The Chop

by Graham Hurley

  I managed to get him back to bed. Doff had found me some whisky just in case (I’d told her Gramps loves whisky), and after the third glass he went to sleep again. By now it was dark, and the wind was still blowing a gale, and I found myself a blanket and lay on the floor beside Gramps. Listening to the wind I started to wonder what it must like to be a mole, living underground with all those half-buried beer bottles driving you crazy, then I thought about the prayer flags, and whether or not I’d tied on the right one, and then Gramps started getting fidgetty again but this time he didn’t get out of bed.

  When I asked him how he felt, he said groggy. Groggy and very hot. I went outside to the yard. There was a standpipe and a bucket and I came back in with the water. I found an old piece of towel that must have belonged to Dimitar and dipped it in the water to bathe Gramps’ face. The water was very cold and seemed to make Gramps feel a bit better.

  After a while he asked about the noise. I thought he meant all the scuffling from the mice and rats up the other end of the barn but then I realised he meant something else. I’d left the door to the yard open by mistake and what Gramps could hear was the snapping of the prayer flag in the wind. I got up to close the door but Gramps said to leave it. For a moment I thought he was going to tell me about the moles again but I think he’d forgotten about all that. All he wanted to listen to was the wind.

  I sat on his bed for a long time, just holding his hand. A couple of times he mumbled something about being Tail End Charlie and how a bad wind could wreck a landing. All this stuff was obviously about the Lancaster and the war and I was going to mention about dad’s plastic model bomber which was still in mum’s bedroom at home when Gramps gave my hand a big squeeze.

  “You’re a good boy” He wheezed.

  I didn’t know what to say. I squeezed his hand back. He was looking up at me. His eyes were all runny in the candlelight. I could see he was trying to tell me something else.

  “I’m glad I had you.” He said at last.

  “Had me?”

  “Yes.” Another squeeze, softer this time. “Ask your mum.”

  I stared at him, not knowing what to say. I was a bit confused. Had me?

  Gramps turned his head away so I couldn’t see his face. He was trying to say something else but the words wouldn’t come. I bent down very low and thought about wiping his face with the flannel again. Then he coughed for a bit and tried to sit up. I tried my best to help him. He could feel his bones under the pyjamas Doff had found for him.

  “Beautiful.” He was looking at me. “Kind, too.”

  “Who?”

  “You, son.” He reached up, trying to touch my face. “You ever wonder about that?”

  “About what, Gramps?”

  “That…” His fingers found my nose.

  I’ve got a very big nose, a bit like Gramps. I was about to ask him what he meant by calling me “son” but he started coughing again and then he lay back on the sheet, staring up at the roof of the barn. I wondered what he was seeing up there but when I looked all I could make out was swallows’ nests.

  Gramps stayed like this for a long time. The wind got stronger and stronger outside and I could hear the prayer flag flapping away and I thought that was probably a good sign but towards dawn I realised Gramps had stopped breathing. I’ve never seen anyone die before, but it was a bit early to phone mum.

  The next thing I knew, she was standing beside the bed. She’d come over first thing to see how he was. I was lying beside him on the bed, sound asleep. Because it was still cold I’d covered him up with a blanket. She bent over and pulled the blanket away from his face. He looked very peaceful like that, much younger than he’d looked yesterday. She stared at him for a long time. I knew she wanted to cry and in the end she did.

  When she’d dried her eyes, we went outside. It was Sunday by now, and the prayer flag was just hanging from the pole on my trike because the wind had gone. Looking at it, I thought about what Gramps had said before he died. Had me?

  “He said that?” Mum was staring at me.

  “Yes.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He called me “son”. Then he said we had the same noses…and told me to ask you why.”

  Mum didn’t say anything for a long time. Upstairs in the big house I could see Doff looking at us through a window. Then mum put her arm through mine and we started walking down towards the road where she’d parked her car. There were rooks everywhere. I could hear them cawing.

  “Gramps was right.” Mum said at last. “He did have you.”

  I was frowning. Being had is hard to imagine.

  “What do you mean?”

  Mum gave me a look then said it was complicated. She said that quite a while after the war, Gramps’ wife – mum’s mum – had died. That left Gramps and mum living together in Gramps’ cottage. Mum was fifteen and it was suddenly her job to look after Gramps.

  “That must have been hard.”

  “It was. And it was hard for Gramps, too.”

  “Of course.” I was still watching the crows, trying to work it all out. “So was that why he found a girlfriend?”

  I looked at mum. She gave me a look back, quite a funny look, then squeezed my arm.

