We are very surprised then when the doctor’s closed face remains calm and detached. Penny is rambling on about the folder the nurses left last night, and where should we keep it, and how often should they write in it and then I cut her off. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he? How soon will it be? Should we get the rest of the family?’
The doctor shakes his head vaguely, unaware of the panic in my voice. Or maybe he is just immune to it with this job of his. He shrugs.
‘He is very sick. I think he has a week. Not much
more than that at any rate. Maybe a day or so less.’
I stare at him as if I’ve been slapped in the face. Beside me, Penny too is silent.
‘But he can’t eat and he hasn’t drunk anything for at least a day,’ she says.
The doctor shrugs. ‘Yes, he’s very dehydrated. Try and sponge his mouth. Maybe with juice as well as water. Pineapple juice is a natural cleanser and might give him some energy. The acids and enzymes in it work well in the mouth.’ Penny nods and quickly scribbles down
pineapple juice
on a piece of paper dragged from her handbag. She has always liked lists. They help her feel in control.
‘A week? Are you sure?’
The doctor looks back at me and nods. ‘The body fights, you know?’
After a moment I nod back as if I understand and perhaps I think I do. In fact, I know nothing. I am so naïve. Penny has started talking again and she talks the quiet fat man all the way to the door. Standing in the kitchen, I wonder at death. You look so sick. You’ve given up. You haven’t drunk anything. I think this should surely be enough to make death take over. I am wrong of course. You have so much more dying to do yet. You have to become so much less before you go. The doctor is, in fact, spot on. One week. Maybe a little less. The body fights, you know?
Now I do.
When the doctor is gone I go up to check on you, but you don’t seem to know I’m there. Or maybe you’re just ignoring me. I wouldn’t put it past you. I say as much and laugh as I leave the room, as if everything were normal. Or at least not-quite-right normal.
By the time I get back to the kitchen, to the warm heart of our microcosm world, I am crying. Penny looks at me and then she is crying too. We cry at each other for a while and then we make more tea, light cigarettes and make lists. I am sure Penny’s list has a function, is organised, but I look down and see mine is just a jumble of words on a small sheet of paper. I have written
morphine/pineapple juice
as if creating a new cocktail. And maybe I have. Maybe it’s a Dad special. Then the words are blurred as my eyes and my nose run free.
We eventually talk about the boys coming. I can feel the tension rising before we’ve even started the calls. Penny’s list of people we need to contact is getting longer, but I think maybe the best way to start is by looking through your little address book. I fetch it from its place by the phone and flick through the yellowed pages, looking at the numbers and words laid down in your neat, scratchy hand. My heart clenches.
You won’t be writing again.
Not ever.
The finality of the thought is cold and makes me shake. I am so tired. It’s been a long few months and, even though time has folded from the first diagnosis to
now, my body and soul know that I have lived through every painful second of it. They sing it to me through aching limbs and a torn heart. I am not very strong. I never have been. I hand the book to Penny.
‘All Dad’s numbers are in there.’ She looks at it as if it’s something sacred and not a ninety-nine pence stocking-filler address book from WHSmith. ‘If you ring Paul, then he can ring the boys. They all need to come and say their goodbyes.’ The words don’t feel adequate as I say them. ‘I’ll go to Tesco’s and get some more food in. I’ll call Mary and some of the others when I get back.’ I start gathering my purse and bag together. I still have my jogging bottoms on and I haven’t showered, but I don’t care. The supermarket will have to put up with it.
Penny pulls on her cigarette. ‘Oh God, what am I going to say? What am I going to say to Paul?’
I look at her. I know where this is heading. ‘Just tell him what the doctor said. Tell him Dad is dying and he needs to come now.’
Her perfect eyes are pleading with me. ‘Maybe you should call him. You’re better at this kind of thing than me.’
I grit my teeth.
What kind of thing, Penny?
I want to scream.
Clearing up the crap?
For a minute I look past the make-up and expensive perfume and see only the worst parts of my sister. Selfish. Spoilt. Damaged by her glow. I feel bitter and I can’t stop it. Penny has always had
Paul – the two of them are thick as thieves – and the twins have each other. I have you and now you are concentrating on leaving me.
