by Jo Gatford
I nod. That sounds like a good thing, whoever Paul is.
She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have - I saw you, Peter, talking to that kitchen porter. I was going to report him but he said it might help with the pain. Might… calm you down a bit.” She leans in and rests her hands on my knees. “Where did you put it, Peter? If they find it… Please, try to remember.”
My shoulders are so used to shrugging I wonder if eventually they’ll get stuck up by my ears. I can’t help her. I don’t even know what’s been lost. Angela picks at the loose loops of thread in the arm of the chair and I need to say something to lift her sadness but I don’t have any worthwhile words. The sun flashes against the wall, reflecting off a car window as it pulls into the car park. For a second the light filters through her hair and I remember:
“Clare was here.”
Angela looks up in confusion. “Last night?”
“Where were you?” I ask. Clare was terrified. I was no help. She needed her mother. “She needed you,” I snarl. Regret it immediately. Grasp at her hands in apology.
Angela tries to smile to show it isn’t my fault. She blames the strokes, the broken pieces of my psyche, the grumpy old man who has taken possession of my skin. I want her to break, to hate me like the others do, but she knows what I know. She knows what I can’t tell Matthew and she still won’t desert me.
She takes a long breath in. We blink at each other. She pats my shoulder again and I forget to wince. Then there’s a barking gulp from her throat and her shoulders shake as she weeps into her hands.
#
“Alice?”
“It’s Lauren.”
“Alice?”
“My name’s Lauren, Peter, you know that.”
“Alice?”
A sharp exhalation, halfway to furious, halfway from frustrated. “Whatever,” Alice says under her breath.
My eyes can’t focus on her; she merely lingers like the ghost of mothers-in-law past by my left shoulder. My right arm is in the hands of another woman, a hospital nurse. She manipulates each finger in turn, flexes and stretches my wrist until it clicks. I turn a whelp of pain into a cough. My sawn-off cast lies disembowelled on the bed next to me. I stroke the strands of gauze that poke out of its belly. Weeks since my last stroke, though I don’t remember how I came to fall, and I cannot work out why Alice would be here with me to have my cast removed. She must be at least a hundred by now. The nurse won’t let go of my arm and I can’t twist around to look at the woman behind me to check who is there. All I can see is her hand impatiently tapping the metal side bar of the bed. It doesn’t look like a hundred-year-old hand. It has a silver wedding band and an engagement ring with too many diamonds that I’ve never seen on Alice before. Did she remarry while I was in the home?
Of course not, her name is Lauren and she’s not Heather’s mother. But that doesn’t stop me asking, “Did you get married again?”
She replies with a petulant and confused, “No.”
It isn’t Alice’s voice either. That proves it. I wonder where Alice is, I could have sworn she was here earlier.
The hospital nurse doesn’t speak to me, converses only with someone over my spotted, balding head about physiotherapy and rehabilitation exercises, about monitoring movement and restricted weight-bearing.
Someone has written all over my discarded plaster cast, the same three words in tiny scrawls that I can barely read. Alex is dead, it says. I think it might be my handwriting but it doesn’t make any sense. The letters switch places with each other, mutating and stretching as I watch them: Alex’s head. Alex said. All is ended.
The nurse gives me a squash ball to squeeze, until the muscles in my forearm contract and scream lactic acid into my bloodstream. Lauren drives me back to the home, switches the radio up to a volume that causes the hairs on the inside of my ears to vibrate.
Alice peers at me in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes are distrustful, irritated and full of tiredness. A phone rings somewhere upon her person. As we stop at a crossroads she peeks at the screen and taps a reply.
“Who was that?” I ask, suddenly aware of the deception in her seated stance.
“Pardon?”
“On the phone, was that her?”
“Who? It’s none of your business, Peter.”
“You know exactly who I mean, Alice.”
“Oh God… I’m not whoever Alice is. That was my son, asking for a lift home from school later, if you must know.”
