Estuary

by Graham Hurley

  This was a story I could recite by heart and although I never dreamed of questioning the depth of my mother’s committment to this wounded creature who stepped into her life, there were all kinds of reasons why this alibi began to wear a little thin. The older I got, the angrier I became with him, not because he was cruel or unkind but because no one should be so completely caged by their past. There had to be more to the story than this sad, sad sequence of events and if some of the clues are in this box of my mum’s then I’m determined to find them.

  My little pile of black and white snaps begins to grow. One I especially like shows two young men posing beneath the branches of a cedar tree. The one on the left is wearing a zipped-up flying jacket. His hands are in his pockets and the bottoms of his service trousers are tucked into a pair of sturdy fur-lined flying boots. Thickset, solid-looking, he has black curly hair and a steady gaze. The way he’s standing four-square to the camera suggests - to me - that this young man doesn’t suffer from a moment’s self-doubt. He knows who he is. He knows where he’s going. And in the fullness of time, he’ll get there.

  Beside him stands my father. His hair is parted neatly on the left-hand side. He’s adopted a slightly raffish pose, one hand in his pocket, one foot in front of the other, his body angled obliquely towards the camera. The moustache has darkened and his free hand totes a cigarette and when I half-close my eyes it reminds me just a little of Clark Gable. I like this little snap. I’m going to go to the copy shop and have it blown up on the laser-print machine and then I’m going to hang it on the wall I face when I write. It tells me that for one tiny moment my dad wasn’t a refugee from the Great Depression, that he wasn’t crucified by his expectations, that life held more for him than an armchair by the radio and bad-tempered assaults on our unruly strip of lawn.

  More photos. My mother, in one of those wonderful forties floral dresses, posed in the back garden of her parents’ Wealdstone house. She has a lovely figure. Her arms are folded across her ample bust and she’s half-leaning on a stone bird bath that obviously survived the blitz because I remember it well from my own childhood. Beside my mum stands my father. He’s wearing a smart three-piece suit with a handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket. He’s smoking again and his other hand lies heavily on my mother’s shoulder. He looks like the young provincial solicitor he always wanted to become. He looks well-fed and prosperous and pleased with himself but it’s the expression on my mother’s face that draws me back. Her head is tilted slightly down and she’s eyeing the camera with what I can only describe as a kind of smug good fortune. She wanted this man. She made a play for him. And she won.

  They were married at a church in Harrow on 8th March, 1942. The formal photographs show them together after the service. My father’s wearing his RAF uniform again while my mother sports a high-necked A-line dress with puff sleeves and a knee-length skirt. The open toed high-heeled shoes, firmly-clutched bouquet and eager smile all add to the impression of the teenage bride, though a check on her birth certificate confirms that she was in fact in her middle twenties. The wedding took place in the late morning and they must have returned to Earl’s Crescent for the reception because another snap finds them back beside the bird bath, same uniform, same dress, same smiles.

  I tidy the photographs back into the box, speculating vaguely about the honeymoon. According to my mother, they managed an awkward night in the Regent Palace Hotel before returning to Earl’s Crescent for the other three days of my father’s leave allocation. After that, like so many wartime marriages, they only met when Hitler and travel warrants permitted. At the time the wedding must have seemed an utterly routine way of beginning a lifetime’s partnership, a hasty parcelling-together of relatives, friends, ration coupons and sweet British sherry. The very notion of a future - peace - was at best hazardous. One day, fingers crossed, everything would get back to normal. One day, they’d find somewhere to live and settle down and have a think about the lives they wanted to live. One day, God knows, they might even start a family.

  The Clarks box back in the bottom of the wardrobe, I prowl from room to room, trying to make a mental inventory of the last days of their lives together. After the scenes at the hospital I think my mother has accepted that the man she’s spent her life with will never be coming home. She’s seen the catheter, and she’s watched the nurses manhandling him onto a commode, and there are nerve sells in her own wrecked memory that still carry the imprint of those final sessions in the bedroom, trying to soften my father’s despair with a little grace and a little dignity.

