by Sue Perkins
Dad was wheeled away for some scans, and I paced the darkened corridors for over an hour. I felt strangely calm. I knew exactly what was coming.
I remember the doctor was Scottish. I think he was called Nick. He was kind. That’s what I remember most of all. Thank you, Dr Nick. I never got to say thank you for being so kind. Thank you.
He emerged through a doorway hung with industrial plastic strips – like vast tagliatelle. Dad was lying calmly on the hospital bed, his forehead bandaged.
DR NICK: Mr Perkins?
DAD: Hello. Call me Bert, please.
DR NICK: Bert, listen, I’m afraid we’ve found a mass in your brain.
A slight pause.
DAD: That’s OK.
Dad put his hand over the doctor’s as if to comfort him. That’s the mark of my father, he is the sort of man who comforts the guy who is giving him a death sentence.
Hours later, we return to the house – this house which I have loved from the very first moment I met it. But now everything has changed. The granite isn’t beautiful: it is a trip hazard. The walls aren’t interesting: they are jagged. The staircase isn’t slim and elegant: it is unfit for purpose.
It has been a great house. But I have a feeling it is going to make a terrible hospital.
34. Checkmate
Dad has asked me if he can die here, in the house. I have agreed because although he is saying the word ‘die’ it does not make any sense and I cannot engage with it as a reality. I have agreed because I don’t know any better, and I don’t know what is to come. What a savage gift hindsight is.
Dad can’t do stairs any more. There is no point in pretending now. There is no plausible deniability from here on in. We decide to make him a bedroom in the lounge, next to the window where he can watch the birds. The carpet is threadbare, so I decide to get a new one – because it will give me something to do. It will give me focus and direction. I head to Penzance, and explain my situation to lovely Lynne, the sales assistant, who is quick to recommend a new eco composite carpet made from corn on the cob.
ME: That sounds good. I like corn on the cob.
LYNNE: The manufacturer lined a rhino’s house with it.
ME: Really? I didn’t know rhinos were partial to carpets.
LYNNE: A zoo in the States, I think, the rhino enclosure there. They laid the carpet down and just left it. Month later, they came back, removed the stinking carpet and cleaned it.
ME: Did they do any of the rhino’s other soft furnishings? The sofa? Curtains? Or was it just the carpet?
LYNNE: (rightly ignoring me) They just used hot-water extraction to clean the thing. That was it. And you know what? Good as new. No smell or stains. With just water. Amazing, isn’t it?
And I wonder, as I reach for my credit card, whether she is saying all this because she thinks there’s a chance my dad will end up making as much mess as a rhino.
That afternoon, I ask Dad if he will play chess with me. He says no, he doesn’t want to. If he can’t play competitively, then what’s the point? (He used to play for the county and even once received a prize.) He begins to descend down that familiar rabbit hole – I’m useless, he says. I’m no good to anyone. I should be on the scrapheap. I’m shit. I’m just shit.
I have grown up watching Dad tell himself he is pointless. Not once has he looked up in those moments and spotted the glaringly obvious: that he was our hero all along.
I press him. ‘Dad, please play chess with me. Please.’ His reply is the same: he doesn’t play for enjoyment. He gets agitated. I have to watch that now: the lump, the meds, they create extreme anxiety. He can shout, cry or even hit himself if pushed too hard.
My body feels heavy with sadness. I wait a while, then return.
ME: Dad. I know how you feel about it. I understand that. But would you do it for me? Would you do something for me?
He is silent.
Tears prick at my eyeballs. I’m wasting my time. I head to the kitchen and put the kettle on. I open the post and discover that Lynne has sent me some additional information on ‘conscious carpeting’, including one made from goat-hair and discarded fishing nets.
I bring Dad his tea. It’s then I notice he has set up the chessboard and is patiently waiting for me to take my place opposite him.