“You lied through your teeth to me, to Matthew, to all of us,” I say in a low quiet tone. She shifts in the driver’s seat, flicking the indicator with an angry hand, pulling out into a too-small gap and getting beeped as she cuts up a taxi. She knows I know. But she doesn’t know about the letters.
“Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’d appreciate it if you stopped raising your voice at me. We’ll be back at the home in a minute.”
“You knew she was still alive, you never stopped believing. Well, more fool you.”
She sits silent, staring ahead at an empty country road as intently as if she were trying to cross four lanes of traffic. Her left foot taps distractedly against the floor mat.
“I knew she never told you, or you wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. For all your holier-than-thou preaching that we had to keep the faith, she never visited you, did she? Did she?”
“Peter - ”
“And now she really is gone, so you can stop holding out for a miracle return, because you’re not going to get it. She’s at the bottom of the ocean.” I can feel a wild grin on my face that disgusts me but protects me from the agony that should be in its place.
There is a long, shuddering pause from her, then: “Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I need her to know, to stop believing. I need her to give up, along with me. It’s laughable. So I laugh. Lazy, like Ingrid: ha aha, ha.
“She jumped,” I tell Alice. “At high tide.” She wasn’t a swimmer. She called me from the clifftop, from a phone box plastered with numbers for the Samaritans, a box for people just like her. I didn’t pick up. All I got was an answerphone message.
Alice blinks like an epileptic doll as we pull into the car park. She sits and breathes in long whistles, hands still on the wheel, shoulders shivering. I roll a cigarette, heave the door open and painstakingly pull myself out of the car. She doesn’t move to help me. She can sit and rot there, she’s dead after all, been dead a long time. I can’t believe I forgot about that.
#
When I was forty-two, it was not a very good year. It was a grey year. Matthew, you were two. Your mother was gone, but not quite gone. Nana Alice posted photos of you through the letter box when I refused to answer the door, until they covered the doormat completely. I started leaving and entering the house through the back door. When I had to pick up the post I’d do so with my eyes closed, feeling blindly across the bristles until my fingertips met matte envelope rather than the gloss of a photograph. She tried to fool me by putting them in envelopes, got her friends to write the address so I wouldn’t know they were from her. But I knew. I frisbeed them back onto the doormat, unopened.
A drunken night-spirit, born of several bottles of wine, dared me into action. I swept the pictures up into a rubbish bag with the broom at arm’s length, doused them with lighter fluid and left them flaming on that bastard’s doorstep. I ran barefoot back to the house, grinding gravel into the soles of my feet, skinning my knee in an elaborate skid as I rounded the corner of my drive.
The wine-spirit was gone when I was safe inside and the lonely terror grasped me by the scruff of my neck. I poured Dettol on my wounds and hissed at the almost full moon. A few days more and I would have made the transition into a beast.
She came in the back, used the spare key that hung behind the birdfeeder. She sat like a Bond villain in darkness, awaiting my return from work, rehearsing her grand reveal.
“Peter,” she whisp
ered.
I swore and my heart sucker-punched me in the chest. Heather sat on a kitchen chair, a shaft of moonlight falling in curved lines across her quivering hands which lay on the worktop, quivering.
She’d lost weight. She’d lost the weight of a whole baby and all that went with it. And more. The weight of responsibility and worry and stress and love. Her face was pale and longer than I remembered. Eyes reddened from saltwater rubbed angrily away. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want pity to state her case. She was holding it in with the last of her strength.
I felt less than I thought I would. “He’s not here,” I told her.
“I know. I’ve seen him.”
“You saw your mother?”
She shook her head, swallowing hard and painful. “I saw him in the garden. He was singing Frère Jacques to the rabbit.”