  I’m back in this same bedroom now. The window faces south and the room is flooded with sunshine but my father’s presence lives on in a dozen little ways. The plastic tablet dispenser, with its fourteen little blue boxes, two per day, morning and evening. Lin and I know these drugs by heart. They served as a kind of mantra, the chemical chant that kept him alive. Paroxetine Hydrochloride. Amiodarone. Soltalol. Soluable aspirin. We dished the little tablets out every morning and he took them with an almost religious devotion (“Fizzies first”) but over the last few weeks he seemed to have lost track. Maybe he’d taken them, maybe he hadn’t. Only the hard evidence in the little blue boxes told the real story and even then he didn’t seem much bothered.

  Beside the tablet dispenser, two huge bottles of lemonade, both half-empty. I give one of the bottles a hopeful shake. We used to buy the stuff in job lots of four, part of the weekly supermarket shop, but somehow my mother lost the knack of finishing one bottle before opening the next. If I look hard enough, I’m sure I’ll find half-empty bottles of flat lemonade all over the flat, crazy paving leading backwards into the chaos and confusions of the last couple of months.

  The bedroom tidied, I go into the lounge. Here, too, my father’s presence lives on. It’s partly a question of smell - heavy, close, distinctly meaty - but there are objects, too, that I will forever associate with this strange half-life he’s been leading. The big red dictionary he kept on the table beside the blue riser chair, increasingly indispensible as his morning assaults on the Daily Telegraph crossword began to falter. The new memory-store telephone with it’s eight quick-dial buttons, each of them programmable and each of them wedged solid with the stickiness of the lemonade he was forever spilling over them. The new Sony radio, blue to match the riser chair, with my bits of white tape indicating exactly where to find the stations he liked. After twenty years of watching television I was rather hoping my dad might return to the fold and retune to Radio Three but a quick check suggests this is unlikely. The tuner is stuck fast at the very end of the medium wave.

  The list of bric-a-brac goes on. The room temperature thermometer that had become an obsession. The blue plastic bucket for emergencies. The three rolls of loo paper for afterwards. I busy around, re-arranging the room as much as I dare, trying to build a damn against those sudden moments of flooding grief that I know these items may trigger in my mother. The last room to sort out is the kitchen and it’s minutes before I realise that in two and a half years my father has never been in here. The details are as telling as the bedroom and the lounge but this story belongs exclusively to my mother, the pretty, eager-faced bride I’ve just tucked away in the wardrobe next door. I look around. She used to be a devoted cook and there’s still a line of much-thumbed Delia Smith classics amongst the recipe books but these last few years she’s come to rely more and more on the Slo-Cooker, a plug-in casserole she primes daily with pork chops, chicken breasts, thinly chopped onions and crumbled cubes of Oxo. The fact that she’s managed to keep pace with my father’s gargantuan appetite - three meals a day - is a tribute to her loyalty and that vein of culinary expertise that threads through her poor, failing memory. Most nights she hasn’t a clue what she’s been dishing up all day but as she herself points out, that doesn’t matter. The food is good, tasty, and hot and so far she hasn’t burned the kitchen down.

  I love my mum dearly and I know that this kitchen couldn’t belong to anyone else in the world.
The frieze of rust around the bottom of the fridge. The stickiness on the floor. The plastic band stretched tight between the taps over the sink, a makeshift drying rack for her threadbare scourers. The yellow rubber gloves clothes-pegged to the window pull, the fingertips dissolved by bleach. The plastic top to the butter dish, cracked in five places. The calender pinned to the side of the airing cupboard, month after month totally blank. Each of these items represents a negotiation - let’s get a new fridge, let’s have a proper go at the floor - but every suggestion produces a puzzled frown and then a brisk shake of the head. She’s given the floor a wipe only yesterday. She’s perfectly happy with the rubber gloves. A new butter dish would be a complete waste of money. This dogged determination to hang on to what she knows best is, I’m sure, the raft that keeps her afloat. It’s served her well for fifty years. We capsize it at our peril.

