Estuary
Graham Hurley
One
Two days before he died, my father allowed himself to be photographed. What’s left of the man who shaped my life is dwarfed by the shiny plastic armchair in which he sits. He’s staring at the camera, his bony unfleshed face gaunt with anxiety and foreboding while the lower half of his wasted body is hidden by the plump bolster on which he rests his purpling arms. My father was a big man, with big hands, and now those same hands are clinging to the bolster. He’s at sea. He’s drowning. And he knows it.
This image of the man who shaped my life is deeply shocking, all the more so because I’d been with him every step of the journey from the first of the strokes that had laid him low to this twilight moment in the nursing home when my father finally realised that the game was up. After a long life, decently led, he’d become the sum of all his fears. Or so I thought.
The day after the photograph was taken - the day before he died - I was back at the nursing home. The woman who’d snapped the Polaroid, Fran Foster, co-ran the home and over the eighteen months of my father’s stay she’d become a good friend to all of us. When I told her what an impact the photograph had made, she gave me a funny look.
“That was a smile” she said, “I told him this was a present for his best boy and he tried really hard. Believe me. He did.”
The photograph haunts me still. I shall take it to my grave.
Two
By April 1998, my mother and father had been living across the road from us for nearly three years. He’d suffered the first stroke while they were both still in Clacton-on-Sea, the Essex resort that had been their home since the war, but my mother was already showing the first signs of dementia and it was quickly obvious that they wouldn’t be able to cope without a great deal of help. My father has never been good at dealing with crises and I knew from phone calls and frequent visits that the aftermath of the stroke was testing him to the limit. We lived in Southsea, a three and a half hour drive away. With my father robbed of movement in his left leg, and my mother’s short-term memory fading fast, our only option was to bring them much, much closer.
The flat we found was fifteen yards away from our front door. It was modern, warm, spacious, and altogether ideal. My mother could still cook, still shop, still attend to most of my father’s needs. The heavier work - longer trips in the wheelchair, visits to the doctor’s surgery or the hairdresser - would be our responsibility. More to the point, we’d never be more than a phone call away. If anything serious happened - a fall, say, or another major stroke - we could be across the road in seconds.
And it worked. While we both retained our independence, we lived as close to each other as the ever-narrowing circumstances of my father’s predicament demanded. A series of minor strokes progressively weakened him. He got around with the aid of a stick at first, then a Zimmer frame, and finally a wheelchair. I’d always known him as a physically big man and he now weighed nearly seventeen stone, thanks to the meals my mother so religiously prepared, but while his sheer bulk made him a bit of a handful he could still do enough for himself to make the situation manageable. We were into each other’s houses daily. We popped over for an evening drink or a Saturday night plate of fish and chips. We drove out to country pubs for a couple of pints and a meal. We shared birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas. Not since childhood had I seen so much of my mum and dad.
Then, in the late spring of 1998, the gathering shadows abruptly deepened. From this point onwards, none of our lives would ever be the same, and in some dim, unfathomed way I think I understood that. Hence the diary I began to keep. And hence the change of tense.
Three
The news comes from my wife, Lin. It’s early evening, rain in the air, and she’s picked me up from work. My father has had some kind of turn. Asleep in his chair, late afternoon, he’d begun to mumble. My mother, bent over him, could do nothing but watch. Eventually, he’s come to but his conversation no longer makes much sense. Best if I pop in and have a look. Mum’s worried. And who can blame her?
My father is 82. When I get across the road to the flat he’s sitting upright in the big blue riser chair, gazing sightlessly at the telly. At first, he doesn’t seem to recognise me. His eyes are huge and glassy, a watery blue. I ask him if he’s OK. He looks bewildered, as if he doesn’t quite understand the question. His lap and his legs are half-covered with an old dressing gown. Even twenty years ago, it was too small to really fit him.
The doctor and the social workers call it TIA. TIA stands for Trans-Ischaemic Attack, a brief tremor way down in the brain, a tiny death occasioned by old age and a faltering blood supply. Another word for it, cruder and infinitely more chilling, is stroke. Where might this one figure on the Richter scale of recent episodes? Major or minor? Serious or otherwise? After all the other TIAs, stretching back more than three years, there’s no real way of knowing.
I stay for half an hour or so and warm up some soup. My father refusing food is the surest sign that something is seriously wrong. Eventually he begins to spoon the soup into his mouth. I watch him very carefully, looking for evidence of motor nerve damage, but he doesn’t spill a drop. When I warn him that it’s very hot, he shakes his head.
“It will be when I’ve finished” he mutters, “Aren’t you going to work today?”
Next morning, he’s no better. He lies in bed, propped up against the pillows, his big white face slack and jowly. When I ask him whether he’s slept OK he looks blanker than ever. I try again to coax some sense from him - has he had any breakfast? Does he know what day it is? Can he remember the name of his favourite carer? - and in the end we have a strange half-conversation, blind guesswork on both sides. I can tell by now that he’s trying, really trying, to get a grip on things but he can’t arrange the words in the right order and semi-formed sentences slowly uncoil as he tries to lassoo some passing fancy in what remains of his brain.
