by Hatch, Ben
‘It’s just so sudden,’ I say.
‘So, so sudden,’ he says.
Cleese has to be somewhere soon so Mary wakes Dad and he goes in. Afterwards, it’s my turn. Dad’s dehydrated from talking so much. He makes a strange motion with his lower jaw that I remember Mum making at the end – his tongue ferreting for moisture in front of his teeth. Every now and again his eyes half roll back in his head. I hold his hand.
‘My lovely eldest son,’ he says.
‘My lovely dad,’ I say.
I sit on a chair by the bed and he tells me to remove the covers. I pull them back.
‘Read my T-shirt,’ he says.
On it is a map of the London Underground. Underneath the red and blue logo it reads: ‘I’m Going Underground’.
‘Cleese fell about,’ says Dad.
He’d put it on that morning and hadn’t realised its significance until he looked in the mirror. I pull the covers up. We go over yesterday.
‘They were mixing up the formula when the call came in from the lab.’ Dad shakes his head. ‘I wanted that chemo. Gorhard knew that. It was a brave decision saying no to me. The right decision.’
He makes the motion with his mouth again. I fetch him water.
‘Fill it only to there,’ says Dad, and he indicates a level, ‘because…’ It’s so he can tip it without spilling any.
Mary comes back in with me.
‘He’s in the snooker room looking at all the pictures,’ she says.
‘Is he?’ says Dad, and his eyes darken with interest.
‘Bringing back memories. Cambridge Circus,’ says Mary.
‘Dear old John.’
When Dad falls asleep I listen to his breathing. It isn’t laboured but slow. It has a rhythm like the tide. His belly rises, swollen now halfway down, as he inhales and his cheeks inflate and then, as he exhales, they deflate, making a splashing sound like the sound of a wave breaking. We take it in turns to sit with Dad, bring in books to read. We hold his hand occasionally or say the odd remark, ‘More squash, Dad?’ or ‘Painkillers yet?’ or ‘Movicol, Dad?’ Whenever he wakes he’s in a half sleep, a sort of beatific daze – his eyes half rolled back in his head. His reaction to a voice or a squeak of a chair is that his eye on whichever side of the bed the sound has come from will widen and hunt for its source, fix on it for just a second, as if confirming a thought, then disappear back into the top of his head. After a while there seems something wrong about taking turns – a false piety in volunteering for it as if you’re broadcasting your greater love for Dad, so instead, eventually, we just slip in and out of other people’s turns, often it being the four of us in there together, heads down in our books, exchanging glances whenever Dad’s breathing changes or if a thought about some matter of care comes to mind to prompt a whisper ‘His lipsalve…’… ‘Squash…’
When Dad’s lucid he smiles in his unique way (the sides of his mouth turned down) and says in a gasp ‘My lovely children’ or, if Mary is in the room, ‘Darling, you are my rock.’ Alone with him in the late afternoon I ask Dad if there’s anything he wants to tell me. Dad blinks slowly, ‘Be honest with your children.’
‘I gave you a lot of trouble,’ I say. ‘Your best advice to me: only listen to two sorts of people. Those who love you and those who’ve been there before.’
‘A good yardstick,’ says Dad.
‘You’ve led a great life,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve had two wives, who you’ve loved and been loved by. You’ve got three children.’
His eyes fade.
‘I’ve been very lucky.’
‘You have so many friends who love you.’
‘Dear old John,’ he says.
He falls back to sleep. I stay. I can hear Pen, Mary, Buster and Katie eating lunch outside in the garden through the open window. I listen to Dad’s breathing, watch his chest moving up and down like a rudimentary pair of bellows and I wonder who he’ll be with when he dies.
The next day he doesn’t get out of bed, doesn’t brush his teeth. He keeps getting hot, then cold. He eats nothing but Movicols. He drinks less squash, struggles to suck it up through the curly straws we realise too late he’s having trouble with. By the afternoon he stops talking. He uses a thumbs-up for yes, a flat hand movement to mean no, and a raised eyebrow for most other reactions. Dad’s nerve endings become hypersensitive. Even a single bed sheet on his belly hurts so he flings it off. The phone rings off the hook with people wanting to visit. Every kind word sets Pen and Mary off but although my dad’s dying I cannot cry. It makes me ashamed and lonely so sometimes when it’s not my turn to be with him, I sit on a wooden bench at the foot of the garden listening to the rip and munch of cows eating grass in the field behind the wrought-iron fence.
