‘Nah, nah,’ he kept saying with friendly denial into his cell phone. Many people waited as couples, with just the occasional exchange between them regarding the length of time they had been there, or the activities of their absent grandchildren. Each time a nurse came and called up a batch for appointments, those waiting perked up and chatted briefly of how they were thus advanced in the list, or suppressed chagrin that they had been sitting longer than some who received the call.
Behind Sheff, two men who were strangers traded intimacies of their health without exchanging names.
‘I suppose you’re here for the old prostrate?’
‘Prostate, yes.’
‘Me too. A bugger, isn’t it. What’s your PSA level?’
‘Well, shot up a bit according to the last blood test, so I’m back here.’ His voice was lower, more guarded, but the topic still drew him in.
‘How many times you up in the night?’
‘A couple or more.’
‘Well, it’ll be at least the old digital today won’t it, if not the machine?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Good, though it’s not a woman doctor, eh?’
‘No,’ which meant yes.
‘You had a biopsy then?’
‘Yeah, just one.’
‘And pissing blood isn’t fun, is it? It’s the old knife for me. I was going to have the new treatment with radioactive rods, or some damn thing, but it’s not suitable for me evidently, so it’s the knife for sure.’ Rather than apprehension, there was in his voice a sombre pride that he was a more serious case than his companion. Sheff didn’t turn, but later the man responded to the nurse’s call for ‘Mr Lilly please’, with a resounding affirmative and followed her into view. A stubby Harry Secombe man in work clothes, who went with false jauntiness to meet his prognosis, the nature of which wasn’t in doubt for all who had overheard his conversation.
None of these people meant anything to Sheff, yet he wished them well. Even though nothing could save his father, Sheff was glad Warwick had private medical insurance and so could have the best care. And he thought with admiration of Georgie, whose professional time was spent with people who were hurt, angry or afraid, and avid for miracles. How steadfast she’d become, and how understanding.
His reflective calm was disturbed by a woman coming back from the water dispenser, a thin, elderly person with a head hung like a lantern in advance of her body because of osteoporosis. She tripped on Sheff’s foot although it wasn’t outstretched, and fell against him helplessly, too slow in reaction even to put a hand out. Water splashed Sheff’s neck, the woman’s face struck his shoulder, causing her denture to pop out with life of its own and jiggle in his lap. Instinctively Sheff reached to steady the woman, and they ended clasped in mutual embarrassment and disorder. The thrall of boredom in the waiting room was briefly broken. The small consternation brought a clerical assistant from out-patient reception, who took the woman chirping back to her seat, and the teeth away to be rinsed. Once again Sheff had the sense of being the victim of trivial happenstance, yet viewed with suspicion by those around him. He assumed what he hoped was an expression of injured benevolence, and took up a leaflet on rhinoplasty.
Georgie returned first, by herself. Sheff got up to join her and, as he passed by the elderly water woman, she steadfastly looked away. He thought of making light of the folly to entertain his sister, but decided she’d take satisfaction in adding the incident to all the other examples she’d stored up of his lack of adroitness in everyday life. ‘How did it go?’ was all he said.
She gave a slight shake of her head, and screwed up her eyes. ‘We’ll get an official report,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing to give hope, I’m afraid.’ She spoke softly and with no dramatic emphasis, but the words had an almost physical impact so that he had to steady himself, and he became aware of the pulse beat behind his eyes.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.
‘Well, we knew really, didn’t we? Nothing’s changed.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘He needed to go to the loo. I had a private talk to Mr Quincy when Mum took him out. He’ll go over the new scan, but doesn’t think there’s anything else we can do now except try to keep him comfortable.’
‘So did he say how long?’
‘Everyone’s different, but it’s days, weeks at most,’ said Georgie. Conversation still went on around them. The water woman, mouthing on her recently cleansed dentures and still obdurate in refusal to look at him, went unsteadily by.
‘Look how stooped that old duck is,’ said Sheff.
