High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  “Politicians.”

  “Ah, right…The conference?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he’s got age on his side.”

  “Has he?”

  “He’s not even middle-aged yet, not really.”

  She thought about this. “He’s forty-five.”

  Dr. Haswell tapped his clipboard. “Yes, exactly.”

  She popped another piece of Hubba into her mouth. Her father’s snores stopped and started again. “How long does the average man live to?”

  “The average? I forget. In the UK, seventy-seven or seventy-six, maybe.”

  “He’s over halfway then,” she said.

  “In a sense.”

  “He’s very much in the middle of his ultimate age, in all senses. Fast approaching the final third, in fact.”

  “Well—”

  “Listen, Anthony,” she said, and watched his brown eyes go wide. It was a good trick. People always forgot they were wearing name badges. It was the same at corporate functions at the Grand. “I’m just doing the maths.”

  Anthony Haswell grinned and looked away, his eyes tracking back to her with cautious warmth, and there came from inside the room a groan combined with a creak. “Welcome,” her father said, “to the not-so-grand hotel.” You could tell he’d been waiting for a chance to use the line.

  —

  Wandering around the Grand in a dark suit and clean white shirt, making mediocre jokes and taking control of minor crises, her father could still look handsome. In here, under bright lights, wearing a tight short-sleeved tunic thing that appeared to be made of paper, he looked old. For how long had his eyes looked this grey? When had his ears become fluffy? Pale, pale. She could smell fag smoke on his skin as he beckoned her forward for a kiss. His lips were cold on her cheek.

  She thought it best to hold his hand. A big hand, full of rough knuckles and veins, klutzy as a crab. She held it. Holding her dad’s hand felt weird. She slipped from his grip and poured him some water. Her leg was jigging up and down, no reason.

  “So how come you look like a dead person?” she said.

  He sighed and closed his eyes. “Frey, you get it from your mother.”

  “What?”

  “Blunt when nervous. A reluctance to beat around the bush.”

  “The only thing.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s the only thing I get from her.”

  He coughed and winced. The wince was sizeable but the cough was small, way short of a proper hack, a kind of diet cough that seemed to admit he wasn’t as good at getting stuff out of his throat as he was at throwing stuff in. Last night she’d put a toothbrush in her mouth and cried. She’d felt angry with him, and sorry for him, and then scared and confused, and now she was a bit defiant again, or an aimless combination of everything.

  “Your mother said once, after half a lifetime of accusing me of beating around the bush, and urging me to cut to the chase, that she’d discovered from a fellow Linguistics lecturer, an Australian guy, that it was actually, etymologically speaking, essential to do one before the other.”

  She looked at him.

  “In bird hunts. It was important for participants to first beat around the bushes. Because only then could other participants cut to the chase, which meant to catch the quarry in nets. Something like that, anyway.”

  “Right.”

  “Beating about the bush is of course the more popular variant now.”

  “If I admit that this is gripping, can we talk about your health?”

  A seagull squawked outside and they both looked up, with curious choreography, at the room’s tiny window. The sun, not knowing what was appropriate, had risen this morning as usual. The weather couldn’t last. The stinging drizzle and leaping foam would return, people hunkering down into the collars of their coats, that special British wince reserved for walking in the rain. A gold test tube of light extended from the sill to a far corner of the floor. Freya felt a little hot, a little woozy. She crossed and recrossed her legs, blew upward at her hair. A kid rode past the window on a bike, no hands. A blur of wheels, the click-click-click of Spokey Dokeys.

  “So,” she said. “I mean, what’s the situation?” Information, please. Information.

  He shifted a little in the bed. “Everyone has off days, Frey. I’m already feeling better. Aspirin, it turns out, is a lifesaver. Aspirin! It can’t be bad if the thing they’re giving me now is aspirin. The procedure—”

  “The operation.”

  “Was a success.”

  There was silence for a while. The word “success” seemed to take his thoughts off on a tangent.

