And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  There was nothing in the least spooky about Janet, though my father said I must be careful: ‘Mind not to break any bones, and don’t tell your friends about her—they might be scared.’ Years later, when we started a youth club in one of the outbuildings, I removed the skull from the box and used it as a light-shade for the disco: the sixty-watt green-coloured bulb fitted through the neck and shone out through her eyes as the floor shook to Tamla Motown. I don’t think anyone ever realized she was the real thing. Sometimes the skull cap seemed to overheat and smoke and smell a bit, and I’d lift the lid off and find a soot deposit in the frontal bone.

  In the end, I hope, Janet found a good home, and the skull and bones got together again. Perhaps another medical student is learning from her, or she really is George in the corner at Airedale. I remember her fired up and throbbing to the latest Tamla, or imagine her on display in a lecture room, not one of those who lie dully beneath the earth but eternally spirited, a doer and teacher, the last of her kind.

  Back home, the vicar calls, an anorak over his dog-collar.

  ‘I never met Arthur, and I’m sorry about that. I’ve heard a lot about him. I’m sure we’d have got on.’

  ‘He wasn’t much of a churchman,’ says my mother.

  ‘No, but I know from all his activities for the village he was a Christian, if not a believer. Sometimes believers don’t behave like believers, and non-believers do. The social ministry, we used to call it in college—that was Arthur.’

  Old Canon Mackay, whose church I’d gone to as a boy, wouldn’t have been quite so eagerly exculpating: he might have made us squirm a little over the question of a funeral service for such a resolute atheist; he would have wanted at least a show of solemnity or belief. But the new generation of vicars aren’t like this: they’re nice —charm school graduates who want to put you at your ease, to say: ‘I know you don’t believe in any of this God nonsense, but never mind, it shouldn’t stop you going to church—after all it hasn’t stopped me running one.’ Or in this case: ‘I know your spouse never went to church in his life, but that doesn’t matter, indeed in some ways it’s better: it makes the funeral all the more of a challenge.’

  I remembered Terry Kilmartin’s funeral from the summer and the silver-haired game show host who had presided over it. ‘I never knew Terry,’ he had begun (‘Well, it’s Mr Kilmartin to you in that case,’ I could imagine the old curmudgeon barking back). Terry at least had a feeling for religion; my father’s only feeling about religion was that he couldn’t abide it. He didn’t come to the carol services that my sister and I took part in. He didn’t like singing, didn’t like sitting . When I was nine, and wanted to join the village choir because my two best friends had done so, he did his best to talk me out of it: ‘You realize it will cut into our Sundays.’ I put his atheism down to his practicality and his medical training: could anyone who had ever conducted an autopsy believe in a soul? Once, though, when I was twenty or so, he had sent me a letter explaining his philosophy of life—something about a long car journey and time. There’d been an obscurantism about it which could have come from whisky and working too late at the billiard table, but which was odd for him and even a little mystical. In my callow, prissy academicism, I found the letter embarrassing and threw it in the bin. Now I wish I had it. Now it might provide some guidance. In life, he wouldn’t be seen dead in church; now that he was dead, would he want us to pew it out through a parade of speciousness?

  ‘What sort of funeral did Arthur want?’ the vicar asks, on cue, from his teacup.

  ‘Hard to say,’ my mother replies. ‘Keep it short, that was the main thing. No pious reminiscences. A couple of hymns only, and he didn’t have any preferences because, to be honest, he couldn’t have named a hymn if you’d asked. An even shorter cremation: he said we’d to scatter him round the garden. And then back to the pub for a big booze-up, and no tears.’

  ‘That sounds all right.’

  I can feel my mother struggling to honour my father’s atheistic impulses, while also honouring her own religious ones: if she’s to be reunited with him in the next world, he must have a proper send-off in this. ‘How long do you think the service should be?’ she asks. ‘What’s normal?’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes is usually enough. I’ve known it done in fifteen.’

  We run through some details and possible hymns, and then he tells me he once read a piece I wrote about Burnley football club: ‘You must be the same vintage as me: McIlroy, Pointer, Adamson, Connelly. I used to go every week. I still do—with my son now.’ He makes some jokes about what it’s like to be a vicar at a football match—being mistaken in dog-collar for a Newcastle United supporter, saying prayers for Burnley to win, a miracle if they get promoted, etc. He sounds as if he’s more at home on Saturdays than on Sundays. He puts his anorak back on and his claret-and-blue scarf. ‘Ring me about the hymns. My sympathies again. I’ll see you Friday.’

  ‘What are we going to do about the kids?’ my mother asks as she closes the door on him. ‘I don’t know if Gill will want hers there. What about you?’

  ‘They’re coming up. Kathy agrees. I’ve already arranged it.’

  ‘Not much of a place for kids, a funeral.’

  ‘I think they should be there,’ I say, and wonder if I’m so sure about this because my father had taken me to his father’s funeral. Grandpa: I can still remember his body in the Chapel of Rest—the waxy stillness, the room’s stiff coldness, the plush firelit lining of the coffin. I can remember, too, my father’s pious hush and muted upset. He said later he’d taken me there to show death was nothing to be frightened of, to reveal the un-terror of mortality, and perhaps he had half-succeeded: I’d been shaken, not scared. But I wouldn’t be showing my children his body. They’d have to settle for a closed coffin in church.

