‘How long did you have to stay there, in Whatsit?’
‘Oh, I was in Honduras for a couple of years. I had to oversee the establishment of professional development best practice guidelines for the drug cartels.’
‘But no rats at all, you say?’
‘I brought one of the Venezuelan lilies back, and I’ll put it in your room. No rat will come near the place, believe me. The pollen may make you sneeze a bit, but as for the rats it’s adios amigo.’
‘And the turtles?’
‘It’s too dry for them here, and MAF won’t let you bring them in because of the possible diseases,’ I said. ‘You should have a really good sleep tonight.’
‘Well, the nights seem to be getting longer.’ Dad’s tone was glum. ‘I can’t seem to get my joints comfortable for any length of time.’
‘Maybe we can suss out where those pills are.’
‘I suppose it’s always warm in Guatemala?’ said Dad.
‘But in the rainy season,’ I said, ‘the water comes so high beneath the pole houses that you can hear the alligators scraping their tails against the piles, and the giant toads cluster on the windows until the light is blocked out.’
‘Rats are mighty swimmers, the buggers,’ said Dad.
At some stage the little girl next door had reclaimed her trike and was again circling intently: I think the three of us were slightly dizzy. Dad gave a yawn which displayed a lower lip like that of an elephant, and massaged his face. I wondered if Angeline would notice if I took an inch or two off his eyebrows, but then reminded myself that neither he nor I would feel any better as a result. Boredom is not often a productive motivation. I wondered also about the mutual effects of our time together, whether the consequence of the meeting of my youth and his extreme old age would be a more intermediate and beneficial setting for us both: a median view of life.
That day’s evening meal was the last I needed to consider, for Angeline and her husband, marriage restored if all went well, were to be back next morning. A sense of closure gave significance to the occasion, and I went out to Angeline’s deep-freeze and found a heavy pack of pork slices. A few games of squash and I would burn off the fat from the desirable crackling; in Dad’s case surely he didn’t have enough time left for cumulative diet-related diseases to be a threat. ‘I thought we’d treat ourselves to pork, Mr Ladd,’ I said, and got together carrots, potatoes and peas as a counter to that indulgence.
‘Ah,’ said Dad, ‘I could do with a drink.’
‘Okay, but we’re not having as much as last night.’
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing. You’re just not going to rip into it the way you did last night, though it was my fault.’
‘What happened last night?’ said Dad.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘You slept like a dead man because of the booze.’
‘Who’s the dead man?’ asked Dad.
‘We’ll have one bottle of red with the pork,’ I said, and Dad nodded.
I moved Dad into the lounge, and put a tray on his lap as preparation. There was something on the television about rearing livestock in barns in the American Midwest — all very American Gothic, and Dad had difficulty in getting a handle on it. I tried to keep his interest up as I cooked dinner. I didn’t want him getting his papers out again and recycling them endlessly. ‘Looks like a pretty big operation they’ve got going on those farms,’ I said, coming in to give him a very moderate top-up.
‘What’s that?’ Dad was gazing at the screen as if it were a box of snakes.
‘All those cattle indoors for months, aren’t they?’
‘Cattle — is that what they are?’
‘Aren’t they?’
‘Look sort of funny,’ he said. ‘It’s dark, isn’t it. I reckon there’s something wrong with the picture.’
‘It’s just being inside, I suppose.’
‘Who wants to watch cattle inside all the time? What the hell is this all about I want to know,’ said Dad. He had a good point arrived at in a roundabout sort of way.
Dad enjoyed his pork. He did take eternity cutting it up, but I resisted the urge to do it for him. Many of the peas escaped him and lay on the tray, his lap, or the carpet around him like green beads. We had a packet of shortbread biscuits for afters, and a cup of coffee.
‘Is Viv coming in?’ Dad asked. He always spoke fondly of his dead wife.
‘No.’
‘What about the children?’
‘Angeline comes back tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Dad with surprise and emphasis, as if he had been convinced her return was to be the present day, or any day other than tomorrow. He steepled his hands and worked his long, loose face like a pantomime actor. ‘And you are again?’ he said.