‘You do it, Penny,’ I say, and then she stays quiet.
*
There are more people in Tesco than I expect on a working day and I lose myself in them as I drift up and down the aisles, filling my trolley with bacon and eggs and pineapple juice. I select a box of field mushrooms and then stare into the aisle. The lights overhead are too bright. A tired mother adds the large bag of King Edwards she’d obviously forgotten into her already overfull trolley, while the little boy in the child seat kicks at his metal confinement, squealing,
‘I want, I want
…’
I can’t make out what it is he wants, but I think maybe his mother will give in and get it for him just to find a moment’s peace. She is pretty but looks exhausted and I wonder if I’ve caught her at a bad moment or whether she lies in bed at night and wonders how her life came to this.
Behind them an old man carefully pulls a plastic bag from the holder and selects three or four new potatoes. Just enough for one. He adds them to his sparsely filled basket and shuffles slowly towards the tomatoes. I can’t tell if the shuffle is brought on by age or by sheer soul-weariness. Behind me I can still hear the cry of ‘
I want
’ It seems that age is all around, brought to nothing under the glare of the too-white light and inane music. My
throat tightens in a way it hasn’t for a long time and my ears buzz. Somewhere underneath my heartbeat and dry mouth I wonder if I might abandon the trolley and run back out into the cold air of the car park. But then the moment passes.
I relax my grip on the trolley and rub my fingers. They are cold. My heart steadies and I continue my shopping, but I focus hard on the shelves rather than the people. When the old man passes me again I squeeze my eyes shut so tight that I think I can hear the pummelling of black hooves somewhere in the distance, but the panic doesn’t grip me again and I open my eyes and sigh out a long, shaky breath. I add the ketchup I’m staring at to my trolley.
*
By the time I get home I feel a little more stable. I am nearly forty, I remind myself. I can cope. The house is quiet. I go into the kitchen with the first run of bags and Penny is crying.
‘I’ve rung Paul,’ she says. ‘He’s going to ring the boys. I told him he’s the eldest brother, it’s his job. You’re doing enough.’ She doesn’t look up. She is looking at sheets of paper pulled from an open folder. I recognise the folder. It is red cardboard, like so many of his others, but for the words
funeral arrangements
scratched on the flap in black pen. Penny is staring at the receipt and the paperwork.
‘Did Dad do this, or you?’
My shoulders ache as I put the bags down. ‘Dad. He did it while I was at work. Hang on.’ I go back outside and fetch the last of the bags, slamming the boot. Pen doesn’t come out to help. She won’t have thought about it. Air to my earth. When I go back into the kitchen she’s unpacking the first lot, though, tidying the fridge as she goes. She lines up the margarine and the eggs so that they are at perfect angles with one another on different rows.
I’ve watched Penny over the years and I think maybe her need to clean and tidy is a little on the compulsive side. I think she will forever seek the order she’s never found in her life, despite her glorious adventures and her romances and her children. She cleans, she scrubs and she tidies. Her house is spotless when I visit and I know that it is always spotless regardless of visitors, and I wonder sometimes what it really means, this need to be clean. To be
seen
to be clean. Watching her rearrange the fridge so officiously I wonder if I really know her under the glow at all.
I throw the mushrooms into the vegetable rack not really caring where they land. This is my order.
‘He had about three funeral companies round one afternoon and basically figured out which one did the best deal. He’s paid for it already. The car and flowers and everything.’ My tone is conversational and I feel as if we’re talking about you booking a holiday. Maybe it’s better that way. ‘He’s having a wicker coffin. He
wanted cardboard but it was more expensive. Figure that one out.’
I don’t tell her about the evening we spent trawling the Internet, examining the biodegradability of various coffins. I wouldn’t be able to say it and she wouldn’t get it. Penny laughs from behind the fridge door. ‘Only Father …’ It warms me to hear her laugh. It’s a good sound.
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Only our mad dad.’
She laughs some more at this and as I join in I wonder where laughter fits into the language.
