Cleaning Up

by Paul Connor-Kearns

  He came back in the evening and Jimbo and Johnny Buck were already there at the bedside, chatting with the old man who was propped up in bed, listening to JB talk with that amused, indulgent look in his eyes, which he often reserved for Buck.

  ‘Ten percent truth, ninety percent bullshit and hundred percent entertaining,’ was Mick’s assessment of Buck’s meandering tails of mischief and derring do. Jimbo stood back to let him in and he bowed down to give the old man a quick, gentle embrace.

  The old man gave him a soft ‘hi,’ and a little ‘what can you do,’ raising of the eyebrows.

  ‘How you feeling then Dad?’

  Another shrug, ‘Alright I guess - not as good as you I reckon,’ Mick gave him a wintery smile/grimace - an unusually fatalistic one at that.

  Johnny Buck filled in some clinical details, ‘they’ve got fluids in him Tom - he’s looking a lot bloody better than he was.’

  Tommy turned to JB and motioned with a flick of the head that they go outside to chat.

  JB’s good cheer disappeared as soon as he knew that they were out of the old man’s eye line.

  ‘He were a fucking mess Tommy, musta been there a few days the doctors reckon. They think he may have had a fall somewhere in the house, made it to his chair then just sat there, couldn’t move his legs at all the poor bastard.’

  Tommy pictured, not for the first time in the last hour or so the phone on the coffee table that would have been within easy reach of his dad’s right elbow. Again, he was thinking squarely about the fact, and the implications of the fact that the old man had made no attempt to alert anyone to his predicament. He was sure that Mick had made a conscious decision to let it all go and he, hundreds of miles away in bloody Brighton had clearly heard that decision, ‘this is what it feels like to die,’ sent to him through the fucking ether - no degree of separation.

  Tommy patted JB on his wide bony shoulder, ‘thanks John, he’ll be right, you know what he’s like, a tough old sod he is.’

  ‘Aye, yer right son, yer right enough. He had us worried though, a fucking mess he were.’

  ‘They X-rayed him yet?’

  ‘Don’t think so, I asked him but he said he didn’t know - probably a bit out of it with the drugs and that.’

  They turned and went back in to the ward and for the next hour they chatted like four old mates propping up the bar. Mick warming up to it a little bit, not talking that much and, at times, a little halting and mixed up in his speech. Tommy had never heard that before from Mick.

  His dad had slivers of brown lodged under the fingernails on both of his hands - Tommy popped back to the nurses’ desk and commented on that, asking them what the story was.

  The young nurse on duty told him that he’d been soiled when they brought him in. He pointed out that, to a degree, he still was and they told him that due to Health and Safety issues/regs/fucking concerns, she no longer provided that kind of care for the patients.

  Tommy had a ‘have I slipped into a parallel universe’ moment but left it alone - he needed his energy for other things. He’d bring some clippers and a nailbrush in the next day and get the old man sorted out. The nurses told him that they would be onto the X-rays tomorrow and they would give him a blood transfusion too, after that they’d know more about what was going on with him.

  When he got back to the bed Mick had nodded off and they quietly left him to it.

  For the next few days Tommy did a run over to see him at lunch, Pauline had no issue with the need for the extra time off. He stayed at the Centre till six then he was straight back to the hospital for the evening visiting hours. The old man had noticeably perked up with the series of blood transfusions and was looking fresh and in the pink. Mick had people with him every time he visited - a rotating roster of Nev, Jimbo, JB, old Lenny from the railway, the boys from the blues band, Drink Gorman and an assortment of other regulars from his various watering holes. Linda, her daughter and even Di, Mick’s many years past old flame had shown up, she was still fetchingly tasty too - much closer to his age than Mick’s.

  During the visits Mick was listening a lot more than he was talking, there were no displays of recalcitrance from him and he was ever the gent with the nurses. Mick always did put women on a pedestal. The old man was rallying the troops the best that he could, lots of winks and thumbs ups - trying to minimise the fuss around him in as much of an energy saving way as possible.