It was the one day we hadn’t had an outing and so without bothering about any confusing preamble of intent or agreement, I stood Dad up in a scatter of peas and we went out into the warm decay of the summer day. The golf course was all vague nature in the twilight. Houses we passed were at their best, blemishes hidden, and weeds not readily distinguished from their invited cousins. It was a slow outing. Dad’s walking stick was varnished, and had a rubber stopper on the end, and he lingered as ever to poke at things: unusual letter boxes, shrubs intruding across the footpath, a dog turd. ‘How long have I lived here?’ he asked. Death can be a sudden fall of the curtain, the cataclysmic closure; it can also be a gradual deprivation of those aspects of consciousness we need to remain in touch with the world. Dad at times seemed in a dinghy drifting further and further out from the rest of us on the shore. ‘I’ll need to get back to work tomorrow,’ he said.
‘What’s so important?’
‘My son, Theo, is joining the board. It’s what I’ve always wanted.’
‘That’s really great,’ I said. ‘I bet he’ll give you a lot of support.’ My landlady said Theo had drowned in Nepal, and hadn’t liked his father anyway, so in regard to his son at least, Dad’s loss of short-term memory was a blessing for him. ‘Well, you haven’t got the skills to make a contribution at that level, have you,’ he said candidly. ‘And no degree.’
‘You’re right.’ I didn’t need reminding about such things.
It took us a while to complete the small suburban block and the dusk was more pervasive by the time we reached home again. Dad would have walked right past the gate and begun another slow circuit, but I directed him up the path from which he swung at a few parched flowers with his stick.
‘So who are we visiting here?’ he asked.
‘We live here,’ I said.
‘Like hell we do,’ but nevertheless Dad was willing to come inside and be surprised by every room all over again. ‘We’ve had our dinner, have we?’ he wanted to know, and, with rather more diffidence, ‘Are you staying the night?’
‘I’m Brian, here to keep you company.’
‘You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t entertain you. I’ve a good deal of work on. Business, you know.’
‘That’s fine.’
After sundown the bad times came for Dad — well, other world times at least. It showed in his increasing uneasiness and fidgeting. As well as all the stuff with his hands, he pulled strange faces, puckering his lips, or stretching them in an exaggerated and mirthless grin, shooting his bushy eyebrows aloft, and clamping his lower jaw out. All a quite unconscious exhibition of gurning. I wondered if it was a sign of lesser, gremlin personality traits normally suppressed by the deliberate imposition of an integrated character; a sort of geriatric possession having nothing to do with right or wrong. We began the laborious process of getting him ready for bed.
And it was marked not just by mutual effort, but mutual indignity. He wasn’t sufficiently supple, or balanced, to soap himself in the shower: arthritis made it difficult for him to raise his arms above his shoulders, or to touch his own feet. I stood in the doorway of the shower to help, lathered his wobbly head, watched the shampoo suds slide over the corrugations of his collapsed chest. Dad
gasped happily in the hot jet and the swirling steam, and would have fallen several times had I not gripped his elbow. He was all bone and tendon, and the nails on his big toes were thick, opaque and yellow. As we stood together afterwards in the bathroom and I dried his bum and cock with a lush, blue towel, the incongruity of it all gave me a brief laugh, and Dad chuckled just to follow suit. Two strangers — Dad couldn’t even remember my name — so intimate, so innocent, together. ‘Is it morning, or night?’ he whispered. His hair stood up damply and his eyes roamed in their deep sockets.
‘Night,’ I said. ‘It’s night now.’
‘Will the rats come for the pomegranate seeds?’
‘Not a chance now we’ve got the Ecuadorian lily,’ I said.
‘Of course. Of course, and what a relief for all,’ he said. ‘There weren’t many women in the war you know, but I saw a falcon high up above the desert before the tank attack.’
As I swotted in the lounge, I could hear Dad singing to himself in bed. There were some words, some humming, and a good deal of pom pom and pum pum as he entertained himself. He talked to himself too, posing such questions as why the sheet had got caught up, where the wardrobe door led to, and when he’d need to get up to leave in time for the meeting. And he answered each question with interest and patience as one might to a friend. In a moment of wishful thinking I imagined the night was to be peaceful and mercifully swift.
