by Carl Nixon
He walks over to the hedge.
‘Excuse me.’
She starts, a visible jolt as though prodded, and looks around, unable to instantly place the speaker. It is only her head that turns. He thinks that with her long neck, her large eyes, she is like some type of grazing animal. Not a deer. She is too solid in the legs and trunk for that comparison, but certainly something skittish away from the herd.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
He guesses that she is in her late twenties. Her pale hair is pulled in to a loose ponytail. She is wearing baggy dungarees, no doubt left over from her pregnancy, and a yellow T-shirt. Her feet are bare on the mossy brickwork beneath the clothesline. She glances furtively towards the house where he imagines her baby is sleeping.
‘I’m looking for Mr Alymer. I’m his son, Mark.’
‘His son?’ she repeats.
‘Yes. Have you seen him today?’
He sees her relax. She eases down from the balls of her feet. He can guess what she is thinking. It’s all right. This is the son. Family.
‘Not since yesterday,’ she says. ‘I saw him out on the street when I was coming home. About three o’clock. He had some shopping.’
‘I was supposed to meet him in town for lunch but he didn’t arrive.’
She frowns. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’
The question forces him to reconsider the option that his father is not all right, that something is seriously wrong.
‘I’m sure he’s fine. He probably just forgot.’ But he knows that this is an easy pretence of the type shared with strangers. In four years his father has never forgotten their monthly meeting. ‘Thanks anyway. I’ll just have a look around.’
The woman comes to the hedge and watches as he goes back to the conservatory. Nothing has changed there. The glass reflects his own face. He looks puzzled, anxious. He is surprised to see that the book lying on the floor is a biography of the war artist Peter McIntyre. How long has his father harboured an interest in artists, in art?
The woman calls across to him. ‘Is there a spare key?’
He turns and sees only her head, balanced on the edge of the hedge like a magician’s trick.
‘I’m not sure. I’ll try around the back.’
He walks behind the house but there is nothing to see there either. There is a double row of stacked firewood leaning against the weatherboards and a chopping block surrounded by pale splinters of wood but no sign of an axe. It is colder in the shadows. The first window he comes to is the bathroom. The glass is bubbled, the opaque of milky water, and he can make out nothing inside. The other window looks through into his father’s office. A desk without a computer, a bookshelf, several framed nautical maps on the wall. Everything is neat, tidy. The window resists his attempts to lift it open.
Back at the front of the house he is surprised to see that the woman is now standing on the veranda. She has lost her skittish air and meets his gaze directly. She is taller than he thought, almost as tall as he is. Her feet are still bare and he sees that her toes are long, splayed across the wood as though she is unused to wearing shoes.
‘I thought I heard a noise,’ she says. She nods her head towards the door. ‘Listen.’
They both stand perfectly still. He strains his ears, leaning his head slightly towards the door, but can hear nothing out of the ordinary. A car goes by on the street, heading down the hill, and the driver turns her head to look at them. He thinks they must make a strange sight, two adults playing stiff candle on the veranda.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ he says.
‘It sounded like an animal.’ She makes a noise deep in her throat that may or may not mimic the noise she claims to have heard.
There are long rectangles of dimpled stained glass framing the door. Red glass roses grow near the top. The pane he puts his face close to is a darker red, and everything he can see inside is tinged burgundy. The glass is as old as the house and has run, pooling and thickening towards the bottom so that his view of the interior is stretched and distorted. He is looking along a corridor with a polished wooden floor. Rugs have been scattered along its length. There is a plant stand and a narrow table to one side.
It is only when he concentrates on the door at the far end that he sees his father. He is lying on his back on the floor, half in and half out of the bathroom, with only his head and shoulders visible. He is not moving.
‘I can see him. There on the floor.’ He grasps the door handle, pushing hard. The door rattles in its frame but does not open.
The woman is looking through the glass. He feels her shoulder push against his. ‘The key is still in the door.’
She turns suddenly and walks down the steps. What is she doing? He watches her bend and forage under the lavender until she returns holding a half-brick covered in clumps of loose earth. Brown slaters drop on to the boards of the veranda near her bare feet and scuttle in her wake.
Without consulting him, she gives the glass two short taps. There is a surprisingly muted crack and a small shower of red glass scatters inwards on to the polished wood. A single shard falls back on to the veranda and shatters. The woman jumps back from the door, afraid of cutting her feet. Gingerly he reaches in through the hole she has made and turns the key.
It is cool inside and dim. His father is still in his pyjamas. The top is unbuttoned, and his grey chest-hair is matted together as though he has been in the shower or has been sweating heavily. He is embarrassed to see that his father’s pyjama pants are down around his thighs and that his penis is exposed. It is pale, bloodless and slack. He does not want the woman to see — for his father’s sake, rather than hers. He positions his body between her and his father, and reaches down, pulling the pyjamas so that Jack is covered.
‘I’ll call the ambulance,’ she says, and vanishes.
