And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  He shakes our hands wanly, raising his head a moment. ‘As you can see, I’m bloody awful. From a fit seventy-year-old to a doddery ninety-year-old in a couple of weeks.’ It’s said not self-pityingly, merely to confirm that he too has grasped this indisputable truth—we mustn’t pretend we can’t see it.

  There is a small milk stain on his lip and chin, and he keeps trying to belch. ‘I feel so full, though I’ve not eaten for weeks. The things I need to help me belch I don’t fancy at all.’ But he tries, over the next hour: a sip of fruit juice; an egg beaten with sherry; a swig of my mother’s Liebfraumilch. ‘Swig,’ he says, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, ‘funny word, swig.’ Under his head is the red tartan blanket that he’s had since my childhood, maybe since his childhood, that we took to the annual point-to-point races at Gisburn, and on other outings, and spread out for the creaking picnic-basket. As we talk, a circling talk of family, Christmas, local scandal, his eyes remain closed and he seems to be asleep, but then he pipes up and it’s clear he’s been taking it all in. He has his hands folded behind him, but sometimes he removes them and holds them raised above his head, right-angled at the elbows, palms flat, as if supporting some great weight. From time to time he asks me to make minute adjustments to the rug behind his head, to double-fold or quadruple-fold, to raise or lower. I stand behind his thinning head, and catch the grass-and-earth reek of the rug, and remember lying wrapped in it myself, late at night, coming home in the back of the Alvis, the murmur of my parents’ voices from the front, my eyes closed just as his eyes are now, the luxury of being borne swaddled and trusting and unseeing through the night.

  Suddenly he tips his chair forward. The handkerchief scrunched between his thighs falls to the floor, and I see his penis scrolled up in its sac, a sad little rose, no engorgement. I remember how big it seemed when I saw it as a child at the swimming baths, and how I looked forward to being an adult so I could have one that big too. I think how as adult heterosexual males we rarely see each other’s penises and never see each other’s erections—least of all our fathers’ erections—and I catch myself grieving that he may never have an erection again. Then I think how embarrassing these thoughts are. I pick up his modesty rag and hand it to him and he stows it gently back in place.

  When he talks, his conversation is of a characteristic count-your-blessings kind.

  ‘I’m bloody lucky, you know. I have you here, and Gill next door, and Pat and Mummy. Marvellous.’

  Or: ‘If our purpose on this earth is to make it a better place for our children, then we haven’t done badly.’

  Or: ‘I’m a little better today than I was yesterday. And yesterday than the day before. And the day before than the day before that.’

  He talks himself up like this all evening. He extols the virtues of the new portable telephone he bought for 129 pounds just before going into hospital—‘you can take it two hundred yards down the garden—it’ll be useful when I’m lying out in summer, or next back-end when I’m raking leaves.’ He tells me about the new headlamps he’s ordered for when he’s fit to drive again, for when he goes back to hospital to have his stitches out in a couple of weeks. There is tenacity in all this denial, some deep will to survive, and we collude in it. My mother teases him—‘We’ve not had him climbing any hills yet, but tomorrow maybe’—and runs her fingers through his hair. I imagine him reaching Christmas at any rate, two and a half weeks away—wrapped in his red tartan blanket smiling bravely while the children open their presents, sad to think there may be no more Christmases but appeased by the joy and continuity around him. I had come up half-ready to spend longer than the weekend here, but there’s no immediate panic. At ten he goes to bed, tottering off like a toddler in its mother’s high-heeled shoes. I ring my wife and tell her to expect me the following evening.

  *

  I wake next day around six-thirty, my father’s deep voice rising comfortingly from downstairs, an echo of my childhood and all its other morning noises—the door unlatched to let the dog out for a pee, the row of milk sentries set chinkingly on the window-sill, the kettle crescendo-ing on the Aga. I read and then run a bath and bolt the door. For the past week my stomach has been bothering me, slight pain and swelling, as if—just as my father had claimed to feel belly pains when my mother was in labour—I were trying to share his cancer, the ties that bind, my filial couvade. But today I’m feeling better. The hot water laps over my stomach and thighs. I think of the behind-locked-doors furtiveness of adolescence, and the thought, or the soapy water, arouses me, because I’m hard now, and start to masturbate, wondering if this is wrong and something I should feel guilty about, in the midst of death and with my father downstairs, but wanting the escape, reluctant to let the feeling pass. Now little white snakes swirl in the water, and Sylko threads snag against my skin. They turn to jelly first, then dry on me in a flaky glaze. I get out and swill the bath with the shower-head. The sky is a misted blue over Pendle Hill, and sheep are passing slowly over the cold fields.

