an argumentative teenager, for blaming him for Ma going and for not being interested in his business and my leaving things unsaid for so long because I was so stubborn. He replied that he was sorry he had been so tied up in his work. He admitted that my face had reminded him, every time he looked at me, of my mother Glynis and he felt on reflection that he had unconsciously pushed me away from him during much of my childhood. I guess I had never taken his point of view into account. So, while I blamed him for my crappy childhood, he was blaming me for ruining his middle years.
Families! All we had needed to say to each other was sorry, and we could have both benefited from being without those last fifty years of heartache.
Da asked about my son Bobby. My ex-wife Jeanie, he told me, had come to see him about a couple of months earlier and wanted to ask him for more money to help "poor Bobby", whose restaurant needed a fresh injection of cash. I told him that his place out in that provincial prairie city needed more than just an injection, it needed life support. I had gone through there two or three years earlier, on a stop-over on my way to troubleshoot an Alaskan rig, and the place was empty of a lunchtime, surrounded as it was by packed burger and sandwich cafés. There was really no market in that city for a seafood restaurant that only stocked and served frozen fish. The partner in the business, Jonathan, was the chef, Bobby the floor manager. I would be surprised, I said, if the partner was still there. According to Jeanie, Da said, he was. Da didn't spare her any shrift, though, Da had been getting regular financial reports from Bobby and Da sure knows how to read a balance sheet.
Bobby's just like us, son, Da said, too stubborn to give in even when the odds are heavily stacked against him. I said no, we were not all alike, Bobby and I were both failures, Da's business, the garage, had been the only one that had succeeded. Me?, I was sliding down the oilmen merit table, I had become a sleeves-rolled-up check-shirt dinosaur in a world of sharp-suited loung
e lizards.
He grinned that lop-sided smile that his stroke had developed and told me that he had gone bankrupt twice before the garage finally took off, and that it was the least likely of the three businesses he started up to actually make it. That's why he had to work so hard, he said, he had almost lost everything, and certainly lost Glynis and me for long periods, in the process. Well, I said, I'm back now and giving up the oil game for good, although I wasn't sure what I was going to do with myself.
The garage is "Bird & Son Motors", he said, it is virtually all yours to run if you want it. I had to admit that I thought he'd got rid of the place years before when he retired. No, he'd had a succession of managers in charge and it had been ticking over reasonably well for years. It was still a sound business that would improve with some fresh blood at the top. Perhaps Bobby will come around to it sometime he thought, in the meantime it would keep me as busy as I wanted to be for at least a decade or so. We laughed about that. His Last Will & Testament was up to date, he said, just a few little surprises for me to deal with, that he didn't want to elaborate on, but nothing major that I would have any problem coping with. Bobby would get a share of some