by Pat Barker
Nick became a spectacularly devious child. Every second of every day was supervised by Da-Sir or Mu-Matron; the only privacy was inside his head. He lied automatically all the time about everything. Once when he was a teenager his mother came into his bedroom and asked him what he was reading. Kidnapped, he said, quick as a flash, pushing Treasure Island out of sight under his pillow. But lying, he soon realized, wasn’t enough. However good you were, you made mistakes. You had to be two people, one in each world, and in each world you had to forget the responses of the other.
Only Grandad, silent, wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, never changed; belonged only to one world.
His face, yellow against the white cloth of the pillows, doesn’t change much now either, though fugitive expressions pass across it rather like the mouthings of newborn babies, reactions generally to what’s going on in their guts. His are like that too, his whole attention focused inwards on managing the pain. A white line runs from his temple to the centre of his cheek, an old wound, as much a part of him now as the colour of his eyes. It’s difficult to believe he wasn’t born with it, though he’d lived the first eighteen years of his life without it. Another inch to the left and it would have taken out the eye.
Nick wonders whether he should go now, or at least walk along to the visitors’ café and have a cup of coffee, give Grandad a break, but he no sooner stands up with this in mind than Grandad says, ‘Don’t go.’ It’s the first sign he’s shown in the last ten minutes that he’s aware of Nick’s presence.
‘Where’s the pain?’ Nick says.
‘Down there. Like always wanting to shit.’
‘Do they give you injections?’
‘Just pills.’ He rouses himself slightly. ‘Do you know they shaved me legs as well?’ He hoists himself up the bed. ‘I says, “What you shaving them for?” It was Ian. He says, “Don’t blame me. Sister’s a navel-to-knee woman. You lose your bush round here if you’re having your tonsils out.” ’
The groin is hairless, infantile. He doesn’t seem to mind, but perhaps he does, it’s difficult to tell.
‘That bloody grub’s on its way through,’ he says.
‘Do you want the bedpan?’ Nick looks around for the bell.
‘No, I bloody don’t, I’ve had enough of that. How can anybody shit lying on their back?’
‘You’re not on your back.’
‘Good as. I’ll go to the toilet.’
He looks daunted, though, even as he says it. For so many years now there’s been something almost miraculous about his body, the erect carriage – he has no arthritis – none – the eyes that still see, perfectly, the ears that still hear, perfectly – all this combined with an almost transparent thinness, a lightness, as if the next puff of wind would blow him away. He has seemed to be as fragile and indestructible as thistledown.
They make the journey to the bathroom in slow stages. So much effort to get to the side of the bed, so much to push the red, shiny, scaly legs and feet into the slippers which Nick places ready for him. Then a rest before the slow shuffle along the ward, Nick at his rear bunching up the smock behind him like a bridesmaid holding up the bride’s train, concealing Grandad’s lean and pleated arse from the gaze of passing nancies. Ian in particular, though Ian rubs surgical spirit into it twice a day and hasn’t been carried away by passion yet.
At last they make it to the loo. A cool gush of water from the next cubicle as Nick lowers Geordie on to the seat and retreats a few tactful steps to the standups, where he pees and then stares at himself in the mirror, listening to the grunts of effort and pain from the cubicle behind him.
Another mirror, this time belonging to Grandad, a looking-glass made of steel, a hole punched through one end with a length of khaki ribbon threaded through. It hung on a hook in the corner of the bathroom where he kept his shaving things. Whenever Nick asked, Geordie took it down and let him look into it, but the reflection that peered back at him was blurry, swollen, distorted by the irregularities in the metal, never the clear reflection you got in glass. Only it didn’t break. Grandad dropped it on the floor once, to show that it didn’t break.
The mirror had gone with him through France, but it couldn’t have been sentiment that bound him to it, for he avoided everything else to do with the war. Never spoke of it. Would walk a mile out of his way to avoid passing the war memorial. And yet every morning of his life he shaved using that mirror, the same he’d propped up against sandbags in France, had brought back across the Channel when he was wounded and taken out with him again. He would watch Nick looking at himself. ‘It’s funny, Grandad,’ Nick would say, pulling faces to distort his reflection still further. Geordie said nothing, just waited patiently, and then when Nick had finished hung the mirror back on the hook.