  But my mother, fetching me tea, is close to tears.

  ‘I’m worried, love. He woke at six and was violently sick—nasty brown stuff, what we call foetal vomiting.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, it’s basically sicking up your own excrement. It’s usually a terminal sign.’

  ‘But he seemed all right.’

  ‘Yes, but he took three sleeping-pills in the night, so he says, and he’s all doped and doolally now. I need your help to move him.’

  He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his favourite hunched-forwards position to get wind up. He’s out-of-breath and looks a decade older than last night, his eyes yellowed over and misty.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’

  ‘Bloody rough. Pig sick.’

  ‘But you were bright enough last night.’

  ‘I was that.’

  I swing his legs up on to the bed, and then my mother and I take an arm and an armpit each and try to slide him up on to the pillows. It’s like moving a heap of rubble, and when we finally get him there he’s asleep at once. We don’t know whether to believe his story about the sleeping-pills or if this is a sudden catastrophic decline. My mother shows me the sheet he was sick into, the dark brown stain on it, not smelling of shit, but looking like it.

  We consult his chart, pages 622 and 624 of an old ledger he has torn out so as to record his regime of pills and injections and food intake—the old workhorse. He has drawn extra rules down and across the chart, so densely that it looks like a pools coupon: Redoxon, Amiodarone, Heparin, Valium, Maxolon, Diconal, Paracetamol, Frusemide, Periactin, Complan, Eggs, Cereal, Chivas Regal, Water. It’s neat and fanatical, just like all the other endless lists and diagrams and instruction sheets he’s compiled over the years, and with the same message: he’s in control. But the last few entries are in my mother’s writing, not his: he can no longer hold a pen. And we can’t tell from his notes how many Diconal he had earlier in the week and how many should be left—there are forty-seven in the bottle, but did he really take three in the night?

  He is still asleep at eleven, when a car draws up. A middle-aged man gets out, the car bleep-bleeping as he locks it. An AIREDALE HOSPITAL plastic identity tag pendulums on his lapel: the consultant, Dr May. My father has looked forward to this visit for days and wakes at once, rousing himself from death, talking lucidly about exactly which drugs he’s taken, how many milligrams, and how he thinks a change in dosage will help his progress. Dr May listens, takes his pulse, checks his temperature, taps his finger against his chest.

  ‘Your back now,’ he says, which means moving my father forward off the pillows. I hold him by the wrists and palms, feeling their gentle jolts and convulsions, the life in him flickering like one of his old cine films.

  ‘We need to give you some more Frusemide, Arthur, which will help you get your appetite back. And there’s a little water on your abdomen, which is pushing your diaphragm up and making you nauseous, so I’ll give you something
to get rid of that. In a couple of days your guts should be working better. I’ll visit again then.’

  But this optimism is for my father, not us. Dr May has seen the sheet, and in the dining-room he tells us: ‘It’s not good. He’s very poorly. We’re talking days, I think, not weeks.’

  ‘You think it’s faecal vomiting, then?’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  He bleeps his car door open and drives away. Faecal vomiting, I realize she just said, not foetal . Had I misheard it earlier because I didn’t want to hear it right, because I wanted associations of birth not death? ‘Foetal’ had made me think of meconium, the black stuff during labour when a baby is in distress, the shit in the womb which midwives and doctors recognize as a signal for a forceps delivery or Caesarean. My father’s, too, is shit voided into a stomach, violating places where it shouldn’t be. He, too—the great moment approaching—is a baby in distress.

