Father's Music

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘You can’t do this to Gran,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t want to.’

  ‘It’s not your concern.’

  ‘You’re frightening me. What’s wrong with her?’

  EIGHTEEN

  I SMOKED TWO CIGARETTES in the hospital car park, the name of which I had finally forced Grandad to give me, almost grudgingly, indifferent as to whether I visited her or not. All the way home last night and then for hours staring at the darkness above my bed, I had been stung by the invective in his parting words outside the Irish Centre, ‘You’ve done enough to her already’. The sense of guilt I could understand, but why did I feel such grief as well?

  I stubbed the second cigarette out and entered the lobby. It was sixteen months since I had been inside any hospital. Inside it was like a minor shopping mall, with rows of flower and gift boutiques, a coffee dock and a brightly coloured play area. A child listened to the hospital radio station on headphones as she keyed in a request. There was almost a holiday feel about the New Year’s Eve visitors, armed with cards and bouquets and fortitude. What could I bring her? Grandad had said the stroke had left her paralysed and incontinent, able to be fed only by a drip tube through her nose. I chose a spray of white and red carnations, though I had never known Gran to have much time for flowers unless important visitors were expected.

  Her semi-private room was two floors up. People queued for the lifts but I preferred to walk. It was a habit left over from visiting my mother, using those extra moments alone to brace myself against the pain in her eyes. I had always been sly in choosing visiting times, ensuring that I never had to share her bedside with Gran. Only when she died had we stood together, and even then I had deliberately remained on the opposite side of the bed. I hadn’t had any room at the time for Gran’s pain. When I had thought of her, it was as a scapegoat to blame for the grief I wasn’t able to articulate. Because I had always presumed I would have sufficient time to make amends to my mother for everything which had happened between us and suddenly I had found that time snatched away.

  I came to the glass doors leaning on to Gran’s corridor, feeling that this chance had been stolen from me again. Often, late at night, I had acted out scenarios about confronting my grandparents in a few years’ time. Normally I would have returned from abroad, having proved myself so successful that they were forced to view me afresh. Some nights only the childish thrill of those fantasies had sustained me in that bedsit. Now I followed the ward signs with a sense of dread. Patients queued in the corridor for a card phone. A man walked slowly in a dressing gown, wheeling his drip alongside him. The door to her room was ajar. I could see Grandad Peter seated by the bed. He had shaved this morning but his shirt were the same one as last night. He sat in silence like a soldier keeping vigil. I felt that if I slipped off and returned in several hours time I would find him in that same position.

  I wanted to run but I pushed the door open instead. Gran was strapped into a chair on the opposite side of the bed. I could see her incontinence bag. She was stooped low over the bed table where Grandad had opened a magazine for her. But I knew she couldn’t read it. It was just so that her eyes were not staring down at the formica table top all day long. I wanted her to lift those eyes and acknowledge I had come, even though I knew she couldn’t, unless by some miracle. Grandad took in my presence without a word of greeting. The other bed in the room had been stripped, prior to being made ready for the next patient. I walked in and sat on the bed between them. I put my hand out to touch her hair. I had been a little girl on the last occasion I touched it or allowed her to hug me. Her hair was soft and fine. Somebody must have washed it recently.

  ‘It’s me, Gran,’ I said, ‘Tracey.’

  I leaned down to hear what she was murmuring, but those sounds weren’t words or at least not words I could comprehend. They weren’t addressed to me either. They were part of an ongoing monologue which she had been struggling with before I entered the room and, for all I know, even before Grandad had arrived. I looked at him.

  ‘Does she know that I’m here?’

  He rose and walked around to kneel beside her chair.

  ‘It’s Tracey,’ he said, staring up into her face. ‘Tracey. Helen’s child.’

  Was this what I was reduced to in their eyes, my mother’s daughter? Yet his words didn’t sound like a deliberate slight to hurt me. His attention was focused purely on his wife’s face where the skin was drooped on one side so that her lip hung down. She moaned something, although I didn’t know if it was in reply. It sounded like an echo of the sounds she had mumbled before.

  ‘Tracey’s come to visit,’ Grandad went on. ‘We’re all here with you now.’

