My father wants to know about the telephones. They’re everywhere. Who’s using them? And why? Telephones and water taps, in my father’s fevered imagination, have always been the devil’s playthings. They both represent waste, the wilful seeping-away of hard-earned money. He begins to grill me on the state of his own finances. Who’s paying for all this? Who pays Evelina and Fran?
Lying, I say it’s the DSS but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. The problem, he insists, is the way the money is divided. Some of it is my dad’s and some is my mum’s but the rest belongs to the two ladies on the wall. I follow his trembling finger. The two ladies are the Princess of Wales. When I point this out, adding that she doesn’t really need the money, he shakes his head. She looks like the Princess of Wales but she isn’t. And she’s still got his money. This is a different kind of mania, altogether quieter, more thoughtful, almost cogent. Then, quite suddenly, he stares at me.
“All those films” he says in alarm, “That’s a hellava lot of money.”
The following morning, I find my father on the commode. We conduct the briefest conversation through the folding screen and he tells me that I’m to stay all day, and tomorrow, and for ever after that. While he strains for a result, I step out into the hall. The extra tranquillisers should have kicked in by now. Why haven’t they?
Back in his room, Fran is busy with the air freshener while my father stares balefully up from the blue recliner.
“Three day fever” he announces, “And it won’t be very pleasant, I can tell you. In fact the second day will be worse than the fourth.”
“Fourth?”
He nods.
“Terrible,” he says. “Shocking.”
He’s had a haircut and Fran has trimmed his moustache. His voice is slurred but he doesn’t seem quite so anxious. What’s worrying him just now is Peg. She’s living with the undertaker. That’s why she hasn’t been round to see him.
I do my best to reassure him that my mother isn’t living with anyone. She’s round the corner in her own little flat, doing her level best to cope.
“But she’s never here.”
“That’s because she’s not very well. It’s her leg. She broke it.”
“I know. I know she broke it. But she doesn’t come round here any more.”
“That’s because you were horrible to her. Shouted at her.”
“I know. I know I did. But she doesn’t come.”
He stares at me, nodding. Then his face crumples in grief.
“She said she doesn’t want to live with me any more.”
“When?”
“I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.” His hand clutches his head, trying to contain the madness. I’ve seen this pose, exactly this pose, in a thousand paintings but only now do I realise its true pathos. My father’s head is bursting, and his life with it. Everything’s spilling out. He’s lost control and the worst thing about madness is that in some dim, unfathomable way you’re aware of it.
“But why doesn’t she come?”
“Because she’s not very well. She’ll come soon.”
“Will she? Will she?” He plucks at the sleeve of my sweater. “You and me, we’re in this mess together. Up to here.” He levels one trembling hand below his chin. “She’ll come and see us both. As long as you’re here.”
It’s easy to agree. His eyes go up to the clock on the wall.
“Bring the paper after lunch. You can live here now, with me.”
Thirty
A fortnight later, my mother finally consents to risk another visit to the home. She’s been increasingly fed-up recently, chiefly because she doesn’t much like her own company, but our attempts to brighten her life with visits to a day center have been met with an angry shake of the head. Back home, in Holland-on-Sea, my mother used to run the biggest Darby and Joan club in the country. For years and years she drove minibuses, organised village fetes, and - every Christmas - wrote and produced the club’s very own pantomime. The last thing she wants now is to be on the receiving end of all that carefully-orchestrated jollity.
A couple of days ago, as a thank-you, we threw a little supper party for the friends and neighbours who have been so supportive over the last couple of years. My mother, naturally, was the guest-of-honour but she hardly said a word the entire evening, fingering her glass and staring balefully down the table. That night, she must have drunk the best part of an entire bottle of Martini, and as the days go by it’s plain that she’s getting crosser and crosser - chiefly, I think, at herself. Both Lin and I have a quiet horror of where this may lead but for the time being, the gap we need to bridge is between my mother and the nursing home. For all his madness, my father needs my mum.