We begin. I make some early positional posturings with a pawn or two. I try to ignore the fact that his hand shakes uncontrollably as he picks up the pieces. I am not even sure he can see the pieces any more. I notice his thumb running over the contours of the wood as if to confirm what he is holding. He can’t distinguish a bishop from a pawn, and when he holds them close to his eyes, I notice they have turned the palest, iciest of blues. A third of the board is entirely invisible to him as the tumour has created a vast blind spot: a wall of darkness to his left. He has taken to seeing things, hallucinating, and twice during the game he bashes away phantoms, the black rats that swarm around him.fn1
He beats me. He beats me in less than twenty moves.
DAD: Come on, girl, put your back into it. You’re not even trying. Concentrate!
So I do. I really do. I focus. I give it my all. And in this, the last game I ever play with him, he beats me in less than ten moves. You see, Dad, I told you but you never listened. You’re a hero. You’re an utter hero.
It is 11 November, and although I don’t know it yet, my dad will be dead in less than four months.
35. Mirrors
I am back in London.
Autumn is shaking hands with winter and there’s a gloom in the air. I’m starting to feel unwell. When someone you love is dying, you become porous, your body mimicking the symptoms of the person you’re so scared of losing.
I had booked in to see my friend, Helen, who is a wonderful human and a fabulous acupuncturist. I’ve gone to see her throughout the years, never regularly, because my schedule is chaotic – but intermittently, when I can. She will make me laugh by feeling my pulse and saying something like ‘Ooh, racing piglets.’ Then she will make me cry by sticking a needle in a point that allows me to let loose a little trickle from the river of sadness that flows inside.
I was running early. This never happens. I am never early for anything. I decided to go and grab a snack from the newsagent down the road. I was still a little hung-over from the night before. It had been my book launch, a little party to celebrate my autobiography hitting the shelves, and I had drunk too much out of nerves. I’m not great with hosting parties. I love to go to them, but I hate to host them. The responsibility is too great. What if no one comes? Worst still, what if everyone comes? What then?
I went into the shop and made a beeline for the shiny packets – you know the ones, the ones with all the bad stuff inside. It wasn’t until I got in the queue to pay that I noticed the row of newspapers in front of me.
Four out of seven of them had my face on the front page. All of them led with variants of ‘Bake Off Star in Brain Tumour Nightmare’.
My first thought was, how could they know about Dad? No one knew about Dad. Then it dawned on me that they were talking about my brain tumour – my benign little brain tumour. My benign little brain tumour that I had talked about for one whole page in my book.
Genuinely, I think that moment, standing there flanked by Twixes, mobile-phone covers and Doritos extra spicy tortilla chips, was the most painful in my entire life. I don’t think I have ever felt such profound sorrow as I stood there, in the middle of a shop, wordless and shaking, trapped between the two iterations of my life: the exterior and the interior, the public and the private.
I was trapped in a Hall of Mirrors.
And Suns.
And Stars.
And Expresses.
My hands shook uncontrollably as I handed over the cash. I lowered my head and, as I did so, gravity sent the welling tears splashing onto the counter. I didn’t want anyone to see me, I was so ashamed. Look at this headline – this waste of ink, this embarrassment of trees. For me. About me. And all for nothing becau
se I am not dying. I am not unwell.
I don’t deserve your headline because this is not news.
The real news, by the way, Mr Dacre, Mr Murdoch, Mr Desmond – the real, seismic news, should you be inclined to print it – is that my DAD IS DYING. That is headline stuff. That is the only news, in fact. You’ve all been looking the wrong way – because while you’ve been door-stepping me and waiting outside my ex-boyfriend’s house in France for a week my dad is dying.
FROM A FUCKING BRAIN TUMOUR.
I could feel the blood pounding in my temples, my ears hissing as my veins constricted. I was in the midst of a seismic panic attack.
I want to scream at the sharp, awful irony.
Oh, Universe, you sick little fuck.