‘Kyphosis – dowager’s hump,’ answered his sister without a second glance. Sheff saw Harry Secombe walk sombrely towards the exit after his consultation, but decided not to tell Georgie about his prostate.
Sheff would have asked more about Warwick’s session, but his mother and father came slowly to join them. A girl wearing a smock emptied a small trash bucket into a black polythene bag, an elderly man pulled up his trouser leg and rubbed his ankle, the skin there mottled purple and vermilion with the massed tendrils of tiny veins. A brief laugh from someone unseen and well down the corridor merged with coughing near at hand. Sheff was appalled at their indifference: the lack of respect for his father, who deserved so much more than other people. His father was dying, and the world paid insufficient attention.
As they went carefully back to the car park, Belize gave a reprise of the examination for Sheff’s benefit. She was impressed that Mr Quincy and Georgie knew one another, as if somehow that might ensure a positive outcome. ‘I’ve just met him professionally at conferences, Mum. I don’t know him all that well,’ said Georgie. ‘He was part-time at med school for a while, but not while I was studying. Just stop for a moment, Dad.’ She had noticed that Warwick’s blue shirt-tail lapped over the back of his trousers, and she loosened his belt and tucked the material in, while he stood patiently. He had nothing to add to his wife’s description of the scanner procedure, or examination, nothing to say of the effort he found it to undress and dress, or of the talk with Mr Quincy. He stood as a work horse would while its traces were adjusted, and when Georgie finished and patted his shoulder, he moved off gingerly again.
‘Would you like to go somewhere for a meal?’ Sheff asked.
‘Why not? Why not?’ said Warwick with palpably false bravado. His voice had altered in illness, acquiring a husky remoteness as if, although physically still close at hand, the essential man was floating away. And his speech was subject to unintended and fluttering changes in register.
‘I think a light omelette at home would be better. You know you can’t stand much,’ said Belize.
‘You’ve had enough up and about today, haven’t you?’ said Georgie.
Sheff would have argued against the women, but he sensed that his father was in agreement with them, despite wishing to deny his weakness. On the drive home Sheff put on the climate control because of the late afternoon heat, and Warwick soon fell into an uneasy sleep resting against his wife’s shoulder. It was still light, but Sheff remembered those times coming home in the dark many years before. He and Georgie in the back seat of the Triumph 2000, drowsy, but happy with the day. The darkness outside, the customary confinement within, the familiar noise and minor movement, all adding to an unexamined sense of family and security. Warwick and Belize might be talking of friends, or work, or whether they should pave a barbecue area. Or they may have said all they wished, and been at ease with that. Sometimes Warwick had whistled show tunes; he was fond of musicals. He could catch a note on both the outgoing and indrawn breath, and Sheff would lean his head against the window, watch the road unravel in the pale beam of the headlights, and think of not much at all.
‘Your shirt’s wet,’ said Georgie. ‘I noticed it back at the hospital. What’ve you been doing?’ The truth was both complicated and tedious.
‘I spilt a cup of water in the waiting room,’ he said, and that was accurate as far as it went.
> ‘They’re all different, those dispensers, aren’t they?’ said his mother. ‘And sometimes it’s hard to get the cardboard cups apart. Almost as difficult to open as those tiny pottles of milk you get on planes, and they squirt over you no matter what you do.’ Perhaps it was from his mother that Sheff inherited incompetence in such things.
He went back to thinking of his whistling father in the past. Once when they were playing in an ad hoc foursome, Warwick had been rebuked for the habit by one of the opposition, who was lining up a putt. Warwick was a bit of a stickler for sporting etiquette, and quite put out and apologetic. Sheff imagined that he would have whistled at the office too, while working with the computer, or preparing to see a client, and no one would have objected, for that was his domain. Whistling seemed to have gone out of fashion, along with wearing floppy hats and writing letters.