  She waited and then said, “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know Grandad? Your dad?”

  “Used to,” he said, smiling weakly again.

  “Am I right in thinking…?”

  He hesitated. “Heart attacks are very common things, Frey. You’ve got to die of something.” He scratched his head. “Poor choice of words.”

  “Right.”

  “But he was—it was a different situation.”

  They sat in silence.

  Ordinarily her father could talk at length about any number of subjects. His main complaint over the last few years was her silence, the more refined allegation being that when he asked her about herself—on the way home from school, over breakfast, on the drive to work—she became what he called an elective mute. What he didn’t realise was that after school she was all talked out, and in the mornings she was deliriously tired. They were completely the worst times of day to catch her.

  He was particularly obsessed, recently, with the idea that she should go to university. This despite him being a living example of the fact university wasn’t everything. He’d never got a degree, but alongside his diving and all those random jobs he used to do, teaching and tutoring and dive-coaching and the extra money from moonlighting as a concierge in that New York hotel, he’d managed to listen to radio programmes about almost everything. He was, for her, a bearer of information: the next exhibition at the Booth Museum, upcoming rates at rival hotels like the Metropole. When he was healthy his blue eyes shone. Those eyes knew things, knew and knew and knew. He could fix a car and unblock a pipe, he could say “You’re welcome” in Swahili and “Train station” in Mandarin, he could recite passages from that Tristram Shandy book her mother had given him in a special edition. He could reel off the first 200 digits of pi. He didn’t seem to see any value in these abilities, but Freya did. She was, though she’d never dream of saying it out loud, impressed by him. And if in life he’d failed to live up to the expectations he’d had of himself, which was what her mother always described as Your Father’s Big Problem, then it seemed to her that those failures related to the real world, not to his education, and therefore fell short of proving that university was worth doing. He’d never actually been to China, or places where they spoke Swahili. He never made it past class six of a language course. You couldn’t always say that he was good at finishing things. Around two-thirds of the way through executing a long-cherished plan he appeared to get massively bored. He’d begin unblocking a pipe on floor four of the Grand—save the hotel some money on a plumber—and then, when an extra hour of work would have completed the job, he’d tire of the task and call a plumber. He’d buy himself some discount jogging gear for Christmas, spend New Year’s morning doing pre-run stretches, and then make himself a coffee and act like the run was done. He never seemed apathetic about a thing until the exact point at which he was apathetic, and then the thing was dead to him forever.

  “They’re running some further checks on my heart,” he said. A quick spurt of words like he was overcoming a stutter.

  “I know.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  It was going to be OK, wasn’t it? She looked at him.

  There’d been a girl in History who’d overcome a stutter. They’d made a thing of it at s
chool assembly last December, and when she got up to give her speech about overcoming a stutter, guess what? Yep. Awful awful. It was so awful Freya had given her a bar of chocolate afterwards, a bar of the size you usually only find in airports. Giant Toblerone. “Snow-Capped” limited edition. The sharp peaks were probably not that good for the roof of her mouth (the roof of the mouth and the tongue’s relationship to it were apparently key to the overcoming), but it was a gift and, like all gifts, it was the thought that counted, and failing that the resale value. The playground at Blatchington Mill was a vast black market: caffeine pills, candy sticks.

  She asked him if it was still serious. He said probably not. She asked him whether he’d have to have another operation after the remaining tests. He said they’d know more in a couple of days.

  “Even if they do their tricks with another artery,” he said. “Even then, it’s no major thing. It’s like clearing leaves from a gutter, a different gutter.”

  “So your veins are gutters, in this analogy.”

  He pursed his lips. “It’s like fixing a bit of wiring, Frey.”

  “Wiring, though—it’s complex.”

  “You’re thinking of the Napoleon Suite. That was down to a bad electrician.”

  “What if these electricians are bad?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctors.”

