‘Ah know, John,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s just somethin’ ye canny get tae believe all at once.’
Elizabeth was still sitting staring into the fire, clutching her handkerchief in a wet ball. Charlie stood looking at her, and in the firelight tiny filaments of vein scarred the whites of her eyes.
‘Ye better go up noo, Charlie,’ John said. ‘The doctor said he would be back in this efternin tae give ’im the morphine. He might no’ come out it again. This might be the last time he talks. He might be in any time now.’
Charlie nodded. He felt like some sort of prodigal son. Well, he was here now, anyway. A trifle late, it was true. But he was here. He went up the stairs slowly, over the worn flowers of the carpet, and he was thinking that his father would never step on them again. Each step seemed to settle in a slough of reluctance to face what was ahead.
‘Charlie?’
Charlie stopped as if trying to locate where the voice had come from. It seemed to dirl from a distance further than the room above him. The door was open, but he knew he wouldn’t see his father until he was in the room, because of the position of the bed behind the door. He went on up and stood still a moment at the door. In the wardrobe mirror he could see the outline of his father’s legs beneath the covers and one hand laid waxen on the counterpane. It looked as fine as filigree. Illness must have sculpted long and patiently at the flesh to make anything as pale and fragile for aesthetic death. It lay motionless, as if life had already left it.
‘Is that you, Charlie?’
The voice drifted thin as smoke from the room.
‘Aye, Feyther. It’s me,’ he said, and went in.
Nothing could have prepared Charlie for this. In his youth his father had made a fetish of fitness because, being little more than literate, he carried most of his assets in his body, a body made hard by the pits and pick-and-shovel labouring through many years before he was smitten by the dream to be his own boss, to ‘branch out’ on his own. It had taken little more than a month of sickness to make a mockery of sinew and muscle and reassert the bone so that the hard muscular form Charlie had said cheerio to now lay skeletal, barely giving shape to the sweat-stained pyjamas, protruding sticks of wrist that even those frail hands seemed too heavy for. The face was a sharp miniature of what it had been, dominated by the eyes, hollowly dark, like twin tunnels to nothing.
‘Hullo, son,’ and a smile came like a scar across his face.
‘Hullo, Feyther,’ and Charlie carved a careful answering smile of his own.
His father was laboriously pretending to feel no pain, pursing his lips. There was a chair beside the bed with a newspaper lying on it. ‘Tragedy in a Tenement’, Charlie noticed before he sat down.
‘Is everythin’ a’ right at the university, Charlie?’
‘Aye, Feyther, it’s fine,’ Charlie said, wondering what difference that made to anything.
It occurred to Charlie that it might be difficult to find things to talk about. What did you say to someone who was dying? Everything he could think of was double-edged, and did not mean for his father what it meant for him. But his father solved the problem by easing himself up in bed, ready to talk. He obviously had something he was very anxious to say. Charlie saw that he was excused cliches. This was to be a monologue.
‘Ah didny send for ye. Sooner, Charlie,’ his father said, pain punctuating his breath at random. ‘Ah knew ye wis busy at the studyin’. An’ Ah didny want. Tae gie’ ye any more worry than Ah had tae.’
‘Aw, Feyther,’ Charlie said. What did he think, anyway, that he rated lower than class examinations? That he had to die out of term time, organize his death to suit the syllabus?
‘Naw, Charlie, Ah didny want tae do that. But Ah don’t ken how much time Ah have now. An’ Ah wanted to see ye.’
‘Ah, mebbe ye’ve some time yet, Feyther,’ Charlie said, the sight of his father denying the words as he said them.
‘Naw, son, naw. Ah ken. An’ Ah’ve had a long time to think. Lyin’ here. A long time.’ Pain suddenly prompted him to hurry. ‘You keep an eye to Elizabeth, son, will ye? She’s a good lassie an’ Harry’s a nice boy. She’ll be all right. She’s mature now. A sensible lassie for her age. She’s had to be, God bless her. Takin’ a mither’s place before she was a woman. Doin’ two jobs. She’s made a good job of herself. She’ll be all right. As long as you’re there just to look after her a wee bit. John’s got his ain family now, ye see.’ Pride flickered for a moment in his eyes, the ghost of an emotion. ‘He’s got his wife an’ son to look after now. God bless them.’
