Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  Love in a hut become: Innocence, in a shed. My father’s shed, the small wooden edifice close to the house, humbly under lock and key, more or less unused now for several years, stuffed with a thousand tools and layered with sawdust, buried worktop, variety of vices, drills, files, knives, holemakers, hammers and chisels and axes and a hundred sandpapers, place of canny retreat. The years roll call back:

  – Where’s Dad?

  – In the shed.

  Smallest room not in the house, tears unshed knowing not where. To shed – I shed tears for my father, shed past and present strange word I don’t say, only think, his word, his place, separating separated, parting from apart forever a part, to shed, the shed a shade, as if for the eyes, from all other eyes, in the shed sad, shade sad said, where’s Dad.

  The funniest thing about the shed, the funniest thing about the whole house, the house beside itself, is the electric cable my father set up to run to the shed, at a height of perhaps seven feet, like a miniature telegraph wire, many years ago inadvertently severed by his wielding a ferocious hedge-trimmer, then almost as quickly mended not by replacing the cable but enclosing the damaged section in a transparent plastic bottle, shedding the house, shed or house on a drip-feed. Shedding tears for my father my English shadow, shadow words shadow wards, I, a doll with real tears, take his hand, holding hands, his breathing hard, as if he had permanent hiccups, a hiccius docius, hocus pocus, a struggle aspiring to expel air, right a blockage, surface a summit, or summat, his joky occasional pronunciation of some words, summit like that.

  I tell him about the new pyjamas and underwear I managed to buy.

  – How long am I going to be here? he asks, as if he hasn’t heard anything anyone’s said.

  – Two or three nights and then we’ll see how you are, I say, with luck by Monday you’ll be feeling stronger and better.

  They’re bringing round dinner now, cauliflower cheese followed by custard trifle. Breathlessly in tortoise slow-motion, pausing as if at every other moment to hiccup and every time falling short, he ingests perhaps three half-mouthfuls of the cauliflower cheese, once one of his favourite things to eat, so simple he even knew how to cook it himself. Perhaps three half-mouthfuls, a couple of sips of water, nothing more. I notice there’s a radio fixed in the wall above his bed and it’s almost news time. At home in recent years he has spent a good deal of time watching TV, dividing the time between 24-hour news programmes and, in the evening, a string of soap operas. I ask him if he’d like to hear the news. He shakes his head:

  – There isn’t any these days, he says, it’s all just terrorism.

  I sit with him quietly as he drifts, nods off then wakes, clear-eyed. While he sleeps I try to read one of the books I’ve brought along to the hospital. I wasn’t sure how long I might be here. Then he wakes again. I rest my hand on his. Up starts the theme-tune of the first of the soaps, on a TV that must be in the adjoining room. I decide to see if I can’t get a nurse to provide a television for him.

  – So that, I tell him, you can watch your soaps.

  – No, he says flatly, I don’t want to watch them, they’re not interesting any more.

  Already he’s drifting off again, then coming to once more, innocent as a little boy.

  – I’m going to go now, I say. I’ll be back in the morning around ten and hope you’ll be feeling better by then. Have a good night’s sleep.

  – See you, mate, he gasps, propped up in the bed.

  He’s held his right hand up in a kind of final salute and gives me a smile, as I make my way out. My father’s smile: he has often said how difficult it is for him. Laughter yes, in the past great waves of laughter, groaning writhing openmouthed, and yes, tears, of course, he would laugh to tears, tears of engulfing comedy. But to round his face up into a full and simple smile he is not able. With the result that there is no midway stopover between a somewhat straining almost sheepish half-smile, ghost or studied intimation of a smile, and at the other extreme a widemouthed beaming bordering on the maniacal. It is to this wavering accompaniment that I depart.

  In the middle of the night the phone rings. It rings and rings, but I don’t hear it. The hospital calls. Then the police call.

