The Extraordinary Hope of Dawn Brightside

by Jessica Ryn

  A huge ball forms in Dawn’s throat. ‘Why’s he in a care home?’ she asks when she can trust herself to speak. ‘He can only be in his sixties.’

  ‘The nurse wasn’t able to tell me very much, but I’m afraid since you last saw your dad, he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Early onset.’

  A lorry halts in front of them after the roundabout. Grace slams on the breaks and the back of Dawn’s head bounces against the headrest.

  ‘And why is he living in a home in Deal? Why is he so far from home?’ Dawn asks once her heart rate has recovered.

  ‘I’m sure the nurse, and perhaps your dad, will be able to tell you more. Nurse Carter says he still has many moments, sometimes hours, of being completely lucid. He may not remember much when you first see him. You might have to be patient.’

  The car sways violently from one side to another. Dawn closes her eyes in panic, thinking they’re about to come clean off the road. It’s only when she opens them again that she sees that they are still moving along in perfect position.

  ‘I thought he’d forgotten I existed,’ Dawn whispers. ‘I should have looked for him. I did when Mum died, and then tried again when I fell pregnant with Rosie. But when he couldn’t be found, I just kept remembering all the stuff Mum had said and it kept going around and around in my head. After he left, she told me he wanted nothing to do with either of us – that he wanted to be left alone with his new woman. Part of me hoped he was looking for me but after the psych unit, I was never in one place at a time. He would never have been able to find me, even if he’d wanted to.’

  Oaklands Residential Home looks nice enough from the car park. It’s just not somewhere Dawn had envisaged her dad ever living. She’d mostly pictured him living in a cottage in the south of France with a glamorous woman and a string of children.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s been right here,’ she whispers.

  Dawn and Grace tread the long path through the skinny trees until they reach the door to Reception. The wide hatch reminds Dawn of St Jude’s and she finds herself hoping that her dad has found friendships there amongst the staff and the other residents, just as she has at the hostel.

  ‘We’re here to see Mr Brightside,’ Grace says after Dawn has stood there with her mouth half open for several seconds.

  ‘Of course. Hello,’ says the bright smile on the other side. The smile belongs to a smiling nurse with a curtain of auburn hair. She disappears from the hatch and emerges from the door next to it, beckoning for Dawn and Grace to follow once they have signed themselves into the building.

  ‘He’ll be in here. The residents’ lounge,’ she explains. ‘Mr Brightside prefers to be in here during the day. We encourage everyone to do this as much as possible. Much better than being cooped up in their room alone each day.’

  Nurse Carter carries on talking about the home’s policy on structured activities, but Dawn has stopped listening.

  He’s sitting by the window in an old-dear chair, holding back the edge of the curtain with two fingers. He’s watching two birds jumping about on the branches of the tiny apple tree on the other side of the glass. Dad had liked birds when Dawn was little. He’d know what species they were. Dawn wouldn’t have a clue.

  So maybe not too much has changed. He still likes company, enjoys looking out of the window and watching birds. Perhaps he’ll turn his face around and it will melt into a smile the second he lays eyes on her. It would be like the last thirty-odd years had never happened.

  ‘Can I help you? Who are you here to see?’ Eyes still the same. Pale blue. Kind. Framed by crinkles that have deepened and joined up with new ones. Same hair, just slightly thinner and flecked with the odd grey speckle. Not too different at all. He stands without too much difficulty. He looks well, healthy in fact. What on earth was he doing in a place like this amongst the ancient Scrabble boards and the smell of stale cabbage?

  His eyes are still on Grace.

  ‘Hello, Jim,’ sings the nurse. ‘I’ve brought a special lady to see you.’

  Dawn’s stomach contents begin to argue with her insides. Her dad moves his gaze from Grace’s face to hers.

  The TV in the corner seems to have got louder; each Loose Woman’s voice fighting to be heard in every corner of the lounge over the scratching of pencils on crosswords and the argument by the coffee table about who’d eaten the last custard cream.