  Tommy saw the specialist on Thursday. He was a slightly diffident Asian guy, maybe his age, maybe a bit younger. They parked off in a non-descript room, which was located just around the corridor from ward’s reception area. The small windowless room housed a half dozen or so reasonably comfortable newish looking battleship grey chairs. The walls were filled with the usual NHS paraphernalia promoting health awareness, handy hints and vigilance. Without any fanfare or pre-amble the doctor told him that the X-rays had shown that Mick had brain cancer - secondaries, he said. They hadn’t found the primary and there was a suspicion that there was some internal bleeding too, probably as a result of a fall. They were reluctant to perform any invasive surgery on a frail seventy six year old. The guy gave him a grave, unreadable look though there was not much need for a postscript after that.

  Deep down he’d already known it, known it ever since Mick had opened the door to him some eighteen months ago, and Tommy absorbed the impact of the news relatively lightly as if somebody had just flicked him across the chops.

  ‘How long,’ he asked, ‘are we talking – months? A year?’

  ‘In my estimation six months would be the maximum Mr Cochrane. It’s hard to say though and we don’t like to speculate about such matters. It might only be weeks even but it’s impossible to say.’ He shrugged a kind of sorry at him but there was no way to gild it.

  Weeks!

  He thanked the doctor who stood, came over to his chair to shake his hand with a light cool grip whilst placing his left hand for a few moments on his right shoulder - the guy told him that he was sorry, very sorry.

  After a few moments alone he made the short walk back to the ward. Linda was at Mick’s bedside fussing over him in her low-key good-natured way.

  Tommy took the chair between Mick’s bed and the long ward window that looked out to the north-eastern fringes of the town and on up to the moors. He leaned over the bed rails and rested his hand on his father’s forearm. Mick looked at him a little quizzically but he was OK with it.

  He told Linda the bottom line when they left the ward and she immediately burst into tears, he held her and they lightly rocked together for a while, impervious towards and uncaring about the flow of activity that swept on around them.

  He went home but he didn’t eat. He put on some music that he didn’t hear then went to his bed to lay down and, finally, in the dark and in the silence he wept hard and long for his old man. Mick was on his final journey.

  Tommy was the first one in to see him on the Saturday. The ward was busy today with lots of family milling around the beds. He’d had an update from the nurses - yesterday they had tried some light physio’ on him and the old man couldn’t use his pins at all and the prognosis for mobility was not good. Mick was a realist - he would know what that meant - no going home.

  They sat quietly together for a while; after all they had had half a lifetime of shared silences. Tommy was sat again with his back to the wall-length window taking in the movements and postures of those attending to their ailing loved ones.

  His old man was awake and he’d managed a bit of food this morning - some pale scrambled eggs washed down with a red jelly for afters.

  Tommy leaned in over the bed rail feeling the weight of all those soon to be shed tears pressing against his eyes and tapped his old man on the shoulder. Mick turned his head and looked at him and Tommy delivered the words that he had incessantly replayed in his mind for the last twenty-four hours.

  ‘You know Dad, you can let go if that is what you want to do. You don’t have to stick around mate - i
t’s OK, you don’t have to, not for me or for anybody else you don’t.’

  Mick looked levelly at him and, for a moment, Tommy wasn’t sure that it had registered with him. Then Mick gave him a brief nod and turned his head back to look briefly over at the guy in the opposite bed to his, and then he looked up at the ceiling and kept his gaze there. A few moments lapsed and then Mick reached over with his right hand to pat the back of Tommy’s and then Mick kept the hand there.

  Drink and Nev showed up some ten minutes or so later. Nev with a couple of books for Mick, one of which was a biography of George Best, Mick rolled his eyes at that but thanked Nev for it anyway. They shot the shit for a while and Tommy left a few minutes before visiting time was over. He turned in the doorway to the ward to look at the tableaux of the three friends - then he went straight home, empty, spent - yet somehow unburdened too. He’d said what had needed to be said.

