Back in Southsea, I cook breakfast for Tom and then head across the road to intercept the carers. Since Thursday, Sue Dawkins has doubled up the morning help, a practical acknowledgement that my dad has become more of a hazard on his legs. Last night, though, has convinced me that no amount of doubling up can compensate for the latest batch of dead nerve cells. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask the doctor to call. Today, my dad can stay in bed.
The carers are already on the job by the time I let myself into the flat. They’ve propped my father up on the side of the bed while they soap and rinse the upper half of his body. He gazes up at them, slack-faced, bewildered. One of the women, Marilyn, is a favourite of his. She’s a big-hearted, cheerful Pompey girl and she’s always managed to lighten his habitual gloom. Today, though, she simply can’t get through. He’s changed. He’s different. Something’s happened.
She’s right. I’m looking at the sheets. My nappy-skills are obviously in their infancy. The sheets are heavily soiled. How come the PVC pants didn’t contain it all? Marilyn and I have a brief discussion. When I mention the pants, she hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about. When they pulled the sheets back, only minutes ago, my father was naked below the waist. Someone had taken the pants off.
I’m tempted to ask my mother what happened but I know there’s little point. She’s up most nights, three, four in the morning, trying to steady my father while he relieves himself in the old plastic tub they use as a potty. She must have taken the pants and the nappy off and simply discarded them - hence the state of the sheets - but trying to concentrate her mind about all this, trying to get through to her that the nappy is important, would simply add another foggy layer of confusion to a world she barely understands. Already, the nappy would have disappeared into that porridge of white cells that used to be her memory. Kinder, therefore, not to mention it.
By now, though, even my mother has begun to acknowledge that something very profound and very terrible has happened to my dad. She’s watched Tom and I struggling to keep him vertical. She’s done far more than her fair share of trying to cope. My father has always had a deep-rooted fear of being carted off to hospital. But hospital, just now, may be where he belongs. Hence tomorrow’s call to the doctor.
A face appears at the living room door. It’s Marilyn. My dad has slipped onto the floor. The two women haven’t a prayer of getting him upright again. Can we help? I phone for Tom and we go through to the bedroom. My father is lying on the floor between the bed and the wall. It takes five of us - including Lin - to get him into bed. By midday, he’s asleep while we retire to lick our wounds.
A long-standing invitation to a drinks party takes us along the seafront. Betty Burton, a fellow-novelist, has been awarded an honorary degree at the local university and she’s having a modest celebration. We spend a couple of hours chatting to friends. Four glasses of wine have absolutely no effect. Lack of sleep and a succession of shocks have created a strange nether world, utterly divorced from the busy hum of conversation around me. Who are these people? How dare they be so cheerful?
We walk home amongst the weekend crowds along the seafront. It’s dramatic weather - bright sunshine tempered by a fierce, tugging wind - and we sit on a bench for half an hour, an event unusual enough to raise a rueful smile. Going home is facing it. Going home is coping. Better to sit in the chilly sunshine, pretending we’re someone else.
Back in the flat, my father lies in bed. He’s been asleep all day. My mother, uncomprehending, stands in the open doorway, staring in at him. We coax her into the kitchen and we all have a cup of tea. For the first time any of us can remember, my father hasn’t had anything to eat all day. I make a weak joke about his weight. Occasional fasting might solve a problem or two. His current passion for bananas - seven a day - has done nothing for his waistline, and my back. A slimline dad would do us all a lot of favours. Not least, him.
We leave at five. An hour or so later, my mother calls us back again. He says he wants the commode. He says it’s urgent. Come quick. We race across. My father is already half-out of bed, reaching blindly for the Zimmer frame. The Zimmer frame is four feet away. It might as well be in Africa.