  Before I leave the flat I briefly check the bedroom again. Lin has changed the sheets and swopped the lemonade bottles for a decent vase. She’s filled the vase with flowers and had a wild time with the air freshener. All my father’s aids - the Zimmer frame, the commode, the wheelchair, the little blue bowl the carers used every morning to wash him - are neatly stacked in the spare room. Even his dressing gown has gone into the big sliding cupboard on the far side of the bed. I don’t want us to airbrush my father out of 56 years of marriage but both Lin and I are convinced that my mum will be best served by sunshine and fresh air and - of sorts - a new start.

  On my way out of the bedroom, I pause by the door. Buying presents for my parents has always been a nightmare. They never saw any real point in presents - why waste your money? - and venturing beyond Marks and Spencer pullovers and hardback novels by Margaret Drabble has generally been a gamble. On the occasions I did it, though, they always accorded these gifts a decent bit of houseroom and now I find myself looking at a map I gave them years ago.

  It’s a nautical chart and it hangs on the bedroom wall. The length of coast it covers extends from Burnham-on-Crouch to Felixstowe and I bought it because that stretch of north-east Essex includes Clacton-on-Sea. These offshore sandbanks were the small change of countless summers. The Gunfleet. The Barrow Deep. I never went out there myself, never mustered the confidence to join the Sailing Club and play cricket on the Gunfleet at low-water springs, but Clacton summers shaped me in all kinds of ways and the sea was a huge part of that. Half a lifetime later, I can still picture the foamy brown water that surged around the footings of the sea wall at high tide, still remember the bubbly, concussive shock of diving in from the piles of my favourite breakwater, still feel the tautness of my skin after a day half-naked on the beach. It was a wonderful childhood, totally carefree, and the chart - in a way - was a thank you for that. I’m not at all sure that my mum and dad understood this little gesture of mine but it still has pride of place over the chest of drawers. Looking at it now, I realise for the first time that it has a title. Across the top, in heavy letters, it says Thames Estuary - Northern Part.

  Thirteen

  My mother moves back into the flat that afternoon. Lin brightens every room with more fresh flowers and the first spell of hot weather lifts all our spirits. By now, we’ve broken the news about the holiday we’ve booked but my mother - far from worrying about being left alone - seems as excited as we are. We’ve earned our little break, she insists. It’s exactly what we should be doing. We’re to sail away and have a wonderful time and not to waste a single moment thinking about things back home.

  It’s a wonderful thought but we’re still in the process of putting together an intricate safety net of relatives, friends, and neighbourly support to keep an eye on my mum. The help we’re getting is immensely heartening but the one problem we don’t seem able to crack is how to get her up to the hospital for her daily visits. A taxi is the obvious answer but my mother’s grasp of geography is vague and we know she’d get hopelessly lost in even the smallest hospital. Would it really be fair to expect the cab driver to accompany her to the ward? Would the next one have the patience to track her down and bring her back?

  This quandry is abruptly compounded by the news that my father is to be moved. The big Queen Alexandra hospital has done everything they can for him. A bed has been found for him up in Petersfield where he will undergo further assessment. Petersfield is eighteen miles away. Who on earth will drive mum up there and back every day?

  Lin and I do our best to sort out transport and an escort. My son, Tom, volunteers to cover the weekend we’re away. That leaves three days before and three days afterwards. We’re on the verge of cancelling the holiday when Hilary appears. She was my father’s favourite carer when he was still in the flat across the road. She’s been up to see him in the QA a week or so back. Now she’s popped in for the latest news. We tell her about the impending move. When we mention our holiday plans she volunteers her services at once. Under the DSS carers scheme, she’ll come and see my mother every lunchtime. After that, she’ll drive her up to Petersfield. It’ll be a pleasure. It’s the least she can do. We celebrate with more coffee. Once again, Spain beckons.

  My father’s transfer is scheduled for the Monday. Before he’s shipped out of John Pounds Ward, I have one last session with the consultant. We talk in the sister’s office again, the door closed. Over the last week, my father has been up and down. Some days he’s almost peaceable. Other days, for reasons we can only guess at, he’s wildly upset, complaining about the service, mistaking the nurses for waitresses, imposing himself on everyone within earshot. On these occasions, tormented by frustration and self-pity, he howls his eyes out, as helpless and vulnerable as the child he’d once been. Sitting beside his chair, there’s little we can offer except the bare reassurance of physical company. With his purple feet and his mismatched pyjamas, he’s a truly pitiful sight. Will all this get worse? Is there nothing that can be done?