It’s inexpressibly sad, watching him like this, but when my mother asks again what’s going to happen, whether or not he’s going to get better, I assure her that there’s bound to be some kind of improvement. He’s had another little stroke. The blood flow to some remote part of his brain has been cut off and he’s lost another spoonful of white cells. Around the edges of the crater, there’ll be some modest recovery. Movement in his one good leg and his arms is still more or less intact. The confusion, or most of it, will quickly seep away. Trust me.
She does. For the rest of the evening we wait for him to perk up, expecting some signal that the intricate matrices of my father’s brain are sorting themselves out, that the neural messages - those tiny flickers of electrical current - are finding new pathways, patching up the damage, restoring a little coherence, making good until the moment inevitably arrives when a major blood vessel closes down and my father’s lights go out forever.
He knows that too, I think, just the way he’s known it since the first stroke, over three years ago, robbed him of movement in his left leg. Since then, he’s confronted mortality with an ever-changing mixture of rage, frustration, self-pity, and - just occasionally - blind fear.
My father has always maintained an iron grip on the smallest detail of his life. Over the years, his determination never to be taken by surprise has built him a cage of his own making. Deeply suspicious by nature, he’s done his best to keep life at bay, believing - quite wrongly - that a clear conscience and promptly settled bills would secure him some kind of immunity from the world’s ruder awakenings.
He’s been this way as long as I can remember and his absolute refusal to entertain risk of any kind is one of the reasons we’ve never been truly close. This belief that he was somehow armour-clad must have made the shock of that first stroke all the more powerful. The long months in hospital and
the imminent prospect of the rest of his life in a wheelchair was the grossest injustice and on the bleaker days he’d rage against my mother, beating his fists against the doors that his own failing biochemistry had closed. Once, he even hit her, a fact that I found harder to forgive than I think she did.
“So how are you?”
It’s the morning of the second day after my father dropped off in the armchair. He’s propped up in bed again. And he’s smiling.
“Feeling OK?” I ask again.
For a moment or two, he doesn’t answer. The smile, if anything, gets wider. A thought of some kind, a response, is forming in the deep recesses of his brain. I can almost see it taking shape, sense the glee he obviously feels in trying to tease it into words. My father rarely smiles. Especially not recently. And especially not in the mornings.
Finally, he answers my question.
“I don’t know” he says.
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
The thought visibly gladdens him. The angst, the self-pity, the burdensome cargo of despair he’s shouldered throughout his life, have - for a moment - gone. In their place, has come a faintly manic sense of amusement. My father, no matter how briefly, has joined the rest of us. Life, quite plainly, is absurd.
“Do you hurt anywhere?”
“Hurt?”
“Does anything hurt?” I gesture loosly at the mountain of blankets covering his huge frame. “Is your tummy OK? Have you got a headache?”
The question means nothing to him. He wants to know if I’m going to bed soon.
“It’s morning, dad. You’ve slept all night.”
“I don’t know.”
“You have. You’re getting better.”
I watch his eyes fighting to focus on me. A cold cup of tea lies on the chest of drawers beside his bed.
“I don’t know who I am” he says at last, “I don’t know anything.”
Four
Two days later, I take the train west. We live in Southsea, a once-genteel seaside resort tacked onto the bottom of Portsmouth. We also have a modest second-floor flat in a beautiful, thick-walled old Georgian house overlooking the Devon coast at Exmouth.
We’ve had the flat now for more than ten years and both Lin and I love it. The chances are that we’ll end up there, tucked up in our seat in the dress circle, watching the seasons change. The prospect warms me, not because I want to hasten the coming of old age - far from it - but because the flat and the view have always had an absolute rightness that somehow conferred an instant sense of peace. I bought it, quite literally, the moment I stepped into the front room and looked out through the big sash window. No survey. No haggling. Not even the usual inquiries about whether or not the place had central heating. Then, and now, it floods our lives with sunshine.
The beach, miles and miles of it, curls away towards the east. When the tide’s on the ebb, the water pours out of the River Exe, flattening the line of buoys that flag the shipping channel to the open sea. The water is gin-clear and the falling tide sucks and sucks until the offshore sandbanks appear, quickly dotted with seagulls, oyster-catchers, dunlins, and avocets. My favourite run takes me along the beach, around the cafe which used to house the coastguard station, and then on beyond the sand dunes to the red sandstone prow of Orcombe Point. The bite of the wind, and the puddles of soft light on the hills across the estuary, salt my exhaustion, conjuring sense from my own bewilderment. The magic of this place is one of life’s rare constants. My dad isn’t my dad any more. The bit of him that dozed off in the chair went to sleep forever.
I phone Lin when I get back to the flat. She, bless her, has already been across the road a couple of times.
“How are they?”
“They’re OK. Much the same really. How is it down there?”
“Brilliant. I can’t tell you.”
“Have the boys arrived?”
“This afternoon.”