He paused, fighting the pain. It was harrowing to watch him, a man numbering his children in his will. All he had to give them were blessings.
‘An’ yersel’, Charlie. Now. Ah want ye to keep in. At the university. It’ll no’ be easy. Ah know. It’s no thanks to me if ye do make it. Fur it’s little. Ah can leave ye. But listen, Charlie. In the jacket of ma blue suit. In the wardrobe. Fifty pounds. Inside the lining o’ the sleeve. It’ll be a help. An’, Charlie. The funeral’s all covered. By the insurance. There’ll be no expense whatsoever from that. There’ll maybe be somethin’ left over.’
It was all arranged. His death was to cause them as little inconvenience as possible.
‘Feyther,’ Charlie said. ‘We’ll be all right. Don’t worry about that.’
‘An’, Charlie. In the inside pocket of the jacket. A key. To ma lock-up down at Fore Street. There’s a lotta metal there. Mick an’ me stripped it off old gas-masks. Ye’ll get a few pounds for that. But Mick. He’s got to get his share of it. He helped me. The key’s in the inside pocket.’
Charlie looked down at his hands. Why was he so concerned with money at this time? The key to the lock-up. It was like a macabre mockery of a fairy-tale – the legendary treasure told of by a dying man. A few bits of metal. He was apportioning his worldly goods. Everyone was to get his share, even Mick, the model-lodging ne’er-do-weel who had played Sancho Panza to his father’s Quixotic dreams of financial success.
‘It’s no’ much, Charlie. But it’ll help to tide ye over just now. Ye must stick it. At the university. Ye’ve got to, Charlie. Ye’re no’ goin’ to be like me. A nobody. You’ll make a success of your life. You’ll be different from me, son. You’ll be different.’
‘Ah don’t want to be different from you, Feyther,’ Charlie said. He couldn’t believe that his father was saying that. Why was he speaking like this? ‘What is there to be different about?’
‘Naw, son. You’ll be different. You’ll no’ make. The mistakes Ah made. Ah can see ma mistakes now. Ah see them. When it’s too late.’
‘Ye never made mistakes, Feyther. Don’t say that.’
‘Aw naw, son. Ah was wrong. All ma days. All the time Ah was wrong. Full o’ mistakes. Ah see them now. Ah see them.’
Charlie said nothing, struck to stone by the terrible sincerity of his father’s voice. He saw with sudden horror how real these ‘mistakes’ were to his father’s mind, like spectres gathered about his bedside. He sensed how they must have haunted him these past weeks, the agony they were giving him at this moment. This was really what he wanted to tell Charlie. And Charlie listened in disbelief while his father talked on through his pain as if he had something terrible to confess before he died.
‘Don’t be like me, son. Ah never did anything wi’ ma life. Ah had nae education an’ Ah never made anything wi’ whatever Ah did have. Whit’s ma life, Charlie? Where is it? Ah wis a terrible failure, son. Nae money fur ye, nae security. Whit wis Ah ever use for?’
Use for? He was use for being a man, that was what he was use for. He was good at just being a man. All the times Charlie remembered him by were all just human moments. He remembered him laughing, moving, talking. He knew him by his courage and his physical strength. He remembered long before, when Charlie was small, how he would come in, muscled like a pony from the pits, and dispense good humour through the house. He remembered his kindness, his presence like a lightning conducto
r for trouble, making them safe. And wasn’t that enough? Who said it wasn’t? Who made it that a man had to measure himself against money in the bank or what he owned or how far he ‘succeeded’ or ‘security’ ? Who decided that a man had to be judged in terms that had no connection with manhood, that coinage was a yardstick for a man? When had it happened that this man had accepted that everything he had was nothing when set against what he didn’t have, an eight-room house with his name on the door, a car, a bank account? Who passed that judgment on him? How did it happen?