  I get up in the morning oblivious, shower and breakfast, and I feel even faintly upbeat. I managed to get my father into hospital, where he’s being properly looked after. Put aside thoughts of the silent heart attack, the disaster of the past, thumping on. The drug prescribed by the doctor will with luck stabilise this and in a day or two he’ll be much perkier. The other doctor, the one who came to the house the day before yesterday, surprised but comforted me when he suggested Dad might benefit from taking some antidepressants for a while. Well looked after all might be well.

  I picture arriving, my father awake bright-eyed propped up, very glad to see me, and I walk through the main entrance of the hospital quite clear about where I am going, along the corridors down to the ward, making to walk by the desk staffed by nurses on duty, with only the thought of seeing my father in mind. But a woman, with long dark hair, a nurse is standing in front of me, asking would I follow her, back down the corridor. Expressions on other nurses’ faces suggest they know who I am, even though I don’t recognise them. She opens the door to an office and shows me in. And then the light, there is no light, only so-called natural light suddenly awry. As if it were a magical trick, a party piece: How did you do that? I almost ask aloud. But to whom: the nurse, my eyes, the light itself? The room in absolutely bizarre light, with a couple of chairs, a desk and computer, filing-cabinets with nurses’ forenames on different drawers: it is a telegram. Transparency’s night letter, stop. Catastrophe of the eye, stop.

  I’m not going to tell the nurse not to open her mouth but I imagine, before and after, the unprecedented encounter in this poky little office, a lapidary telegram, as if the light preserved in stone, a miracle. I have never seen anything like it. I could literally cry out, My God! Look at the light! What’s happened to the light?

  – Sit down, please.

  I see from the identity card on her chest that she is called Mary. But it’s too late. Everything is so too late. I hear myself saying: We could walk around this, inspect it, dance or run from every angle, stand on the chairs, the desk, crawl inch by inch up the walls, don’t speak to me, Mary, I’ll never see you again, we know that, you’ll never see me or me myself. By requesting I sit down, Mary, you have destroyed the world.

  In the event, she doesn’t do a fine line in gentleness, something brittle and hard in the voice. My father is dead. Yes I can read, but: they don’t know how he died.

  She’s very tensed up, conscious that this is her duty, the one who has been singled out. (You tell him, Mary.) As the senior nurse on duty this morning she braces herself, treading the shaky border between compassionate delivery of the news and adminstrative care to minimise any suggestion of negligence, any possible grounds for litigation.

  – I’m sorry to say, she begins, speaking at last, long after the end. I’m sorry to say your father passed away in the night. We tried calling you a number of times, and the police also tried to contact you.

  – Oh, I say, oh.

  (We’ve tried to contact you more times than we care to remember: that line, telephoning home and I don’t hear.)

  – The phone is downstairs, I didn’t hear it, I never heard a thing. Did the police phone or did they actually call at the house?

  – I believe, she says, they came to the house.

  This has to be a lie, I think, or at least highly unlikely, since the front door is directly below my bedroom window and the doorbell is piercingly loud, inside and outside the house. What does it matter, not sure I understand you, you can, can you explain please? Your father fell out of bed in the night, there were no witnesses, the only other people in the room were two gentlemen, one of them is blind and the other has learning disabilities, brackets hanging in silence so neither could give evidence in a court case should you find yourself meditat
ing on the idea of mounting one brackets. A nurse had checked the room only a little while earlier, brackets a silent barrage of questions, as in a game of hangman the gallows steadily rising: a little earlier than what? when? how do you know if you don’t know, as you say? earlier than his death, you mean? or his dying? there’s a difference, isn’t there? brackets, but evidently he fell out of bed and bumped his head, brackets and couldn’t get up in the morning that is certainly singsong merrily on high what we are both thinking, brackets. The nurse on duty brackets name not supplied, no night letters for her brackets found him, unfortunately, on the floor, brackets brackets: why were there no brackets attached to the sides of the bed as there often are in hospitals, precisely to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen brackets brackets brackets exclamation mark query. Interrogation mark today and from now on, because, how many times does she say this I wonder, is it only once, and couldn’t get up in the morning, because there were no witnesses and, does Mary this virgin speaker say and or or, or if not or something like in any case:

  – There were no witnesses in any case we don’t yet know the cause of death. I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a post-mortem.