  He seemed to consider this closely. “They’re expensively educated.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Their vowels. Their assumptions.”

  “This is bad. This is, I mean, heart attack, I mean—fucking hell.”

  “Appears I may have eaten a few too many fatty foods,” he said.

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “No,” he said, “the digestive system is working well.”

  “You’re not funny, Dad.”

  “You’re not funny either, daughter.”

  They went on like this for a while, touching on the dangers of Mrs. Peachsmith’s driving (she’d given Freya a lift here last night) and whether it was possible to blame his current health on the stress induced by Lady Di’s abuses of refuse-collection etiquette. Di lived opposite. She’d been putting her bin bags on the Finch household’s section of pavement each Tuesday. Once or twice under cover of night Moose had moved them back to their proper place with notes attached. Last week a response had arrived taped to the windscreen of his Škoda: “This car belongs to a very silly man.”

  She asked him if the nurses were treating him well. He said yes, of course, NHS, brilliant brilliant. They’d given him this amazing little room to recuperate in. Loads of privacy. It was a word he kept using: privacy. She thought of Susie and her lectures on private life vs public life, apathy vs activism, on terrorist attacks and the distinction between victim and witness and culprit, and her dad said with fake cheeriness that there was a TV lounge somewhere down the corridor. Strictly, this wing was probably for patients with unaffordable private health plans. Lucky.

  “How did you get that Marshall guy to move you here?”

  “There are various ways to get an upgrade, Frey. As a front-desker you should know that.”

  “Shouting?”

  “Come on. Shouting sometimes works, fine, but then the front-desker resents you, don’t they? Items like your fox drape may go missing…Anyway, saying nothing—that never works. And being quietly rude is the worst of both worlds. Best method?” He shifted in the bed and winced. “You tell the person in charge that you appreciate how busy they are, but you’d be hugely grateful for anything they could do for you, and then you give them a tip.”

  “You gave the doctor a tip?” She was a little bit appalled and a little bit impressed.

  “Voucher,” he said, yawning. “Twenty-five per cent off doubles. Keep some in my wallet at all times. Only applicable during low season, of course.”

  “No one’s ever given me a tip.”

  “No?”

  “Well, a couple of times. And you feel…I mean…”

  “I feel right as rain,” he said, and a mean desperation rose up in Freya. Please, she thought. Please do not go on to explain my mother’s investigations into that phrase. She was with another man now, her mother. Back in London it seemed. Postcards sometimes came stamped from “Mount Pleasant,” which was almost funny given how mean she could be.

  “Well”—might as well lie—“you’re looking much better than yesterday, anyway.”

  “Yeah?” He nodded. “That’s good. Really good. Marina said I looked washed out. That I looked blank.”

  “Blanco,” Freya said.

  “Ahhh,” he replied, winding up into his mock-Mediterranean accent, “so you speaka da Spanish?”

  “If you’re going to travel around somewhere you’ve to make an effort, haven’t you?”

  He looked defeated by this, shoulders sagging around his breastbone like a tent around a pole. Duke of Edinburgh expedition. Hills, winds…

  “Had a few new guests arrive,” she said.

  His features lifted a little. “Who?”

  “A couple of people.”

  “Good. That’s very good.”

  “Someone on crutches. I put him in the old RAF guy’s room. He finally checked out.”

  “As in?”

  “As in he checked out. Paid his bill. Went to Worthing.”

  “ ‘Went to Worthing’ would make a pretty good metaphor, actually.”

  “For a lawn bowls competition, he said. Televised. Does that happen?”

  “Only on earth.”

  “Also a couple of honeymooners.”

  “Rose petals?”

  “Already arranged.”

  “The non-itchy ones. The fake whatsit ones.”

  “Yep.”

  “What about the little strawberries in chocolate tuxedos?”

  She stared at him.

  “Thatcher won’t even turn up,” she said. “That’s my bet. She’ll have booked the Metropole too, kept her options open.”