  Gran went silent. Grandad turned the page of the magazine for her. It was an issue of Country Life, a colour spread on some big house. A resolute middle-aged woman smiled among the daffodils on her lawn, while a great dane lolled obediently beside her. Grandad patted Gran’s hands which had been folded on her lap and rose to stare down at her stooped frame.

  I tried not to stare at the catheter tube. I felt sickened. I wanted so many things but most of all I wanted her not to make those sounds again. Her mumbling carried such a register of pain. It was like a scream broken down by computers and relayed in the slowest of slow motions. There was nothing human left in her voice, I thought, and then I realised I was totally wrong. All that was left in her voice was essentially human, with only the decorum which we cloaked ourselves in stripped away. It was a cry of pain at its most naked. For years I had harboured resentment of her. I searched inside myself for any shred of triumph, for which I could despise myself now. But I just felt shock and grief and also a sense of unreality as if I was shielding myself from the scene. If I was watching this happen to someone else in a film I would have cried my eyes out. Grandad stared at me. There was no escape from the question he was about to ask.

  ‘What do you think she’s saying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, suddenly scared of him.

  ‘Listen.’

  He bent down beside her again as if encouraging those terrible utterances. I didn’t want to listen.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Inside her head the doctors say she understands every single thing that’s going on,’ he said. ‘If there is a God then why couldn’t he have the decency to let her go daft? There’s women in nursing homes with perfect physical health except that they don’t know if they’re aged eight or eighty. Yet he comes along to strike your Gran down and leaves her with a brain as sharp as a diamond. What class of a bastard would do that? She’ll never recover. They’re not even bothering to try speech therapy. They say there’s nothing we can do except wait. And she always had a will inside her like an ox. It doesn’t matter how terrible the pain is, your Gran can will herself to do anything, except get better or die.’

  Gran moaned suddenly and began to mumble. I wanted to run from the room. I had never heard any sound more terrifying. There was a sequence to the garbled mumbling. You couldn’t describe it as a phrase or a sentence, but something was being repeated over and over. I could feel the anguish in her desperation to communicate.

  ‘I can’t understand a word,’ I lied.

  ‘Then listen harder!’ His voice was terse and raised. I was a child no longer. Footsteps passed along the corridor. People glanced in and then hurried quickly on, trying to block her image from their minds.

  ‘Was it me?’ I asked. ‘Did my going away cause this?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Grandad snorted, ‘make yourself the centre of everything. This has nothing to do with you. At least she had some peace when you left. I came home four months ago and found her lying in her own dirt. I don’t know for how long, she can’t say, can she, or we can’t understand. The doctors say she could be like this for years. Soon they’ll farm her out to a nursing home, with strangers putting nappies on her at night. Your Gran was always proud, proud of your mother, proud of you. When you ran off she wanted to sit and cry. I
could see it, but all her life she had to be strong. She reared two brothers when only a child herself. Her blackguard of a father did nothing except drink himself stupid and beat them. I remember him on Sunday mornings shivering outside the pub in Cricklewood in a stained suit, waiting for it to open and spitting like he was back in the arse of whatever Irish bog he crawled from. A stinking, mean bastard. Your Gran wouldn’t marry me till he finally died. She couldn’t bear the thought of being given away in church by him. She’d find him lying in pools of vomit and patch him up, keeping him alive. Is it any wonder the woman was always ashamed of being half-Irish?’

  Gran moaned again, even more high-pitched and distressed. It made my skin crawl. Grandad knelt to take her hands. She had never mentioned her parents once during my childhood or told me a single story about growing up. It had made her seem like someone who had never been young and all the harder for any child to identify with. I realised I didn’t even know her maiden name. Surely I must have asked or perhaps I’d never had any sense of her owning a life before us. We were her life, myself and my mother before me, she keeping us healthy and the house spotless. I stared at her stooped head. The grey hair was shaking. Her father had beaten her. Were there more secrets she had never spoken of? What else had that Irishman done, rolling home drunk when she was a girl? I had never been able to tell her about Dublin. I had remained mute in those doctors’ waiting rooms, absorbed in my own guilt, when perhaps Gran, of all people, would have understood? I could imagine her suddenly, silhouetted in the doorway the night my mother brought an Irish husband home, and fearing that another cycle was being repeated.

