East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  Dad’s eyes are now fully open. He is staring ahead in narcotic wonderment, as if he can see it all being played out in front of him. He raises his hand in a weak fist to cheer the goal, his face widening to a beatific smile. We love seeing him like this so much we want more. And more.

  MICHELLE: Terrible tackle from Gomez. That’s a red card, Germany down to ten men.

  ME: And a speedy run on the wing from Dier. And it’s a goal!

  DAVID: Unbelievable! I don’t believe it! They are breaking again!

  MUM: (keen to be involved) They are in a diamond formation, Bert!

  We snigger for a moment. Mum doesn’t know much about football, but she’s giving it a good old go.

  DAVID: Kane linking up with Alli … passing to and fro … And …

  ALL: GOAL!

  Dad is open-mouthed, silently cheering.

  ME: Incredible dummy from Barkley. REFEREE!

  MICHELLE: Definitely a penalty.

  DAVID: And it IS a penalty … Kane to take it … and …

  ALL: GOAL!!!

  For fifteen minutes we stood commentating, around Dad’s bed, as he lay there, hallucinating and enraptured.

  As it happens, England did indeed win later that night, a mere 3–2 against Germany. But Dad left this world thinking we’d put 42 goals past our old rivals, while they ended the match with only two players on the pitch.

  Life is wonderful. And some of its most wonderful moments are shot through with sadness.

  39. And I Will Fix You

  David, as wise as ever, suggests we make a makeshift lounge in the top room. It will be somewhere where we can get away from it all, but also somewhere where we can begin to recalibrate, as our new family. In our time off, we sit glassy-eyed, watching endless episodes of Tattoo Fixers with Mum – who, despite her veneer of prudishness, becomes quite the fan.

  MUM: Will that spider’s web on his neck ever come off?

  ME: No, Mum. It’s a tattoo.

  MUM: So it doesn’t come off.

  ME: No. It’s permanent. That’s what a tattoo is. Permanent.

  MICHELLE: Susan’s got one.

  ME: Shut up!

  MUM: Have you?

  ME: Yes.

  MUM: Will it come off?

  We passed days like this. We’d retire to our new room when the carers arrived for their early-evening shift, and make vats of spaghetti with tinned tomato sauce and pre-grated Parmesan. The sort of food we ate when we were kids. We’d eat it and try not to focus on the sounds of Dad screaming as he was turned and changed.

  MUM: (glued to the screen) What’s that on his side? That tattoo there …

  ME: It’s a penis.

  MICHELLE: It’s a cock and balls, Mum.

  MUM: Why would you do that?

  ME: They were on holiday.

  MUM: When I go on holiday I go and see if there’s a concert on at the local church, I don’t have a penis engraved on my ribs.

  DAVID: Well, you should live a little.

  MUM: And what’s that?

  ME: That’s the new design – the one that’s going to cover it. It’s a foot-long 3D rip-effect space robot emerging from his chest cavity.

  MUM: Oh. It’s horrid, isn’t it? I think I’d have stuck with the penis myself.

  We start taking shifts throughout the night, though none of us, in truth, sleeps a wink. I like the 3–5 a.m. slot, when the still cold air, as yet untouched by sunrise, starts to eat into your bones, when the trees begin to emerge from the blackness, silhouetted by a fresh blue canvas.

  I remember the silence, the molasses sky, the ash trees silhouetted against the retreating silver. The baby owl screaming in the tree, the noise driving clean through the quiet. But I also remember a time before this. I remember the heavy exhalation of gas in the oven before it caught alight. The clink of glasses over dinner. The memory of two excitable beagles ploughing through the dog-flap at dusk.

  Home. This place used to be my home.

  It is now just a repository of loss, bounded by walls, with a roof over its head.

  I hold Dad’s heavy hand in mine, and with the other, I jab at my iPad.

  I have taken to reading endless internet articles about death. A quick search of my browser history reads:

  – How do you know when someone is dying?

  – What happens in the final stages of dying?

  – How do I know when someone is close to death?