I nodded but couldn’t move any closer to her, so strong was the scent that had slowly faded from her left-behind clothes, her pillow, the towel she’d used the night she went into labour. I remembered in a rush of blood all the ways in which I used to hold her; the soft resistance of her skin, the angle of her head against my shoulder, her hot breath leaving condensation on my cheek. Eyelids, lips, tongue, neck, nipples, stomach, hips, buttocks, calves, big toe. Even if she gave them all to me, they no longer belonged. I’d lost her the moment she gave up Matty. I thought that if she smiled she might break me into pieces.
“You got my letters?” she said.
I nodded again. I’d tried to burn them too, on a bonfire at the end of the garden, but my hands wouldn’t let go. My fingers disobeyed and stuffed the envelopes into my coat pockets where they sat for months. I had to buy a new coat to avoid contact with them. At last the earth moved around and spring came. I packed away the loaded garment into the top of the wardrobe, out of sight until the following autumn when I somehow found the strength to seal them into a shoebox.
She breathed in bubbles of excess saliva produced by her determination not to cry - countless intakes but no words in exchange. We were almost motionless there together. In three or four strides I could have crossed the vast distance between us, grabbed her by the shoulders and manhandled her into the cupboard under the stairs. I could have kept her in there, fed and watered and safe. I could have dragged the spare room mattress in as well, to make it comfortable for her. I would have slept in the hall. We could have talked through the gap under the door. We would have been close again. We wouldn’t have ever had to answer the door.
Her eyes turned dry and enraged, glowering at her bitten-raw fingernails, snapping up to pin me to the wall.
“You would have been happy never to try again. You said: Maybe. It. Just. Wasn’t. Meant. To. Be.”
“It’s my fault?” The words were snatched off my tongue before I could chew them up.
She faltered, rolled her head from side to side, “No. No… I’m sorry, Peter. I’m so sorry.”
“Are you coming back?”
“No.”
“You don’t want me.” Not a question.
She didn’t reply.
“You don’t want your son.” Not a question.
No reply.
“Do you want - ” I can’t say his name, “ - Him?”
“No. No!”
“What are you going to do?”
“What’s left?”
And that was the point at which I should have gathered her up into my arms and kissed her, stroked her hair behind her ears, pressed her against my chest and held her tight and all those clichés that mean nothing when you’ve been carved out and left echoing. She’d shrunk into someone I didn’t know, perched miserably on her chair like a pigeon in the pouring rain. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to stay. It wasn’t that I wanted her dead. I don’t know what it was. Pride, perhaps? Stubbornness. Lydia’s idea of fate, come to punish me? So I did nothing. Said nothing. I might have even nodded, validating the unspoken implication. It was my fault.
“Why are you here?” I asked her.
She rounded her shoulders and her bottom lip curled down over itself in a grin which possessed no joy at all. Her eyes squinted into lines and out came the tears. Still, she tried to prevent them, gritting her teeth so her voice came through the gaps in a squeak, “I don’t know.”
I turned around and ripped off a few sheets of kitchen roll, tossing them onto the counter in front of her. “Thank you,” she whispered.
I sat down opposite her. “You didn’t have to tell me,” I said softly.
“I know.”
“You could have pretended.”
“I know.”
“I would have loved him anyway.”
She looked up and the resolution behind her eyes terrified me. “I wouldn’t have,” she said. “I can’t.”
She left again and I didn’t stop her. I didn’t watch her disappear down the road. She might never have been there at all but for the crumpled up kitchen paper that had blown onto the floor with the breeze of the front door closing.
Chapter Twenty-One
I must have passed out on the sofa. I wake at midday and Clare is gone and my flat is a shithole and my phone is full of messages.
Sarah: asking if I want to meet up after work later for a drink, which I was not expecting at all after standing her up for a concussion last night.
Clare: telling me to go fuck myself, which I was definitely expecting and probably deserve. I should go fuck myself and she’s moving out.
Third one’s the charm.
Angela: half begging, half demanding that I visit my dad this morning because he’s gone and done something really fucking stupid.