  ‘Funny the vicar saying he never met Dad,’ my mother remarks later. ‘He did, sort of. He’d only been here a week or so, but then he heard about my fall and came to the house. Dad chatted to him a bit on the doorstep, not unpleasant or anything, but he wouldn’t let him in, said I was too ill to see anybody. And of course, being Dad, he couldn’t resist telling him that he didn’t hold with church. Maybe that’s why he’s blotted it out, or was pretending to. I hope he doesn’t try to get his own back on Friday.’

  Coffin

  SHE WILL SLEEP with him tonight. She worries that it’s macabre, but I encourage her: she must do what feels right. And she says this is the last night she’ll ever have him here, and she wants them to spend it together.

  We are sitting on the bed round midnight, and she is stroking his hair and kneading his face and then she tweaks his nose and says: ‘Icy. But you never did complain of the cold, did you?’ We have kept the window open, which is just as well because we’ve not been able to turn the radiator off and from time to time I catch a whiff of something I don’t much want to think about. His face, the chin propped up on its T, is still perfect. He has always been a great sleeper (‘I was really hard on,’ he’d say when he woke from an afternoon nap or evening pre-pub zizz), and all this sleeping he is doing now seems his apotheosis—the hardest sleep of all. ‘No, the easiest,’ says my mother when I try this conceit on her: ‘No dreams, no worries about oversleeping, nothing.’

  She leaves the room and I lift back the sheet. It isn’t him in quite the same savoury way now. There is a deep blackberry bruise spreading either side of the stomach scar—the skin looks papery-thin and in danger of oozing or bursting. Little red lines have appeared on parts of his bleached hands. The back of his neck, from what I can make out, has gone purple and discoloured, all the blood gathering there. I admire her for sleeping with him, but hope she won’t slip between the same sheets, that she’ll find a way to fold them so that her warm flesh isn’t up against his cold.

  When I come in at seven next morning, she’s breathing beside him. Later, when I return, I find she’s been crying.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to my little man.’


  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been telling him he shouldn’t have gone and left me alone like this—not so soon.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t want to.’

  ‘No, I know, I don’t mean to be nowty. But the fact remains: he’s upped and gone.’

  She berates him some more, and I think of Cleopatra berating Antony:

  Hast thou no care of me, shall I abide

  In this dull world, which in thy absence is

  No better than a sty .

  This is the way the world goes, the men running out on the women, running out before the women. A shorter life-expectancy: there’s one great inequality men can brandish on their placards, can grumble about to women, who endure most of the others. But perhaps even in this women—as the ones left painfully behind while their husbands move beyond pain—end up suffering the most.

  In the next room the phone goes again. Each time it rings, my mother has to confirm the rumour or accept the condolences and live his death over again. At least in here, by the bed, the phone is disconnected. I laugh with her about this—how we’ve not wanted the phone to ring and disturb his sleep, how no vacuuming has been done for the same reason, how we find ourselves whispering or low-voiced not out of grief and piety but because it would be such a pity to wake him. The GP has been fine about our holding on to the body—said that if we kept the room cold enough we could have him here right up to the funeral. We decided against that: he’s going today; we don’t want the house to be a morgue or chamber of rest, just to hang on to him a little longer, get used to him not being in his body.

  ‘Do you think it’s odd what we’re doing?’ I ask my mother. ‘What’s standard?’

  ‘Remove the body and put it in a coffin on the day of death, I suppose.’

  ‘This seems better.’

  ‘When someone dies at home, anyway.’

  ‘Even for those who die in hospital: you could bring them home.’

  ‘I don’t know—when people get maimed in accidents …’

  ‘Maybe not them. But if someone drops dead in the street of a heart attack, and the relatives want him home, why shouldn’t they get the body back, and sit with it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be right for everyone.’

  ‘But it’s like the authorities fear for the corpse and won’t let it out of their sight, as if it were going to get chopped up or boiled down or something.’

  ‘No, it’s just the palaver of organizing it.’

  ‘The undertakers could do that. A day or two with the body at home could all be part of the service.’

  We sit on, my mother and sister and I. At twelve-thirty we spend a last half-hour beside the bed. We don’t say much, no grand finales or profundities, and when my mother leaves to go next door with my sister, not wanting to be present when the undertakers arrive, she simply kisses him on the brow and says, ‘Goodbye, my love.’ I take the covers off for one final, secret look at him. No secrets left himself, he lies like an open book. The belly is more swollen now above the fawn pyjama bottoms. Little blisters have formed around the long stomach scar: his skin here is like ancient parchment, crumbling once touched. His body begins to seem degraded and demeaned in some way now—something which, even when it was scavenged by disease, it had never done. ‘You have to look after yourself,’ he had always said, and he had done so until … Until when? Until a month ago, when an unusually virulent or, well, healthy cancer had overcome him? Until three months ago, when my mother’s fall had kicked that nice-and-slow cancer into life? A year ago, when he began to complain of tiredness? Two years ago? There’s no saying when. There’s only this moment, which happens to be this moment, but which would feel this bad whenever it happened. Now he is past looking after himself. Now he has stopped. I shut the covers on him, the end of the story.