At the sound of her voice his father’s left arm moves slightly. He makes a noise deep in his throat, a primitive gurgle that could be anything: an attempt at speaking, or simply the release of trapped air and phlegm.
He is aware of the woman speaking from the kitchen. She is giving the address to the operator. She says, ‘I don’t know. We just found him.’
‘Stay still,’ he says to his father. His voice is little more than a whisper. ‘Don’t try and move.’ He crouches down but does not touch his father. His father’s eyes are partly open. They roll slightly beneath the lids. The skin of his face is grey and blotched.
He is not sure what he should do. He has heard that you should never move a patient yourself. Or is that only for accidents, hit-and-run victims lying bloody in the street?
He stands and goes into the bedroom, searching. The bed has not been slept in. There is a coarse woollen blanket folded in the top of the wardrobe. He brings it back and lays it over his father’s body. His bare feet, blue veined and cracked at the heels, poke out.
There is a choking noise like the wet mutter of blocked pipes and his father is throwing up in an unexpected gush on to the blanket. Afraid that his father will choke, he grasps his head and turns it to the side. Fluid, pale yellow and watery, continues to spill out of him, spreading from the outlet of his mouth, over the edge of the rug and on to the wooden floor.
The yellowed vomit, the acidic smell. He stands and steps back. He thinks he might throw up himself, and looks away from the liquid’s progress across the wooden floor.
The woman has come back into the hallway.
‘He was sick.’ He feels foolish for stating the obvious.
‘Has he said anything?’
‘No.’
She crouches down next to his father, ignoring the sputum soaking into the rug. Before he can stop her she is lifting him. He thinks that she is shifting him into the recovery position, but she moves her body so that she is cradling him. Her arms pass easily under his thin body. When did his father get so thin? She sits on the floor, the old man’s head resting on her thigh, smoothing the hair back and acros
s his scalp where the skin is mottled from the sun.
He can think of nothing to do except watch.
She talks to his father in a low voice: sing-song, nonsense words of reassurance. He wonders if this is the voice she uses with her newborn baby, the night-babble she speaks when her child wakes in the long darkness, as she sits next to the cot before lifting him to her breast?
‘Get a tissue or a towel,’ she says. ‘Something to clean him up.’
He goes to the bathroom, pulls handfuls of toilet paper from the roll. As he turns to leave he sees himself in the bathroom mirror. He looks flustered and his hair is askew. A man in his forties holding a wad of white tissue. For some reason the sight makes him ashamed, as though he has spotted himself in the middle of some act of deviance.
He returns to the hallway and hands her the tissue. He stands looking down at her as she wipes his father’s mouth and chin with gentle strokes. When she is finished, she brushes back the thin hair with her hand, moving it away from Jack’s forehead. His father stirs in her arms. She hum-talks to him, most of her words not really words at all. She tells his father that everything is fine. That everything is going to be fine. All right. Her voice, no, more her tone, offer shelter.
For a moment his father opens his eyes. He looks up at her face and seems to see her. His expression softens. After a moment his father closes his eyes again and it is almost as though he has chosen to be here. As though he has simply fallen asleep here in the hallway in this woman’s arms.
He stands back silently by the wall. He does not think that his father has seen him or is aware of his presence. He feels as though he is intruding on this scene, as though he is a voyeur caught peeking in a neighbour’s window.
After a long time he hears the ambulance’s siren, faint but clear like a distant keening.
TWO
He waits in a small room in the hospital where he makes tea in polystyrene cups from the machine in the corner. He is the only occupant of the room and has spent his time watching people move past his door and down the corridor: blue-uniformed nurses with quick insect steps and loud laughs; perplexed relatives; doctors; an old woman who spoke polite nonsense to him as she slowly ushered a pole on wheels from which dangled a bulbous bag of yellow liquid. He is just about to find a nurse to again ask about his father when a man appears at the door.
‘Mr Alymer?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Danie Peterson. I’m the doctor who’s treating your father.’ They shake hands. ‘Would you come this way please.’
He is led along corridors with paths worn down the middle of the pale orange linoleum. The doctor walks slightly ahead, keeping up a steady stream of small talk. He is South African. Probably one of the recent wave of immigrants who have fled here from the aftermath of apartheid. Thinning blond hair caps a boyish, slightly doughy face. He believes that the man can be no more than thirty.
He is expecting to be taken directly to his father, to turn into a ward and find him propped up in a hospital bed, smiling sheepishly and apologetic for the inconvenience he has caused. Instead, the doctor holds open the door to a small office. There is a desk and a bookcase. Beyond the desk is a window with a view of another wing of the hospital, three-quarters in shadow. Looking across the divide, he can see patients moving around in their rooms.
‘Take a seat.’
‘Thank you.’ He sits, expectant.
The doctor also sits and spreads some papers across the desk but does not refer to them immediately. He comes straight to the point. ‘Mr Alymer, your father has suffered an epileptic attack.’
This is unexpected. Will he now be required to force objects between his father’s teeth, to bit him like a horse as he writhes on the floor? ‘I was not aware that people developed epilepsy at my father’s age.’