He said very little. With Nick’s father he was deferential in that curiously English way, though Nick sensed that beneath the surface respect there was a certain degree of contempt. ‘A man among boys, a boy among men.’ Whether Geordie knew the phrase or not, that had been his verdict. Though at the same time he was pleased that his Mollie, by marrying a schoolmaster, had taken several crucial steps up in the world. He was careful to mind his p’s and q’s whenever his son-in-law was around. Literally. He was uncomfortable with his own way of speaking, the local accent, the stammer, his inability to articulate. The stammer was bad in those years. There were times when he seemed to be hoiking up words like phlegm, raking them out of his gut.
But the silence went deeper than that. His body, stripped off in the garden – the wound in his side – suggested questions. Why? How? What happened? Nick would ask, but there were no answers. The past was hidden, veiled in silence, like his grandfather’s head behind its screen of cigarette smoke.
‘You know it’s cancer?’
‘Yes. Dr Morton told me.’
Neil Shepherd’s in his early fifties. His face is grey in the grey light falling through the tall windows to the right of his desk. The growling and gurgling from the pipes that run along the wall behind him suggest ominous possibilities, but not as ominous as the state of Geordie’s intestines.
‘I’m afraid it’s spread beyond the stomach. It wouldn’t be operable even in a much younger man. I’m sorry.’
‘Yes,’ Nick says. ‘That’s more or less what I expected.’
A pause. ‘How would you describe his state of mind?’
‘Seems fairly cheerful.’
‘Clear, mentally?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He said something the other day that seemed to imply he thought the pain was coming from his bayonet wound.’
‘He’s said that to me too.’
‘But he must know it isn’t true.’
Nick hesitates. ‘When he came back from the war they had a memorial service for his brother, who was killed. And as they were leaving the church his mother, my great-grandmother, turned to him and said, “It should have been you.”’ He sees Shepherd wince. ‘I think he needs to believe it’s the bayonet wound that’s killing him. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I don’t think it’s just confusion or ignorance. He wants to believe it.’
‘Even after all this time?’
Nick pulls a face. ‘He seems to be getting closer to it, if anything. The nightmares are back.’
‘Yes, he’s very restless at night. Are you sure Mrs – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.’
‘Mrs Wilson. His daughter. My aunt.’
‘Do you think she can cope?’
‘Well, she won’t be coping on her own. I don’t think there’s any question of putting him in a home.’ He pauses. ‘How long do –’
Shepherd’s already shaking his head. ‘It really is impossible to say.’
‘Educated guess?’
Another shake of the head. ‘A few months, at most. Frankly, he could go any time.’
Well, yes, Nick thinks, going back to the ward, but at the age of 101 that’s true even without the cancer.
Auntie
Frieda’s by the bed when he gets back, sitting in the plastic chair, nursing her handbag as if she suspects somebody of planning to steal it, and running her tongue round the front of her dentures as if she thinks they might have a crack at those as well. She looks disgruntled and virtuous and mildly critical, darting fierce little assessing glances round the ward.
Nick bends down and kisses her cheek, feeling how much more loosely the skin hangs from the bone than it did even a week ago. She should be resting, trying to get her strength back after the last two months of virtually round-the-clock care. Shepherd’s right. She can’t possibly cope on her own. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, not so bad.’
Her eyes are red-rimmed, from crying perhaps. She nods at the bed curtains. ‘I was just saying to your grandad, I don’t dislike that shade of beige.’
Nick turns aside to hide his amusement. Auntie Frieda’s enthusiasms are always couched in these negative terms: ‘I wouldn’t mind…’ ‘I don’t dislike…’ ‘I can’t say I object…’ He sometimes wonders whether her marriage remained childless because Uncle Wilf never felt sufficiently encouraged to persevere.