  I have no notion when, how or why the nurse leaves me, perhaps it is to inform the police so they know to stop calling me, stop telephoning home, stop calling round, like a herd of storm-troopers, at any rate she leaves me in this night letter slowly stop disintegrating into thundery light stop pointing out the dark green object on the table with the words:

  – There’s a telephone here. If you want to call anybody, please feel free.

  So this is it. I am the winner of some competition, or runner-up, my consolation prize, however long I want to make phone calls courtesy of the National Health Service to whomsoever I please, no expense spared, no bourn ruled out. He’s where? I want to ask. And did the blind man not hear anything? Unable to move I make my way mentally through the door, down the corridor, to the room, and I see the blind man and the gentleman with learning disabilities and there, in the corner, the bed empty, remade already, without the lightest trace of previous occupancy.

  Nary Mary quite contrary: call someone, yes. In Tibet for instance, my father always had a fondness for Tibet. Calm caves and mountain monasteries. He never went there, but it’s the thought that counts, nary that. Or in Madagascar. Or is it on? An island so immense: does anyone say on England? Never went to Madagascar either, no matter, all the same, any random number, put me through, chance following the international country code, speak English, no, not a word, nary that, all awry, telephoning home, no, never mind, already impossible, hallo, my father has died, he’s gone, given the world the slip, I am sorry I can’t linger, Tibet, I haven’t phoned Madagascar. So many calls to make, call alarm system that is me, not in, not on, no one dead-end no answer, not a word. I remain, unmoving in my seat.

  To follow this yarn you have to go back into what is called deep time (as if there were any means of doing so). Once upon a slime, before the creation of the Andes, prior to the earliest fossils (naturally, cartilaginously, not a leg to stand on in that department, today any more than of yore), over 220 million years ago, ranged the ray. No yarn without ray: long before the dinosaur, or anything of ragged claw. Anticipatory of the pterodactyl, but how softly, how irenically! And in the sea, the sea itself so strangely kin: for what other creature so accurately mimes or seems already shadowing it, the seeming flatness, swell and roll, the curl and lapping of its wave-wings? In the sea, in the seas, though not ceaselessly. For it came to pass that the Andes were raised up and waterways earlier radiating into the Pacific met up with nowhere to go, the Amazon now reaching into the Atlantic through other hydraulic routes. It was party time. As it became increasingly difficult to juggle life between the Pacific and the brackish or freshwater, as the great sea was gradually, over millions of years, sealed off, the ray developed the capacity to tolerate and finally make itself at home, chez the ray, in freshwater. The anal gland ceases to function. There is scarcely any urea in its blood. A ray without urea in its blood and tissues is not one to get in a flap for salty waters. Ray segregation accordingly: freshwater over that side, marine over this. And all of this, keep in mind, took place in what is called deep time (as if there were any other).

  Mary comes back with two green plastic bags with little white name-sticker bracelets on the handles, my father’s belongings, and then I leave.

  My father’s house is the family home of twenty-five years, a cottage dating back to the eighteenth century, situated half a mile or so up a single-track lane, standing in seclusion in an acre of what were once beautifully tended gardens and a small piece of woodland, with fine views of the valley below. In recent years especially, the garden has gone to wilderness. My father managed to cut the lawns in the immediate vicinity of the house, but beyond that the grasses, cow parsley, nettles, brambles have grown above head-height. Even his shed, only a few feet from the house, is inaccessible, with brambles and nettles and the side of a huge hedge overgrown across the door.

