I stand watching him as he makes sure the car doors and windows are properly closed: ‘Tight, mind: water can get through the tiniest crack.’ He hands me the hose-pipe, whose floppy octogenarian pee I dangle vaguely over the bonnet.
‘No, not like that—it’s kinked under your foot, look. That’s better. Now put your thumb over the end.’
I do this, but the spray is erratic, hissing off over the car roof one moment and down inside my Wellingtons the next. Gradually, as my thumb turns to ice, I begin to control it better, until there’s a steady forked tongue of spray, which spitters on the bonnet and boot simultaneously, but omits the whole side of the car. I ease my thumb back a bit more, and at last I’ve got the full, solid eight-pints-in-the-pub-gents power-stream my father’s been looking for.
‘That’s it. There’s only one right way to wash a car.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘Hose it first. Start at the top …’
‘Then work down … I know.’
‘Bonnet, sides and hub-caps last of all.’
The two dishcloths are in a red bucket of hot soapy water. I plunge my chapped hands in, and keep them there as long as I can, making a great ceremony of squeezing and re-squeezing the cloth. My father is enjoying himself—triumphant at forcing me from my warm bed, absorbed in a practical task, glad of the company and someone to boss around. We work together, swishing the warm cloths, taking it in turns with the hose, going over the little mud-streaks we’ve missed. My ears ache in the December wind, my duffel coat is sodden from the misdirected hose, my toes in the damp Wellingtons have gone missing. My father, in his thin overalls, is happy.
Out on the road there’s a screeching of brakes, and my father says: ‘Christ. They still can’t negotiate that corner.’ The ‘corner’ is a T-junction just beyond our driveway. Until the council improved it, every other Sunday seemed to bring an accident. I remember one lunchtime two years ago, a loud bang and chandelier-fall of glass, my father’s knife and fork left on the edge of his plate in a smear of horseradish as he ran down the drive with his bag. I skipped pudding and peered over the wall where bushes hid me. The motorcyclist under the lorry was white-faced, not moving and half-hidden by the wheel. My father crouched over him in the rain. An ambulance came, and more people crouched by the lorry’s grille. When the fire engine arrived I went back in. I couldn’t imagine how they’d get the motorcyclist free. Lately there have been no accidents, but as we swish and spray my father recalls some of the worst he has had to attend: the young lovers hit by the Nelson– Skipton train at an open level crossing (‘Just bits—couldn’t identify them’); the lad in a van who braked too hard and was decapitated by the metal extension ladder he’d propped in the back; the girl run over by the school bus (‘at a pedestrian crossing—criminal’); the woman found dead on the moors, MURDER headlines in the paper until her boyfriend went to the police weeks later (‘choked to death—when you’re older I’ll tell you what happened’). The talk is ghoulish but my father’s tones are comforting. By talking about accidents he hopes to ward them off, perhaps—or to interest me in his work.
‘So what are you going to study in the sixth form do you think?’
‘Oh, you know—I seem to be best at English and languages. Something like that.’
‘And what career would that lead to?’
‘Teaching, I suppose. Or journalism, maybe.’
‘Journalism? That usually means London. The Yorkshire Post ’s not a bad paper, though.’
‘Or law.’
‘A profession, that’s the thing to aim at.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘But if you do sciences in the sixth form,’ he says, bending over the silver platter of the hub-cap, ‘surely you’d have more choice of career. Even if you’re not a genius at science, and it’s a bit of a chore for two years, at least you can read medicine later on.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘And medicine is different, not a science exactly, more practical—you’d enjoy it.’
‘I know, you’ve said.’
‘I want you to do what you want to do, but Mummy and I have built up this practice, and I don’t suppose Gill is likely to be a doctor, and if you took over, a son taking over from his father, and by then you’d be married probably, and you could live nearby with your wife and children, that would be marvellous, all of us together.’
‘Hum.’
‘Think about it.’
I’m on the hub-caps now, feeling through the cloth the grains of muck that have sploshed and stuck there from puddles and ditches and gritted roads. I scrub hard to be rid of them, the old mud-stains and scratches, until the circles of chrome shine in their dark rubber like full moons.
