‘Did I ask for orange juice?’
‘It says so. But you can have soup.’
‘What soup is it?’
‘Vegetable.’
‘I’ll have the soup.’
Kieran reappears with a white porcelain soup-bowl sloshing over the plastic tray and paper napkin, and puts it down on the wheely table. My father holds a trembling spoon and sucks at it, the liquid only, not the little vegetables floating around, which he avoids as if they were the equivalent size and hardness of a chop.
My mother and I, sitting there, silently will him to eat more, more. Then Kieran is back. ‘How are we getting on, then?’ he asks in a slow, loud, deliberate voice. I want to scream at him: ‘This is my father, you dickhead. He’s not some decrepit invalid to be patronized.’ But of course that is exactly what he is.
Kieran gathers the soup things.
‘And hotpot to follow?’
‘I can’t have ordered hotpot,’ says my father. It is his favourite dish, after tripe and onions. Once a week at least, throughout my childhood, my mother would cook it in a big, brown earthenware pot: onions, scrag end, butter, salt and pepper—best of all the crispy-brown potatoes at the top.
‘Surely I said fish.’
‘I’ll check, doctor.’
Kieran returns, plate in hand. ‘It’s chicken hotpot.’
‘Ah, chicken.’
But it might as well be stone. My father chews away for a minute or two, then spits it out. There are two little mounds of mashed potatoes, too, but he ignores these completely.
‘It tastes like paraffin,’ he says, not whingeing, merely reporting. ‘And it’s so dry. It’s like swallowing sawdust, or twigs.’
He lays his fork down, and his head back on the pillow, his features blurry. I think of a Francis Bacon painting, a reclining figure, discomposed, decomposed. I think of a phrase from Auden: We seldom see a sarcoma/As far advanced as this. And then I think how indecent it is to think of such things, for my mind to wander off and leave him now, here, at such a time.
Exhausted, he raises a cup of cold tea to his lips, then sets it down shakily in its saucer. It is six o’clock and he is ready for his night’s sleep.
Three months before, my parents had come south for someone’s eightieth birthday party, the sort of jaunt they liked: getting up at dawn, driving a hundred miles before breakfast, the open road, under their own steam, not stopping off for meals or staying with anyone but cooking and sleeping in their Bedford Dormobile (later traded up for a German Hymobile), restless septuagenarians free to come and go as they pleased, a proud-to-be-pensioners sticker on the rear window—GET EVEN: LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO BE A PROBLEM TO YOUR CHILDREN . But this particular outing had gone wrong. In the evening they stopped for a meal at a pub. My mother needed to use the telephone and set out for the bright cubist box a hundred yards away, not knowing that between her and it there was a low wall and, beyond, a four-foot drop. Puzzled when she didn’t return, my father went out to look, first on foot, then in his Hymo. The headlights picked up a bundle of clothes on the concrete below the ha-ha, a bloodied heap. He thought she might have broken her neck, and dared not move her. At Stoke Mandeville hospital, the X-rays found two small breaks in the vertebrae and hand, and there was heavy bruising to the face, neck, arms, legs.
‘She’s going to be all right, but we won’t be coming on to see you,’ he said when he rang next morning, making it sound like a nursery tumble rather than a case for the country’s leading spinal injuries hospital. I drove up the day after, his Hymobile conspicuous in the car park. My mother was sitting up, cuts, a black eye, a bright blue bruise on her forehead, but healthily peeved that owing to lack of space they had put her in a men’s ward. My father ushered me away as soon as he decently could, out to the car park and the Financial Times . He wanted to talk about his investments. He wanted to talk about my tax returns. He did not want to talk about the accident—though later he admitted that he’d gone back to take photographs of where the fall happened, the blood on the pavement, ‘in case we decide to sue the pub.’
Four days later he drove her back to Yorkshire, having talked the hospital into an early discharge—wasn’t he a doctor, and wouldn’t she be better off at home than on a ward, and didn’t he have a Hymobile, with a bed she could lie flat on, kitted out as well as any ambulance? She was up and walking within a fortnight.
So when my father began complaining of stomach pains and loss of appetite, we took it to be delayed shock—the penalty of denial, nothing more.