  – How can you stop someone hurting?

  I know he is dying. I need to know when. WHEN. I am human. I cannot bear the not knowing. Nothing, not even death, is worse than the not knowing. I need a schedule. A timeframe. I need to understand. When is it going to happen? When?

  I need to know. I need to prepare.

  In retrospect, it was all so stupid. No amount of preparation can steel you for your new life – the one where the table is missing a leg, the car has three wheels, the sat-nav voice is indistinct.

  This pain. This is the price. This is the reckoning. This is what you get to feel when love is replaced, pound for pound, with loss.

  Dad would wake, every thirty minutes or so, through the fog of midazolam and morphine, and scream. I’d console him, whisper in his ear, stroke his hand, then he’d succumb to the darkness once more.

  As five o’clock came, I would feel my back stiffen, and I’d sink my forehead onto his chest. Whereupon I’d feel a light tap on my shoulder and turn to see David, or Michelle, or Mum standing there, ready to take my place.

  It’s 27 March. It is Easter Sunday.

  Dad is out of midazolam. We ring the local pharmacy. They are out of stock. We ring another. Same story. We ring several more, but no one has it available. Midazolam is a common palliative-care drug. It’s routinely used as part of a package of pharmaceuticals to alleviate agitation, stress and anxiety. Dad is anxious. He is twitching and calling out, and he needs this drug. Now.

  Michelle and I set out in the car. We will not return until we have these meds.

  The sun is shining. We pass villages, their slate roofs gleaming in the spring light. We can hear church bells. We go to Hayle. Nothing. We try Camborne, Pool, Redruth – nothing. Michelle is frantically calling pharmacy after pharmacy, while I drive, the sound of my dad screaming in my ears.

  An hour later, and we finally find a chemist who has the drug in stock.

  ‘You’re lucky, it’s the last packet,’ said the sales girl. She had no idea what she had just waded into.

  ‘We’re not lucky,’ said Michelle, her voice rising.

  There are fourteen people dying this weekend in West Cornwall. All of them need this drug. None of this is about luck.

  40. It Pays to Go Premium

  The day begins with sun, which we weren’t expecting. I have developed a lump in my throat and I can’t swallow. We don’t know it yet, but this is the day that Dad is going to die.

  We started to gravitate to his bed. No one left the room for more than a few minutes. I noticed his feet were turning purple, and his nose was icy to the touch. Death was creeping over him, gently stealing him away from us, inch by inch.

  Now I understood what all those articles meant. Now I understood the timeline.

  The freeze spread across his face. His body motionless. Michelle stood at his head, her hands in the thatch of his hair – the hair that had withstood age and the endless, toxic carousel of chemo and radiotherapy …

  Mum had his right hand in hers. David was to his left, hand in hand – stroking him. I was sitting at his shoulder, the side of my head lying on his chest. I could hear his heart beating just millimetres from my ear: two lives separated by a thin sheet of skin.

  You can go now, Bert.

  It’s OK, Dad – you can go now.

  Still Bert’s brilliant metronome beat on. You can ravage his body, Cancer, but let me tell you, no one will ever taint this man’s beautiful heart.

  ‘Apparently your hearing is the last thing to go,’ one of us said. I can’t remember who.
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  Michelle reaches for her iPad, and searches on Spotify for the three tracks Dad loves best. We want him to hear them one last time.

  She presses play. First comes the third movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto, all sprightly and vigorous. Next, there is ‘Danny Boy’. We all bow our heads and try to sob as quietly as we can.

  Then, suddenly, a woman’s voice starts bellowing:

  VOICEOVER: DO YOU HAVE DRY CRACKED SKIN? DO YOU WANT TO TURN BACK TIME AND GET A FRESHER, ROSIER LOOK?

  Michelle is stabbing at the screen, trying to make it stop.

  VOICEOVER: THEN TRY OUR REVOLUTIONARY SKIN CARE SYSTEM, WHICH WILL LEAVE YOU REJUVENATED AND FEELING GOOD AS NEW.

  MUM: What’s going on?