By Speargrass they passed the Painter farm, where Sheff had worked in the holidays at the end of his seventh form year. The sinuous dirt track up to the house and sheds that looked much the same, except even more desperately in need of a coat of paint and with some planks twisting awry as they weathered. Warwick had arranged the job, and allowed Sheff to use the car. Driving there and back had been the best parts of the day, for he’d felt quite grown-up, and would lift a finger from the wheel casually to acknowledge the few other motorists, as was his father’s habit.
Working with old man Painter had been less satisfying. There was often no break for smoko, morning or afternoon, and they rarely had lunch in the house. Sheff remembered a window held open by a wooden spoon, and curtains stained with condensation and bedraggled like worn petticoats. Mr Painter was a widower who seemed to Sheff at seventeen to be as old as the stumps they spent much of their time uprooting. A thin, dark man in a singlet, with heavy wrinkles on his upper arms where the flesh had atrophied despite no let-up in physical work. For the first few days Sheff had shared the old man’s midday meal, mutton sandwiches and cold milk tea from a flask, but then he said his mother was keen to provide, and so she was once he’d asked her.
Painter usually had the stained stub of a roll-your-own in the side of his mouth, sometimes lit and sometimes not, and he could eat without removing it. They must have done all sorts of farming jobs, but in retrospect it seemed to Sheff every day was spent pulling out stumps. Old man Painter had a Farmall tractor with a perforated metal seat perched high, and he would sit swivelled there, watching impatiently while Sheff hacked with an axe around the tree roots and then attached the chains. Painter had been a Bren gunner in the war, but he never talked about that, or much else. Racehorses seemed to be his only interest apart from the farm, and Sheff knew nothing about that.
Maybe before Sheff started work there, Warwick had agreed with Painter what the pay would be. It was never mentioned between Sheff and the old man. He was given nothing at the end of the first week, or any week except the seventh, when the farmer came out to the car with him at the conclusion of the last day, and fished a cheque out of his pocket. The sum was more than Sheff expected, given what he knew of the Painter lifestyle. On the back of the cheque the old man had written in pencil the number of days and hours Sheff had worked, the rate, and then calculated the total. The working remained there, as in a piece of primary school arithmetic.
‘Remember the Painter place back there?’ said Sheff. ‘He’ll be well gone by now, the old guy. Remember I had that job there in the holidays?’ But Warwick didn’t reply, and it had too small a place in their past to interest Belize and Georgie. Old man Painter had taken the thin cigarette stub carefully from his mouth in case it had stuck to his lip. He had lit it and drawn a slow lungful. He had handed over the cheque with a due sense of occasion.
‘Well, son,’ he’d said, ‘just don’t spend it all at once.’
CHARLOTTE HAD RESISTED ANYTHING being put on her feet, and was diligent in removing what was forced on her. Booties were kicked off, and later shoes and socks discarded no matter how cold it was. She would pull her foot close to her face and worry at laces, or Velcro straps, until she had them undone. Sheff had been concerned about it. ‘Why won’t she keep anything on?’ he said.
‘Because she has such beautiful feet,’ said Lucy.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHEFF HAD RARELY been as attentive to his father as he was when Warwick was dying. As a child his parents were the magnetic poles of his life, but in adolescence he’d begun to resist the attraction, and in adulthood he largely forgot it in the immediacy of his own affairs. Now he sat for hours with Warwick, taking his turn with Georgie and his mother to fill up the day, and sometimes night. And it was more than just a duty. During the good patches there was time to tease out conversation without concern for practical value. Indulgence is granted to the dying. One hot afternoon when distant thunder rumbled beyond the open window of the sickroom, they talked of first memories.
‘Did you ever meet Elaine Pettigrew?’ asked Warwick, after they had counted down the interval between a lightning flash and the thunder that followed.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sheff.
‘She was in the office for years.’
‘No, can’t place her.’