  Camp Cuba

  SUNDAY BREAKFAST IN the dining-room, the sun riding down from Embsay Moor. My father has recently bought a freezer and his paean to frozen food sounds as if it’s been scripted by an ad agency: ‘Just think, these raspberries we’re eating were picked three months ago. And they taste as if I’d brought them in this morning. Marvellous. None of that metallic sogginess you get from tins. Incredible thing, science.’ The raspberries are a rich purple, paled and mottled by sugar. There is All-Bran or Weetabix to follow, from the same deep-blue bowl we have had the raspberries in (‘Must save on washing up for Mummy’). On the side-plates my father has laid out a series of vitamin pills: he has become fanatical about minding his As and Bs, his Cs and Ds, newly convinced that we can avoid colds and flu if we adopt a regime of tablets and capsules. Some of the pills are hard to swallow, others star-burst oilily when you nip their skin with your teeth. The family, not for the first time, is acting as a controlled medical experiment: what we are swallowing today, every patient in Earby will be swallowing tomorrow.

  It is hard to reconcile this health regime with the next course, the bacon, egg, tomato and dippy bread—a slice of white bread frizzled in the leftover fat in the frying-pan. ‘You can’t beat dippy,’ my father says as he slides the last piece of it around his plate, soaking up yet more heart-gunge, yet more killing fluids. Dippy is the last of the bad old fat habits to go—even after butter has been replaced by margarine, it passes muster. Once, we used to consume the hot fat on chops, the crackling on pork, the white lard-edge on cold beef, the fat-smeary blood-juice of a roast joint. This was more than just the house rule about ‘finishing everything on your plate’: fat, I was told, would ‘get some strength in you.’ By now my father is cholesterol-conscious, and no one is pretending that dippy bread is good for you. Still, we’re eating it.

  After toast and marmalade, my father and I retire to the two tip-back chairs which face out through the sash windows towards the moor. He is checking the share market, I the sports pages of the Sunday Express , where I stare for hours at the blurred anguish of a backward-arching goalkeeper as a shot from Burnley’s Ray Pointer (white dotted arrows painted on the photo to trace its path) inflates the net behind him—for me at twelve, the ultimate erotica: the breast-like bulge of a top corner. My mother, having cleared the breakfast stuff, is back again now with two mugs of coffee: ‘Made with hot milk, Mummy? Smashing.’

  It is my father who says this, not me. All through our childhood he has called his wife ‘Mummy’, never Agnes, her actual name, which he hates because it sounds drab and old-fashioned, never Kim either, the name her friends use and which he persuaded her to adopt not so much to seem chic and fifties—was it plagiarized from Kim Novak?—as to erase her rural Irish past. She has shed her name, abandoned her country and buried her Kerry accent; in return he calls her ‘Mummy’. Until now, it has sounded fine, but at twelve it’s beginning to embarrass me: I want to call them Mum and Dad, which is what my schoolfriends’ parents are called, but which they think ‘common’; and I want them to call each other Kim (or even Agnes) and Arthur. It’s a futile ambition. My father will never change his habits. He’ll go on calling her Mummy—‘Glass of wine, Mummy, love?’—long after my sister and I have left home. He’ll call her Mummy with increasing frequency once his own mother dies. And he’ll call her Mummy not just in front of her grown-up children but in the company of friends, strangers in pubs, even when they are alone.

  ‘It’s your half-term coming up,’ he says.

  ‘Hum.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. It’s time we went camping.’

  ‘Camping?’

  ‘You know, fathead—tent, poles.’

  ‘Hum.’

  ‘Just the two of us, boys together—or men together.’

  I have just had my twelfth birthday. This is what he must mean by ‘men’. The thought of a camping holiday with my father fills me with dread.

  ‘We could go to the Lakes. Just us. The girls could drive up and join us for a meal out together at the end.’

  ‘Hum.’

  ‘It’s good to get away sometimes, you know—we love Mummy and Gillian, but there are things we’re better off doing on our own, no faffing about or worrying if they’re cold: you can’t imagine them enjoying three nights in a tent like we will.’

  ‘Hum.’

  ‘Under the stars, fresh air and exercise—marvellous.’