I prepare the commode. The three of us try and get him standing on his feet. It doesn’t work. There’s no way he can help us and without his help we - in turn - are helpless. He’s sitting on the bed. He’s crying. Time, yet again, is running out. It’s never been as bad as this. Never. We try again, heaving and straining. Finally, we lever him up to the vertical and attach his hands to the Zimmer. Getting him across to the commode, two steps at the most, should be child’s play. It isn’t. He won’t move. Can’t move. Finally, with a surge of what I darkly recognise as blind fury, I lift him bodily. He yells like a baby. The legs of the commode get wedged against the side of the bed. There simply isn’t enough room.
Lin darts across to tug the bed closer to the other wall. For the longest twenty seconds I can remember, my mother and I hang onto him, locked into a grotesque family tableau. If he falls now, there’s no way we’d ever get him up again. The bed shifted across, Lin repositions the commode. Another tiny adjustment and my father sinks backwards onto the seat. He looks terrible, his hair everywhere, his skin the colour of putty. We go through to the kitchen while he begins to strain on the commode.
A minute or so later, through the open door, comes a noise. It’s a noise I’ve never heard in my life. It sounds like an animal being strangled. I head for the bedroom. My father is tipped forward over the commode. His head is slumped on his chest and his eyes are bulging, and the noises are coming from way down inside him. He’s dying. I know it. I don’t need books to tell me. Or diagrams. Or experts. This is what happens. This is the noise you make when the game is finally up. Helpless, I try and ease his head back. Dimly, I’m aware of Lin behind me.
“Get an ambulance.”
My mother appears, hobbling slowly in from the kitchen. She can’t take her eyes off my father. The noise has eased now and he’s lying back in my arms. His eyes are closed. A sheen of sweat has appeared on the putty-greyness of his face. His breathing is very shallow, barely audible. I stare out through the net curtains, completely numbed. I don’t know what to think, what to say. What’s happening is obvious, and ugly, and completely beyond my control. It isn’t until days later that I realise that not a single practical thought had entered my head. Not the kiss of life. Not external heart massage. Nothing. All I could do was hold him, and let the view through the window slowly blur.
Lin returns. The ambulance is coming. My father’s chin is on his chest again. Every now and again he gives a little shake, again like an animal, but he’s deeply unconscious. My mother hasn’t moved. She just stares and stares.
The ambulance arrives. The crew hurry in with oxygen and cardiac equipment. The first thing they want to know is my father’s name.
“Stanley? Stanley? Can you hear me?”
The para-medic’s name is Sean. He looks middle-aged. He wears glasses. He kneels beside my father, trying to get through. At last, my father’s head comes up. The glassy stare.
“Yes?”
“Are you OK? Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“How do you feel? Have you got a pain?”
While Jane, Sean’s colleague, sticks cardiac leads to my father’s chest, the interrogation goes on. Remarkably, my father seems more cogent than he’s been for days. What this tells us about the life force isn’t entirely clear but my father has obviously retained a grip of sorts.
Sean is taking his blood pressure. It’s dangerously low. He and Jane are talking of a heart attack. He prepares an injection while my father’s head goes down again. He’s breathing oxygen now, the clear plastic mask strapped to his face.
The cardiac machine begins to chatter and a long paper read-out spills across the carpet. The news here is better. The heart is pumping very slowly but there’s no sign of terminal damage. Sean has the syringe ready. Lin and I can do nothing but watch. The c
are and the skills of these people is extraordinary. I’ve always been impressed by para-medics and these two have very obviously saved my father’s life.
At last my mother stirs. She’s said absolutely nothing for the last half hour but now she has a thought she wants to share with us.
“If only he just died” she says, “If only he didn’t have to go through all this.”
It’s a moment of the blackest comedy. I’m watching Jane. She’s staring up at my mother. She can’t believe her ears. She turns quickly away to monitor the resus equipment but there’s no disguising the faint shake of the head and the quick exchange of glances with Sean. These people have just hauled my father back from the brink. And my mum, bless her, wishes they hadn’t.