Asleep, his hands flat against the bed either side of him, there’s always a hanky in his hand now, curled up ready to dab at his sore lips. He flutters his fingers occasionally, a sign his circulation is failing, according to Mary. When it’s my turn now I read Dad P. G. Wodehouse stories. Whenever I stop his eye finds me at once.
‘I didn’t think you were listening.’
He raises an eyebrow and his eyes roll back in his head and I carry on.
On the day before he dies Dad grows agitated. He winces, hand flops onto his head. When we shout, ‘We love you, Dad,’ his ‘Love you’ back is virtually indistinct from his exhale. His eyes move less. His hands and feet are cold, although his forehead’s clammy. He lies in a swoon now, head up, one arm almost pointing to the heavens like a Michelangelo painting. Occasionally he shifts position. He places his hands on his chest, moves his head from left to right, puts his legs up, then down. Pen lies on the double bed beside him in a comma shape, mopping his brow. He holds her knee while Buster, Mary and I take it in turns holding his hands, although he doesn’t squeeze back now. His most animated motion is the way he pushes his lips towards moisture. Like a cat rubbing its face to your hand he roves his lips across the surface of the sponge, occasionally putting the whole thing in his mouth to hungrily suck.
A watery rattle enters his throat and that afternoon the Macmillan nurse, Margaret, rigs up the morphine driver. The noise is so reminiscent of Mum dying – that little whirr as it feeds the drug – Pen, Buster and I all exchange looks. Within minutes Dad’s unconscious. His breathing settles into a pattern. Mary recites a catechism and after Margaret tells us ‘It won’t be long now’, Mary breaks down. ‘Oh darling,’ she says. ‘Oh sweetheart.’ Over and over again. ‘Oh darling. Oh sweetheart.’
For the next nine and a half hours we try coaxing Dad over the edge. ‘We’re all here, Dad. We love you, Dad.’ Mary calls him, ‘The best boy in Buckinghamshire.’ She says, ‘I love you more than I did the day I married you, more than I did twenty minutes ago when I said I loved you. Oh darling, please let go now.’ In a random way we take it in turns to hold him. A hand if you’re lucky, although if you leave the room to go to the toilet you get a foot on your return or maybe an elbow. It’s painful hearing Mary’s anguished love. It’s during her outbursts of affection that I have to hold my head down and pinch my nose to stop the tears. It’s claustrophobically intense – pleased to be here as Dad would have wanted, at the same time I want to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction back to Dinah and the kids seeing seals at Blakeney Point, walking around the Sandringham estate in the sunshine. Around teatime I hear crows amongst the birds outside. But on and on it goes. In the room it smells of lavender now from the cream Pen is massaging Dad’s feet with. Steve, the surgeon brother-in-law of Mary, comes round. He feels Dad’s feet.
‘Cold,’ he says.
He rubs Dad’s legs.
‘He’s going blue. He’s barely alive, poor man. The body’s closed down. Only his lungs and heart working now. There’s no blood getting anywhere else.’
An hour later Steve says, ‘He has a very strong heart. Nothing wrong with his heart.’
And then when he leaves, what breaks our spirit is what he says before going,
‘It might be another twenty-four hours.’
Mary sleeps beside Dad downstairs and the rest of us go to bed. An hour and a half later Buster says my name at the door. I sit up tingling with sleep. Buster says, ‘He’s gone.’
Downstairs Pen’s lying across the bed kissing Dad’s forehead.
I ask if I can kiss Dad. She moves away. I kiss Dad’s forehead. I hear a sound, a gurgle in his throat.
I say, ‘Goodbye, Dad.’
Pen tries shutting his eyes but they won’t close. Mary says a prayer, gives us each a sleeping pill and we return to bed.
