by John Hunt
“Laurel and Hardy,” he said. “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve got me into.” He tried to put an exclamation at the end of the sentence but didn’t have the strength.
His father enjoyed the quick smile and easy silence that followed. It caused him to look at his son differently, as if seeing something he’d not noticed before. To align their height, he moved higher up his pillows. Father to son, eye to eye. Phen enjoyed seeing the top half of the patient vertical for a change. Although he continued to shrivel, his pyjamas gave him broad shoulders and a firm chest as the thick flannel armoured his body. It was only the thin neck that could not be disguised. Even with the top button fastened, a huge moat circled the sagging skin.
“You look uncomfortable.”
“Don’t want to damage the tape recorder.”
“Put it on the floor.”
“Then you won’t be able to reach it.”
His father shrugged. Phen imagined the gaunt collarbones tensing as they tried to lift the scrawny shoulders. It was only after the Philips had been tucked under the bed that he fully understood the implication of his actions. His father thrust a bony finger towards him and simply said, “You.” He was back. Reader-in-chief. Storyteller to the man on the pillowed throne. Phen looked up at the bookcase waiting to do the king’s bidding. Instead, the emaciated neck swivelled left and right within its flannel collar. The Adam’s apple looked dangerously too big and in need of scaffolding to hold it in place.
“There’s not enough time for long stories and elaborate plots. Tick tock. Tick tock. Side table by the window. Bottom drawer.”
Phen stood up and moved around to the other side of the bedroom. He pulled at the little plastic handle and eventually managed to work it open.
“Under the Milk of Magnesia.”
He lifted out the dark-blue glass bottle and saw a large book as thick and as wide as an encyclopaedia. Besides being a little frayed at the top and bottom of its spine, it was otherwise in good condition. The pages looked stuck together the way only time could seal them. The cover lay flat, heavy and silent like an unused door. Phen ran his hand across the five characters of the title and was surprised to find it deeply embossed. His fingers disappeared into what was once silver lettering but now shone with an oxidised green.
“Chums annual. Nineteen twenty-seven. My Christmas present when I was your age.”
Phen stared at the cover and tried to imagine his father as a young boy holding the book. The cowboy had crested the hill and was now galloping on his trusted steed straight towards the reader. A line of pines guided his way while the horse’s hooves created clouds of dust. Lasso at the ready, it formed a loose circle behind his Stetson and ensnared the bottom of the H and the U. His father could’ve used the scarf that was neatly tied around the buckaroo’s neck. His belt appeared too big for him, the pistol in its leather holster bouncing far from his hip.
“Open it.”
The book was so heavy he had to put it on the bed. He watched his father exhaust himself by lifting his hips and moving sideways to make room. Once he’d got his breath back and had a sip of water, he gave the order again.
“Open it.”
The first page was a black-and-white lithograph of another cowboy riding up a hill pursued by four Indians. Phen wondered if this had any relationship to the action on the front cover. It was a brave man who took on four rampant Sioux with a few yards of circular rope. On the left side was a fold-out that released itself into three panels, each lined with deep crevices. “Wonders Beneath the Street” was a set of diagrams, all precisely labelled, showing the engineering feats of London’s underground railway system. Tunnels, like tin cans stuck together, wormed their way from Camden Town to Kennington New Street. They burrowed under Tottenham Court, Oxford Circus and Charing Cross, coming up for air at Bank, Liverpool Street and Canonbury.
It was a Jules Verne world, although there was nothing to fear. The Dead Man’s Handle was explained. Should the Motor Man be suddenly taken ill whilst driving, his hand would be removed from the driving handle. A button immediately sprang up and the brakes were instantly applied. Likewise, a cross-section drawing of the lift shaft, not dissimilar to Phen’s Krakatoa, described how a rotating ball governor ensured that the cage ascended and descended at a regular pace. In addition, a safety catch was fitted so the lift could not be started until the gate was shut. Phen pondered what the cowboy and four Indians would think if they ever made it across to the other page.
He stood beside the bed with a flat hand on each page. The Reverend Clayburn did this at his church just before he began to preach or give a reading. Perhaps he thought the good book could be absorbed quicker through his fingers. Phen pretended he was at the lectern, straightened his back and waited for his congregation of one to tell him what to do. Even in this room, reeking of illness, the honest smell of stored paper lifted off the book’s pages. His father seemed to catch the musty scent too. He lifted his nose and closed his eyes.
“Just the colour plates,” he said. “Read the captions under the colour plates. I know the stories. I’ve read them each a thousand times.”
The first one he found was a group of fierce-looking nomads who blocked the way of two men dressed in khaki. They hovered around their desert vehicle not sure whether to reach for their guns or not. Both looked more stoic than terrified. Their upright posture and steady gaze from under their pith helmets showed they would not be cowed.