I ride in the ambulance to the hospital. My father is now very much with us and the oxygen has pinked his face. He hasn’t looked so healthy for months and as I say my goodbyes to Sean and Jane outside the Accident and Emergency Unit, thanking them for everything they’ve done, I feel almost fraudulent.
Sean, I suspect, is no stranger to these situations. He pats me on the arm.
“Good luck” he says.
Eight
In the Accident and Emergency Unit, my father occupies a curtained cubicle beyond a pair of swing doors. A succession of medics conduct more tests, trying to tease a clinical picture from my account of what happened, and from the umpteen para-medic read-outs, already logged and cross-referenced. The care and attention he’s getting, barely an hour after the event, is beyond belief. Read the newspapers and you might come to the conclusion that the NHS is failing us. It’s not true. Just here, just now, my father couldn’t be in better hands.
The tests over, a doctor appears. Her name is Alison and she looks about 25. She’s tall and dark and slightly harrassed, and once again she attempts to piece together all the fragments of evidence that the tests and yours truly have provided. She runs her stethoscope over my father’s chest. She tests his reflexes. She shines a light in his eyes. She examines his tongue. And finally she reaches a provisional conclusion.
“I’m afraid he’s had another stroke” she says, “You were lucky the ambulance got there so quickly.”
Lucky? I’m looking down at my father, thinking of my mum. Lin’s bringing her up to the hospital in the camper van. What happens next?
“He’ll be admitted” Alison says, “Either here or down at St Mary’s. They’ve got a stroke ward there. It may be that we’ll transfer him across.”
She leaves to hunt for a bed and I stay by the stretcher, looking down at my father. His eyes are closed and he’s still wearing the oxygen mask but he’s obviously conscious because every time I move his eyes flicker open. My hand finds his.
“How do you feel?”
“Shocking.”
“Whereabouts?”
“I don’t know.”
I find Lin and my mum amongst the walking wounded in the waiting room. I take them through to see my father. My mother, catching sight of him lying there, is uncertain. She doesn’t know quite what to do and neither does he. Displays of affection have never come easily to either of them. Even touching seems awkward and somehow unnatural and so she stands beside the stretcher, staring blankly down at him, saying nothing.
A nurse brings news that a bed has been found for him in a ward upstairs. Two porters turn up and we follow the three of them as they wheel my father down a long subterranean corridor towards the older part of the hospital. Because of my mother’s hip, we can’t begin to keep up with them and it’s the oddest feeling, watching my father receding into the gloom of this long tunnel, hung with an assortment of ticking pipes. If I was making a feature film, this would be the perfect image for death. Your time is up. We’ve come to take you away.
On the ward, the staff settle my father while a nurse takes yet more particulars. We talk in a side room, thoughtfully furnished with tea and coffee. Once again, the nurse is exceptionally patient and her tact and kindness cushion the shocks of the past few hours. The old boy’s in good hands. That, at least, is a relief.
Before we leave, we sit beside him in the ward. The surrounding beds are occupied by gaunt old men in various stages of decay but there’s a resilient cheerfulness amongst the small army of nurses and attendants. A young Australian houseman asks me to describe again exactly what happened. His manner is almost apologetic. It’s early days but he’s clearly determined to get to the bottom of this latest episode.
We’re back home by nine. We open a bottle of wine and put a flame under the remains of the curry. My mother will be staying with us until we all get a chance to draw breath. Hunting for the carer’s telephone number to cancel tomorrow’s call, I realise that it’s over the road, scrawled on my mother’s kitchen calender.
I slip out into the darkness. It’s stopped raining now and it’s much colder. Inside the flat, the lights are still on and I stand in the open bedroom door, gazing in. It’s the strangest tableau: the bedclothes thrown back, my father’s pyjama bottoms on the pillow, his nappy discarded on the floor, the blue bucket beside it. It looks like a battlefield and in a way I suppose it is. Whether we’ve won or lost the battle is utterly beyond me but as I stoop to retrieve the wreckage from the carpet I know with absolute certainty that he’ll never come back here. In all kinds of senses, he’s gone. Forever.
