by Jem Lester
‘Take him home. He can’t come in now, it’ll totally confuse him.’
‘Is he in there?’
‘Ben.’
‘Mr PP32.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘So he is in there.’
‘Ben, I swear to God!’ She flops to the wall. ‘It’s three thirty in the morning, please just take him home.’
‘He is home.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘He’s in my space, Emma, my space.’
‘Ben, the car in your parking space belongs to Tricia from next door’s brother. She asked if he could use it for a couple of days and I said yes.’
‘I’m not talking about the parking.’
‘You’re not talking any sense. Go back to your dad’s, please.’
I hear the car door open and Jonah skips past me and grabs Emma by the hand. She pulls him close and cries into his hair. Everything, at this moment, feels wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me to see two moons in the sky, or to see Jonah open his mouth and shout ‘fuck off’ to both of us.
Instead it starts to rain and he pulls away from Emma and bounces around laughing. Her tears do not stop as she watches our son perform his rain dance and it hurts me like nothing before to see the rain mix with tears on her cheeks as she watches us drive away.
Tasmanian Devil
I’ve woken up with scratches and bruises before, but usually have no memory of how or where they were inflicted. Not this morning. The rose thorn scratches are stinging and itching. I’ve only had a few hours’ sleep and the smuggled whisky bottle lies empty beside me, but still I take the cap off and stick my tongue in – desperate to catch any remaining drops. I just manage to push the bottle under the sheets as Dad’s head fills my vision.
‘Where did you take him so late?’ he asks.
I pull the pillow over my head. ‘Close the curtains, please.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Stringfellows.’
‘Don’t be clever.’
‘He wasn’t asleep, we went for a drive.’
‘At three in the morning? How’s he going to learn to sleep if you drag him out in the middle of the night?’
‘Dad, will you leave me alone? I’ll get up soon.’
‘It’s midday, you’ll get up now. I’ve got a bowls match in half an hour. Here.’
The tea is sour – the colour of peat – and tea leaves stick themselves to the roof of my mouth like dead flies. ‘I drink coffee, how many times?’ I say, but he’s already left the room.
I slump across the breakfast bar and light a cigarette. My eyes still refuse to open.
‘Going in today?’ he asks.
‘Later. There’s only washing-up to do, Valentine can handle it.’
‘So who’ll answer the phone?’
I wave my mobile at him. ‘Diverted.’
‘Well maybe you should turn it on? You want them to go to a competitor? And yes, in case you were wondering, JJ went to school okay.’
I point the phone at him and hold the power button until it sings. ‘All right? Don’t forget your balls.’
‘Bowls.’
‘Whatever.’
Back in bed I scroll through the missed calls – all numbers, no names. I turn it off, toss it on to the clothes mountain, have a cursory wank and roll on to my stomach and doze. Wednesday’s already half done and I feel no compulsion to get up.
There are books arranged around me on the bed, none opened further than page twenty. A bottle neck peeks out from beneath War and Peace. I introduce myself to it, turn on the radio and drift off again.
I am in an airport and the metal detector just keeps going off, even when I’m down to my underwear it keeps going off. Hundreds of travellers queuing behind are laughing and wolf-whistling at me, but it just won’t stop ringing …
The doorbell. I haul myself from the bed and almost fall down the stairs.
‘Coming, coming,’ I shout. Jonah’s face is pressed up to the frosted panel, so I kneel down and stare through the glass. ‘Afternoon, mate,’ I say. When I open the door he passes me without a glance. ‘Did he have a good day?’
Minibus Marge, Jonah’s regular bus companion and one of Emma’s favourite people, looks me up and down. My boxer shorts are creased and rolled and my pecker is peeping out the bottom.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter, pulling them down.
‘Here,’ she says, handing me a knotted plastic bag of clothes. Drops of piss and condensation are running down its insides. ‘Is his grandfather home?’
‘Soon. See you in the morning,’ I say to her back and close the door. ‘Jonah?’ I call, following the trail of clothes down the hall into the kitchen. The cupboards are open, the fridge is breathing arctic air and grapes decorate the floor. ‘Bloody hell, Jonah.’ On my hands and knees I sweep up the grapes like marbles before being nearly scalped by a family-size jar of Marmite.
‘Toast?’
I search the kitchen cupboards, but there’s no bread. I check the fridge. Nothing. As I close the fridge door, beneath the hammer and sickle magnet is a note in Dad’s classical hand: Ben, please buy bread.
Jonah is at me again, banging me on the forearm with the Marmite. He’s so desperate he even runs to his PECS book, plucks the correct card and slaps it into my palm.
‘I know, but we need to get some, Jonah.’
He’s not having it, or not getting it, or both. He objects, his exclamations getting gruffer, and he starts to jump. It’s not a happy jump, it’s frustration.
‘We’ve got no bread, Jonah. Look, we’ve got no bread. How about some crisps?’
This communication system is fine when you have the item he wants. He can request, but can’t comprehend the lack of cause and effect.
He bats the crisps out of my hand and they fly across the kitchen. He forces his hand into his mouth and bites down hard until the scar tissue begins to bleed.