‘The pain, Dad: that’s where they cut into you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s still very sore?’
‘Too true.’
‘Is the pain on the inside, or is it the scar on the surface?’
‘Both.’
‘You had a blood transfusion yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you must have lost a lot of blood.’
‘No, it was routine, Dr Taggart says.’
Every lunchtime, eating sandwiches on high stools by the kitchen Aga, or maybe shepherd’s pie at the dining-room table, my mother and father would discuss their caseloads: who had mysterious pains in the arms, who had been vomiting for three days; who had gone into hospital, who had come out; who—my sister and I used to giggle at the word—was ‘fibrillating’. Then the phone would ring and he’d be probing the unfortunate caller: how long had she been complaining of this? where was the pain exactly? did she have a temperature, catarrh, diarrhoea? It was the same whenever I was ill, or, later, when my children were, or when someone on holiday began bombarding him with ailments, as they invariably did when they discovered he was a doctor. I’m used to these medical cross-examinations (sometimes, with hypochondriacs and time-wasters, very cross indeed), the relentless questions, the answers to which might mean him going out in the middle of the night. But I’m not used to my father being on the receiving end.
‘Is it a long scar where they opened you up?’
‘Look.’
He tries to show me, but pulling up his nightshirt is a laborious task. He puffs and tugs at the hem. When he gets there I see the white fluffy dressing running from just below his chest down to his pubic hair—or where his pubic hair should have been.
‘They shaved you.’
‘Yes.’
‘The legs as well?’
‘No, not the legs.’
I have not seen his legs until now, because of the baby blanket. The ankles rise out of his felt moccasin slippers like loaves, twice their usual size. The shin bones are red and shiny. The hairs are there, I can see that now, but under the blotchy sheen they have lost their spiky darkness. When he rises moon-slow to walk to the bathroom, I see how swollen his legs really are. They were always so slender and shapely, a woman’s legs, you might say (though men’s legs are often like this—in drag, the bit from the waist down, the nylons and high heels, is the most convincing). Perhaps my father’s legs seemed especially graceful because they fitted so oddly with the rest of him—the flabby waist, the vast ribcage, the blunt head. He seemed, sometimes, like a random assemblage from that children’s card game, Misfits, where you draw the gazelle’s legs, the elephant’s torso and the head of a seal. On the beach in summer, standing by the water’s edge in his shorts, he resembled a wading bird—the impossibly thin pins, the huge puffed chest. Now his legs are bloated, as if everything he drank sloshed straight down to his ankles. Out of breath, he reaches the bathroom door and gently closes it behind him.
It was on Hallowe’en that I knew something was wrong. He had come down three months before to give me ‘advice’ about buying a house—i.e. to decide where I should live. I took him through the shortlist and when he saw the house I’d anticipated would be his choice (a big, bland three-storey affair from the fifties, set in a wide road that seemed more John Cheever country than south-east London), he told me to go for it, that he’d chip in the extra money, that this was a great place for three kids to grow up in,
and sod my reservations. He wanted to meet the owner, to see if he could beat down the price some more. He wanted to take photographs of the stairs and landing to discuss with his own builder, up in Yorkshire, the feasibility of a loft extension. He wanted the architect’s plans. He wanted the name of every estate agent in the area so he could visit them and check I hadn’t missed something better. He talked about helping me decorate the place, and I knew I’d cave in and move there, never admitting how large a part of me hated the house, let alone how wrong it felt, at forty, to be financially and in other ways so dependent on him. That night I made an offer on the house and we got drunk together. Next day he was off again.
In October, completion approaching, I readied myself for the arguments we’d have when he discovered that I’d hired a removal firm. ‘But why? I’ve got the Hymobile, haven’t I? I’m retired, I’ve got all the time in the world to help. Why spend good money when I could ferry all the furniture there for you?’ I worried how I would break it to him that I didn’t actually want him there for the move, that it would be better for him to come down a day or week or month or two later.