The boys, respectively, are 25 and 18. They’re both children from my first marriage and this flat is the glue that has kept us together. For eight years, I made the journey down here every other weekend, determined to retrieve something from the wreckage. If I ever thought of the place as an investment then it was strictly emotional and in those terms the dividend has been immense. This on-going party of ours, resumed every ten days or so, has been a gently-deepening confection of darts tournaments, moorland excursions, nights around the video, clifftop walks, endless games of cribbage, and a rather haphazard flirtation with windsurfing. It’s been an odd-shaped peg onto which to hang the notion of fatherhood and while I’ve done my best never to confuse it with the real thing, the fact is that we’ve become very good mates, a friendship tempered - rather than weakened - by the brutal realities of divorce.
The boys arrive, on cue, at five. They’ve always found my father a rather forbidding figure - remote, stern, almost pathologically cautious - but now they’re keen to know how he is. Even more important, they want the latest on my mother. Indisposed or otherwise, my father has always required a degree of nursing through life’s rougher passages and with the natural intuition of kids, they’ve sensed this. My mother is herself in her eighties. She’s a great favourite with the kids. How on earth is she managing to cope?
I explain in some detail what’s happened, aware that I’m talking as much to myself as to them. My dad has had a kind of half-death. He’s not himself any more. After weeks of heavy rain, as it happens, the local cliffs have changed shape, their vegetation stripped away, the substrata of rock and shales laid bare. My dad’s a bit like that. Another gale. Another downpour. Then who knows?
Sensibly, we go to the pub. These get-togethers of ours are much rarer now and all the more precious for that. It’s a beautiful April evening, still and almost eerily quiet with the remains of a cold front piled high over the hills that rise from the west bank of the river. We stroll over the long tongue of glistening sand that licks into the estuary, talking.
My older boy, Tom, works for a big American firm of tree surgeons in Beaconsfield. His brother, Jack, is doing his “A” levels. In character and attitude they couldn’t be more different - Tom go-getting, organised, ambitious; Jack more relaxed, more gentle, less driven - but recently the seven year age gap seems to have narrowed and they’ve become close. Over Easter, they’ve been up to Newcastle together, giving Jack the chance to prowl around one of the universities on his UCCA list, and we sit against the seawall, watching the sun go down, talking about the north. When Tom was 12, he and I cycled across the Pennines together. As night creeps over the Haldon Hills, it seems like a lifetime ago.
Later, after the pub, we return to the flat to rescue the pork roast. The veggies will take another half hour or so and we stand around in the tiny kitchen, several pints down, discussing Tom’s love life. Six months or so ago he broke up with his girlfriend from university. They’d lived together for nearly four years. The decision to call it a day was his. His girlfriend retreated to the Shetland Isles and began a new relationship. Now, Tom’s just learned she’s pregnant. The news, understandably, has rather shaken him but when we do our best to disentangle all this balled-up emotion, what’s left seems - at least to me - to be jealousy. She used to belong to him. And now she’s carrying someone else’s baby.
This happens to be something I understand only too well. When I was his brother’s age - 18 - something faintly similar, though infinitely messier, happened to me. For the first time ever, I tell them the story. Some of the detail is startling. Other bits, I have to admit, are shameful. But the lesson remains the same. You make a decision. And then you live with the consequences.
My youngest, Jack, is still gazing at me. The last twenty minutes have, I fancy, given him a new take on yours truly. He looks across at his brother. For someone so young he’s remarkably perceptive and he recognises the parallels at once.
“Sins of the father” he murmurs approvingly, “Tops.”
&nbs
p; Five
I return to Southsea after the weekend. When I nip across the road to the flat, nothing seems to have changed. My mother is visibly relieved to have me back within reach but my father seems to think I’ve been out to the shops. He sits in the big blue chair, slack-jawed, his eyes half-closed. Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph lies upside down on his lap and there’s a tide-mark of crisps around his slippered feet.
After half an hour or so, I beat a retreat, extracting a promise from my mother that she’ll call the moment she needs me. She looks worn-out, poor thing, buffered from reality by paracetamol, sweet Martini, and the slow onset of dementia. Her own short term memory has long gone and she spends each day limping slowly back and forth between the kitchen and the front room. She knows where the fridge is. She knows how to light the gas. She still prepares three meals a day. But the rest, quite literally, is silence.
An hour later, she knocks on our door. My father is driving her crazy. Will I come and sort him out?
I find him spilling out of the chair. His trousers are round his ankles and he’s crying. Tears have been a regular feature of the last year or so, a consequence - he claims - of the strokes he’s suffered. That may well be true but these tears are different. He’s not crying for effect any more. Or for sympathy. Or because he’s so frustrated he can’t express it any other way. Instead, he’s crying the way an exhausted child cries, mute, unseeing, the tears pouring down his face.
I position the commode at right angles to the chair. Between us, my mother and I haul my father to his feet. He’s a big man but days ago this would have been relatively easy. Now, though, he doesn’t seem to understand what we need to do.
Estuary Page 1