CHAPTER 26
Draft Copy for Guidebook: Stretching back to pre-Roman times, Colchester, England’s oldest town, is home to a huge army barracks but has an even prouder claim to fame. While Liverpool has the Merseybeat and Manchester staged the 1990s rave scene, Colchester is home to the nursery rhyme. The legendary merry old soul, Old King Cole, was from Colchester, and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ was written by Jane Taylor in the town’s Dutch Quarter in 1806. Meanwhile, Humpty Dumpty wasn’t an egg-shaped man with poor balance, but a large cannon used by the Royalists during the English Civil War (1642-1651) in the Siege of Colchester. The town, we’ve heard, is currently working on its difficult fourth nursery rhyme featuring, it is rumoured, a cat, a fiddle and some tooled up members of the 16 Air Assault Brigade.
I’m parked at the top of Ray’s Hill in Cholesbury, looking down the driveway at the windmill. When my mum died, Dad, having retired the year before from the BBC, went a little loopy here before Mary rescued him. One of the projects he threw himself into was painting everything in the windmill either black or white.
He whitewashed all the internal walls. The beams he painted black. He painted the kitchen floor white, the windowsills black. He had the outside walls repainted white and the sails went from red and green to black and white. Buster and I used to joke that if we stayed still long enough he’d paint us black or white as well. This white paint is flaking off the windmill now. The drive’s been re-gravelled since Dad sold up and the fish pond has been removed so cars can turn round. The kids are asleep in the back of the car after a mad dash around the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden that I cut short to bomb over here. I’m sitting beside Dinah on a bollard that still has a scrape mark on it from when Mum got the camper van wedged up on it more than twenty years ago.
‘I remember the exact sound the camper van made reversing down here. The rat-a-tat-tat of the wheels going over that drainage grill.’
‘Me too,’ says Dinah. She holds my hand. I think backwards, picture us all here – my family. ‘Do you remember warning me about your Dad the first time I came here? You made me so nervous.’
‘Did I?’
‘I couldn’t believe how much your parents swore. Both of them. My mum and dad never swear.’
‘They loved swearing.’
‘And the one-upmanship. You and Buster sparring to make your dad laugh. What was it they nicknamed you?’ asks Dinah.
Sunday lunches were always particularly good fun if one of us was bringing a new partner round. If it was me, Dad and Buster always brought up the stamps I used to collect.
‘Stanley Gibbons.’
Dinah laughs.
‘That’s so childish of your dad.’
‘I know. One Christmas I didn’t get the air rifle I was hoping for. The last present under the tree was an umbrella that I was sure was the gun. I remember we burned the wrapping paper in the metal bin just there,’ I say pointing down the drive. ‘I was in tears as Dad explained why I hadn’t got one. “Because you will shoot people, my son.”’
Dinah laughs.
‘We used to get sightseers, ramblers. They’d knock on the front door in their wellies expecting to be given tours of the windmill. Mum used to hate it when her knickers were on the line.’
‘Why don’t you see if they’ll let you have a look inside?’
‘Do you think?’
‘Why not?’
‘What time we seeing Mary?’
‘You’ve got time. Go on, while they’re asleep.’
I walk down the drive. Standing on the front doorstep looking through the glass panels into the dining room and touching the horseshoe door knocker, I remember the noise it made when the door slammed and I can feel the old me slithering inside my body, the me I was when I lived here. By the phone there used to be a blown-up framed photo of Dad dressed as a high court judge with a wig on, a gavel in his hand. He was peering over a pair of half-moon glasses, looking very stern. It was from his days in the Cambridge Footlights. Dad used to tell us off underneath it. He joked that it got him into the role of disciplinarian. There’s no reply when I knock so I walk down the side of the house. When we were kids we had no back garden. There was just a barbed wire fence there. The year Mum got sick Dad bought some land at the back, though. Mum always wanted a back garden to sunbathe in so Dad decided to make her one. It was to give her something to look forward to. After Mum died, this became another project of Dad’s. I came home to help him finish it. Buster was in Germany then. Pen had kids to look after. We had a little system. On Friday lunchtime I’d call my dad. He’d be watching a war film with some of the regulars from the Full Moon he’d started to prop up the bar with. ‘Are you all right Daddy-boy?’ I’d ask.