Nine
We drink a lot of wine that night and the feeling of a wake, of a page irretrievably turned, grows stronger. My mother talks about the first time she and my father met. It was 1937. Down from London, she was staying with her parents and a girlfriend in a rented house on St Osyth Beach, out on the Essex coast. She and Renee, just 19, walked into nearby Clacton, looking for something to do. There, in a cafe of some sort, she met my father.
“I thought to myself Who is this beautiful man?” she says, “And I told Renee to keep her hands off.”
She skips forward in the story, beyond their wedding day. The war has ended. They’ve been married for three years. They’ve settled down in a chilly upstairs flat in Clacton. My father has returned to his pre-war job as a clerk in the Town Hall. Then I turn up.
She’s getting sentimental. Half a bottle of St Emillon has a lot to answer for.
“You were lovely” she says fondly, “No trouble at all.”
My father, fresh from the RAF, was crazy about sport. He was especially good at cricket and badminton but my mother quickly tired of the company of cricket widows and simply didn’t understand why she was alone so much of the time. When my father wasn’t working, he was off on some match or other. My father never gave this passion of his a second thought - sport was what men did - but for my mother this new life she’d chosen became a deepening mystery. Wasn’t marriage about caring and sharing and providing a bit of support? Where was this beautiful man she’d married?
She tells more stories, not with malice but with a kind of regret. I was much too young to have been aware of these early days in Clacton but the rest of it I remember only too well and when she hints at the long evenings of silence by the fire, punctuated by concerts on the Third Programme, I know exactly what she means. My father was never much bothered by other people. Curiousity - even simple conversation - was never quite his thing.
Next morning I’m due to drive to Gloucestershire on a research assignment for the book I’m writing. For once, it’s non-fiction. The book is called AIRSHOW and my brief is to spend a year alongside the team of men and women who make and shape the world’s biggest military air tattoo. After ten novels, it’s been nice to have a change and I’ve been thriving on the mix of reportage and simple nosiness that has taken me into the small print of so many lives. It’s April now, just three months from the show itself, and the book is already half-complete.
This morning I’m due at a food and wine tasting at the premises of a Cotswold firm of outside caterers. They’re contracted for the airshow’s Gala Dinner, a black-tie occasion attracting royalty, government ministers, plus a raft of foreign and UK s
ervice chiefs. Because this event is so prestigious, the choice of food and drink for the 600 guests is correspondingly important. Hence the tasting.
In professional terms, the day goes well. A delegation from British Aerospace, this year’s sponsors of the Gala Dinner, have joined forces with half a dozen of the show organisers, and the tasting yields a wealth of material. I know it’ll make a wonderful scene for the book but as I watch and listen - scribbling the odd note to myself - I can’t help thinking how remote and how irrelevant all this is. Who cares whether the confit of duck is a bit too greasy? Will the substitution of a Pouilly-Fuisee for the ‘84 Gewurztraminer really rock the world on its axis? When my dad’s lying there in hospital? Edging ever closer to the grave?
These are daft questions, of course, occasioned by shock and the first slow stirrings of anger, but daft is equally the word I’d attach to the pantomime I watch unfolding before me. The seventh wine option has loosened too many tongues. The drunker we get, the more we’re convinced of our own culinary prowess. When one of the British Aerospace ladies mounts a serious bit for mashed potato (“so trendy these days”) I fight the urge to applaud. Mashed spud, my dad’s all-time favourite, some deep genetic echo of his Tipperary ancestors.
The road back from the tasting takes me through a string of pretty Cotswold villages - honeyed stone and shrouded churchyards - and deep in the country I stop the van on a narrow bridge that straddles the infant Thames. The river here is only five miles from its source and I stare down from the driver’s seat, thinking about the events of the last ten days.
Estuary Page 3