‘No, please stop, Jonah, please, we’ve got no fucking bread.’
He releases the jar of Marmite at the top of a jump with some force and it smashes on the floor; brown glass and yeasty brown glue cover the lino by his bare feet. I grab at him and try to pull him away, but he’s too heavy. I summon every ounce and just manage to swing him around away from the glass, gashing my own foot in the process.
He’s off now. Left hand at my neck, right hand clawing my scalp – uncut nails doing damage. He’s a Great White, twisting and pulling. I lose my balance and his weight falls on to me, pins me to the floor. A bloody footprint marks the lino. I feel the unmistakable metallic sweetness of my own blood trickle into my mouth yet I know that if I hit him hard enough – really belt him – I may bring him out of it long enough to extricate myself, but I cannot. I want him to hurt me because I deserve it. I can’t even remember to buy a loaf of bread.
I feel his teeth grip on to my nose and I still don’t care. I want all his anger, deserve the scars of this. I know the cuts on my face and head are deep and bloody and yet I lie here motionless; like a drowning man facing the inevitable and slipping beneath the surface with relief.
Then he stops dead and starts to cry. Proper tears, fat and salty. A release. His release is also mine and I sit up and pull him to me in an embrace and he doesn’t object.
‘I’m sorry, Jonah. I’m so sorry.’
I feel his breathing calm against my chest, although it still catches – and his voice has softened to a sweet incomprehensible babble. If he had a speaking voice it would be like a mesmeric peal of church bells.
‘I got bread just in …’ My father stands and stares. ‘I’ll get my clippers and do JJ’s nails,’ he says.
‘Make him some toast first, please,’ I say. ‘There’s an unopened jar hidden above the fridge.’
And Jonah laughs. His fa
ce changes, he laughs, he giggles, he runs back and forth from the kitchen to the lounge – a Marmite toast relay. He settles in front of the TV, twiddles his hair, goes back for more toast, takes an apple from the fridge, eats his dinner with his fingers and just forgets. Forgets that less than an hour before he was at war with me, that he’s injured me or that my lack of care made him hurt me. He’s forgotten it all, no grudge, no remorse, no resentment. Lucky bastard.
He yawns.
‘You want me to run his bath?’
‘No, I’ll do that, Dad. I’ll do that. I’ll go and run it now. You stay here and watch TV with Jonah.’
Jonah climbs on to the sofa next to Dad as I mount the stairs, and I hear him start to chatter. More family history, I suppose? More information that I can’t be trusted with.
I start down the stairs on tiptoe, then halt. I want to know what he feels unable to share with me, but I want to confront him, not eavesdrop. It may be, I ponder, that this is not about me, but about my father. He can talk to Jonah, because Jonah neither judges nor gossips and, as painful as the information is, Jonah is immune. Whereas I? What could be so bad that he feels I can’t be trusted with it? Maybe if I am witness to his catharsis he’ll feel powerless. Knowing how that feels, I have some empathy with him. The inquisition will have to wait.
Bath time is my favourite ritual. Firstly, I put a clean sheet on his bed, change the duvet cover and pillow cases and turn the duvet down. Then I make sure the aqueous cream is on his bedside table and close the curtain. Next, I switch on his toy fish tank and check that the brightly coloured plastic tropical fish are revolving freely and, finally, switch on his CD player – always the same CD, Mr Tumble singing children’s favourites (number two on the volume dial).
In the bathroom, I use the shower attachment to clean the bath, put the plug in and switch to taps, testing that the water is hot, but not too hot. Then I squeeze hypoallergenic bubbles into the running stream of water for three seconds and watch the bath fill up with a foamy mass. I locate his two bottles of medication that he takes first and last thing – apparently they moderate his mood.
This all takes approximately ten minutes. Finally, I call him up and wait. Sometimes I have to call twice, but usually I hear the ‘thump, thump, thump’ of his ungainly progress up the stairs and then he bounces into the bathroom, grinning. He is, I think, anticipating an end to the stress and trauma of his own personal groundhog day.
I help him undress, remove his nappy and clean him up with wipes before he climbs in. The nappy and wipes get tied in a plastic bag. The first drug I administer with an oral syringe; the second by spoon. He takes both without fuss.
I kneel by the side of the bath and watch him play, rub the bubbles all over his body before he eats them, and when I wash him we catch each other’s eyes and laugh – a father–son connection, hilarious, fleeting and precious.
I let him play for as long as he wants, or until the water is too cold, and then I open his bath towel wide and he climbs from the bath and free-falls into my arms so that I have to brace myself to catch him, and for the thirty seconds that I squeeze him tight and dry him he is a baby again, with his head on my shoulder and his smell all innocent and clean.
When I release him, he runs to his room and bounces on his bed in time with Mr Tumble, and while he does so I dry the bits I couldn’t reach before. Then he lies on his tummy – my baby boy with his cellulite bum and spare tyre, fat thighs and soft spotless back, pink from the heat of the bath.
‘Turn over, dude,’ I say, and he shuffles himself over and raises the small of his back so that I can fit a nappy on him for the night and, as he does so, he is no longer a baby – not quite an adolescent – and he will never, I understand again, as my wounds begin to sting once more, be a man.