“A Crisis in the Desert,” Phen read. “‘No ordinary Arabs these, but fearless and daring, with eyes that flashed and glinted as s-s-s-savagely as the eyes of their mounts. The arm that held the s-s-spear was bent backwards, it had only to move forward and the s-s-spearhead would dart towards the white man’s chest like a s-s-s-serpent’s tongue!’” Then it s-s-says in brackets …”
“See Sparrow-Hawk’s exciting yarn ‘The Spear-Arabs’,” his father completed the sentence. “Go to the pirate one.”
Phen found the “Marooned” colour plate opposite “Stamp Corner” by Stanley Phillips. “Cutlass took off his hat and made a s-s-sweeping bow. ‘Farewell, Picaroon! Farewell, Martain Lacy!’ he cried. ‘Here on Doom Island, you’ll be fellow captives until one of you dies.’”
“From S. Walkey’s thrilling story ‘Marooned’.” His father smiled at the memory of it.
Phen stared at the picture of the downcast teenager manacled to a tough-looking pirate with an anchor tattoo on his wrist. They were chained ankle to ankle, yet he seemed more thoughtful than worried. Even with the rest of the crew setting off on a rowing boat back to the ship, he remained nothing more than pensive.
“The Fourth Throw,” his father asked.
A young boy about Phen’s age was tied to the massive trunk of a tree. His shirt was tucked into the top of his jodhpurs, which in turn were neatly pushed into knee-high leather boots. His arms were stretched sideways; one spear pierced the cotton cuff although it had missed his wrist. The pupils of his eyes were wide, yet the squareness of his jaw and clenched mouth showed a grim determination. A highly muscled warrior with a skin tied around his waist and a red-feathered headdress was about to hurl another spear straight at him. A group of his tribesmen, clutching their shields, looked on with mild interest.
“Derek realised that Zumtewayo was balancing for the throw, and as the great black arm rose to the level of the plumed head, his knees s-s-shook with terror.”
“The Witchdoctor’s Victim.”
His father fell silent. Not sure if he was drifting back to sleep, Phen turned to the next colour plate. High up in the Alps, a powerful motorbike seemed to be racing a train. As they both roared around the bend, Phen saw the motorcyclist was on the ledge of a wall that curved around the railway track. Wheels blurred with speed as he flattened himself behind the handlebars and desperately tried to avoid falling down the yawning precipice. Behind him, black smoke poured from the oncoming locomotive in relentless pursuit. “‘Unhesitatingly, Terry opened the throttle to the limit,
felt the bike leap beneath him and saw the bay under the front wheel’ … Allen’s thrilling story, ‘Dynamite Devine’.”
He turned to his father to await instructions. The halo of the bedside lamp illuminated a pair of moist cheeks. The tears ran down his face without being absorbed. There was no sound to the crying. The eyes stayed closed even as they leaked. There was no attempt to brush the weeping away. The water raced to the edge of his jaw, gathered in drops, then leaped onto his pyjama top.
“Adventure. I was scared of living a little life.” His eyes remained closed. “Terrified if you drew a map of what I’d done you’d find no contours. Just flat … frightened I’d wake up at the end and not be able to remember any of it.”
His face was streaked with rivulets. They ran faster now over his thin, shiny skin. Some formed tributaries as they coursed downwards, zigzagging between the stubble. Phen wanted to reach for the tissues on the bedside table but he stood still. He’d never seen his father cry before. Ever. The face looked rained-on under the light.
“Weights or wings. Get dragged through or try fly above.” Again the shoulders shrugged like some skinny puppet manipulated from above. He looked around the room again. “Unhesitatingly, Dynamite Dad leaves the bedpan on the sideboard and all-powerfully, inch by inch, strides magnificently across the unknown frontier towards the toilet. All he has at his side is his trusty scout Phen. Will they make it? Or is their incredible adventure doomed to failure?”
Phen helped his father twist sideways and placed his slippers directly beneath his waiting soles. His toes hung down pink and baby-like. The fur lining of the slippers smothered his ankles and grew up towards his shins. To stand, the knees, then back, then neck had to unfold themselves in three separate stages like the foldout in the Chums annual. He moved forward, sliding his feet slowly, then stopped as if waiting for acknowledgement that he’d made it halfway across the parquet badlands.
“I once peed into the Limpopo from the bank. It was only June but it was already long dry. Didn’t make any difference, although I felt I’d contributed. Does it matter being insignificant, if we are uniquely so? Either way, in the end, we become a parody of ourselves.”
Phen waited at the closed door for his father to finish. Pal passed with the tennis ball in his mouth and could not be persuaded to stay. It mattered less now that he was no longer scared of this part of the apartment. The narrow passageway didn’t squeeze at his stomach the way it used to. The absurd dado rail running horizontally and into itself like a snake eating its own tail didn’t unnerve him any more. Still, he wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to be older and wiser and sure of himself. He leaned against the wall and decided he was in an important hall in a renowned university. Perhaps Oxford or Cambridge. Church-like windows allowed the light to fall on him, as it did on Mr Lansdown. Long, golden shafts illuminated him and the eager crowd he waited to address. With a pipe still smouldering in the pocket of his tweed jacket, he peered over the thick frames of his glasses and began his lecture. Margaret Wallace, now a university student in a white miniskirt shamelessly borrowed from Zelda, swooned at his every sentence, mesmerised by the depth of his erudition.