In the event the row didn’t come—and nor did he. He didn’t even propose coming. I put this down to his continuing anxiety about my mother’s fall. I even wondered whether he was belatedly learning some tact. On Hallowe’en night the two removal vans pulled up outside the new house. A football team of carriers and packers filed in and out, bearing the first sofas and wardrobes as gingerly as if they were coffins, then, as the hours passed, beginning to sweat and swear and bump into each other, and still no end to the accumulated junk. A deeper darkness fell. Children at the open door asked ‘Trick or treat?’, and a painted lady in a witch’s cloak introduced herself as a neighbour. Another witch asked if we had toffee for the spirit-children holding pumpkin skulls beside her. Finally the last packing case came off, and the men sat on the front step drinking lager. ‘Look, a fox,’ one of them said, and there it was, rooted to the lawn just a few yards away, a thief in the night, one of its front legs raised and tucked under, body tensed, nose lifted, sniffing the night air.
I rang my father next morning, from a gap in the scattered packing cases.
‘Not this weekend, lad,’ he replied to my invitation. ‘I’m feeling a bit rough.’
‘He’s not himself,’ my mother chipped in.
‘Too true.’
His stomach pains worsened. I stopped asking him when he was coming. I even stopped describing how I’d been fixing bookshelves in the basement, knowing it would torment him to think of how he was missing out and how bad a job I was bound to be making. Then, a week after I’d moved, he rang me.
‘They’ve fixed an investigatory op for next Thursday. They’d have done it tomorrow but for the warfarin I’m taking.’
‘Warfarin?’
‘Rat poison to you. To thin my blood and stop me having a coronary. Now the bloody stuffs so thin it won’t clot. One advantage, though. It gives me time to come down before I go in. I thought you could do with some help on that house of yours.’
He arrived next evening. It was the last weekend he spent out of Yorkshire.
‘Your mother has told you?’
‘Yes.’
Dr Taggart looks like a cancer patient himself, strung out, fleshless, hollow-faced.
‘Well, I don’t know what more I can tell you. The last two patients I’ve had in his sort of condition, pain in the bowel, turned out to be infarcts, not cancer: that’s what we’d hoped to find. Or if cancer, something we’d caught in good time. But I’m afraid when we opened him up we found the disease had spread too far.’
‘It’s inoperable, you’re saying.’
‘Yes. He is dying. We all die, sooner or later, but with him it will be sooner. It could have been his heart. He’s been coming here with that for the past three years, and obviously there was a risk with the operation that it would give out. And it still might. But the probability is that cancer will be what kills him.’
‘Will there be a lot more pain?’
‘There shouldn’t be, with this kind of cancer. Usually they just quietly fade away. Did your mother explain about the tube?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Basically we’ve bypassed the whole of his stomach, where the disease is, so that the bowel can function a bit better again, for a while. He’s likely to suffer from diarrhoea, but that’s preferable to the constipation he’s had.’
That much was true. My father had recently described to me stopping at a Happy Eater on his way home from the last weekend at our house. ‘I went to the gents and had to dig the shit out by hand, horrible, but there was no other way.’
‘And you can’t predict how long?’
‘That’s the one thing everyone wants to hear, and the one thing we can’t tell them. There should be time for him to go home and sort his affairs out. I’ve known miraculous cases where people in his condition lasted a year.’
Friends had spoken to me consolingly of cancer patients who’d been told their number was up five years ago but were still going strong. Dr Taggart didn’t seem to be saying that. He was talking of one year as a miracle. He was talking months—Easter, maybe even Christmas.
‘Does attitude matter? He seems so defeated.’
‘I’ve known people who just turn their faces to the wall and die. Fighting can give you more time. And I know he’s a very active and positive man. The problem is, being so ill to start with, he may not feel like fighting.’
‘You’ve told him?’
‘He asked me the moment he came round. So I put him in the picture.’
‘It’s funny, he always said, if ever, he wouldn’t want to know.’
‘But when it came to it he did want to know. That doesn’t mean he’ll want to talk about it again. It’s possible he’ll deny it—people do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. To say, I’ve not got cancer, not me, those doctors are fools or liars, is a kind of strength too.’
‘And there’s no treatment?’