‘Ah know now where Ah made ma mistakes, Charlie. Ye see -’ Charlie saw by his father’s face that what he was going to say was made difficult by more than the pain – ‘ye see, whit yer mother did that time. Goin’ away.’ Pain gave way to hate on his face. ‘Wi’ that bugger Whitmore !’ The words shot out like bile, and he subsided. ‘That was me, Charlie. It was me. She wanted things. An’ Ah jist couldn’t get them. She was used. To them, ye ken. Everybody wants them. Don’t blame ’er, Charlie. Everybody wants them. An’ she wanted them. An if Ah couldn’t give her them. There was somebody who could. It was ma fault, Charlie.’
That was it, a poison six years in taking effect. A kind of hemlock. Slow death. But leaving no trace. She left him and gradually he came to believe that she was right to leave him. And why shouldn’t he believe it? What did he have to dispute it for him? All around him, that was the only measurement he could see. And he didn’t fit it. He was a failure. Charlie remembered how he himself used to be exasperated at how often his father changed work. That would be mainly at the time before his mother left. He had always had a slight suspicion that it had been part of the reason for his mother’s leaving. Now he saw that it was the other way round. It had been his father’s pathetic and desperate attempt to be what he thought he ought to be, what he had been convinced he should be. He started several ‘businesses’, trying to sell cars, or ice-cream, or fruit and vegetables. They all folded. Charlie had found it laughable at the time. When he was given a form to fill in at school he was uncertain what to put for ‘father’s occupation’. He knew now. His father had never been anything more than a full-time human being. And it had never been enough. Now he realized the lonely desperation that must have been behind what had seemed to him laughable whimsy. He saw the reason for it. His mother went away and his father was left with something that had lived inside the banter and the cliches all this time, quietly doing its work. And nobody had paid much attention. Not even Charlie, himself. It was all done so neatly and skilfully, you could hardly tell. Now, six years later, with his mother married to someone else and living in another town, his father was dying quietly in this room and it wouldn’t be noticed. That other married couple somewhere else could not be connected with this husk of a man dying here. No one would notice or see any connection, except Charlie. He noticed. He sat staring at his father, seeing a connection between him and those other two, somewhere in a brighter room.
‘You’ll no’ be like me, though. You’ll stick in, son. You’ll get the education an’ the good job. You’ll make somethin’ oot yer life. Ah ken ye can dae it, son. You’ll have the university an’ the education . . .’
So that was what he had been left with, a mouthful of shibboleths, a few magical words that he kept muttering like an ‘open sesame’, that he was passing on to Charlie as if they were the keys to all the doors he had always found closed, had bled his fists against. That was how he had been left to finish, mouthing a few empty incantations, broken and bemused, surrounded by the painful mystery of his ‘failure’. He wasn’t just allowed to die. A man had to die. That was nothing. But nobody had the right to destroy a man before he died. And he had been destroyed. This wasn’t the way he should have died. It had been made this way. This wasn’t something just happening now. It must have happened a long time ago, and no one had noticed. A man had had everything taken from him, had been destroyed, and nothing had been done.
‘You’ll be a’ right. Charlie. Wi’ a university education. You’ll no’ be like me. The guid jobs. The big money.’
The last will and testament, a few words they had taught him painfully, punishing him when he neglected their importance. That was all he had left. When Charlie thought of the man his father had been and realized what he had been made now, and then thought that it had all happened in the utter isolation of his lonely self, he seemed to understand something for the first time. He knew what it must have been to be his father. And the insight was blinding, seared his mind, cauterizing it clean of every other thought. The injustice of it cleft his mind like lightning, and something vague and terrible followed in its wake, like distant thunder. But he could give it no shape, could form no definite thought from it as yet. Only one bitter word kept hammering on his mind as on an anvil. Bastards. Bastards. But what it was forging there he did not know. He just sat looking at his father, branding that image of him on his thoughts, and the small wooden carving on the bedhead above him, a cross inset in a diamond, stamped itself on his mind like a hieroglyph of hate.
His father’s voice was petering out, but he was still trying to talk on, as if it mattered. He had lost the grip he had been keeping on his pain and his body was visibly racked. Charlie thought of the agony he had suffered to wait and talk to him. And what could Charlie say that could be commensurate with what his father had suffered? Nothing. He felt more bitter than he had ever felt before. He choked with inarticulate rancour. This was so wrong. His father was completely mistaken. But he had neither the time nor the words to tell him so. Nothing Charlie could say to him would make any difference. Speech dwindled to meaninglessness dropped into this chasm. Words withered in his breath. This was beyond talk. Something else was necessary. Something else.