  The consultant, Dr Logan, has a rare talent for salting compassion with candour. The time for rehabilitation, he says, has come and gone. The physiotherapists have tried and tried but he’s barely responded at all. The phrase Dr Logan uses is “diffuse brain damage”. Successive strokes have taken their toll. The inside of his cerebellum is, like the moon, much cratered. He’s also, alas, become dispraxic. That means he can’t co-ordinate anything, either mentally or physically. The intention is there, and the will, but not the execution. In most respects he’s now helpless, and the worst of it is that - however dimly - he knows it.

  Standing beside the window in the sister’s office, we can both see my dad.

  “So what’s the point of taking him up to Petersfield?” I inquire.

  The consultant talks about a course of anti-depressants. For my father’s brain and body, medicine can no longer do very much. For his spirit, drugs may - just - make a difference. He’ll be up at Petersfield for at least six weeks. It’s worth a shot.

  I tell him I’m grateful. The consultant smiles.

  “Are you still going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Best thing.”

  I return to dad’s bedside. He’s never looked worse. In desperation, I thumb through the thickening folder that holds his daily notes. On the 6th May, in the middle of the night, a nurse had written Stanley very depressed. Keeps saying he wants to be left to die. Catheter draining well. I close the folder, looking at my dad again. What an epitaph.

  Fourteen

  We drive down to Exmouth the next day. After a night at the flat, we’ll push onto Plymouth to take the ferry to Santander. The camper is full of trekking boots and rucksacks. As Portsmouth recedes, our mood lightens. You can only put up with guilt for so long.

  Exmouth is as serene and peaceful as ever. If you could bottle it as a lotion - apply twice daily - you’d make a fortune. The walk to the pub takes us along the gentle curve of the seafront. It’s been cloudy all day but now the sky beyond the estuary is pinked with the last of the sun. The tide is pouring out of the Exe and we pause to watch a fishing boat butting in aga
inst the current. A tiny figure is throwing fish guts from the stern and the gulls swoop and wheel, fighting for scraps. Happiness smells of seaweed and fresh air.

  We go to bed early. At three in the morning, for no reason I can remember, it occurs to me to check the package from Brittany Ferries. It’s lain on the bedroom dressing table for the best part of two months. Because of everything that’s happened since, I havn’t even bothered to open it.

  Inside is a helpful checklist of vital documents. As I read through, I realise that I havn’t bought insurance, or a green card, or even thought to pack my driving licence. Normally, I’m a pretty organised sort of bloke. The consequences of any kind of traffic accident in Spain without third party cover don’t bear contemplation but for once in my life I realise that I don’t care what happens. We’ll go, regardless. At worst, we’ll end up in some Spanish jail and just now that doesn’t sound unattractive. Que sera.

  The crossing takes twenty four hours. May is Saga holiday time and the boat is full of elderly couples, gamely tottering from deck to deck. A thick sea mist cloaks the ferry the moment we nose into the English Channel and we push south towards the Bay of Biscay in a bubble of grey. My holiday reading boils down to a 600-page account of the development of the H-Bomb and by mid-evening I’m feeling profoundly depressed. I very rarely suffer from depression. It’s just not something that’s ever figured in my life. I’ve seen it in friends of mine, and I’ve done my best to help, but deep down - like my mother - I regard it as a form of self-indulgence.

  I’m wrong. It’s half past nine at night and I’ve found myself a perch way up on the top deck at the very back of the boat. It’s dark now, and cold. Light spills over the stern and the wake churns away into the infinite greyness beyond. For the second time in a month, like the moment we found ourselves in the tunnel beneath the hospital, I’m struck by how perfect an image this is for death: the rumble of the ship’s engines, the clammy chill of the night air, the feeling of being completely adrift on a voyage from nowhere to nowhere.