  ‘I never knew Gran was Irish,’ I said. ‘Did Mammy know?’

  ‘Your Gran was thirty-eight when she walked down the aisle with me,’ he replied, his tone softened by memory. ‘She took the name Evans. I said to her, “No one will ever look down their nose at you again, girl.”’

  ‘She must have hated my father’s arrival.’

  Grandad stroked her hands and rose stiffly. I had never asked him about my father before. Indeed, until last night we had never had a proper adult conversation. He had just been my grandfather. Now he was someone I wasn’t sure of any more.

  ‘Your father was a harmless enough old codger,’ he said eventually. ‘Though in some ways I think your Gran would have preferred it if he was drunk or violent. She would have understood what she was up against. But nobody knew what he was on about. Your Gran couldn’t make head nor tail of him.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  Grandad walked to the window, staring at the car park below in the fading daylight. I looked at the flowers on the bed. It seemed a cruel joke to have brought them when Gran couldn’t even raise her head.

  ‘He was old.’

  ‘That’s no answer. I was always let believe he was a heartless bastard.’

  ‘She was only your age,’ Grandad protested, ‘and he got her pregnant. Can you imagine going with some man old enough to be your …’ He stopped, sickened by the thought, but I sensed his unease. ‘You never asked before.’

  ‘I’m asking now?’

  ‘He was nearly three times your mother’s age,’ he replied sharply, then glanced at Gran, before continuing more quietly. ‘Age wasn’t the real problem. Deep down, himself and your mother were both cut too soft. Your mother was always the same, a lost soul. But if anything your father was worse, sitting up in the bedroom playing that bloody fiddle all evening. It’s all he ever did, the same bloody tune over and over, and your mother thinking he was God’s gift because of it. The man was older than me and he’d never worked, except picking spuds in Scotland as a boy. He was a peddler, a tinker. I even found his company too old. He thought Terry and June the funniest programme ever. He’d laugh his head off at Norman Wisdom like he’d never seen him before. I don’t know if he’d ever watched television. He tried to fit in, I’ll give him that, he found a job as a postman. Up at dawn, walking for miles. He was the fittest man I ever knew but he’d give you the creeps and that’s the truth. The other postmen were never done taking the piss out of him.’

  Gran started to moan again. I saw the effect her cry had on Grandad. He had always seemed so self-contained, but I knew he’d be lost without her. The wailing went on, like a blade grating on a blade. I couldn’t decide if she was following our talk. But I’d avoided this conversation for years and now I had to finish it, whether Gran could hear or not.

  ‘Why did he disappear?’

  Grandad stared at Gran’s bowed head. ‘Listen to her, Tracey,’ he said. ‘Tell me what she’s saying.’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘Your father went back to where he belonged. It was the best for everyone.’

  ‘Who decided it was best for everyone?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tracey,’ Grandad snapped as Gran moaned again. ‘They might have called it love but he was a dirty old man to me. I could hear them lying in the bedroom next door, listening through the wall for any sound from us. Your Gran made sure they were never alone. It would have been better if your mother had got herself banged up after a dance in Hammersmith. She was bright enough when she put her mind to it. We’d plans for her, she could have done well. That old tramp had done enough damage. If he’d any decency he would have buggered off himself.’

  ‘He wasn’t a tramp,’ I said angrily. ‘I know what he was.’

  ‘Then it’s more than we ever did,’ Grandad shot back, just as angry. ‘What was he? Had he a job or a house? He’d the daftest notions about the three of you tramping back to Donegal in the depths of winter when you were only a few months old. What sort of life did he think we’d allow you to live? The man was daft, stroking your fingers for hours and saying they were made for a fiddle. The long-winded names he tried to give you, like a fucking Welsh railway station. It was bad enough being Irish, your Gran said, without flaunting it. There were bombs going off a few miles down the road and he wanted to take you all off hawking needles and thread and sponging off strangers in the arse of nowhere.’