  Tommy saw the change in him the next day. It was amazing really, powerful testimony to how the body followed the mind. Death was now clearly showing on the old man’s face. Mick had started to incrementally step away, drawing back from this mortal coil. Over the next few days there was little talk from him, just the odd nod and a cheery thumbs up. The conversation of his visitors flowed over, across and around the old man as he serenely lay there in his bed, the ailing King as still and calm as a rock in an eddying stream.

  Every night, as soon Tommy lay down in his bed he asked for his old man to let go - in fact he willed it. He couldn’t bear the thought of a protracted struggle both for Mick’s sake and, perhaps selfishly for his own sake too. He embraced the overwhelming helplessness. No matter what he wanted he could not do a fucking thing to prevent it. It was all beyond his wishes and well beyond the force of his will. After another week in the ward they transferred Mick over to the hospice, which was located a couple of miles away from the hospital, Mick was obviously beyond their care now. On the day of the transfer Tommy had taken the afternoon off work and made the fifteen minute drive over there from his flat. The hospice was located on a large block of landscaped grounds, a single storey building flooded with lots of light and suffused with a feeling of space and tranquillity, everything that took place in there felt calm and unhurried.

  The hospice reception directed him to Mick’s room and he spent an hour or so sat in a big comfy chair next to the high bed listening to the old man’s shallow breathing. Mick’s digital radio was playing softly next to the bed. He got up and double-checked that it was tuned into Mick’s favourite station.

  He felt himself start to nod off briefly and when he woke the old man was awake and stirring slightly.

  He said, a ‘hello Dad’ and Mick’s eyes turned towards him and he blinked a hello back.

  A nurse had a left a beaker of tea on the tray next to Mick’s bed and Tommy stood up, walked around to the tray and asked the old man if he would like a drink. Mick blinked another yes, this time emphasised with the shadow of a nod.

  He went to the head of the bed, put his hand between the pillows and lifted Mick’s head up and brought the beaker carefully to his lips.

  He tipped the beaker gently and Mick took in a taste.

  Tommy put the beaker back down, still holding Mick up with his right arm behind the pillow.

  ‘How was that then Dad?’

  Mick gulped a couple of times and, after a few seconds his voice came to him from a long, long way off. It was no more than a dry rustle but, all the same, it was distinctively Mick.

  ‘Just right son, just right.’

  Tommy nodded and smiled at him. He gently let Mick’s head down and returned back to his chair.

  His old man was back asleep within a couple of breaths.

  Tommy got up and left the room.

  Linda called him at home the next morning just as he was busy gathering up all his work gear in his little kitchen space.

  Her voice was wobbly and smeared. Mick had gone just fifteen, twenty minutes ago. She’d been there in the room with him - he hadn’t been alone.

  As he tried to absorb the news it felt as if, albeit briefly, his mind and body had splintered as if he was dimensionless - nowhere and fucking everywhere - ego, sense of self completely gone. The room grew, then shrank and then grew again. He felt himself sway and he had put his hands on the kitchen table to stop himself from falling.

  He willed himself into autopilot, jumped in the car and was at the hospice in the usual fifteen minutes drive. The girl on the reception told him that the nurses were laying him out and he could see him as soon as they finished, which, she reassured him with a sympathetic smile, wouldn’t be too much longer. He phoned Jimbo as he waited and gave him the news. Jimbo told him he was leaving work right away and would be there in ten.

  A nurse called him in through to a wicker chaired anteroom, it was a warm, sunny, light filled space, which had lots of pot plants, cane furniture and some magazines that were neatly placed into a pile on a low level glassed table. He opened the mid-brown door at the end of the anteroom and there he was. Laid out on a high single bed almost unrecognisable in death as the man he’d always known, a desiccated husk, his face frozen into the rictus of a hollow-cheeked death-mask grimace. They’d dressed him in one of his signature check shirts and track suit bottoms and someone had placed a flower on the pillow just to the right side of his head - a very un-Mick like touch but, still…

  Linda got up from a chair in the corner of the room and gave him a kiss and a long hug.