I wheel her round to see him. After nearly a month away, the staff make a great fuss of her. Dad, thank God, is relatively peaceable. Yet another adjustment in his medication appears, at last, to have calmed his demons - though when my mother totters in, he shows neither surprise nor affection.
“You’ve lost weight” he grunts.
It’s an accusation, not a greeting. I settle her on the sofa beside the blue recliner and leave them to it. An hour later, when I return, he doesn’t seem to have shouted at her or done anything to create the kind of scene I know she was dreading. Even so, when we’re back outside in the sunshine, she seems less than happy.
“He doesn’t even look at me” she complains, “I don’t know why I bothered.”
As I begin to wheel the chair away down the street, she looks back towards the nursing home.
“I’m very fuzzy this morning” she frowns, “Have I just come out of hospital?”
Thirty One
In some respects, my mother’s grasp of reality is as tenuous as my dad’s. By nature, she’s always been much, much tougher than him, but my father’s seeming indifference - allied to his self-evident madness - hurts her deeply. Cocooned in his new medication, my father seems an infinitely nicer man than the howling child we brought back from the hospital but the tranquillisers have encouraged him to take gently crazy rambles through his past and my mother finds this extremely hard to cope with. She married a man who could finish the Daily Telegraph crossword in the time it took her to cook tea. Now he does nothing but talk nonsense.
One afternoon in late September finds the three of us in his room at the nursing home. Dad, as usual, is in free asociation, ticking off the items on his daily list of worries. He’s glad I’m coming home every weekend in the coach. He’s desperate to clear up the mess in the shed. There’s hardboard to collect from the shop in Old Road and he wants to have a serious word with me about the tulips.
Tulips?
I get to my feet and pat him gently on the shoulder. I’ve got stuff to do. I’ll be back in an hour or two. My mother is staring into space. When I get to the door, my father calls me back. He’s got something for me, something I’ve forgotten to take. I should put it in my pocket, keep it somewhere safe. Intrigued, I return to the blue recliner. His right hand is clenched tight. I extend mine. He beams up at me, slowly opening his hand. It’s empty.
A couple of days later, I put him in the wheelchair and take him to the seafront. For early October, the weather is glorious: warm sunshine, the lightest breeze, and a cloudless blue sky. By now, it’s plain that the change in medication has transformed my dad. Hunched inside his big old sheepskin coat, his favourite flat cap tugged low over his forehead, he peers left and right as we bump over kerbs, and zig-zag through strollers on the path to the funfair. Alert, calm, and occasionally almost cogent, he reads the signs aloud as we wheel past. Walt’s Waltzer. Skyways. Treasure Island. He’s developed a habit of repeating whatever I say and while this gives the conversation a certain predictability it also offers a companionship I thought had gone forever.
Past the funfair, I pause above the little pebble beach from which we always swim. The water is cold now, icy on the face and fingertips, but I’m determined to have one last swim before the bathers go back in the
drawer.
“Do you mind, dad?”
“Do I mind what, dear?”
I’ve parked the wheelchair beside the wall above the beach. My dad is staring out at the busy stretch of water between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The sea, for once, is the bluest blue. He can see ferries, a hovercraft, a big container ship, and dozens of weekend yachts. When I ask him again whether he minds me going swimming, he shakes his head.
“Lovely” he murmurs.
I get changed. The water is even colder than I’d expected but I swim out fifty metres before turning to wave. My father is up there on the promenade, pale faced beneath his precious flat cap. He’s looking at something else. He hasn’t seen me. I wave again, and then a third time, until finally his right hand slowly lifts in an almost regal gesture. It’s a signal I’ll treasure for ever. From the depths of his old age, my dad is waving back.
Thirty Two
For another year, my dad’s presence in the nursing home shapes our daily lives. My mother visits daily for her lunch, wheeled around by either Lin or me. Together, we watch the leaves turn on the trees in the gardens en route, and on the way back - after the hour or so she likes to spend with him - the conversation is always the same.