  A week later, on a hill above Lake Windermere, we’re listening to the six o’clock news: there is something about Fidel Castro, with his big beard, and President Kennedy, who is so young and smily and perfect, and President Khrushchev, who my father says you can’t trust. ‘Secret installations’, the newsreader says several times, and I think how difficult it must be to hide bombs: I have seen pictures of them and they are huge, or at least the clouds they give off are huge. Below, a rowing-boat chops and stitches its way across the water. The sheep on the green hills opposite are dotted tinily up to the summit, then evaporate into cumuli. ‘Marvellous,’ my father says. ‘Couldn’t have picked a better day. Fresh air, blue sky, not a soul in sight—makes you glad to be alive.’

  I sit on the tartan rug while he reaches into the boot, then dumps the heavy, rope-necked canvas swagbag on to the turf beside me. He undoes the rope, then slides the bag along the length of tent and yanks it up, like a mother removing the dungarees from her flat-on-its-back, nappy-heavy toddler. It must be years since the tent was last up, on the beach at Abersoch or in the back garden, but at once a familiar smell rises from it—the smell of canvas and sand-dunes and grass cuttings and suntan oil and dead earwigs.

  ‘Funny,’ my father says, and goes back to the boot of the car. I get up, and fiddle with the guy-ropes, their heavy wooden adjustables.

  ‘Is there a bag anywhere under the tent?’ he shouts, as he opens the car door and peers under the back seat. I lift one corner and find a small blue canvas holdall.

  ‘Yes,’ I call.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Pegs,’ I shout back, pulling out a clunky handful of them—they look like primitive-man sticks of firewood, with little notches axed into the side.

  ‘No poles?’

  ‘No.’

  I can remember what the poles are like—thick, wooden, three feet long, with large metal spears and slots at each end. I search the bracken, the canvas, under the car.

  ‘I must have put them in,’ my father says, without conviction.

  ‘Couldn’t we break some branches off and make do with those?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. It’ll be dark in half an hour.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Pack up and go home.’

  On the drove-road back down, though, he has another idea. ‘We could stay in a hotel, I suppose. And ring Mummy, and get her to drive up with the poles tomorrow and meet us halfway.’

  Monday evening, with poles. After the misfortune of the night before—soon enough converted by my father into a huge joke against himself, the sort he could afford once he’d found the cosy hotel, with its log
fire, consommé and roast duck—we have spent most of the day in the car. First we drove to meet my mother and sister in Kirkby Lonsdale, and had lunch. Then we came north again, nosing through the drizzle round Grasmere and Rydal Water, listening to the car radio, the weather forecast, the latest on Cuba. ‘It’s bound to clear up soon,’ my father says, who is never one to complain, whose meteorology is a science of optimism. To him, rain is the natural order of things, which in the Yorkshire Dales is about right, and anything other than rain is a blessing. ‘Lucky with the weather,’ he’ll say when it’s heavy and overcast. ‘Marvellous day’ denotes high cloud. ‘Miraculous, like being on the Riviera’ is when the sun, however briefly, gets through the clouds.

  At five we begin looking for a good pitching spot—‘I suppose there are official sites, but it’s not the same as camping wild, and you have to pay.’ We drive to Ambleside and Windermere: nothing. We take a left turn to Skelwith Bridge: the fields by the river are fenced off with barbed wire. We go back to Grasmere, through Chapel Stile, to the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel (trying not to notice the word Hotel), and as darkness begins to fall we settle on a spot by a stream. It is a low, unsheltered strip of flat grass. The sky above us is threatening heavier rain than this mild fuzz. Already I’m nostalgic for the site we found last night, but to which my father says it would be ‘bad luck’ to return. The farmer, though apparently surprised when we ask, has no objection to our being here. And it is a good spot to begin walking from tomorrow, up to Harrison Stickle and the Langdale Pikes. As my father’s torch dims from a bright stare to yellow myopia—‘Bloody batteries gone already’—we get the last guy-rope secured, the last bendy leg of the camp-bed into its slot. It is only, what, seven-thirty, but I want to climb into my sleeping-bag.