I pull his pyjama bottoms on and he sits so I can do likewise with his top, and then he flops to the pillow, face up close to his fish tank as I kiss him, tell him I love him, turn the light off, close the door and leave. Downstairs, I throw myself on to the sofa and bury my head in a cushion.
‘Try not to get blood on my furniture.’
Empty
Wynchgate and Carlton NHS Trust
Department of Oncology
Mr G Jewell
14 Oakfield Avenue
London N10 4RG
April 10 2011
Dear Mr George Jewell
We have now received the results of your recent biopsy and would request that you attend an appointment on the following date:
April 15 2011 at 11:30
where you will be seen by Consultant Oncologist Mr Graham Stonehouse.
Keith Waters-Long
Administrator
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been going through the folders marked ‘Jonah’. They are beginning to form a tower on my bedside table. Each report is accompanied by emailed comments from Emma. I read her emails along with the reports, searching for clues and looking for excuses to contact her. But they are businesslike and insightful about Jonah and completely free of comments about me, or us. Through my obsession with them both, I have managed to push the terror surrounding Dad’s swelling neck out of mind – until today. Jonah is seated with a slice of toast in each hand and Dad is at the sink, rinsing his mug.
‘I’m busy,’ Dad says.
‘Dad …’
‘Bowls match, league.’
Oh for God’s sake. ‘You have an appointment with a consultant in an hour and you’re not going to miss it.’ And I don’t need this. My father acting like a child.
‘So what is he going to tell me, their Mr Stonehouse, that I don’t already know? What do you think he is going to do? Measure my inside leg and run me up a nice pair of trousers? It is cancer.’
‘What if it is? There are fucking cures these days.’
‘Don’t use that language in front of Jonah.’
‘Why? You think he’s going to repeat it? If he turns round and calls me a fucking bastard I’d die a happy man.’
We are both terrified, I realise. At a pivotal point in our lives where the future lies in someone else’s hands. I am used to being out of control, but Dad? I look at him fussing around, dropping things, trying to clear his mind of negative thoughts through mindless repetition like he did for years – polishing glasses in the warehouse.
‘It is cancer. They do not waste their money on old men like me these days. They have league tables.’
‘You don’t know that.’
He bangs the letter down on the kitchen table and pokes it with his finger.
‘No? Do you see where it says Clap Clinic? Oncology, Ben – cancer. Even an old fool like me knows the difference. Anyway, it runs in the family.’
‘What family? All I’ve had from you is a generic “gassed by the Nazis”.’
‘Yes, but if they hadn’t, they would have died of cancer.’
I look at him closer, my seventy-eight-year-old father with his neck like a prop-forward, and I notice his dilated pupils and the sweat on his brow and I know that he’s losing the battle with his demons.
‘I’ll come with you this time. No arguments.’
But he’s not listening. His left hand is stroking Jonah’s hair while the other feeds him cornflakes with a spoon.
‘You have a tumour on your thyroid gland, Mr Jewell.’
Mr Stonehouse is pinstriped and silver-haired and the lightbox next to his left shoulder has an x-ray clipped to it. It looks like Dad has swallowed a golf ball.
‘And unfortunately it is malignant.’
Dad nods.
‘Now, ordinarily, we would operate. Remove the gland and destroy any remaining cancer cells with a dose of radioactive iodine. Then it would simply be a case of taking thyroxine on a daily basis. Please sit down.’
Mr Stonehouse waves us to two chairs opposite his desk.
So that
would be the simple solution, but we don’t do simple in our family. Dad has an anaplastic tumour, Mr Stonehouse tells us. It is extremely rare and very aggressive. They can’t operate, can’t guarantee to remove every single cell which would send it racing round the rest of Dad’s body – if it hasn’t already done so.
‘So what can you do?’ I ask.
‘Well, the first step is an MRI scan to check whether the cancer has spread to any other organs.’
‘And if it has?’
Mr Stonehouse turns to my father. ‘Mr Jewell, I need to be candid with you. Your cancer is incurable. The average life expectancy from diagnosis to death is three to fifteen months, depending when we catch it.’
And my first thought is of Jonah’s case and the money, not of my father’s pain, and it drenches me in guilt. Is this normal? Does the impending death of a loved one turn your mind to practicalities? And then I think of the old Luger and its two bullets, how I must hide them because he’s capable, pig-headed, fatalistic and fearless.
And then I finally notice him crying, and the sickness and shame I experience at this moment feels as untreatable as my father’s cancer.
‘Mr Jewell, I have arranged for a scan this afternoon, after which we will have a better idea of the appropriate palliative treatment. I would like to admit you now, Mr Jewell, and begin treatment as soon as possible. Mr Jewell?’
Dad is staring at the rain hammering the window behind Mr Stonehouse.
‘I sent him to school without a coat, he will get wet. Ben, go home and pack me some clothes and on the way back, drop JJ’s coat into his school. I don’t want him catching a cold.’
‘Of course, Dad.’
‘And Benjamin …’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Don’t mention this to Jonah, I don’t want him knowing.’
‘No, I won’t.’
A nurse arrives, as if by magic.