I went to bed with a head full of the battle of Gettysburg: Cashtown Inn, Willoughby’s Run and McPherson’s Barn, and photographers with the armies for the first time. But barely had the smoke cleared when I was woken by the noise made by Dad barging about in the dark hallway. The slick, green numerals told me it was 3.36 a.m. and Dad was weeping loudly. I went out and lit up the hallway. Dad had taken off his pyjamas and wore dark suit trousers and his beloved long coat. ‘Where am I?’ he implored brokenly. ‘And who the hell are you?’
‘I’m Brian.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m keeping you company,’ I said.
‘Where’s Viv and the kids?’
I began an explanation to bridge some thirty or forty years, but Dad turned away with a hollow moan and wandered back into his bedroom. Nothing related to the present was any consolation to him. There seemed no option but to follow him through the looking glass. I persuaded him to exchange suit trousers for pyjama ones by pointing out he had no underpants, but agreed that the coat of the high plains drifter was useful in protecting him in case he was visited by the rats from the other side. Dad went reluctantly back into bed, and to settle him I sat under the covers beside him, for at four o’clock it was cool enough wandering in my boxers. ‘Angeline’s coming tomorrow,’ I said. ‘You’ll like that.’
Dad nodded, his lined face glinting with tears. ‘What about Viv and Theo?’
‘Yep, the whole family.’ So could I assume power of life and death, and summon back his wife and the watery Theo. Anything to keep his mind off the rats; anything to help us drift through the darkness without despair.
‘Things haven’t always been easy, you know, Warren,’ Dad admonished me. ‘We had a truck load of trouble with Theo. For a while there he just seemed to go from one scrape to another and we were at our wits’ end.’
‘I suppose most young guys go through a time when they’re fooling with drugs and stuff.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Dad. ‘You know he was still stealing money from us when he was nearly thirty years old. He had a baby with a girl in Sydney and he abandoned them both and went trekking in Nepal.’ Dad stopped and listened for a time. ‘It’s very windy outside,’ he said, yet everything was still.
‘A real southerly buster,’ I said.
‘Anyway, things haven’t always been easy. But they were both great kids and Angeline was never any trouble at all. You worry more about your kids than your own life, do you know that?’
‘Absolutely.’
Dad was quiet for a time, but his hands and face twitched and shimmied as the outward show of some inner agitation, a string of Tom Thumb crackers somewhere along his nervous system. I thought maybe a song or two would calm him, and allow me to go back to my own bed. I was tired, and worried about Dad’s condition.
‘Let’s sing a bit,’ I said.
‘Eh?’
‘Sing a bit. You like that.’
‘What time is it?’ said Dad.
‘Time to sing,’ I said, but then couldn’t think of anything that both Dad and I would know well. I finally came up with ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and then ‘Lili Marlene’. Dad enjoyed that especially, and the singing was more successful than I’d hoped. Only once he stopped singing and put a hand to my mouth, then said, ‘Listen to that storm outside.’ There was no wind at all. Or maybe winds cracked their cheeks for Dad that I was too young and temporal to hear.
‘Maybe it’s inside,’ I said. ‘Let’s drown it out.’
We sang ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window’, and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. Songs are sung by people and in places never contemplated by their composers, and for reasons quite inexplicable in normal times, and we must have been as odd a juxtaposition as any. Eighty-eight-year-old Mr Ladd and twenty-year-old me, strangers in bed together well before the dawn. When we had sung ourselves out, I told Dad I was going to my own room. ‘Do you want the light left on?’ I asked him.
‘Better had,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s the swordfish making all that noise outside.’
‘They’re not doing any harm,’ I said.
‘Things haven’t always been easy, you know, Warren.’
‘So you said.’
‘Why have I got this coat on in bed?’
‘You might have to get up for a piss.’
