Tonsils
THE HOSPITAL BED is higher than mine: you have to climb down, not step out. There’s that horrid empty-stomach feeling, like coming down from a wall or a ladder—the long gap before your feet touch something solid, the middle-of-nowhere gulp when you think you’re going to fall. You have to backslide down, pinning and arching your shoulders against the bedsheets while you cast your legs out into space. And when your feet touch the ground the floor is icy-cold marble, not warm and ruggy like at home.
Beside the bed is a metal cupboard with a glass of water on top. I don’t like water. I want the blackcurrant juice in the bottle behind it, which the nurse says I can’t have. Beside the water-glass, the bunch of flowers, the GET WELL cards, the two oranges I’m also not allowed, there’s a new present I opened today, a model of Donald Campbell’s Bluebird with a working propeller. I wish there were a lake near home where I could launch it. The only places I can think of are the dirty river by the Armorides factory and the stream by the surgery where I once saw boys paddling—but Bluebird needs flat water, perfect water, at dawn. There is a boating pond at Sough, but I have seen the wind on it, the lapping and foam.
My throat is sore still, though not as sore as yesterday or the day before. And tomorrow, the nurse says, I will be leaving—it has been a week, and that’s the time most children stay here. I don’t think the girl with the big head and the open mouth will be leaving. I think there’s something more wrong with her than a week takes. Maybe that’s why no one ever comes to see her even at the big visiting time in the evening. My mother and father have been every evening to see me, but it’s a long drive. It would be better if there were hospitals where parents could sleep overnight. Once they brought my sister Gillian too, and once they came on their afternoon off—it was not really a visiting time, but Daddy said it was all right because he and Mummy are doctors.
When it stops being sore, will my throat feel different from before? It doesn’t have as much inside now, without the tonsils. You don’t need tonsils, my father says, in fact it’s bad to have tonsils because they get sore and infected. Tonsils are two flaps of skin, a bit like tongues or folded birds’ wings, beneath your Adam’s apple. No one knows why they were put there, but now they are taking them out of children. The boy across from me had his out, and I don’t think he looks any different, though I don’t know what he looked like before. I’ve felt my neck with my fingers under the bedclothes, and it seems the same, on the outside anyway. But it still hurts drinking the water and eating the squelchy meat-and-potato pie and most of all swallowing the pills.
My father says, when it hurts, to think of the presents I’ve got—Bluebird, but also the Dinky BRM from Gillian and the Eagle annual from Granny. Eagle is my favourite comic—well, the only one I’m allowed. I’ve tried to work out if Dan Dare has tonsils, but you can’t get a proper look at his neck because he mostly wears a helmet. The Mekon doesn’t look as if he can have tonsils, his neck is so thin. He is supposed to be wicked but I like the way he rides round on a little tea-saucer or bubble and bosses everyone about. He has bags over his eyes, instead of under them like Daddy, and though he hates all earth-things his head is like a green globe. I showed Daddy the page where the Mekon destroys Treen civilization on Mercury by blowing them all up, and he said it looked like the H-bomb, the bomb the English and the other goodies dropped to end the war—my father was in the RAF, but a doctor not a pilot, and he was nowhere near that bomb.
They don’t tell you what’s for tea here until you get it, but it’s usually jam sandwiches and a cup of tea (which is funny, giving cups of tea to children), and rice pudding or jelly. Then we can listen to the wireless or play with our toys, and then it’s bedtime. They don’t have a television here: I didn’t expect they would, but I was hoping. We got ours last year, and my favourite programmes, apart from Blue Peter and Double Your Money and the one with Michael Miles when everyone shouts ‘Open the Box,’ is Emergency Ward Ten . On Fridays we’re allowed to stay up till eight and watch it and drink lemonade. But the hospital on television isn’t like this one because there aren’t children and terrible things happen like car accidents.
Daddy says I have to eat to get well, even if it hurts. The nurse smiles at me when she brings the jam sandwiches. She smiles differently at the other nurses, and when she smiles at sister it is different again. I wish there were bubbles coming out of her head with words, like in Eagle . Thought bubbles would be a useful invention in real life.