  Dawn’s dad looks her in the eye for several seconds. Then he extends a polite hand towards her. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

  Dawn clamps her jaw down tight to keep the sob from erupting. She takes his hand with her wobbly one and squeezes it tight. A tear falls from her face and lands on the back of his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. I need to… I just can’t…’ Dawn drops her dad’s hand as if it’s been in the oven on gas mark seven and scurries back past the lace doilies until she’s out through the door.

  The reception hall is stifling. Dawn stares across at the green door release button as if she could open it with her eyes. It’s only about three strides away but there seems to be several bodies in the lobby between her and the exit. Loud questions from men in hi-vis jackets shout through the hatch. Which drain had been flooding? Had the staff been putting baby wipes and sanitary towels down the toilets again? They’d been advised last time to put a sign up.

  Dawn wants to peel her cardigan off but there’s no room to move her elbows between all these people stealing the air from the room. Sweat trickles down her back as the voices get louder and faster, and then the smell wafts through. Old cooking fat mixed with turds made from overcooked vegetables. The room shunts from side to side as Dawn focuses on slowing her racing heart and swallowing back the bile.

  A heavy hand on her back. Another one on the crook of her elbow.

  ‘You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Come and sit down and catch your breath,’ says Nurse Carter as she guides Dawn towards the telephone bench next to the leaflet stand; her very presence parting the waves between the Dyno-Rod experts.

  Dawn sits on the lumpy cushion, leaning forward in an effort to suck some oxygen back inside her. A glass of water held inside a hand and a concerned voice appears in front of her nose and she gulps it gratefully, without even looking up at where it came from.

  ‘He gets confused. Forgets,’ the nurse says, gently. ‘He always comes back, and he always wants you.’

  The bodies in the hall begin to file out through the front door closely followed by a staff uniform, leaving a welcome gust of cool but rancid air.

  ‘I wanted him to see me,’ Dawn sniffs.

  ‘And he will. I promise. You just need to get back in there.’

  Ignoring the wobble in her legs, Dawn puts one foot in front of the other, through the lounge door and back to the chair by the window.

  He’s looking out of the window again, his stare fixed through the glass. Grace is sitting at his side, speaking quietly and gently into his ear.

  Dawn keeps her own words inside and perches on the chair on the other side of him; the deep, plastic-covered cushion squelching all the air out as her butt sinks in.

  ‘But that couldn’t have been her. My Dawn-light is only nine years old,’ he cries out. ‘Lovely girl she is. Always making me laugh. Where is she?’

  Dawn looks at the back of his shoulders, willing them to turn. They begin to jerk up and down and a sob reverberates around the room.

  Grace continues to speak in a low voice, and he spins around, presenting Dawn with the sight of his face, flowing with tears.

  ‘Oh, Dawn-light,’ he gulps, grabbing for her hand.

  Dawn and her dad remain in the corner by the window for most of the afternoon. Barely speaking at first, just looking at each other and holding on tight. One by one, the other residents had begun to shuffle off to their rooms and the staff had found jobs to do in other areas of the building.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ Dawn asks.

  He smiles. ‘I think I do. Most of the time, anyway. I just have to keep
reminding myself why I’m here. Ironic, really.’

  Dawn reaches inside for the right sentence. It feels like an attempt to engineer a bridge that’s strong enough to hold up thirty-three missing years.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long to visit,’ she says, tutting at herself for the inadequacy. She needs way more material. More steel. Definitely more bricks if she’s ever going to reach across to the other side.

  ‘I just thought… I didn’t know where you were.’

  He takes a long, shaky breath and crosses his slipper-clad feet together. ‘I looked for you for years,’ he says finally. ‘It was my fault. Gave her an ultimatum about the drinking. Next thing I know, she’d upped and left with you, leaving a note saying I’d never find her. She thought I was going to take you away from her.’

  It’s like a cold sponge has wrung itself around Dawn’s heart, holding it still. ‘But – she let me think you’d abandoned me. That you went off with another woman.’

  Dawn’s dad’s face goes fag-ash grey. He tries to speak but the words come out in a splutter and he coughs as Dawn pats him gently on the back.