Grandad’s back on the bed, scaly red shins peeping from below the hem of the smock.
‘I’m dying for a fag,’ he says, unconsciously echoing the government’s latest anti-smoking campaign. ‘It’s bloody torture, this is.’ He sets up a great grumble about the hospital’s no-smoking policy, designed, Nick suspects, to deter him from too great frankness about whatever the doctor might have said. His clever grandson’s talked to the doctor and sorted things out and he doesn’t want to know about it, thank you very much – that seems to be the message.
‘You could go to the day room if you leant on me,’ Nick says.
He sees Geordie weighing the pain of the long journey against the delights of a cigarette when he gets there. ‘Aye, ho way.’
‘I don’t know,’ Auntie Frieda says. ‘You’re as bad as each other. You egg each other on.’
This is said in her ‘all men are children really’ tone. Nick can see Geordie being exasperated by it, but also, secretly, liking it – as he does himself.
‘I’m on if you are,’ Nick says.
The old man might have changed his mind after the pain of standing upright, but he grits his teeth and hangs on. Leaning heavily on Nick, shuffling along in his scuffed slippers, gasping for breath, he’s made it down the corridor, Frieda bringing up the rear with a blanket for him to sit on, and the longed-for cigarettes.
They sit at a little table with a heaped-up ash tray. A quiz show’s playing on television, blurred contestants against an improbably orange backdrop, but the day room’s empty except for a woman in a pink quilted dressing-gown with a shaved patch on her head, who sits at another table chain-smoking and staring blank-eyed at the screen.
‘Are you going to have one?’ Geordie asks Nick.
‘Yeah, I’ll join you,’ Nick says.
Geordie lights up, closing his eyes as he inhales. ‘Puts me back behind the bike shed, this does. Do you know I’ve gone a bit dizzy?’
A disgusted tsk from Frieda.
‘So what did he have to say, then?’ Grandad asks, fortified by his second drag.
‘Not a lot.’ Nick’s feeling his way.
‘Did he say when I can go home?’
‘No.’
Nick hears Auntie Frieda’s caught-in sigh of relief. She can’t cope, he thinks again. It’s asking too much. Grandad thinks of her as a young woman still. She’s his daughter, after all – how can she not be young? He doesn’t seem to see the reality of a woman in her seventies in failing health.
‘Did he mention the bayonet wound?’ Geordie asks.
‘He did, yes, well he mentioned it.’
‘I told him that’s what it was,’ he says, turning to Frieda, triumphant. ‘I said that’s what it was, didn’t I?’
What’s it all about, Nick wonders. The wound’s given him no trouble for eighty years, why on earth should he suppose it’s started playing up now? But it’s not just the wound that’s moved into the forefront of his mind. For years he’s been free of nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations, all the dreadful baggage he brought back with him from France, yet in the last few months they’ve returned. His nights, recently, have been terrible to endure. Terrible to witness. Worse than that, he’s actually become quite dangerous. Auntie Frieda’s been mistaken for a German soldier more than once.
Geordie’s finding the hard seat and the upright posture more and more uncomfortable. He drags impatiently at his second cigarette, no longer enjoying it, just stocking up for the famine ahead.
‘That’s enough,’ Frieda says. ‘It’s time you were back in bed.’
He doesn’t argue, but stands up at once.
‘Are you coming back later?’ he asks Frieda, on their slow progress back to the ward.
‘Not tonight,’ Nick says, before she can answer. ‘I’ll look in again before I go.’
They get him back into bed and settled under the sheet. He eases himself right down, his sparse grey hair rucked up by the pillows, and lies flat at last. His hands flap like fish along the counterpane, unhappy with the hospital tightness of the sheets around him. He wants to pull the eiderdown up to his chin, and burrow down into the warmth the way he does at home. ‘Dress rehearsal for a bloody coffin,’ he complains.
‘Why don’t you try to sleep?’ Nick says, bending down to give him a hug.