  Tommy went over to Mick and stood next to him, nodding to himself without any real meaning in the gesture. He leant down and kissed his dad softly on his forehead and, as the tears rolled down his face, he told Mick that he loved him. Then he stood there for a long, long while, his hand resting lightly on Mick’s bony chest.

  NOVEMBER

  Pasquale had adjusted pretty quickly to life in the unit. He was assigned a key worker as soon as he arrived, this huge bloke from New Zealand, Steve, whose gentle voice belied his mammoth muscles and cool as fuck tattoos. The kids were a mixed bag, some in there because of family problems or because they had nowhere else to go, others like him, inside doing their bird because of criminal offences.

  Everything was on a fucking timetable though and there was a privileges system too. If you kept your nose clean, the more brownie points they gave you - fuck up and they were all taken away and you were right back down at the bottom of the ladder.

  The place had a good gym that pissed all over that sad ass shed at the ref and there was an expectation that he use it. He didn’t mind the exercise bikes but Steve had got him doing some weights too - all smiles and easy prompts as he busted his bollocks.

  It was a little touchy feely at times, inmates were given the opportunity to discuss their issues with each other as they sat in a big, surly, self conscious circle with the staff gawping on.

  There was no free access to any room in the joint, staff had to lock and unlock nearly every room apart from the large communal area and that was all a fucking drag. It was a full day of lessons too and there would be no break for what would have normally been the school holidays either.

  The kids quickly found out that he was a criminal placement and that gave him a cache of sorts although he made the point of keeping that in his back pocket. He was towards the older end of the residents so it wasn’t difficult to sort out what was, for him, a comfortable place on the pecking order. His mum came down south every second weekend to see him, she’d banked the dough for him and she had a job transfer in the pipeline, possibly down in the smoke. Junior had sent him an email. He was already down in Haringey. So, maybe, they would hook up again.

  Wendy had been in weekly contact from the ref and he was surprised at how much that communication and gesture meant to him. Kat was doing well in her new place and they hadn’t heard anything from Neil since he’d moved out.

  A lot of the kids whinged about the place, it was too big, too small, too many rules, too many restrictions, can’t smoke, c
an’t do this, can’t do fucking that.

  But, he liked the rhythm of the place and the regular workouts with Steve and some of the other boys. It was making him feel stronger and cleaner somehow. He felt good about not smoking weed too.

  He was doing well at his lessons - knocking them dead in art with his paintings and he’d even done some sculptures, working hard with Rosie the art teacher, proudly keeping the pieces he’d made on display in his room.

  He had to see a shrink once a week and she was a smart one too. She was getting him to think about what had brought him to this point in his life, probing around about his mum and his dad and, at first, that had pissed him off a bit. She was like water though, lapping at his shore, forwards and then backwards but always coming.

  They told him that, if all went well, towards the end of the year he’d get more supervised time away from the unit - mobilities they called it.

  As Steve said, repeatedly, it was all up to him and if you fuck up it’s because you’ve fucked up. Growing pains, Steve called it.

  Pasquale had always known it. In fact, it was like they were holding a mirror up to him. Maybe the time for bullshit was over. His mum had often alluded to the fact that he had no men in his (and her) life and now they were fucking everywhere. Steve was right, he had choices and they were his to make. That had to be a kind of freedom, he supposed.

  The station had buzzed for a few days with the Bazzer killing - everybody on the same page that it was a gay-boy tryst gone wrong. They had no leads and no suspects. Mozzer had been pulled onto the investigation team and nobody had approached him about the chat he’d had with Baz, that stone remaining left unturned and he was happy to keep it that way, although it stayed as a sort of wary tension within him, he wasn’t comfortable with the implications of it and his mind regularly wandered through a maze of possible meanings, none of which unburdened him. He was tired of feeling like the lone voice in the wilderness, seeing what nobody else appeared to see.