  ‘What did my mother want?’ I said.

  ‘She wanted what your Gran told her to want. We had to drill it into her for your sake. She wanted what any mother should want, a safe home for her child. She wasn’t some flighty girl any longer, she was a mother.’

  His voice had risen as if to drown the sounds Gran was making. It wasn’t her fault, she was in pain, but I wanted to shake her to make the noise stop. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  ‘It was Gran who stopped us going with him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Can you not see you’re upsetting her?’ he asked.

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Nobody could have stopped your mother if she really wanted to go,’ he said. ‘And no one would have stopped him if he’d chosen to stay. He’d a job here and all. Your Gran would have cooked for him, like she cooked for her own father. No one kicked him out. It was he who left her.’

  Gran stopped moaning suddenly. The silence was as terrible as the noise had been. Grandad walked over to stroke her hair. I saw how distressed he was, like a man on the edge.

  ‘I have to tell Tracey,’ he told her, ‘while one of us still can.’ He put his forehead down to touch her hair and placed his arms around Gran. It was the first time I’d ever seen him close to tears. Very softly Gran repeated that brief jumble of sounds. ‘Stop asking me,’ he said. ‘You know I can’t do it.’

  I watched them, linked in pain. Even in childhood I had never seen them embrace like this. I walked over but found I couldn’t put my hand out to either of them. I had become a stranger. Gran moaned over and over. I knew she would spend all evening like this, until the nurses got her back into bed, and that tomorrow would be the same and the day after. The same monotonous moan, jabbing at the nerves like a scratched record. I forced myself to kneel and listen. This was the woman who had driven my parents apart, who had set standards and expectations which helped to mar my life. I didn’t know if I could really decipher her words or i
f I was just hearing what Grandad had claimed they meant. But he looked at me, coldly and desperately, as if defying me to deny that I could hear her moan; ‘You promised to shoot me, you promised to shoot me.’

  I backed away, my hands shaking. A nurse came in with a tray of drugs. She left it beside the bed and walked out into the corridor. Gran had gone silent. I knew they were about to change her bag. Grandad Pete looked up.

  ‘Every day it’s the same,’ he said. ‘The sound goes on and on. Even in my sleep I hear it. She’s haunting me already and she’s not even dead yet. The doctors tell me nothing. I can’t discuss it with anyone in case they try to stop me. It should be so easy. Look at the state of her. But I can’t do it unless I find a gun.’

  ‘I promise I’ll get you one,’ I heard myself say. I honestly believed that my offer might be enough to break the spell. Last night he had told me he’d once tried to suffocate her but had been unable to bear her body’s involuntary struggle. Surely, when it came to it, somebody who loved her this much couldn’t put a gun to her head. But all his life he had done her bidding, no matter how he felt inside. Grandad looked at me in despair for a moment before the nurse returned.

  ‘When did you ever keep a promise?’ he sneered.

  I could still hear Grandad’s scorn as I got on the Northern Line. The carriage was packed with sullen people. I wondered how many of them would wind up like Gran and how many – if they knew their fate – would sooner throw themselves under this train. Nobody should have to live like that. I felt sickened, remembering the way her head lolled as one tube fed into her and another tube slopped out. She would never let me out into the garden with food in my hand and had frowned on women smoking in the street. No purgatory for her could be crueller than this.

  It was after six o’clock when I reached Luke’s shop but I knew AAAsorted Tiles would still be open. You don’t put yourself first in the Yellow Pages unless you’re the sort of person to hold monster late-closing New Year’s Eve sales. The store was crammed with bargain hunters. I walked along the main aisle and spied Luke through the window of the office, talking on the telephone. This time he knew exactly who I was as I approached. I climbed the steps up and pushed open the office door. There were boxes of tiles on the floor and scattered bunches of dockets and invoices on his desk. I leaned on the edge of it and watched him deal methodically with the details of his business call. I had never wanted to see him again, but who else had I to turn to? I’d seen Luke turn violent on Al and, put to the test, scorn me. His family were criminals and he cheated on his wife. Yet, deep down, part of me still felt that I could trust him. Finally he lowered the phone.