The pale blue eyes fasten on his face. He’s disconcerted by their sharpness, their awareness of the unintended irony of his suggestion.
‘I’ll sleep soon enough.’
When they reach the end of the ward and turn to look back, he lifts his hand in a gesture that’s almost more a salute than a wave.
SIX
‘Trouble is, he thinks I should be there all the time,’ Frieda says, as they walk back to the car. ‘I don’t think he realizes what an awkward journey it is. I have to change buses twice.’
She’s enjoying her grumble, but Nick knows he mustn’t make the mistake of agreeing with her, because that will put her back into defensive mode. The wheel’s turned full circle. Grandad’s her baby now.
He unlocks the car door on her side, and sees her seat belt fastened before he turns the key in the ignition. There’s a smell of wood smoke in the air. Autumn with its pre-packaged nostalgia is just around the corner. He feels a passionate desire to cling on to the last of the summer. He won’t spend tomorrow covering up the wall painting, he decides; he’ll take Fran and the kids out somewhere instead, and then finds himself yawning. He feels too tired to concentrate on anything.
‘Perhaps if you told him what time to expect you? Then he’ll know how long he’s got to wait.’
‘Hm,’ Frieda says, unconvinced. She doesn’t want to be rescued. But she can relax in the car, doesn’t have to wait at that draughty bus shelter they’re just passing, full of women like herself with pinched faces, belts knotted tightly round non-existent waists, clutching plastic bags full of dirty nightdresses and pyjamas, looking up the road for a bus that doesn’t come.
‘You look tired,’ Nick says.
‘I haven’t been sleeping. Can’t sleep. When I was up and down to him all the time I used to think, Oh, if only I could have a good night’s sleep, but you see, I’m still listening for him. I was convinced last night I heard him get up and go out.’
Grandad’s taken to wandering. Or going out on patrol. One or the other.
The car heater’s making Nick drowsy. He opens the window on his side and a few spots of cold rain blow on to his face.
‘You know that thing they’ve got him in?’
‘What thing?’
‘You know, the white thing.’
‘The smock?’
‘Yes. Do they put you in that if they know you’re not going to get better?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It just makes bathing them easier. They don’t have to pull them about so much.’
‘On
ly I thought it might be easier for them to lay you out.’
She knows it’s cancer, but she belongs to a generation that can hardly bring itself to say the word. ‘The big C’ was as far as he’d ever heard her go to naming it, and that was explaining the death of a woman at the bottom of the street, a woman she hardly knew. How many of the reassuring things she says to Grandad does she believe herself, and does he believe them? Is anybody saying what they think? When he next looks at her she’s fallen asleep, hanging from the seat belt like a toddler from its harness. He concentrates on braking smoothly, and manages in this way to safeguard her sleep until they bump once, twice, over the sleeping policemen in the street outside her house. She blinks like an old tortoise, sits up straight, clasps her handbag with both hands, runs her tongue round her front teeth, pretends she has never not been awake.
‘Do the sleeping policemen work?’ he asks, as she fumbles her front-door key in the lock.
‘Do they heck as like. You’d think it was the dodgems round here.’
Inside, it’s a matter of moments only to light the gas fire and put the kettle on. She comes back, unwrapping her scarf, to find him sitting in one of the armchairs staring at the regular blue buds of flame. ‘I thought we’d just have a sandwich,’ she says. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Fine.’
While she’s making them, he looks round the room at the photographs. Nick’s mother and Auntie Frieda as children, himself in his graduation gown, Miranda at various stages of development from newborn baby onwards. The photographs of Miranda stop abruptly at the time of the divorce. He must bring her some more up-to-date ones, he thinks, but then he’s hurt because several of the early photographs are of Barbara and Miranda together, but there are none of Fran and Jasper. When he first asked if he could bring Fran to see her, Frieda had said, ‘Leave it a bit, Nick. You know I’m mebbe a bit old-fashioned.’ It had spread to include even Jasper. She always asks after him, but it’s never ‘How’s my bairn?’ as it used to be with Miranda.