I drive one-handed, picking chunks of congealed blood out of the back of my head to keep myself awake. The B-roads run through tree-lined tunnels and on a clear day the sun strobes through the branches. I always miss the turning. A sign in the shape of a chicken, hidden in a hedge, is the only indication that a narrow dirt road veers off round a blind corner. I take the turn too sharply and my tyres freewheel on the gravel. The car park is half empty, half full, depending on how depressed you are.
The receptionist non-smiles politely as I push through the double doors. I nod, pointing towards my dad’s corridor with questioning eyebrows. She shakes her head and jerks a thumb in the direction of the common room.
The residents cluster around the telly like it’s a cold fire. Grey rain batters against the windows - an all-consuming white noise that puts me slightly off balance. No-one looks up when I walk through the doorway. A glossy gold paper chain flutters down from the mantelpiece without a single reaction. A nurse squeezes past me with a fresh catheter bag, followed by a porter in rubber gloves carrying a bucket of soapy water. They are ignored too.
And there in the corner I spy, with my tired, jealous eyes, a father who is asleep. Well, at least I won’t have to talk to him.
“There you are!” Every shoulder in the room twitches but this one’s for me. It’s the duty manager for Dad’s corridor. Hannah? Helen? No, something odder. I meet her halfway across the room. She continues to shout, even though we’re standing a foot apart. Her name badge reads ‘Honour’.
“I’ve been looking for you!”
“My dad’s asleep. Is Angela around? She asked me to come in.”
Honour lies with no attempt at grace, “Angela’s busy with a resident at the moment. I just need to have a quick word with you if you don’t mind.” She looks me up and down, taking note of the abrasions on my face, the awkward stance that keeps me off my sore leg. She doesn’t look impressed.
Honour heads off towards Dad’s room and I follow with sickly anticipation. Why the hell does she want to talk to me? The staff either pity me or flick disdainful glances at me for not visiting my dad enough. I’m just the idiot son. Angela knows all the technical stuff and the money stuff and the medical stuff and the emotional stuff. All I do is come in once a week to tell Dad that Alex is dead. The one thing Angela can’t do.
<
br /> “It’s not like an old death,” Angie told me. She’s had enough of them. She’s been ready for Dad to die since the moment she co-signed the home’s application form with me. Her face slipped for a second and then recalibrated into something more solid than before - a face beyond her face that could not be touched by what was inside.
“With Alex… When it happens like that, with no warning. It’s like being shaken.” Her face was not controlled, then. She sat across from me in the hospital canteen and her eyes twitched, squinting like she was looking into the sun. The tightness of her mouth pushed new lines into her skin. Her hands would not leave her alone, scratching at imaginary itches, pulling on strands of hair until they snapped out of her skull, rubbing across her eyelids until lashes came away on her fingertips. At the funeral her expression contorted into a cry with no sound, no breath. And now there’s just the flinching. Every mention of her little brother’s name is an open-handed strike. Thinking of Dad’s predictable death must feel like a relief.
The woman in the room across from Dad sits so upright it looks unnatural. I watch her until the door closes behind me and I can be sure she’s not about to leap out of bed, baring fangs. Honour lowers her voice once we’re safely inside Dad’s room, now that there is no-one to overhear.
“There was an incident yesterday,” she says. “I don’t know if Angela told you.”
It’s happening again. Another stroke. He’s been losing the power of sensible speech for months. My lungs tense to half their capacity. “What happened?”
“Well. As far as we can tell, Peter got hold of something he shouldn’t have.”
Shit. He tried to top himself. What with? A knife? Pills? Shoelaces? The thought weighs like stones in my stomach. My voice becomes paper thin, creeping up high, past the massive swelling that has suddenly appeared in my throat. “What happened?”
“Another resident believes he may have been… on some sort of non-prescription drugs.”
“What?” Seriously? I’m smiling and I can’t help it.
She pauses disapprovingly. “Recreational drugs, I mean. Marijuana, maybe.”