  ‘It explains why we moved house so often after you left,’ Dawn says as the pieces of her past begin to slot into place. I tried to find you when… oh. Mum. Did you know?’

  ‘I know she died,’ he says gently. He places a hand over Dawn’s. ‘The staff from here told me. I’m so sorry you were left all on your own, pet.’

  You’re dad’s not here. He’s left us. You will never see him again.

  ‘Your mum did love you. She just didn’t always deal with things in the best way. Guilt probably. She found it difficult after you were born. Got depressed. None of it was your fault, love.’

  Dawn nods slowly at the memories. Her mum’s closed bedroom door. Her all-day dressing gown. The empty bottles behind the sofa.

  ‘I fought to get her as much help as I could. I didn’t plan to leave, and I never stopped loving you, Dawn-light.’

  Dawn releases the ball in her throat and throws her arms around her dad’s skinny shoulders. She has so many more questions, but her dad’s misty eyes look tired.

  ‘Thank you so much for everything,’ Dawn says to Nurse Carter when they arrive back in the lobby. ‘There is something I don’t understand, though. What is my dad doing in Deal? Why is he so far from Manchester?’

  Nurse Carter gives Dawn a whistle-stop tour of her father’s life since she’d last seen him. He’d been diagnosed several years ago and was quickly unable to manage without support. There had been a fire at his first residential home and no next of kin could be found to look after him. The nearest emergency placement had been Birmingham and then that later closed down too.

  ‘Happens more than people realise,’ Nurse Carter says. ‘So many people are moved from pillar to post and lose contact with their families. I’m sure he would have asked for you many times before he ever arrived here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been easy to find back then,’ murmurs Dawn.

  Nurse Carter comes out from behind the hatch and pulls Dawn into an exuberant hug. She’s at least six-foot-tall and her puffed-up hair is thick with hairspray. ‘Come back soon. I’ve never seen your dad look so happy.’ She tells Dawn she can call her Petunia, but Dawn can already only think of her as Nurse Carter: fellow stranger-hugger. She’s pleased her dad has someone so fabulous looking after him.

  ‘I just can’t get over the lies,’ Dawn says to Grace when they reach the car. ‘Why couldn’t she just try to stop drinking? She actually let me think he’d abandoned me.’ Dawn punches the dashboard as she climbs into the passenger side.

  ‘I understand the anger.’ Grace places her hand on Dawn’s elbow. ‘You have so much to process. You need to give yourself some time.’

  She turns the key in the ignition. ‘There is a certain resident who lives in our hostel who would tell you to look for the positives.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t need to look very far. And I can’t thank you enough for taking me to see my dad.’

  ‘Time to look to the future,’ Grace says. ‘Early night for us all tonight. Tomorrow, we have our sleepout to look forward to.’

  Chapter 33

  Grace

  GRACE LOOKS UP FROM her desk on the afternoon of the sleepout and watches the drops outside the window as they fall from the grey sky, cursing inwardly as they tap against the office window. The very same night they’re asking Dover’s inhabitants to sleep on the streets for St Jude’s would have to mean that huge drops of rain begin limbering up, detangling themselves from the clouds in readiness to flood their sleeping bags and soak their cardboard mattresses.

  ‘It’s better this way. Trust me,’ Peter says as he looks over Grace’s shoulder at the computer screen.

  ‘How’s it better?’ Grace asks, trying to keep the impatience from her voice. ‘Less than half of the participants will probably show up now, meaning we’ll make a fraction of the sponsor money.’

  ‘But think of the awareness we’ll raise. Sleeping on the ground sucks big-time, trust me, but it’s a whole different game of ping-pong when you do it in the wet. It gets right into your bones until the despair has eaten away at every bit of your insides.’

  Through the hatch, Grace can see a line of St Jude’s residents standing by the door all dressed in waterproof jackets and carrying backpacks stuffed with sleeping bags. Each one had been assured they were under no obligation to take part – they had all been through quite enough on those unforgiving streets to last a lifetime, but almost every one of them had still signed up.