  Moose gave her a stony look and she felt a prickle of guilt. Why the need to jab at him, even now? Why did she feel, at some level, annoyed that he was ill?

  “All I meant was, her plans must change all the time. So you shouldn’t get your hopes up, right? She could still end up in the Metropole again, so I’m just saying don’t rush your…” What was the word? “Your recovery.”

  Her dad’s stony look had become his Special Stare. It was the stare he used to give her when, hearing her returning from one of her nights out with Sarah or Susie, he’d wake in his armchair and ask her into the living room for “a chat.” She’d walk through the door and sit down next to him, narrowing all her remaining energy, all her concentration, into making short sober sentences that corrected the boozy drag in her voice.

  She got up and moved to the end of the bed, smoothing out a blanket. She remembered the grapes. “Here you go,” she said. “This is, you know, supposed to be the sort of thing that helps.”

  “Thank you. That’s very…thank you, Frey.”

  He plucked some grapes and held them cupped in his right hand. Reached for his water glass with his left. After a sip of water he began to wrinkle his nose. She leaned forward and scratched it for him.

  “They’re not bad, are they? Did you buy them with your own money?”

  She shrugged. “They’re grapes.” A woman walked by in excellent boots.

  “Any nuts?”

  “No way. Is there healthy stuff you need?”

  “I’d be interested in receiving some HP Sauce, Frey. Really interested. The food here could do, between you and me, with…something.”

  “Brown sauce is quite vinegary. You’d be better off eating the hospital food on its own, and then snacking on fruit or whatever.”

  “Vinegar is not the reason I’m in here,” he said. “Vinegar is innocent.” He plucked another grape and inspected it sadly, as if somewhere, engraved on its thin shiny skin, were the secrets to a healthy life. “Make sure you don’t take on any extra shifts.
Really, you don’t even need to do your own shifts. Everyone would understand.”

  “Act normal, you said.”

  “I’ve been telling Marina to run the show. And maybe our esteemed General Manager will also show his face. Is he still on the jam-tasting trip to Yorkshire? He really is winding down. Happens when people are on their way out.”

  “I think he’s doing that training series at the other hotels. Then New York to make links with the high-end travel agents there, is what John said.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “New York.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe we should move back there, Frey.”

  “Maybe you should stop smoking,” she said.

  He chewed. “I’ll be out of here in a few days. This Thatcher visit’s going to—”

  “The promotion, yeah.”

  “Soon enough you’ll be in Spain, eating tapas and swigging sangria, busily not-talking to boys. I might join you. I might have my pick of hotel offers in a year or two. Manage a famous one, maybe, in…I think I fancy Madrid. Marina can suggest places. I think one of her sisters lives in Madrid. If you do Spanish at uni, they probably offer a year abroad. Food for thought.” After this speech his body slipped downward in stages and his eyelids began to droop.

  Beyond a wall someone retched. Down the corridor a woman wailed. This place was a department store for sadness.

  “I’ll come back tonight.”

  “Tonight? Maybe spare pyjamas.”

  “OK.”

  “OK then.”

  “Cool, bye.”

  She kissed his cheek. Cool was a word she never, ever used.

  Outside, a clarifying knowledge came over Freya: I am well, I am young, I am fine. Her relief for a moment overpowered her concern. The air was fresh; she was free. A cat walking along a wall. Pausing and diving down. You could hear in the distance tiny wavelets rushing in.

  Only when she reached the corner shop and bought a drink did tears come again. Stupid. He was fine. She twisted the ringpull off the can.

  She passed the White IIart pub, the arm of the capital “H” crushed by last year’s snows. She remembered her first ever kiss, the fake ID she’d had in her hand, Tom Williams’s tongue in her mouth, the convivial saltiness of it, the unwelcome touching of her bum, and the unexpected moment a month ago, at a posh dinner to which all hotel staff had been invited, when she’d tried an oyster for the very first time and found that she fleetingly missed him.