  “Yes.” She said.

  “And that girlfriend would have been my real mum? Meaning it wasn’t you at all?” I was getting really confused by now. I quite like my mum being my real mum. I always have.

  “No.” She was trying to be honest and nice at the same time. “It was me. I was Gramps’ girlfriend for a bit. He gave me a baby. And that baby was you.”

  Things got a bit complicated after that. Mum arranged for someone from the supermarket to pick up Gramps’ body from the barn. The supervisor had found a space beside dad in the supermarket freezer where they’d kept the chickens so now there were two reasons why I had to have a look in there. According to mum, I could go in next Thursday. By this time, we were back at home.

  “If Gramps is my real dad, who was the dad I thought was my dad?”

  “He was a man I met later, after you were born. He was older than me. He had a little pig farm over towards Stowmarket. Even Gramps liked him. He always loved you like a proper son. You can still think of him as your real dad if you want to.”

  I said I thought that might be easier. But I still couldn’t stop thinking about Gramps.

  “So why did he call me Old Wonky?”

  “Because he thought you had a screw loose.”

  Someone else once told me this. At school. In the playground.

  “And is that why I never passed any of those exams? Because I was called Old Wonky?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “And was that because of Gramps?”

  “Yes…and me. But we loved you Norman, and so did dad when he came along. Scout’s honour.”

  She hadn’t said about scout’s honour for years so I knew it had to be serious.

  “But you still love me? Even though I’m a bit wonky?”

  “Of course I do. Come here…”

  Mum’s got a lovely hug but I think I gave up at that point. It was nice to be loved but I was in a bit of a muddle about dads. Also I was very sad about Gramps and I gave Elmore a ring. He’d just come back from taking Dimitar across to Doff’s place. He’d given the barn a real go with the disinfectant because Gramps had obviously died of the virus but he’d told Doff that everything would be alright.

  Elmore and Maddie are my best friends (apart from mum) and I was going to tell him about dad not being dad and Gramps being my real dad but then I had another idea.

  “We ought to say a proper goodbye to Gramps.” I told him. “And I know just the way to do it.”

  We all met the next day at the little church on the edge of Bassington where we’d got rid of Bridgeman. Elmore was there, and Maddy, and Dimitar a
s well. I’d invited Doff but she had to be with Mrs Bellamy, and mum was busy with the supervisor at the supermarket. Because I was the only one who knew how to do bellringing I had to explain the way it was done. Really, we needed six people but the Prime Minister had just announced something called an Enhanced State of Emergency so I thought four would do.

  The way you ring bells is to give the sally a pull. This makes the bell in the roof do a somersault and go bong. Every bell has a different bong so the simplest thing to do was to go from high to low with four bells.

  Off we went. When you pull the sally, the rope shoots up towards the roof and it’s important to hang onto the loop bit at the end. Elmore forgot to do that a couple of times and the rope shot up towards the roof so it was all a bit of a mess to begin with. Maddie thought this was very funny and she was still laughing when she forgot about her rope, too, which made it even worse.

  This was when the new vicar arrived. I explained about Gramps dying and how much he’d loved the bells. The vicar was very young. After I’d finished about Gramps, he went off to find his wife. It turned out that she was a real bell ringer, not like us, and when they both came back we had the right number of people to do it properly. It took quite a long time but in the end it must have sounded OK because Dimitar got a phone call from Doff who could hear the bells from miles away. Even Mrs Bellamy thought they sounded nice and she was half deaf. That made me very pleased. Gramps would have been proud of us.

  A bit later, we stopped. Everyone was quite tired because bellringing can be hard work but I was really sweating. When we went out into the fresh air I started shivering and it was the vicar’s wife who asked if I felt OK. I could see Elmore looking at me the way he sometimes does but I said I was fine, just a bit wonky.

  Then I felt a sneeze coming, and sniffed and I sniffed, but realized there was nothing I could do to stop it. After that, I sneezed a lot. Elmore took me over to the camper van and when we drove off he put the heater on in case I was cold (which I wasn’t).

  After a while I started sneezing again, which made Elmore look even more worried. He and Maddie had a conversation (which I couldn’t hear), and then Elmore stopped the van. We were quite a long way from home but he thought it might be better if I walked.

  When I got out it was the middle of nowhere. Watching the camper disappear, I had another sneeze, and then another. The country lane was empty. All I could hear was the wind. The wind and the bells. Except the bells had stopped. Come to an end. Got The Chop.

  A bit like me.