‘I am fine, my son,’ he’d say. ‘We’re having a little party. Keith’s here, Pete, and you remember Dave from Piggots End.’ I’d hear voices in the background, Dad saying, ‘Down the spiral staircase, and straight on’, giving directions to his wine cellar, and then back to me he’d say ‘My son, you must watch The Cruel Sea’ (forgetting I’d watched it with him a dozen times). ‘That scene between Ericson and Ferraby where he says, “It’s the war, the bloody war.” Ahhhh it’s just… perfect. You coming over later?’ By the time I pitched up, Dad would be fast asleep in his armchair, all his new so-called friends from the Full Moon long gone, and the windmill would be a tip. I’d help Dad tidy, watch him move from room to room with a black bin liner clearing up the empties, shaking his head in wonderment as he’d tell me, ‘There are sixteen people I now know by name and who know me by name in that pub. I tell you it’s not the church that’s the centre of the community, it’s the pub. You missed a great film this afternoon. Right, that’s the nasty bit over with. Let’s find my son a drink. What would a son of mine want? We have it all here. Whisky, gin, beer, wine…?’
We’d eat one of the meals Pen would’ve dropped around frozen and foil-wrapped and then we’d walk round to the Full Moon, a pub he’d never stepped foot in for the twenty previous years we’d lived in the windmill when Mum was alive. Here, Dad, stood at the bar with his new mates, would dominate the banter, buying rounds, cracking jokes, telling stories. ‘Number One Son,’ he called me, or ‘My personal tramp’ because I wore his hand-me-down clothes. ‘My shirt, yes, and my shoes. My personal tramp, what can I get you? Isn’t it great he wears my clothes?’ I’d listen to them planning quiz nights, tricks on the landlord Geoff, telling tales about their wives. Then we’d walk home through the back field in the dark, taking it in turns to lift the barbed wire for each other, and back in the house he’d pour himself whisky and gingers I’d dilute when he wasn’t looking, and then Dad, with his feet thrown over the arm of his chair, would talk to me about politics, history, Pen, Buster, my writing, everything except Mum. When he fell asleep I’d extinguish his cigarette, take the drink from his hand, lay him down on the sofa under a blanket and in bed I’d hear him talking in his sleep, dreaming Mum was still alive, ‘Mason said she had a better day’… ‘It’s the steroids. She needs to eat, my son.’
The next morning, no matter what he’d drunk the night before, the first sound I’d hear would be his shovel. We bought an elaborate stone fountain one weekend, we dug out a pond and installed spotlighting on another. When the phone rang neither of us ever wanted to answer it. People came to the door with condolence cards and Dad shooed them away. ‘We’re fine, fine
, bit busy. Thank you, thank you [taking the card]. Goodbye. Got to get to World’s End nurseries. It closes at five.’
We became equals. Dad asked my advice.
‘Is that straight?’
‘Looks straight to me, Daddy-boy.’
In the kitchen: ‘Is that pie off?’
‘Looks all right to me, Daddy-boy.’
We became sensitive.
‘You all right, my son?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘You all right, Daddy-boy?’
‘I think so.’
Grass was laid, fences erected and creosoted, trellis nailed into walls, creepers trained, hanging baskets bought, gravel poured into sectioned-off squares. A corral was constructed in the right-hand corner of the garden and sometimes Dad would crook his finger, and I’d follow him. ‘And here’s where the nymph will go. Do you like that? I think what this garden needs is a nymph. That will be nice, I think. Mum’s nymph.’
It was two months after Mum died on a Saturday morning. Dad rose late, didn’t shave. He drank red wine in the corral with his back to the windmill. I left him alone, and it was late evening when he finally came inside. He strode in, his head held back drunkenly. In the middle of the room, his back to me, he said, ‘I think today is the day I will cry.’ And then his shoulders had heaved like a small child’s and very quickly he’d turned, rushed towards me and buried his head into my shoulder so fast and unexpectedly I didn’t have time to react before he broke away, and scurried up the stairs, again, like a child. The following Friday when I called Dad was busy. The Friday after this he seemed angry with me. And soon after that I went travelling and while I was away he met Mary.
The sails creak in the wind and cast shadows over the lawn. On a bench overlooking the rose bushes we planted Dad mounted a plaque – ‘Roses, roses all the way’. It was what he promised Mum when he proposed to her. I sit on the bench and stare for a few minutes at these rose bushes my mum’s ashes were scattered over before I return to the car.