When the shopping is put away, Penny goes to have a bath. I wonder why she bothered putting on all that make-up and then I remember she’s already showered once this morning. I think about the bath and put the immersion heater on so there will be enough hot water for me later. Baths are not about washing. They’re about soaking. Floating. Drifting privately in the warmth. Maybe that’s what Penny wants. Some private time. I don’t mind. I understand private time and it’s good to have the kitchen to myself again. I look outside. It’s raining. I open up the window and put my face into it, stretching my neck. The fresh, dewy smell fills me up and the water hits my skin in tiny slaps. For a moment the sensation is exhilarating, but then the cold and damp are too real and I shrink back into the shelter of our home. I settle for watching the water streaming against the glass and trees, the drops erratically chasing each
other before becoming one on the windowsill or the ground. I could watch for hours, mesmerised by the everything and nothing of nature.
It was raining like this on that Sunday morning when we went to see the crematorium. Another bubble of time.
*
The windscreen wipers scratch across the glass in a steady rhythm, smearing the water. You sit beside me. You tell me I need to get
new bloody wipers
before they ruin the screen. I bite my tongue to stop myself saying that all of this is too bizarre, because you already know it is – just as I know I need to get new bloody wipers.
We are silent as I pull off the clinical grid road and follow the sign down a sweeping drive. Even though it’s raining and the grounds look beautiful, I can’t help but think of Dachau or some other death camp. I look to the sky, half expecting to see a plume of black smoke rising and pressing against the grey clouds. It isn’t there, of course, but I see it through the window of my mind, far too clearly. I see a lot of things I don’t like through that window.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I ask you, although the question screams inwards, at me. Only our mad dad, I think. Only our mad dad would ask me to do this and think that it’s fine. You smile at me and nod, and I see how tired you are, just the act of leaving the house draining more hours and minutes away. I
smile back. You put the small plastic sputum tub into your pocket. You carry it with you everywhere now, just like your tobacco and lighter. The yin to the smoke’s yang. But then all that spit has to go somewhere and it can’t go down, so it has to come out. Surreptitiously, though, and when no one is looking, because spit is rude, spit is wrong and you are always such a polite man. It doesn’t make me heave anymore when I see it. Not like it used to.
I get out of the car and zip my jacket up so that it’s nearly touching my nose. Sometimes, at home, when you’re using the jar, I concentrate hard on the TV so I don’t have to catch sight of the tobacco-brown slime that escapes from you as you cough and choke it out. I don’t let you see my discomfort. I don’t want you to know that I’ve started to hate the feeling of my own wet spit flooding against my tongue. I’ll get over it. You won’t. Time will heal me. Time will take you from me.
We don’t speak as we hunt out the office, our feet crunching on the gravel, disturbing the silence. The rain patters lifelessly to the ground. It’s thinned since we left the house; only drizzling now. Through the window of my mind I see an ageing, fat God sitting above us in stained underpants, hacking and choking as he sends his saliva down in rain. It’s a comical image, farcical. My mind does that to me sometimes.
You are striding ahead and I run to catch up. There is no breeze or wind and it should be cold, but it isn’t.
There is a nothingness to the weather, and although I normally like the fresh chill of water on my skin I don’t want it today. Too much water.
Too much water under the bridge
. The phrase makes no sense, but I think it anyway. My world is full of clichés. My empty thinking space finds trivia to occupy itself as we trudge along the path that leads from one brown building to another. Nothing is open. We find no one. I can feel your frustration. ‘This is a waste of time,’ I mutter, and then realise the depth of my words and bite hard on my cheek.
We walk past the garden of remembrance and I see a small wooden sign pointing the way to the children’s garden. It is in bad taste. Why would children want to play here? I stare. My breath catches. I understand. I look at you and see the lines of age and experience on your wasting skin, and I see the sadness in your exhausted expression. You turn away and maybe in that moment I can understand why you are
okay with this
as you keep telling me. Some things are natural and some things are not. You may be going quicker than either of us want, but you are a long way from the children’s garden.
The stillness around us makes me want to cry and I’m glad to follow you back to the building. I don’t want to think of the dead children. I can’t think of them. It might make me drift too far. I like to think it wouldn’t, but it might.
Doctor drifting
. Like before. And I don’t need that right now. Right now is all about you.