“It’s such a shame, isn’t it?”
“It is, mum.”
“But they’re so kind, aren’t they? You couldn’t have found a better place, you and Lin. I think they’re marvellous with him.”
This, I sense, is mum’s way of coping with the guilt she feels at somehow abandoning the man she married, though in truth it’s beyond any of us to cope with the sheer weight of nursing that my father now demands. The staff at the home have a rare mix of compassion, skill, tenderness, and robust good humour, and they do everything they can to ease his slow, remorseless descent into total helplessness. Month by month, he shrinks in front of our eyes, becoming a bent, frail old man, dwarfed by the chair which once could barely contained him. As his digestive system closes down, his body begins to consume itself - first his fat, then his muscle - until there’s nothing left but skin and bone. He sleeps more and more, his chin on his chest, his mouth sagging open, and it becomes harder and harder to coax a conversation. Little shivers of stroke pass through his brain, wiping away his few last memories. Acupuncture helps soften the pain he clearly feels from time to time but we all know that my father’s life is nearly at an end.
Even so, combative to the last, he battles on and as his weight sinks towards eight stone, the face I’ve studied in a dozen wartime photos re-emerges from the fleshy, heavy-jowelled man I’ve known all my life. My mother, too, is losing weight, and some afternoons, pausing by the door when I return to collect her after lunch, I can half-close my eyes and kid myself that the pretty London typist might just have met the handsome and rather stylish young pilot officer with whom she was to share the rest of her life. In reality, of course, this is the final act in their fifty seven year marriage but I sense how important this daily ritual has become for both of them. My mother has even begun to hold his hand. I’ve never seen her do that before.
Thirty Three
Two weeks before the end of the millennium, once I’ve delivered mum to the home, Evelyn takes me aside for a quiet word. Overnight, dad has worsened. His hands are becoming mottled. His feet are icy. His circulation is beginning to fail. Soon, he’ll start resisting fluids. After that, it will only be a matter of hours. The GP arrives, hurrying in from the rain. He checks out my father and returns to the hall. Evelyn’s right. My dad’s time is due.
As it happens, Lin and I had been planning a rare excursion to Exmouth to see a film at the arts centre where Tom, my eldest boy, now works. That night, I phone him, apologising for the lost weekend and explaining what had happened. Over the past year, Lin, my mother and I have weathered a number of deathbed scenes, prompted by my father’s occasional announcements that he’s about to expire. To varying degrees, these have been dramatic, vocal, and emotionally draining. Now, though, he’s barely conscious, and the prognosis is brutally clear. Mortality has taken over. Within 48 hours, the bed behind the door will be empty.
Despite all the rehearsals, despite the terrible logic of the last five years, the thought is beyond my comprehension. To my astonishment, it makes me cry. Next day, he rallies. His colour is better, pinker. He sits crookedly in the blue recliner and while the acupuncturist plants tiny golden needles in his stick-thin legs I perch alongside him, trying to understand the pain and bewilderment in his face.
Lately, we’ve come to assume that he’s past conversation, beyond reach, but looking at him now I’m not so sure. Maybe he’s been watching us all this time, been listening to us, keeping track of the lives we lead and the way we talk about him. In truth, he deserves more of our time and attention, especially mine and probably my mother’s too. Over the past few weeks, she’s taken to planting big fat kisses on his pink scalp when she first arrives. These have become ritualistic, rites of his passage out of this world, but even now the touch of her lips - even her hand - seems to make him physically flinch. What’s the story here? What did they never do together? How come the distance between them is so great?
Shortly afterwards, we’re joined by Fran. She’s brought a bluff, warm North country affection to all our lives, and now she stands beside us, a witness to this strange tableau: father and son trying to bridge a gap far wider than a single generation. Like my mother, I’ve always found physical contact with him difficult. I could talk to him, amuse him, impress him, feed him, care for him, and latterly perform the most intimate tasks, but simple affection seemed beyond me. Even now, it’s a step I hesitate to take and shamefully it’s Fran who takes my hand and puts it over dad’s.