‘They don’t normally. In this case I’m afraid the epilepsy is a symptom of an underlying problem. Based on this attack and the other symptoms he has been able to tell us about, we thought it best to perform an MRI. A scan of your father’s brain.’
‘I see. And what did you find?’
The doctor shifts in his chair. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you but your father has a quite advanced brain tumour.’
So now it is said. Laid out clinically in this doctor’s clipped vowels. A verdict not subject to rescission. Brain tumour. Cancer. It is a word that has always seemed to him to be hovering in the air, looking for people to attach itself to. And now it has settled on his father lightly in the night like a large predatory moth.
From a red-and-white envelope on the desk the doctor produces a series of images. A single sheet divided into nine separate photographs. (Are they photographs in the technical sense? he wonders. He is unsure). He sees a curving landscape of rolling hills and valleys, each viewed from a slightly different perspective. He is immediately struck by how beautiful they are. There is the graduation between bone and flesh, between solidity and emptiness and all the numerous combinations in between. The black and whites and the liquid greys. Here is art of a high order. He could frame this sheet and hang it in the gallery today, give it pride of place, possibly even mount an exhibition, and would never have its artistic merit, its profundity, questioned.
The doctor is still speaking. ‘This darker mass, here, is the tumour. And here. Do you see?’ He finds himself nodding. ‘It is relatively large, about the size of a golf ball in real terms.’ The man demonstrates by holding up the finger and thumb of his left hand in a broken circle. ‘We’ll need to do further tests but I’m confident that this is a type of tumour called a glioblastoma multiforma which, I’m sorry to say, is the most aggressive form.’
‘I see.’
He decides that he does not like this young South African. This immigrant. There is something too enthusiastic in his manner. The man is inappropriately eager to parade the medical facts.
‘This must all be quite a shock. I don’t want to overwhelm you with medical jargon.’
‘I have six years of higher education, Dr Peterson. I think I can cope.’
The doctor blinks twice. ‘Of course. Well, I’m going to recommend that your father is administered a course of a steroid called Dexamethasone. It will relieve some of the pressure that the tumour is creating inside his cranium. That should reduce the severity of his headaches.’
‘I was not aware that my father had been suffering from headaches.’
‘He told me that he’s been having quite severe headaches now for about —’ he checks his notes for the first time — ‘six months. He’s been treating himself with Panadeine. He’s also been having some problems with his eyesight, blurring and some tunnel vision.’ He is reading straight from his notes now.
‘He’s never mentioned anything to me.’
The doctor smiles and nods his head. He finds it a condescending gesture as though the man believes he is privy to a secret. ‘Actually it’s quite normal for older patients, particularly men, not to discuss symptoms with their families. It’s not entirely a cliché when people say that the family are often the last to know.’
‘Still. It is a surprise.’
‘Of course it is.’
So. His father has been concealing problems with his health. Serious problems, as it turns out. He tries to recall their last meeting. He searches his memory for unexplained lapses in his father’s conversation or fleeting expressions of pain which he read nothing into at the time. But the truth is he can remember almost no specific details of their lunches at the Jade Garden. All their meals together are overlaid in his mind, blurred and indistinct like the carp below the wind-ruffled water. It is entirely possible that one of these headaches came upon his father as they sat together spooning white rice on to their plates and that his father did not say a word. And that he himself did not notice.
‘Can you tell me what treatments are available. How do you propose to deal with this tumour?’
‘Mr Alymer, I’m very sorry to say but there is no treatment that is going to
help your father. With many other low-grade tumours we have had good results with surgery and radiotherapy, but these would be pointless in this case. The position of the tumour, here, deep in the left hemisphere, and its quite advanced growth mean that treating it would achieve very little and would undoubtedly reduce your father’s quality of life in the time he has left.’
‘So you are telling me that his condition is terminal?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’
Aah. He sees now. The collapse, this discussion, these are just the first steps along a short and treacherous path. He stares over the doctor’s shoulder to the other building. In one of the rooms he can see a woman in a pale blue nightgown. She is standing, framed in the window, carefully removing selected flowers from a vase of what look like irises on the sill.
He brings his gaze back to the doctor who is looking at him expectantly. ‘Have you told him this?’
‘Yes. I discussed the details with him earlier. In fact, he was the one who asked me to talk to you. He thought you would prefer to hear the news from me. He told me that you would have questions which I could answer.’
‘How did he react? I imagine he was quite shocked.’
‘Actually, your father was very calm when I told him. But, in my experience, the first reaction is often unreliable. It’s only after a few days, when news of a terminal illness has had time to sink in, that people show their true feelings. Some get depressed, some go into denial. Others deal with it remarkably well. It’s impossible to tell early on.’
He is aware that the obvious question is still unasked. It is what this interview has been building towards. Across in the far room the woman in the blue nightgown finishes with the flowers and vanishes from view.
‘How long would you estimate my father has left to live?’