  The undertaker’s car pulls up outside the window, not a hearse but a Ford Escort estate. The coffin looks to be made of a sort of pale pine, like the bookshelves I’ve put up without him. Malcolm, the boss, and the middle-aged assistant wearing a carpenter’s apron, have some difficulty manoeuvring the box down the hall and into the room: ‘Gently does it.’ Finally they put it down on the far side of the bed. The thinner end of the coffin, for the feet, is hard up against the wardrobe. They chat and dither, awkward about getting on with moving the body, perhaps expecting me not to be here. They ask whether I want little white drapes—see, like this, stapled against the side—to conceal his pyjamas: they know no one is likely to come and see him in the Chapel of Rest, but if anyone does we won’t mind if the coffin is open, will we, and these drapes may be more discreet. They take the lid off to show me his resting place: there is nothing plush about it, no purple velvet, no fancy panelling or inlay, just some white-cotton-lined foam under the head, plain and cheap as he’d have wanted. The phone goes, and they look at me, thinking this will be their chance to get the body in unobserved, but I keep jabbering and let it ring until it stops. I’ve been waiting for this moment, I’m not going to let him out of my sight.

  Now Malcolm slips his arms under my father’s shoulders, while his sidekick holds the ankles. They lift him clear of the bed, being careful not to knock his head against the bedside cabinet, where his clock and and brush-and-comb set and drinking glass with the hunting motif are still laid out. They hold him suspended above the coffin a moment, and try to ease him down—as if he were a living body needing careful handling, or me a relation needing careful handling: ‘Gently does it.’ But both the legs and head judder and jolt a bit as he hits the bottom of the coffin, sort of bounce or spring back unnaturally, no working muscles to absorb the strain, and I see the meaning of the phrase dead weight . It’s taken till now, till that judder, for me to accept that he is dead, that he’s vacated the premises of himself. They start to manoeuvre the lid on, with its name-plate ‘ARTHUR B MORRISON Died 15 December 1991, Age 75 years’, and I do not even try to see his face one last time: there’s no need, it’s not him. The lid clicks home.

  They lift the wooden box, and get it out of the bedroom and back down the hall without destroying any of my mother’s porcelain. At the door I hand the green cremation form over, and Malcolm says he’s sorry the GP hasn’t been up to remove the pacemaker: ‘He’ll do it at the chapel of rest: you won’t mind not being there, will you? I’ll make sure he keeps it for you.’

  ‘OΚ.’

  I watch the Escort pull away and feel angry with myself that I didn’t insist on seeing the scalpelling out of the pacemaker. I wanted to know if I could take that. I wanted to stand there while his body was opened up, his skin slit open, and not faint or be squeamish or feel that wince in the stomach that the sight of blood brings. Sang froid : I wanted to prove that I possessed it, that I could be a doctor like him.

  Back in the bedroom I find a large bloodstain on the sheet and bolster where his shoulders and head have been, where the blood had gathered once it was no longer pumped around. There must have been a small skin-tear there, a nick in the neck, from which it has seeped. I pull the sheet from the bed, the pillowcase from the bolster, and take them through to the washroom. I pick up an old dishcloth and wipe the blood and other fluids from the red plastic sheet that had covered the mattress. The body has gone but there is still a faint smell in the room, not unpleasant—a depersonalized decomposition may be part of it, but I can get his sweat and body-scent, too, the distinctive odour of him, engine oil and rosehips. I go back to the washroom, and let the cold water wash his blood away, let it stream to transparency under the tap, thinking how often I’d seen him with gashes on his fingers or purple-mooned fingernails, the wounds of carelessness, of saws and chisels lost hold of at crucial moments, or the day the top part of the extension ladder hurtled down and tore open his forehead and he stood unreacting there with a beck of crimson running into his eye. I pour myself a drink, gather up another box of photographs and sit on the empty bed. There he is, lying in an easy chair with a cat or dog in his lap, or with his arm round a good friend, or r
ound the wife of a good friend. Often there is a drink in his hand; until the late sixties, when he bought his chalet down in Wales and gave up the habit, there is a cigarette, too. I wonder whether drink or smoking contributed to the cancer. I push my fingers against my ribs to feel my heart, which is, so it seems to me, all over the place, a double or triple beat in every ten. He used to worry—no need now—that I would predecease him, and would bang on about me learning to look after myself better; I’d snap back that I was fine, and would he shut up, and that if anything was going to give me a coronary it was the stress of listening to him nag me. Once, not long ago, he had placed a stethoscope against his heart, then against mine, to test the difference: he had wanted, I think, not to show me how bad his health was, but to reassure himself how immortal I was. There is still a difference between us, but not the same one: we have both moved on a stage, he into the silence past all monitoring, I forced to listen to a strained, erratic heart. Patron and protector, he’d been the wall between me and death; now that wall is gone; now I’m on my own.