‘The Riviera, look,’ my father says, as the sun breaks through the clouds and a sheen comes off the bodywork. I pick up the hose again from where it’s bleeding into the metal drain, and aim it noisily at the wheels. I empty the bucket’s foamy black liquid, fill it with cold water from the stable tap, and pick up the chamois wash-leather. It is a khaki colour, hard and stiff and fossilized, like a small plaice: it makes me think of a poem we’ve been reading at school this week, Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’. I dip it in the bucket, where it changes its nature, softens, plumps out. I hand it to my father, who wrings its neck.
‘Clean as a whistle,’ he says, as he finishes wiping and the last yelps die on the windscreen. ‘There’s a fault on the brake-light I need to fettle, but you go in and warm up if you want.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Remember what I said. Not a bad life, being a doctor. There’d be a practice all waiting—a son taking over from his father, people respect that. Think on.’
Johnson’s Baby Powder
THERE IS A low point that comes when you’ve been sitting by a sickbed—around six, say, after the light has gone, about the time you pour yourself the first anaesthetizing short. My father has been asleep since Dr May left this morning, his head back on the pillow, his mouth wide open so that you can see (I’ve never noticed before) the uneven run of his bottom teeth. Sitting on the dressing-table stool next to my mother, both of us with Glenfiddichs, I feel suddenly, clearly, that he will not wake again. The dog skitters into the room and fusses round our feet, his coat—through my glass—the colour of whisky. ‘Poor little Nikki, you don’t understand,’ says my mother. ‘You don’t know what day it is. You don’t know what’s happening up here.’
For the last few days, my father, whenever he sits on the edge of the bed and Nikki comes running, has had to spread his hands out in front of him (as if warming them on the fire) to stop the dog jumping into his naked lap, and the dog has slunk away, not used to such rejection. But his animal bewilderment isn’t so different from our own informed incomprehension. A tear falls on my shoe, another on to the carpet between my feet. I keep my head down, not wanting my mother to see, but she passes me some paper tissues and says, not unkindly: ‘Better do your crying alone.’
Is it this that wakes my father? Suddenly he is there again, alert, wanting a pee, and walks unaided to the bathroom. ‘Walk’ is maybe not the word. It is like swimming in some new element, performing some previously unperformed task. There’s been a National Electricity advertisement on television lately, in which a gang of pylons shuffle into life and stride stiff-jointedly across the countryside; his walk is like this. Yet his penis is gratifyingly large, not the shrivelled miniature rose, and he pees, a triumph. Back in bed, he leans towards the glass of iced water I’m holding for him and cups his hands shakily round the glass, trying to get his lip over the top of the straw. As he drinks, the fingers of my right hand, cooled by the glass, touch his left nipple, which hardens a little—a bright pink pearl, not the slack, down-tilting brown teat of earlier. The folds of skin under his breasts are like some fancy rucked curtain, parted at the middle. Across his chest, stomach, back, shoulders is the familiar fallout of birthmarks and moles.
For the next hour he slips in and out of sleep. My s
ister arrives, briefed now that we won’t have him much longer, and whenever he closes his eyes and seems to fade away we bring him back him with some question, like parents coming in late from a party and—drunk, elated, sentimental—waking their baby for a play. I tell him what’s been on the news: a train crash in the Severn Tunnel, not any dead; the latest about Robert Maxwell’s missing millions, the financial mess his sons have inherited; fighting in Dubrovnik. He shakes his head in a what’s-the-world-coming-to way. I tell him some of the football results, and he makes me fetch his pools coupon from his desk. He has done the pools without success for forty years, the same complicated perm every week. I can find no record of it among the mass of paper, so he dictates it from memory: ‘One, the cross is in column E, three D, four F, six A, seven B, seven C, nine F,’ and so on up into the fifties. It’s a slow process, in and out of consciousness, but when I later turn up his master copy and check his memory against it I find it’s almost faultless. This is the poignant thing: his body is clanking into a grassed-over siding, but his mind is humming along perfectly. When I tell him that Match of the Day is on, Bolton v. Blackpool in the FA Cup second round, two great old teams now in lower divisions, he says:
‘Grandpa bought one of his cars in Blackpool, an Austin, FX 709, a Blackpool number-plate. And he was once going to a football match at Bolton, his team, a big all-ticket job against Blackpool, and the queue of cars was terrible, so he said “Bugger this” and drove past them up the outside. When he got to the front, the steward flagged him down, angry-looking, thinking he was queue-jumping, then saw his Blackpool number-plate and waved him straight into the visitors’ car park, the Blackpool supporters’ end.’