“There, Stan” she whispers in his ear, “It’s your Graham, your best boy. Just back from the pub.”
My father stirs as Fran and the acupuncturist leave the room. When I ask him how he feels, his head comes slowly up.
“Shocking” he mutters, “Absolutely shocking.”
I ask him exactly where it hurts but this quest for a symptom yields no clues. Nothing hurts. He’s not cold. He’s not hungry. He’s not anything. Except frightened.
“I don’t know where I’m going” he says, “I don’t know where I am and I don’t know where I’m going.”
When I try and comfort him he lifts his head again, his eyes swimming with tears. His eyes have become the lightest, clearest blue. He’s staring at something high up in the corner of the room, something that seems to obsess him, and it takes me longer than it should to interpret the expression on his face. He’s terrified.
All his life he’s kept an iron grip on his bearings. Like the young trainee navigator who won all the plaudits in his log book, he’s had a life-long belief in figures. Arithmetic, in my father’s world, never let him down. Whether it was the miracle of compound interest, or the fuel savings guaranteed by driving at exactly 55 mph, figures have kept the real world at bay. Now, in this small sunny room, he’s days away from death and he hasn’t a clue what comes next. There are no charts to help him, no slide rule to compute a course. What he needs now is faith, and faith is beyond computation.
After a while, he falls into a doze. I bend to his ear and whisper that I have to nip home to sort out mum. His thin body is twisted in the chair but his head snaps up again, his eyes wide open.
“No” he says, “It’s me. I’m bogging off. But I don’t know where.”
Christmas Day comes and goes. Evelyn coaxes a small glass of sherry down my father at lunchtime and we gather in a circle around the blue recliner, stroking his hands, exchanging glances. He’s beyond conversation now, most definitely, but he always hated Christmas and positively loathed getting presents. My mother finds this scene almost unbearable and next day I return with Chris, my cousin’s ex-wife, to see what difference another 24 hours has made. Chris has known my father for nearly thirty years. She’s had her own share of troubles and has been toughened by the experience but even she is visib
ly shaken by the sight of my poor old dad. There’s nothing left of him. The man who so dominated all our lives has gone.
He died at a quarter to ten next morning. Lin and I were running on the seafront together when it happened and I returned to a phone call from Fran. My father had slipped away just minutes ago. After all the rehearsals, all the anguish, all the torment, it had been remarkably peaceful.
For a moment, illogically, I can’t believe it. If I feel anything, I feel numb. Then the numbness eases and I cry my eyes out. Lin comforts me. Chris joins us. Minutes later, cold now, I go across the road to tell my mother. I have bad news. Dad’s passed away. She looks up at me, uncomprehending.
“Has he been ill?” she asks.
We say our private goodbyes. He lies full length in the bed, his body covered by a sheet and a cellular blanket. When my mother catches sight of him, she makes a small, strangled, almost animal noise. She stares at him, kisses him, then limps away on Lin’s arm. When my lips touch his forehead, his flesh is still warm.
The following days are a blur. Phone calls are made to friends and relatives. At the funeral parlour, I leaf blankly through the selection of caskets and shrouds. Back home, we drink quite a lot. Then, on a wet cold empty Thursday between Christmas and the end of the millennium, I find myself sitting in the Registrar’s office, completing the paperwork that will file my dad away.
The Registrar crouches over a computor keyboard, tapping in the details of my father’s life, and as we work methodically down the form I realise that this is the flesh made word: Stanley Albert Hurley. Born June 21st, 1915 at Ilford, Essex. Married to Marguerite Frances Bevan, 8th March, 1942. Occupation: local government officer. Status on death: retired. Died on 27th December 1999, at the age of 84. Cause of death? Advanced cerebro-vascular disease.
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