When you wake in the night there are strange slapping and scraping noises on the marble, and sometimes screams, but I close my eyes, and pretend I’m at home, and think of my presents, and imagine the Mekon in his bubble, and I do not cry, Daddy, I do not, I do not.
Dogs
WE ENTER THE house through the garage, and the first thing I see is the chestnut flash of Nikki, the dachshund, squirming at us, his tail a frantic fox-brush sweeping the carpet. He hurls himself towards my crotch, not making it, scrabbling at my knee. As I bend to stroke him, he rolls over on his back, his front paws flopping campily, double-jointedly, back on themselves, his tail no longer a wide swishing metronome but a stumpy, irregular thump on the floor. Warmth, fur, the beating heart of a held creature: I’m resisting the soppiness of this, or trying to. I push him away and think sternly of dog-shit, of muzzles, of knotting, of a girlfriend scarred for life (a neat crucifix on her left cheek) by the family terrier. But then my hand goes searching along his jawline, and I’m a child again, back in the doggy comforts of his father’s house.
I look up and there are more dogs—a line of them in a naff, pseudo-French drawing, legs crossed, faces agonized under berets, waiting for their place at the lamppost; and a photograph of Gunner and Terry, the golden labradors my parents bought the year before I was born, their twelve pups feeding out of a trough which my father must have cadged from one of his farmers. Perhaps this was the same farmer high up above Earby who, one snowbound winter, fell sick and could be visited only by helicopter—a helicopter which my father got to ride in by making friends, ‘Over a pint’, with the pilot, who was inspecting pylons for the Yorkshire Electricity Board and who was persuaded to park his machine overnight on our back lawn (‘safe as houses’) rather than in the car park of his hotel over the way (‘it’d get vandalized, you know’). After his doctor’s flying visit, my father hit it off with farmers: word got round that, however isolated they were, he’d reach them; he had special privileges, perhaps even special powers; if your tractor toppled over on a farm-hand, he was the man to call. Only his labradors, with their tendency to chase sheep, jeopardized these relations.
Gunner and Terry lasted all my childhood, and after they died my father did without dogs for a while, in homage. Then he bought a long-haired dachshund, and that’s what he’s had ever since, sausage dog after sausage dog, most of them with the same name, Nikki. He felt awkward at first—a dachshund was such a small and effeminate dog to take out on a lead, especially for him with his big chest; a man’s man with a woman’s dog, he looked like something out of Laurel and Hardy. But as the years passed, despite my gentle mockery, he lost his self-consciousness and grew to depend on dachshunds. He even shared his beer with them, his nightly party trick: the nearly-empty pale ale bottle placed upright on the floor; the dog knocking the bottle over with its snout, and using a paw to tip the liquid into its mouth; the bottle dragged over to the edge of the rug and tipped again, a deeper tilt, for the dregs; a pint or two later, the sound of gnawing at the glass.
Of course, I prided myself on a fastidious distaste for all this cutesiness, this dogginess, and made a point of lecturing my father on the perils of dog-shit. In our regular disputes over the value of having a dog, I reckoned to win on the security question, pointing out as ungleefully as possible that Nikki had been in the house when it was burgled. But he always triumphed when it came to social usefulness: dogs help you meet people, he said, and proved it one summer when he made friends with a woman on the beach who, as wel
l as owning a poodle, had a speedboat and water-skis to which we were given unlimited access. Dogs brought out the sentimentalist in him. He was still not properly over the death of his last Nikki; one Bonfire Night some years ago he had let the dog out by mistake, and the noise of fireworks drove it distractedly into the road. Or so he alleged: neighbours’ reports that Nikki had crossed the road several times earlier that week to visit a bitch on heat down at the farm did nothing to allay his guilt and remorse. He found the corpse on the grass verge, and came home crying with it in his arms.