Charlie just wanted his father to sleep now. That was all that could help him. As if from a great distance, he heard a car draw up outside the house. The front door was opened. Footsteps came slowly up the stairs, and Charlie felt that he was in a room where they could never join him. As the doctor came in, Charlie’s father reached out to hold on to Charlie, as if not wanting to be gagged with morphine.
‘Ah’m talkin’ tae Charlie,’ he said.
He was groggy with pain. Charlie barely noticed the doctor. He had hold of his father’s hand in an incongruously formal gesture of handshake.
‘It’s a’ right, Feyther,’ he said. ‘Ah hear ye. Ah’m listenin’,’ pushing back the pyjama sleeve. 6Ah know whit ye mean. Ah know it, Feyther. Ah know.’
The doctor came forward. Come on, Charlie thought, give it to him. Let him sleep. It’s over for him. But not for us. Not for us.
‘God bless ye, Charlie,’ his father said. ‘God bless ye.’
John stood in the doorway awkwardly. The needle searched a second in the puckered skin and submerged. Charlie felt the hand go rigid and relax, as if passing its pain into his. The lips kneaded themselves in silence as if trying to say more. Then the mouth went slack. He was asleep.
Chapter 4
HE NEVER RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS. AS THE DAY progressed and as the family, making from time to time pathetic pilgrimages upstairs to his room, sensed him going inexorably from them down a lengthening corridor of cold and clinical fact, the practical requirements of the situation impressed themselves on John. Most of the immediate family knew that their father was within a day or two of dying and had been calling in at the house each day or so to find out how he was. In the late afternoon John left to go round them all and inform them that his father was not expected to last out the night. It was a laborious business and he had to be careful to omit no one who would expect to be told. To many, such an oversight would be an offence that no bereavement could extenuate. Even grief had to be practical.
He was gone a long time and he was hardly back before the first of the mourners followed on his heels. For an hour after that they made a solemn, uneven procession into the house. There was an indefinable sameness about the way they filed upstairs, as if all their thoughts were dressed in uni
form black. Every negotiable chair had been taken from other parts of the house and placed in a wide semicircle round the bed and when there were no more chairs left they sat on cushions on the floor or squatted on their haunches against wall or wardrobe. New arrivals were greeted with a muted murmur, a slow sough of sound in which no words were decipherable, a communal sigh which drew the newcomer into it as if their grief were swollen by his. The room filled slowly till it brimmed with people. At other times they met each other only fitfully, in street or shop or at the football or on a quick visit to borrow a tool or bring a little news. Each had his own concerns. For each, habit had laid private roads that none of the others frequented. Old familiarities that they had had with each other in their youth were neglected, became overgrown in disuse. Each grew apart into his separate life. Often when they met in the street they would greet each other almost grudgingly, like toll-tax paid for roads they didn’t use. Some did not even like each other. Some remembered the bitter word or imagined slight and filed it away for ever in their minds under the appropriate name. Some were merely indifferent. But all came together unquestioning for this, like amoebae in reverse. And their presence seemed to assume a single pulse that moved in time with that of the man who was dying-
No one spoke. Someone might offer round his cigarettes to those who were nearest him. Then they were lit and smoked, with the lengthening ash tipped into cupped hands. Small gnats of sound and movement flicked at the grave stillness from time to time. Someone coughed, and the sound was gagged with silence almost at once. Someone eased the position of a leg that hurt irreverently. Someone was picking fragments of clotted dust from the turn-ups of his trousers. For the body had to be occupied, was a troublesome encumbrance here, too skittish to submit for long to this solemnity. Hands moved of their own accord, roamed into pockets, furtively searching for occupation. Feet tapped on empty air, forgetting where they were. Eyes studied palms, escaping through an old scar to the past. It did not matter that the body misbehaved. No movement lived long in the face of that awful quiet. Only the small metal clock was insistent, relentlessly whittling the seconds from a life.
Remedy is None Page 3