36. Say It
Love. He wants it, all right. I am sure of that. But he wants it assumed, not spoken. It is almost as if it’s too much of a burden for him to have it voiced out loud, to hear the actual words fill the room. I suspect that he doesn’t think he is worthy of the sentiment. I am determined that today I am going to tell my dad I love him – even if he can’t bear to hear it, even if he says nothing in return.
We are watching Skyfall. I am sitting on a rickety stool right next to his bed. I am not even sure that Dad can see where the television is, let alone the pictures dancing across it. He has become so good at dissembling. Even at this late stage he desperately covers how ill he is to spare us pain, though the charade is painful in and of itself.
I laugh at something. He laughs too. I don’t know whether he is just copying me, to make me feel less alone. And I do feel so terribly alone here with him in this room.
I ready myself. There is an incredible pressure building in my head and behind my eyes. I wonder if that is where all the unarticulated sentiments of the last forty years have been hiding, and now they are massing, ready to make a break for it.
‘I love you very much,’ I say, my throat constricting with the excruciating sadness of it all. ‘You’ve been a great dad. I couldn’t have wished for a better dad.’
He carries on staring at the TV. After a few beats, he speaks.
DAD: You know, I remember going to Mike Flynn’s house for dinner. I was with your mum. We turned up on my motorbike. Anyway, I had a dicky tummy or something – I dunno, something like that – anyway I couldn’t finish the spag bol his missus had made. So we had a few whiskies and time ticks on. Eventually, we get up to go and I put my crash helmet on, and guess what? Mike has filled it with all the leftovers. I had pasta and tomato sauce running all the way down my face.
British Telecom have well and truly messed up. During ‘routine’ engineering works they have managed to seriously screw the line. There is no phone service, no internet at the house. For three weeks. Mum has no escape: she cannot reach out to her friends, most of whom live in London. Dad cannot Skype his family or pretend he can still play his beloved computer games.
I go mad. I ring every employee of BT. I tweet, I email, I holler to the skies until I have the telephone number of the chairman himself. And then it gets sorted. I immediately Skype home, and can see Dad, a blur of thick pixels, crying, with Mum cradling him round his waist.
ME: It’s OK, Dad. I can see you. I can see you now. It’s OK.
I call in later, just to check everything is working. Dad is cheery again, and we talk about the garden and the weather and the birds. I sign off, as I have been doing since his diagnosis.
ME: OK, Dad, I’ve got to go. I love you.
DAD: Love you too.
It is a reflex. He’s said it without thinking.
Everything is still and in its place. But I am elsewhere. I am flying through time and space. I collapse on the floor, my head on the cool wood, and I cry more than I have ever cried before because even though I always knew he felt it I have waited forty-six years to hear it confirmed out loud.
37. The Strong One
In the middle of March, I arranged to go down for four days and give Mum a break. I had no idea this would be the last time I had on my own with Dad. The days were long; up at 6 a.m. to start the drugs regimen, then a solid, rolling buffet until 10 p.m. when the final steroid got popped. Dad had developed a slavish fondness for rice cakes, pale Styrofoam discs with the nutritional value of an old youth-hostel mattress, topped with a precarious tower of pre-grated Cheddar. To eat one would have been a tricky task for even the most dextrous of gourmands, but for an eighty-year-old with failing sight and compromised grey matter it was almost an impossibility. As he lifted one from the plate, a shower of waxy, yellow shavings fell to the floor. As he moved it to his mouth another dairy landslide, this time onto his beard. I’m not sure any of it got past his lips. Ever.
He partnered this meal with an orange.
DAD: You know – for colour.
It was imperative I got his drugs right, the daily fistfuls of tablets and capsules. There were anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, steroids, statins, ACE inhibitors and blood thinners, plus an equal number of mitigating pills, which acted to dull the side effects. Each med seemed to have a pharmaceutical twin, a shadow self, that counteracted the worst excesses of the other.
As evening fell, I started doubting myself. I panicked I was getting it wrong. I double- and triple-checked. I took each pill out of its blister pack and sat up half the night with a magnifying glass checking the tiny manufacturers’ marks imprinted on the various capsules and pellets.