He has always cried easily: he cried when dogs and cats died; he cried when he left my sister at her boarding-school; he cried waving goodbye from under our chestnut tree the day I went off to university. So why had he taught me to be brave and hold it in? Why have I never been able to cry? Why can’t I cry for him? Even now, shaking myself loose of the dog and at once coming across a photo of my father from a year ago—tanned, happy, arms round his grandchildren on the beach—even now the tears won’t come.
I pour myself a large gin and tonic, then another. There are too many cracking-up photographs around, too many mementoes: even his shoes in the workshop, the neat shelves of them, left-right, left-right, the cold leather turning up at the toes. My mother and I sit by the fire with plates on our knees. We drink wine with the roast chicken, and she begins a litany of if onlys : if only my father had had himself checked out regularly; if only he’d not refused the barium meal they’d offered him a month ago; if only she’d not had her accident.
‘But the doctor thinks the secondaries have been there two years,’ I say.
‘Yes, I know, but if only they’d caught it a bit earlier, he’d have been spared that month of terrible pain.’
‘But he’d have known for that much longer,’ I say, ‘he’d have been devastated.’
‘Yes … But if only he hadn’t got so weak before the operation, maybe he’d have more fight.’
‘But we don’t want the agony drawn out.’
So we yes, but and if only , until, several drinks later, we both begin to drowse, brief lid-droops then deeper sleep. I wake to find myself staring into my sister’s face on the sofa, a younger, browner, wrinklier face than mine (Gillian has inherited my father’s fondness for sunbathing). Quiet, anxious, she sits with her hands tight in her lap as we talk. We don’t see each other much now—only when I’m up or she’s down. Our lives have been separate from the day she went off to boarding-school thirty years ago, after she failed her eleven-plus. She hated it there, in banishment, and after three years of unhappy letters finally wrote one of such misery that my father, opening it at surgery, walked out on his patients, drove straight up to the school in the Lake District and brought her home. But by then I was fifteen, and more than our sixteen-month difference in age seemed to separate us. It’s only recently we’ve things in common again, the things we talk about now: houses, spouses, children.
At midnight I walk Gillian back to her house next door, past the outbuildings—barn, stables, pigsty, garage—of our old house, each of them now converted to a house or flat, a hamlet blazing where we had once played among hay or cobwebs. She clutches my arm. With her night-blindness—a rare eye condition—she sees poorly in bright sunlight, badly at dusk and not at all at night. At forty, she’s already on to large-print books from the library.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask.
‘Yes, if someone’s holding me.’
‘I meant about Dad. Are you coping?’
‘I think so.’
We talk about the operation: she understands his condition only dimly as yet, knows it is cancer but not that it’s terminal, is being let in on it gently, protected from its full glare. It’s my father’s usual way of doing things: Mum’s a doctor, I’m a man, but Gill’s the youngest, a woman and the sensitive one, and he wants her led there slowly. I’m not sure: her serenity alarms me; it’s based on kindly lies, and I want to shock her with the truth; or if she knows more than she’s letting on, I want us both to admit it. We reach her laundry room, back in the safe light, by the boiler, out of the cold, and I pause there, steeling myself to tell her more, to say at least, ‘We’re talking months, Gill, you know, not years.’ But what comes out of me is ‘Goodnight,’ and a peck on the cheek, and then I walk back under the blank lit immensity to bed.
In our old house—The Rectory it had been, The Grange as my father renamed it—there’d been a billiard room, long and with tall windows, which my father filled with a full-size snooker table, bought at an auction in Otley. A lorry fetched it over, and we watched it being laboriously lifted out and reconstructed—the slates, the rubber cushions, the string pockets, the lawn of green felt, the Scoreboard with the sliding arrow-marker. He played on the table every night for six months, taught me to play, too, even invited Freddie Trueman round for a game—a friend of our solicitor. A racy new life beckoned, smoke-filled and alcoholic (the room also contained an outsize drinks cupboard): I dreamt of a misspent adolescence, Yorkshire champion at thirteen, a precocious toff wizard of the felt. I discovered backspin, sidespin, how to stop the cue-ball dead; I potted colours from improbable angles—a wafer kiss of white on black, the erotic plock in the pocket. But one morning my father put a cloth over the table and kept it there forever after, disrobing it only for a week each Christmas.