  Peter and Grace switch everything off and lock the office door behind them, sticking a ‘Closed’ notice on the foyer window. It feels odd to empty the building of people, even just for one night, and Grace’s stomach somersaults when she looks back at the word ‘Closed’, hoping it’s not a word that’s ever there to stay.

  The mood is quiet and sombre as the staff and residents of St Jude’s march their way as one body down the winding hill and towards the market square, occasionally looking up at the falling sky. Lost in thoughts; perhaps battling memories of days when they’d slept under the raindrops, not knowing when a dry room would next be there to hold them.

  Dawn and Cara are already in the middle of the empty market square, erecting the banner lovingly made by St Jude’s residents at last week’s weekly meeting. It says, ‘St Jude’s Last Cause: The Sleepout.’ But the bright felt-tip-filled letters have begun to run across the page, rendering the words only just legible.

  It’s only the St Jude’s lot so far. ‘How many people did we have signed up to this through our Facebook page?’ Grace whispers to Peter.

  ‘Quite a few.’

  ‘How many?’ Grace repeats.

  ‘Around forty people.’

  ‘But then there should be at least some people here by now.’ Grace’s throat feels scratchy and a raindrop hits her in the eye and falls down her face, pulling a tear down with it. ‘Then even if forty people and us from St Jude’s just raise twenty quid each, that would be…’ She uses her fingers for the simple maths, trying to get her fried brain to operate at its normal capacity. ‘Just over a grand. Then it would be worth it. It might be enough to buy us more time.’

  Peter’s gaze is directed away from the square and up towards the high street where the doorways of boarded-up shops are littered with huddled bodies under assortments of blankets and coverless duvets. ‘If you’d ever spent one night having to do this for real, trust me, you’d know this would be worth it either way.’

  One by one, the residents of St Jude’s drop their bags in place and roll out their sleeping bags so that they lay in a vague semi-circle around the half-hearted shrubbery in the centre of the square.

  Cara’s pale, slender fingers fumble with the zip on hers, before she opens it and climbs inside, nodding briefly at Teardrop Terry as he follows suit.

  Jack has positioned his sleeping bag as far away as he can from Grace’s and catches her eye only briefly as h
e unlaces his trainers. Grace is grateful he understands how she needs to keep things in their different compartments right now, but she feels the loss of his closeness keenly and it cools her quicker than the chill in the air.

  ‘Perhaps we should have hired a marquee?’ Grace asks Peter, regretting it when she sees the sudden stiffness in his jaw. ‘I only mean so that more people would be prepared to do it in the rain,’ she says, folding her arms. ‘Plus, I’m slightly worried about people contracting pneumonia.’

  Someone sneezes and coughs simultaneously and Peter finally meets her eye. ‘It will be fine,’ he says quietly but there’s a firm edge to his voice. ‘We just need to keep everyone’s spirits up.’

  Heavy grey shutters thunder to the ground behind them, covering the last remaining open convenience store in the town centre.

  ‘That’s it, it’s nine o’ clock,’ says Teardrop Terry.

  A group of pigeons begin to waddle away from them up the high street as if even they have given up on them. The waterfall behind the shrub stops dead. The water ceases moving as if it’s been turned to ice. Grace hadn’t realised how much noise it had been making or how much silence it had been hiding.

  Cara is sitting up in her sleeping bag and blowing hard on each hand in turn.

  ‘Here,’ says Terry as he throws her a pair of balled-up gloves.

  ‘Won’t you need them?’

  ‘Nah. Never wear ‘em. They don’t really work for me. Make my hands colder if anything.’

  Grace doesn’t feel as if her hands could get much colder. She keeps them scrunched up under the tops of her thighs, lying back to lean on her elbows and stretching her legs out in front of her, forcing herself not to shiver. The rain’s getting harder and each available drop is finding its way inside the front of her raincoat. She pulls her hood up higher, but it just slips back down again. She thinks about how it’s still July. What must it be like in February, when the air hasn’t tasted warmth for several months? When the ground beneath where they are now is not only cold, but frozen solid? When it’s not just for tonight but for as many days as she could see in front of her, stretching out with no end, no light and no tunnel?