‘Well, anyway, she reckoned she could recall events from the time she was in the pushchair. A white dog came and licked her leg, she said, and she remembered the Chinese fruiterer weighing potatoes in scales that hung from the ceiling, and the red face of her newly born brother brought home when she was two. Heaps of stuff, and specifically tied to chronological markers. Whereas I can’t think of much that happened at all before I was five, and not a lot afterwards for a couple of years.’
‘I guess your family repeat things about you, and after a while you come to believe that you recall them yourself. That’s part of it,’ said Sheff. ‘Like the story that I went down to the library to see if it was open, found it was and came back home to get the books to return. Conscious memory doesn’t kick in for most of us until we’re at school. The earliest things are often seared in by fear, or oddity, like the dog licking her leg. Imagine how gigantic an ordinary dog would seem to a baby.’
‘So what’s the first thing you can remember?’ his father asked him, shifting his head on the propped pillows so that the tendons flexed like puppet strings beneath the slack skin of his neck.
‘The cupboard under the sink. I could open it and get inside with the pots and tin trays. The water pipes twisted down in the darkness at the back like petrified worms, and there was a smell of damp wood, dishwashing liquid, mould, and the yellow contact on the shelves. Confined spaces give you a sense of security when you’re really little, even if they stink.’
‘Yes, you’d turf everything out and bang on things. You were a little bugger for opening every door, cupboard and drawer you could. You’d get stuck in all sorts of places and howl until you were rescued, and then do it again. Belize always said –’ Instead of finishing his sentence, Warwick stretched his head up and to the side, opened his mouth, held the pose for a moment, then relaxed back.
‘Is it worse today?’ asked Sheff.
‘No worse,’ his father said. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I’m sorry.’ For a moment Sheff felt an urge to cry, but it passed as a gust and he was okay again. If his father could bear approaching death, then a son should be able to witness it without tears. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what’s yours? Your first clear memory, I mean.’
‘The clock falling off.’
‘Off what?’
‘Off the kitchen shelf. We had a clock with a large wooden case the colour of chocolate, and my father used to put letters behind it, bills and things that needed attention later, and they gradually pushed the clock closer to the edge. It must have been a summer tea time, because I remember my father’s sleeve was rolled up as he reached to push an envelope behind it. And it was the last straw. The whole bloody thing came crashing down, smashing the glass face and making a hell of a noise, and some of the papers fluttered down. Mum cried out with the shoc
k of it. The case splintered, and the mechanism continued to jangle for a second or two. To me it seemed like the end of the world.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I was on an ordinary kitchen chair, but I had a cushion, so no more than four, I reckon. We left that house before I went to school. Oddly enough, I’ve no recollection of how Dad took it, but I can still hear Mum’s shriek, and the little jangling noise from the wreckage when everything else was still.’
‘Well, it’s a long time ago now, Dad.’
‘Strange, though. I can see exactly how my father’s white shirtsleeve was turned up on his arm that summer evening, yet years of more important stuff since has vanished.’
Dark, massive clouds tumbled before the sun so that the room dimmed suddenly and then lit up again richly, and thunder growled a long way off. And there were wind gusts that flounced the bushes. Sheff went to the window and closed it. ‘How will you remember me?’ his father asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My father was a miser. That’s what I recall most of all,’ said Warwick. ‘He was good to us, but he had a pathological fear of poverty. It must have been living through the Depression. He had to work on the roads, and rabbits were the only meat they ever had, he said. He never got over those days no matter what happened. He lived and died a miser. He hated a light on in an empty room, or to buy food for a cat. He never put more fuel in the car than was necessary for the immediate trip. I think he was afraid of evaporation. He would get the very last out of a tin of boot polish until the bottom itself had a shine, and he would force himself to eat a green rind of cheese, or a rotten banana, rather than throw it out.’
‘Well, maybe we forget how tough times were in the thirties.’
‘I remember him in the garage with a hammer straightening used nails, and nothing pleased him more than to find a coin on the road, or a fizz bottle to cash in. He tried to resole our shoes himself, and when finally he had to let them go he would strip out the laces to tie up the tomatoes. Jesus.’
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