‘So that’s where you got the habit of jumping queues,’ says Gill.
‘What about your own cars?’ I ask, stilted as a fifties BBC interviewer. ‘There was some story, wasn’t there?’
‘Which one do you mean? There was my little Austin, my first car, and I was so proud of it, but I had this problem with the handbrake cable. I put some oil on, but the oil didn’t seem to be going down the cable tube, so I thought if the engine turned over and I had a short run out on the main road that might help, but I was so busy looking down at the cable I drove into a lamppost.’
‘And didn’t you crash into some railings in Manchester once?’
‘I was trying to reverse into a tight space and I couldn’t see, so I leant across to open the passenger door to get a better view, and I knocked the car into third gear and it shot forward across the road up on to the pavement and against some coping stones supporting railings. There were girls working in an office basement there, and masonry came pouring down through their window, and they all came out to see what had happened. I was about twenty. They were sniggering at me in my blazer and tie. I had to ring Grandpa to help get me out and tow me home. I felt a prize fathead.’
‘At least it wasn’t like blowing up the tram in Bolton,’ says my sister, coaxingly, prompting him to embark on another old story, about how he and two schoolfriends raided the chemistry lab and laid some explosive they’d mixed on the tramlines in Bolton. We know the tale by heart—the loud bang, the tram-driver scratching his head, the traffic brought to a standstill, the pranksters sneaking away unnoticed. To hear him tell it is comforting—for a moment, death seems to have receded. But then again, not: for us to cajole him into telling stories which we’ve spent most of our lives being bored or exasperated by is a sign of how desperate we’ve become, how little we believe we’ll ever hear them—or him—again. It’s like the ornaments or pictures on the wall I’ve always hated, the lolling dogs, cutesy goose-girls and naff souvenirs, suddenly precious now. We don’t want different stories; we want the same stories. And it doesn’t matter what he says, only that he says something: now that everything is a last thing, even the most banal utterance is depth-charged.
In the kitchen, my cousin Kela has arrived from Ormskirk. She has been told not to, but she has come: ‘This is family. He thinks he can get away without seeing me, but he’s bloody well not going to, the pet.’
We’ve always called her Kela, but her real name is Mikela, after her father, Michael, who went missing over France two weeks before she was bom. Along with Ronnie Astle, Mike Thwaites had been my father’s best friend: the three of them were schoolmates, played the same games, mucked about in the same cars, went into the RAF together. My father’s sister Mary had married Mike in 1940; after his death, after Kela’s birth, after the war, she married Ronnie, and they had three more children of their own, Richard, Edward and Jane. We used to spend every Christmas with them, Yorkshire one year, their house near Manchester the next. Kela, the odd one out, a Thwaites rather than an Astle, has always cherished my father as a lost link with her father, who is a man she never knew, a ghost, a god, an RAF hero. She sits half an hour with my father, then is back in the kitchen with her poor, dry, eczema-flaky skin, her fags, her glass of wine, her laughter, her unfailing cosiness. Since Auntie Mary died of cancer ten years ago, Kela, herself nearly fifty now, has appointed herself chief Holder Together of the Family. Despite the official protests, we’re glad she is here. She makes it easier for us to indulge ourselves, to harp on the past, though the past we harp on is a score of death not of life.
‘Dear old Uncle Arthur,’ Kela says. ‘Hanging on, just like Mummy did.’
‘Does cancer run in families?’ I ask.