“Apologies for the delay,” his father called out, trying to be jolly and taking deep breaths after every second word. “It appears I’m full of sound and fury. So far it has signified nothing.”
The body that made it to the bathroom needed four stops on its journey back to the bedroom. His skeleton offered no ledge to stop his pants from falling down. “Every time a coconut.” Phen would retrieve them from the slippers and slide them up to his chest. Clutching the waistband at heart height they edged forward. Phen could hold him on the elbow but was not allowed to put his arm around his father’s body. “We’re walking, not dancing.” They inched past “Lily’s folly”, the folded, never-used wheelchair, flat and sandwiched between the wall and the wardrobe. “If I was meant to have wheels, I’d have been assembled in Detroit.”
It took his father a full ten minutes to recover. The bravado in the bathroom and the walk back left him panting and white. He breathed so heavily into the oxygen mask it filled with condensation and made the middle of his face disappear. While Phen waited he kept the Chums annual closed and on his lap. It had assumed a sacredness. “How to Build your own Valve Radio”, “Sportsmanship in the Ring” and “How Eskimos Count” were all part of the holy text. He would not open it without permission. Being reinstated as reader-in-chief didn’t mean you could just randomly flick through your father’s paged and printed past.
“Keep it,” he said.
The oxygen mask was pushed up off his face. The elastic at the back of his neck kept it tightly wedged at the top of his forehead. The air continued to blast through, making his hair dance in the plastic cone. It hissed differently, angry and annoyed at its abuse.
“It’s yours. Keep it.”
Phen held up the book to confirm the meaning of his words. He didn’t like the wave of his father’s hand. It was too urgent, too impatient. As if he was chasing something away. He had to take the book now. The book must leave. Phen understood that by getting the colour plates, the diagrams, the stories, he was losing his father. He looked down at the cover. The cowboy kept his lasso in a lazy loop and his horse kept galloping down the mountain. The pines stayed rooted and in their straight lines, the story would remain the same forever, but not the reader.
Phen stood up, holding the annual to his chest. He waited to be dismissed, not sure if the wave of the hand included him as well as the book. His father turned sideways, allowing himself to be profiled in the pillow, and watched him with one eye. His hair still swayed and twirled in its plastic dome. Although the curtains were drawn he knew the afternoon sun was low. It was time to take Pal for his walk. His self-control was beginning to crumble. He was desperate to get out and determined to stay. He saw the tape recorder at his feet and wished he could push Pause. Everything was happening too fast.
“Can I ask you a favour?”
“Yes.”
“I would ask your mother, but she won’t. And my eyes are too bad. I’m due for a shot any minute. The morphine takes the pain away. Unfortunately my mind goes with it, so we’d have to do it now.”
“What?”
“Under the Milk of Magnesia bottle, once more.”
Phen walked to the other side of the bedroom again and opened the drawer. The light was poor, and at first he didn’t see it.
“In the back, far corner.”
The book was small, pocket-sized. Unlike the Chums annual, the cover was broken and deeply scarred. A crack up the centre caused the leather to erupt and peel. The brown skin clung on, bent and fraying yet refusing to let go.
If the cover had a title it had been rubbed off a long time ago. It had disappeared against the rough fabric of a hundred different pockets. The corners had been forced inwards to accommodate the tighter pouches. A thin strand of cotton lay hooked in the blistered surface. It was clear the cover was not meant to serve as an announcement of its contents; rather it was a shield, a protective layer of what lay within. Phen opened it as carefully as possible. The spine seemed to groan, like someone forced to stretch. The pages stayed in an upright V, refusing to go any wider.
“Page sixty-seven.”
As he delicately leafed through the book he noticed the square verses displayed with military precision under their slightly bolder headings. “That Sanity be Kept”. “The Seed-at-Zero”, “This Side of the Truth”. He liked the short sentences and large gaps between stanzas. Words proud in their sturdy and brief building blocks. There seemed less room for camouflage here. And yet, he turned the pages slower and slower, scared of what he might find.
“I don’t want to be mawkish or even worse, obvious …” His father ran out of words. Phen kept the book in its tight V, scared of the damage opening it any wider might cause. This made getting any illumination very difficult. He had to bow under the bedside lamp and tilt the words towards the light.
Old age s-s-s-should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
As he read, his father began to breathe more evenly. Phen placed his voice above the swirl of the oxygen. Forced to face the lamp, he wanted to be sure his father could hear. Halfway through, he turned to face him and found him no longer staring into the wardrobe mirror, but up towards the ceiling. His head swayed imperceptibly as his eyes followed what his son couldn’t see.
Wild men who caught and s-s-sang the s-s-sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who s-s-see with blinding s-sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
“Well read. Again.”
18
Succumb