Within a few days my horizon had shrunk, until all I knew was the rhythm of care. Rice cakes, with cheese and an orange. Telly. Drugs. Rice cakes, with cheese and an orange. Telly. Drugs. Doesn’t want rice cakes. Telly. Drugs. I don’t blame you, Dad, they taste like you’re licking a quarry. Drugs. You need some food, Dad. Drugs. Have some custard, then. Sleep, awake, sleep. Drugs. What do you mean you don’t want custard? You love custard! Drugs. Telly. Sleep. Drugs. Why don’t you want custard?
Daddy, please eat.
He lies in the hydraulic bed. I notice his feet are crammed against the bottom board. He never complains, not once. Dusk is falling; time to tuck him in. The bed emits a mechanical yawn as it stretches itself flat again.
ME: Night, night, Dad. I love you.
He is staring at me, really staring at me.
ME: What? What is it?
He is looking right into the soul of me.
DAD: You’ve always been the strong one, Susan.
I don’t know what to say. It is too big a thing to respond to just yet. I can feel the sting of a single tear scoring my cheek. I make my excuses and go and fetch his final steroid of the day, then pretend to busy myself in the kitchen, rattling bottles and clinking glasses for several minutes until I feel composed enough to return.
I approach. His pale blue eyes fix on me again. I offer him some water. He drinks, his eyes never leaving me.
ME: What?
DAD: You’ve always been the weak one, Susan.
ME: What?
DAD: What?
ME: WHAT? You just said I’m the strong one!
DAD: What are you talking about?
ME: You just said it, like, five minutes ago! You just said I’m the strong one.
DAD: Did I?
ME: Yes! It was a massive moment for me!
DAD: Really?
ME: YES!
DAD: Well, I must have been off my head.
He roars with laughter.
ME: Well … Well, which one am I?
DAD: I don’t know.
ME: Of course you know. You have to know. Which one is it?
DAD: Well, let’s just say you’re both. Satisfied?
He is still laughing. And I laugh too because both things are true, and because it is time I learned to get my self-esteem from within, and stop relying on a man with a frontal lobe mass to give it to me.
After that night, Dad doesn’t get out of bed again.
38. Fantasy Football
I sit with him in the morning, his hand in mine. He wakes up and turns his head towards me. I wink
at him. He puckers his lips and sends me a smacker through the air.
Later, I bend over him and whisper, ‘I love you very much, Dad,’ and he says, ‘And I you.’ I can only just hear it through the click and clack of his dry lips.
He is fitted for a morphine syringe driver a few hours later. We are now at the endgame.
His anxiety is worsening. He is gurning and clawing at the bed sheets. Each and every night he is in pain and we call the emergency care line. Each and every night there is another locum doctor trooping out to the middle of nowhere to increase the dosage.
If he were my dog, I would have put him down three days ago. He will live like this for another week.
All of us are gathered around his bed. There is a polarity of late, a gravitational pull that draws us in – as if we are becoming aware the time is nearing and we don’t want to be too far away. We circle him. We pretend to make tea or make calls, but we inevitably return, after mere moments, to his side.
Mum is round the other side, Michelle at his head, David stroking his shoulder, and me holding his hand. He is agitated and we are trying to calm him. David pipes up.
DAVID: The England game is on, Dad.
Dad’s eyes open a little. I can see they are misty. He is now, I believe, totally blind.
ME: Yes, Dad – it’s the match.
His mouth parts in an almost-smile.
DAVID: They’re coming onto the pitch now.
We look at David, confused. The telly is off, and the match isn’t for another hour or two. It dawns on us what he’s doing, and we join in, one by one.
ME: They’re looking good.
MICHELLE: Kane looks fit.
ME: And Vardy. Really sharp. They’re off!
DAVID: And Vardy’s scored! Unbelievable – brilliant bit of poaching at the net.