The snooker table became his desk, its entire length covered with paper: invoices, receipts, newspaper clippings, share certificates, bank statements, you name it. Every night he would come back from the pub around eleven-thirty, pour himself a whisky, and sit—or rather stand—doing his ‘paperwork’ till one or one-thirty in the morning. I made a point of not getting involved. The paperwork was something to do with the investments left to him by his father, a mining engineer. It was hard work keeping on top of them, I knew that much: he never finished, and never left the table any tidier. When he retired and moved to the new house he built at the back of the old one, there was no room for a billiard table. His paperwork was now supposedly confined to a mere desk, though he quickly spread it across the study floor as well—splays of arithmetic and tax returns, a very large number of brown envelopes with mysterious headings.
Those envelopes, in a stack on the parental bed, are the first thing I see this morning. I have slept indecently well. My mother has not. When I go in with two mugs of tea, and take his place next to her (we are going to have to get used to that empty pillow), she’s straight into her worries.
‘I thought I’d better look at these. It’s not the stocks and shares I fret about. I know about those. I used to call out the share prices to him from the newspaper, I’ve seen the portfolio. It’s all the other stuff—these insurance policies and bonds and pensions and saving schemes. He’s so many bits of paper, you wouldn’t believe it. I just don’t know what’s in them.’
My mother’s fear of the chaos she’ll inherit is understandable, though I know she is really saying something else. She dreads the paperwork because paper will soon be all that remains of him. She can’t cope with figures, because she can’t cope with the figure we saw yesterday, the figure receding on that bed.
‘This is his special file,’ she says, reaching into her bedside table. ‘Have a good look while I use the shower.’
It’s the family tree he was drawing up, a task he took over from his Uncle Billy (whose oil-lush garage we used to stop at on days out to Southport), one which had him writing to relations wherever they could be traced. There doesn’t seem to be much in the file—a few letters and postcards—but I’m not expecting revelations. Though my mother’s Irish side is bogged in Celtic mist, on my father’s the impression has always been clear: a family settling in Lancashire and living off the fat of the Industrial Revolution; stolid captains of industry and their little wives; red-brick detached houses within shouting distance (but there would never be any shouting in these homes) of Bolton or Manchester; unshowy northern affluence; an enthusiasm for cars, railways, practical and mechanical things. No poets, no
artists; no divorces; a fair bit of drinking, but not so much as to give the family a bad name.
The frail elderly handwriting, the photos and memory fragments come as a shock: their version of family history is very different. Here’s an impecunious start, Daniel Morrison writing to his son in 1868 to say he’s ‘middling well’ and asking, ‘being I’m out of work and tramping the last six weeks and on the road for England,’ for money to be sent to ‘your poor old father’ c/o Dumfries Post Office. Later there’s talk of steady jobs in mining or with ships’ instruments or on the Manchester Ship Canal. But in between, the record is of alcoholism and Wanderlust and early deaths through several generations: my father’s cousin, four-year-old Neil, gored to death by a cow when he got too near its calf; Crawford, who fell from a pigeoncote at three, was confined thereafter to a spinal carriage, died at fourteen; Jessie, who at the same age got pregnant by a rich Jewish boy in Manchester, took to the streets to hide her shame from the family, was spotted begging with her sickly child bundle and brought home; Daniel’s father, Alexander, who remarried after his first wife’s early death, moved away and left his children to fend for themselves; another errant Daniel, who married the sister of his wife (who had died in childbirth) either in France or illegally, since British law did not then permit you to marry your wife’s sister; Bunty, who lost her mother at six, her father the following year; and Robert, who was run over and killed by a horse-drawn beer dray, having that lunchtime more or less consumed the contents of one.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 3