  MICHELLE: It’s just Spotify, Mum.

  ME: What? You couldn’t pay for Premium? You tight bastard.

  DAVID: Susan, now is not the time.

  Michelle is punching the screen, trying to make the adverts stop.

  VOICEOVER: WHEN LIFE SEEMS TOUGH …

  And then we laugh. All of us. We roar, like we’re going to burst – a collective eruption that cuts through the pain.

  Finally, his third chosen track kicks in, the theme tune to Star Trek: Voyager. We fall silent again. It’s silly, all of this. It’s so impossibly silly that Dad is dying and we are listening to the sounds of the Starship Enterprise. It’s all so silly, you see?

  Suddenly, the morphine driver starts beeping, Dad is now out of drugs. His heart races a little in response.

  ‘He reacted. He can hear,’ I said. ‘He can hear everything.’

  I love you, Daddy.

  I love you, Bert.

  We love you.

  We love you.

  And then, just then, I felt his heart slow a little, like a feather falling to earth.

  One …

  Two …

  Three …

  Then his chest fell silent.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said. But they all knew anyway.

  The morphine driver beeped again.

  ‘Good to the last drop,’ said David. And we laughed and cried at the same time.

  My dad saw me take my very first breath.

  I had my head to his heart when he took his last.

  That final time I was on my own with dad, those few days I got to spend alone with him, I remember asking him if he thought there was an afterlife.

  ME: If there’s anything behind the curtain, Dad, will you make sure you come and tell me?

  Dad was staring out of the window at the blur of trees beyond.

  DAD: Absolutely. Of course I will. I’ll come back. I’ll come back as a blackbird, and then you’ll know for sure.

  41. Blackbird (Redux)

  Six months later, four thousand metres skywards, and six and a half thousand kilometres east, I saw, in the haze of a puja fire, a blackbird diving in and out of the ash. And I remembered.

  I’ll come back as a blackbird, and then you’ll know for sure.

  And it’s crazy. And it doesn’t make sense. And that’s just fine with me.

  My little donkey is picking her way through the sharp grey stones, fresh from the constant landslides. ‘Chulla! Chulla!’ roar the porters. ‘Hurry up! Hurry!’ They rush at her, slapping and cajoling. ‘Leave her alone,’ I hiss. ‘She knows what she is doing.’ She alone can be trusted to bring me down this mountain.

  You don’t notice much on the way up. You’re so shot with tiredness, so absorbed by the fight for breath that you don’t notice what’s disappearing as you climb. It’s only when you catch your breath at the top that you realize the world has gone white and cold around you.

  When you descend, the beauty of the natural world reappears, unfolding piece by piece. There is a re-emergence of life, of bloom and colour, with each step you take. First comes the sound, the dry percussion of wind on leaves. Then the thin lines of trunk and branch decked in green. Finally there is an explosion of orange and red, as the acers emerge once more. I was on that donkey’s back for four hours, as it picked its way along the thin scar of a track. To my left, mere centimetres of rubble between us and the edge of the ravine. You could see the drop, thousands of feet down towards the clean green twist of water. I thought about my dad. I thought about the unspeakable beauty of this place – and how he could never have seen it with his own eyes. How circumstance and finance and fear would have put paid to even the thought of a trip like this – and how lucky I was, how boundlessly fortunate to see this place, with this clarity, on this day.

  VARANASI

  * * *

  42. Coincidence

  The universe is strange. We seek order in the chaos, and sometimes we are lucky enough to find patterns, which console or enlighten us. Coincidences, those concurrences of events without obvious causal connection, are the cat’s eyes on the road – helping us to believe we’re in the right lane.

  Whether or not these events are meaningful in and of themselves is no matter. We perceive them as important in relation to other experiences we have had. We take comfort in the apparent impression of a universal order. Or, at least, I do.

  Our next trip was to Varanasi, also known as Benares, the City of Light. A fortnight before I was due to fly, I started to have extreme pains down the left side of my stomach. This became so unrelenting that I decided to get it checked out before leaving the country, just to be on the safe side.