‘Nothing’s like it was before,’ said Dad and he lay back on the pillows. ‘Someone keeps coming in and watching me when I’m asleep,’ he whispered.
‘How do you know?’
‘I can hear them breathing,’ Dad said.
I stopped in the doorway for a last check. There he lay with the top of his black coat from the bedclothes and his caricature of a face on the pillow. He was looking back at me, and I bet he was wondering who I was again.
‘It’ll be morning soon,’ I said.
I dropped into my bed as if pole-axed, and into a pit of sleep too deep even for dreams. I awoke to full daylight and the noise made by Dad as he tried to manage himself in the lavatory. I hoped to God he’d taken off the coat, and found my appeal divinely answered. The other things could be washed easily.
‘Did you have a good night?’ I asked him, wondering what he remembered of the swordfish, the southerly and the songs.
‘An okay night, I suppose,’ said Dad vaguely. ‘It’s not as comfortable as my own bed somehow.’
We had our last breakfast together, and Dad was too polite to ask who I was, so I told him anyway. He perked up when I said that Angeline was returning before lunch, and gave me a history of her school achievements, which included awards for physics and impromptu speaking. In the fifth form she gave a reading from the Book of Job at the school prizegiving. ‘Theo didn’t do himself justice at school,’ Dad said.
There was a full, gleaming summer sun for my last morning with Dad. He sat on the patio again in his black coat and seemed to gradually expand in the heat. I had found his best shoes for him to wear in honour of his daughter’s homecoming, and their domed, black toes shone at the end of his grey trousers. While I had a cleanup inside the house I could hear Dad talking to himself from time to time, but there was no anxiety in his tone. He seemed to be scrutinising and rearranging bits of his life from long ago. I took particular care to hide the last empty wine bottles well down in the rubbish bag. I packed my gear ready to leave and put it by the Suzuki. ‘Are you getting ready to go somewhere?’ asked Dad as I came back to the patio with mugs of tea.
‘I’ve got exams in a few days,’ I said, and he gave a little chortle as though pleased to be missing out on such things himself.
I wanted to wish him well, but wasn’t sure how I could do that with sincerity when I knew what was happening to him: the inevitable path before him. ‘You look after yourself and don’t worry about things,’ I said. How could I thank him for not dying on me during my time of supervision.
‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he replied huskily. ‘The nights get longer, don’t you think? I suppose I’m not doing much during the day to tire me out.’
Dad was having a snooze when Angeline and her husband returned, but he woke up and knew her immediately, though I thought perhaps he was for a moment surprised to find her so grown up. What a hug they had and then a flurry of questions and answers about their trip and our stay, which bewildered him, and after a minute or two he turned to Angeline’s husband and politely asked him who he was again. Welcome to the club. ‘Goodness, Dad, you’re wearing that greatcoat on a scorcher of a day,’ said Angeline and she raised her eyebrows at me.
‘He feels good with it on,’ I said. ‘He likes the heat, doesn’t he.’
Angeline called me into the lounge to give me my money in a manila envelope. ‘Was everything all right?’ she asked, looking at me keenly. She and I knew there was a rich history to my stay, that there had been wild moments on the heath, but that nothing would be served by the rendition of it blow by blow. To talk about it, to admit to such things as we knew, would give them substance and power.
‘He wasn’t so good at night, but otherwise things were okay.’
‘That’s the pattern of his dementia,’ she said.
It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to Dad, for in some ways I never really got to say hello. I wished him well and took his big, loose hand in mine, and he said thank you and that it was a pleasure. But when I was on the motorbike, about to start, with my squash bag balanced on the tank and handle bars, he stood up from his patio chair and called out, ‘Warren, Warren.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
He gaped at me for a moment, gave a rueful smile. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in his hollow voice. ‘I’ll tell you next time.’
Angeline smiled as apology for her father’s confusion, her husband raised a bland hand. As I rode down the drive I had a last view of Dad standing in the hot sun in his black, gunslinger’s greatcoat. In all that mundane suburban scene he was the innocent and hapless harbinger of howling winds, swordfish, lilies and rats, womenless wars, and the high cliff before the chasm.
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 58