  I drive back there with surprising calmness. I put the green bags of belongings down just inside the front door. I see someone at the hospital has written on a slip of paper the date, his name, the letters R.I.P. and a list of contents, duly signed:

  1 pair slippers

  5 pair pants

  1 pair pyjamas

  1 vest

  1 Belt

  1 jacket

  2 Hankies

  2 Jumpers

  1 Polo Shirt

  1 Pair trousers

  Why do some of these words merit capital letters and others not? Did the nurse who wrote them unconsciously suppose, as the text went on, it would be more dignified for these articles to have caps, words cap in hand, begging not to be read too carefully, while also not to be overlooked? As the priest says, we bring nothing into this world and it is certain we take nothing out. Naked and crying we come, in darkness invisible go, leaving two green plastic bags as today’s riposte to Egypt’s ancient dreams, as if, as if

  – I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that.

  – Couldn’t I at least take my glasses? No one will notice I’ve got them on, and it’ll make such a difference if I can see. (Through the departure gates, not even a boarding pass.)

  – No, madam, I don’t care if your name is Cleopatra, he’s already gone.

  – There was something I had to give him.

  – That’s what they all say. There’s always something: a bite for the journey, a few last words, a kiss, a clasp of the hand, iron grip, rip, no, rules is rules. Rip into the world under strict orders, nothing extra out, not a sausage. Try all sorts these days, seen some fine cases I can tell you. It’s no good, same as it ever was as far as we’re concerned, Up and down the City Road. Easy to see why you think you come in, In and out the Eagle, but just because you come in doesn’t mean, That’s the way the money goes, pardon me for singing, doesn’t mean you actually go out, like there is some plane for you to catch, or even any departure gates, Every time when I come home, it’s a lonely job this, I tell you, most people these days think of us as machines, I think I’m gonna be sad, no, in peace we say, daft, the rest likewise, She’s got a ticket to ride, I says to her I says ticket, you don’t need no ticket, it’s all free, completely free, not a bean, I says to her, But she don’t care, receding hair, wispy silverwhite and gray. Lovely man as a matter of fact: Pop goes the weasel.

  Unless that’s wrong. Yes, I’m skipping. It’s still Saturday. The green bags don’t come till I pick them up on the Monday morning.

  Now that he has died, I no longer know how long anything takes.

  As if on stage, I try to say that minimal palindrome so close to ‘dead’ perhaps lisped from the start with that skip in view: ‘dad’.

  I stand in the main room just inside the front door, the dining room we called it, though no one ever dined in it, dining died out before we moved here. I open the door to my left, it’s been a habit for two or three yea
rs now to keep doors closed in the house, part of his strategy for keeping mice out, or perhaps in, for the strategy has never struck me as very coherent, at any rate to minimise their movement. He has even constructed precisely measured, tried and tested, weighted rods of wood and aluminium for sliding into place once a door is closed, especially last thing at night, having discovered the little creatures can easily scoot under. I walk into the drawing room and draw my breath, absurd to reason, dining and drawing, all these dying words, rooms in tombs, for drawing breath, withdrawing-breath-room. I stare about this large and splendid space, with its oak beams and windows on three sides and fireplace on the fourth. There are armchairs and sofas, tables and sideboards, but most of all there is post. What a word. And now the tears come to my eyes for the first time since it happened, alone:

  – These things happen from time to time.

  The tears surge like waking up in Eden, in need of Eden. In the wings all this while, yet it was only yesterday they ran down my face as my father lay upstairs in his room, dying it can now be said, dying in neither the dining nor drawing room, can be said post, post saying past, all post past past the post. The room is almost knee-deep in junk mail, a choked sea of pointless post. My father never, so far as I know, sent any money to any of these scam-mongers, but he seems also never to have given up believing that somehow some day one of these proclamations that he was winner of the lucky draw, sitting in the lucky drawing room, would come true and a cheque for some huge amount of money arrive in the post. He would receive up to twenty items a day, meticulously open and read them, then replace the letters in their envelopes and annotate the envelopes with a summary of what the senders were promising, the amount of money they wanted from him first of all, the date of receipt, and the deadline for response. In the past six months the mounds have risen dramatically, he stopped bothering to throw the stuff away. But he kept up this barmy archivism, annotating and specifying dates. Now the post is so deep you can hardly cross the room, his armchair the solitary accessible island, humble sedentary fortress lapped by postal tides.