‘You mean, is it genetic?’ my mother says. ‘Or does a certain sort of person … I don’t know, love. Your father is hardly the repressed sort. Nor was Mary. And they had very different personalities.’
‘Mummy had a year after they found the primary,’ says Kela. ‘She was walking round with a colostomy bag.’
‘And she didn’t deny it like Dad?’
‘At first she did. But once the secondaries were found she was talking openly about dying. She wasn’t afraid of death itself—only of choking or the horrible pain there might be. And then, the love, she left these notes about the house for us, in drawers and cupboards, which we kept finding afterwards: “Families need each other,” “Keep seeing one another after I’m not here,” “No worries about me where I’ve gone.”’
‘And it wasn’t a horrible death?’
‘No, we were all there, and chatting not long before. Then a few minutes before she died she said, “I can’t find Michael.”’
‘My brother Patrick was a bit like that,’ says my mother. ‘The last thing he said was: “There’s my mother at the end of the bed.”’
Kela drains her wine glass and lights another cigarette.
‘At least Mummy died peacefully,’ she says.
‘Granny, too,’ says my mother, rehearsing the old details of her mother-in-law’s death. ‘Fine until she was eighty-six. Then she began to have trouble with her hands, they became twisted and useless, and she couldn’t play the piano any more. One morning she said: I’m fed up, I want to die. Later that afternoon she was screaming out with pain—I gave her some pethidine, only a small dose, but she never recovered consciousness.’
‘You mean you eased her on her way,’ I say.
‘No, she was eighty-seven, with an abdominal infarct—I was saving her from pain. I did the same for my brother Patrick. He was in a hospital run by nuns, last stages of cancer, and I was sitting there, and he was in such agony because they were mingy with the morphine, the dose they gave was about as strong as a Smartie. So I went to the sister and said: could he have an extra dose? He died later that night. It’s a mercy, when you’re never going to recover anyway.’
I open another bottle of wine. We make up a bed for Kela. There are fronds and crab-claws of frost on the window.
*
I dream I’m at the office. Reception call up: ‘A gentleman to see you—says he has an appointment.’
‘Tell him I’ll be down.’
I’m expecting no one, I realize, and up to my eyes: I have widows to turn, kill fees to negotiate, a paper to put to bed. I decide to make hi
m wait. Soon I relent and go down.
‘He was sitting over there. Must have gone.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Didn’t say.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Your size. Thinning hair.’
‘What age?’
‘Old enough to be your father.’
I rush out into City Road. No sign. I search the Underground. No one. I walk in circles round the graveyard in Bunhill Fields. Nothing.
Sunday morning, and I can hear my father’s voice as I wake. He has just had my mother make him a second breakfast: the spoonful of Complan wasn’t enough, he wanted a quarter cup of cornflakes too. Now he feels in need of a shower, and I fit a new light-bulb in the cubicle for him as he soft-shouts the instructions from the bed: ‘Twist the old light-bulb in and leftwards to release it. Got it? Right, now push the new one in and rightwards to insert it.’ Is it that he assumes I still don’t know how to change a light-bulb? Or that his is the one infallible method, the beautiful simplicity of which he thinks the rest of the world hasn’t yet cottoned on to? I take heart from my irritation: he must be feeling better.
Not that he can be, much. I watch him stagger to the shower, loose skin flapping like an elephant’s. His chest looks as if someone has ploughed across it, deep furrows between the three huge top ribs. His pacemaker, once buried in the fat of his chest, now stands proud, like a parcel on a doormat; I can even see the contact points, top right, where the two wires come into it. After the shower, which he takes leaning with one hand against the wall, he lies on the bed and asks my mother to powder his bottom—Johnson’s Baby Powder, the sweet whiff of it—‘and maybe the balls, too, they get trapped.’ She puffets out the white powder from the big phallic container, then smears its strange silkiness across him, under him. Johnson’s Baby Powder: the Johnson’s factory is nearby, in Gargrave; he was powdered as a child with it, he saw his children powdered, now he is being powdered for death. My mother’s hand is under his sac, then she kisses his forehead and leaves the room quickly, tears behind her glasses.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 9