‘I don’t see the point. Certainly not radiotherapy. I’ll give him chemotherapy if he asks, but it can have some nasty side-effects. There is a vitamin course I might suggest to him—but being a doctor he may just say, Vitamins! Don’t talk bloody nonsense.’
‘He’s always been keen on vitamins. I should put it to him.’
‘I will.’ Dr Taggart looks at his watch.
‘Thanks for talking to me,’ I say.
‘Not at all.’ He grips my hand. ‘And I’m sorry.’
Back in Room 2, my father wants to hear what Dr Taggart said. He needs to know that I know, that I’m under no illusions. That’s why he fixed for Dr Taggart to see me. Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps he hopes I’ll bring him something new, something different, something hopeful.
‘He says he’s very pleased with your progress. He says he expects you to go home next week.’
My father lifts a little at this. But soon he has sunk back on the pillows, turning in on whatever’s eating away at him. I try to jolt him back by switching on the television. The news leads with two knifing incidents in London, a young constable stabbed to death, two other policemen in hospital.
‘Bloody wogs, come over here and start killing people,’ says my father. A Daily Mail and Sunday Express reader all his life, he has become noticeably more racist and reactionary over the last decade.
‘Hang on, Dad, they didn’t actually say …’
‘Yes, but it’s funny how often it’s them, isn’t it?’
I let it go, determined not to be provoked for once. The second item is about Gary Lineker’s baby, eight weeks old and found to be suffering from a rare form of leukaemia. ‘Terrible,’ my father says, ‘Terrible,’ my mother agrees, and adds: ‘You know who they’ve got along the ward here? That lad who’s been a vegetable since Hillsborough. Life-support machine—everyone wants to turn it off, but the law won’t allow it. Tragic.’
We all agree it’s tragic, any child or y
oung person dying or coming near to it—though two hours ago, on the train from Leeds, looking round the carriage full of people going home, a deadbeat young Friday crowd with glazed eyes and Walkmans, I’d have cheerfully swapped the life of anyone there for my father’s.
It’s seven-thirty, and my mother and I are saying goodnight. It seems odd and cruel leaving him. But he doesn’t want us there, will be happier thinking he’s ‘not a nuisance’. He hugs me longer than he usually would, then sits holding my mother’s hand, the kind of tender, quiet thing he never does, something I want to feel touched by but which seems so untypical it’s almost offensive: a late bloom, another man’s flower. I’ve always imagined him dying in character—overtaking impatiently on too short a straight, or collapsing with a heart attack while rotavating an obstinate corner of the orchard. This new gentle-ness, his slow drained face above the bedsheets, seems a sort of death already.
We walk out into the dark, the cold, then drive up the long curve from the hospital’s sodium glare, past the endless signs saying AIREDALE . I think how far I am and how far the meaning of the word AIREDALE is from when I first heard it at school. Then AIRE meant one of the rivers of the north, whose descending order my father helped me memorize as SUNWACD , pronounced sun-whacked—Swale, Ure, Nidd, Wharfe, Aire, Calder, Don. Then DALE meant the Yorkshire Dales, the hilly syllables of Borrowdale, Wensleydale, Ribblesdale, Malhamdale, the fells and streams we drove to on days out, and the lesser dale whose name I couldn’t say right and never quite believed, Arkengarthdale. AIRE and DALE meant that drizzly past. But AIREDALE , the compound, means the unavoidable present—two blunt, hard, wiry syllables, not a soft limestone roll of the tongue. AIREDALE is the harsh, low-lit, single-storey sickness factory we’re driving from into the night.
It’s me at the wheel. My mother’s driving, earlier, from the station where she collected me, had been alarming—she was using sidelights only, getting too close to things, going fast and slow in the wrong places. ‘Bit knackered,’ she says, tipping her head back. For years she has woken early, insomnia, waiting for the light, the milkman, the papers. And now she has something more to wake wide-eyed and worrying for, something even worse to get through—the trauma, the enervation of the ward, the harsh chemical glare. Juggernauts sweep past me on the A59, grit lorries and refrigerator trucks, and I think of her alone at the wheel, drifting off into their path, dead before him. When I turn to check she’s belted in beside me, I find she’s already fast asleep.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 2