  The problem with scans is that they always find something. Tucked among the organs, arteries and visceral fat will be a bulge or a lump or a speck. Then, suddenly, to add to all your worries about the outside world you’ll be gifted with a whole new arena of concern – your bloody insides.

  I have had a million and one scans before, but there was something unbearably sad about being in that tube that day. I felt the presence of Dad, who had lain in these things countless times, the dull chime of magnets around his head, dye coursing through his veins. I thought of him as the blocks were placed either side of my head, as my torso was strapped and my legs bound.

  How sad that I should find communion with him in this sterile tube. I want to think of him when I am walking in the forest, or tickling the dog, or eating fish and chips on the harbour wall. I don’t want to think of him here, in a place like this. It is too much.

  When you have an MRI scan, you have to sign a release form before the procedure, part of which takes the form of a questionnaire.

  Q: Do you have any metal implants?

  That one is easy.

  A: No. Next.

  Q: Do you have a pacemaker or a heart replacement valve?

  Also easy.

  A: No

  Then comes the kicker.

  Q: Have you ever been treated for metal in your eyes?

  Ah.

  Every time – EVERY TIME – I read this question, I think back to the time when I was eighteen and pressed down too hard on a piece of paper with a propelling pencil. A shard of lead pinged into my eye and briefly got embedded in my cornea.

  The next question does not help quell my rising fear levels.

  Q: Is there any possibility of metal/metal pieces in your eyes?

  I think about that, and every time – EVERY TIME – I ask the consultant if:

  It is going to be OK (even though the lead was removed over twenty years ago)

  Lead is even a metal

  And even though he says it’s all going to be fine, I panic nonetheless – panic that this forgotten chunk of pencil is going to rip through my eye tissue, fire upwards out of my skull towards the magnets and destroy hundreds of thousands of pounds of state-of-the-art NHS equipment while shredding my peeper in the process.

  This time, there was an even greater reason for concern. While stripping down to my underwear in order to pop on some rather fetching blue scrubs, I noticed that there appeared to be some gold filament woven into my knickers. They were posh pants that Anna had bought for me, and I hadn’t thought twice about wearing them until now. I stared down at them, woefully. Then came the fa
miliar argument between The Two Susans.

  MAD SUSAN: Christ. These pants are gold. They are actual gold. They have gold in them. Gold is a metal, isn’t it? That means that once that machine gets going, my pants are going to take off from my pelvis, slice through these surgical trousers and jam the magnet.

  SENSIBLE SUSAN: Sorry, but who puts real gold in knickers? You think Anna has bought you eighteen-carat high-waisters? Who the fuck do you think you are? Tutankhamen?

  MAD SUSAN: You won’t be saying that when my gusset is responsible for taking down a £1.2 million piece of medical equipment.

  SENSIBLE SUSAN: Oh, piss off, Cyberman pants …

  CLINICIAN: Ms Perkins? We’re ready for you now.

  I had to make a choice – should I go with Sensible Susan, or Mad Susan? Well, put it this way, I ended up throwing my pants in the medical waste bin and going commando for the scan. I am nothing if not my mother’s equally paranoid daughter.

  The scan took ages. Gosh, they are being thorough, I thought. After it was all done, after the metallic bangs and crashes had subsided, the radiographer came out of his anteroom, walked across the shiny hospital floor and shook my hand. It turned out he was Mel’s cousin.

  Coincidence.

  I went through the results with the consultant urologist, a man roughly my age with an immediately warm and engaging manner. I was relieved to find out that nothing serious was wrong – I merely have an odd ureter and a slightly clubbed kidney. Who knew?fn1

  ME: Am I OK to travel?

  CONSULTANT: Of course you are. Where are you off to this time?

  ME: Varanasi.

  CONSULTANT: How wonderful. My family are Hindus. For us that is a special place – a very special place. To die there is to achieve moksha.

  ME: Moksha?

  CONSULTANT: Freedom, a liberation from the endless cycle of life and death. That’s what we believe.