Hayley had long displayed a hectoring side, and although Cyril loved his daughter, the badgering was not attractive. “You can at least take comfort that your mother wasn’t alone in her final moments, but in my arms. She died knowing she was cherished—”
“I could tell the police, you know.”
“Tell them what? I didn’t break the law.”
“You just admitted to me that you watched her die. That has to qualify as criminal negligence. Maybe it’s not murder, but it’s freaking close. Besides, you lied to the cops. You weren’t upstairs in bed. She didn’t overdose in secret. You helped her. And in the UK, assisted suicide is super illegal.”
“Most of those cases are never prosecuted—”
“Honestly, what did you accomplish? You basically killed my mother. Now you’re all by yourself. Is that what you wanted? Were you tired of her?”
“Don’t be absurd. And there’s no evidence of anything criminal. No one will be interested in pursuing an investigation, and you shouldn’t be either.”
“She texted me because she obviously wanted to be rescued. From my father, the zealot. Who didn’t even have the decency to carry out his own dumb idea.”
“You sound as if you wish I were the one who’d topped himself.”
“Yeah, well”—Hayley’s forefinger loomed towards the screen, poised over her red “Leave” button—“the truth hurts.”
* * *
Even before agreeing to leave this world hand-in-hand on 29 March 2020, Kay and Cyril had long embraced the commonplace romance that if one of them died, the other would soon follow. After all, this actuarial mirroring in long marriages had plenty of precedent. The prospect of soldiering on single again, perhaps even continuing to have a pleasant time, had seemed traitorous. They’d a mutual understanding that either losing the other would also entail losing the will to live.
Yet it turned out that Cyril could live without his wife. He couldn’t decide if this reflected on him poorly or well. The discovery that he was able to carry on alone was saddening in a way, as it threatened to cast the defining relationship of his life as ancillary or expendable. Still, it was worth remembering that he did not create himself, and so could not be held responsible for his own essence. Besides, his surprisingly unshakable determination to endure did not reduce to petty selfishness or, as Hayley put it, egotism. From an early age, Cyril was naturally possessed of a ferocity—also not of his concoction—that could be directed towards ill or good. In the main, he had aimed the energy at his long, distinguished medical career, throughout which he had helped thousands of ordinary people to experience less pain, enjoy greater functionality, and overcome disease. The same ferocity had also sent his wife hurtling towards a D-day of her husband’s design.
Looking back, Hayley was right: the grand scheme had accomplished nothing but tragedy. Perhaps the proposition had always been a bit too high-concept. The trouble was that on reaching the improbable year of 2020 neither spouse had been ailing. Such a hard-and-fast deadline might have been feasible had everyone else in the country also agreed to reach the knell of eight decades and call it quits. But everyone hadn’t. The eccentric protocol was therefore fragile. Admittedly, Cyril had always been bloody-minded, and now he didn’t benefit from the moderating, cajoling influence of a more flexible companion. Kay had been more given to caprice; good grief, consider that absurd impulse to vote Leave. Thus he’d little doubt that had he implored her to abandon their plans rather than pushing their original agenda that fateful birthday, she’d have popped the Seconal cheerfully back in the bottle and washed her teeth.
His life as a widower was not as warm and not as fun. The chill wind that blew through his days was made the colder by the fact that Hayley, predictably, could not keep her gob shut, and now all three children blamed him for their mother’s death. Furthermore, their filial attachments had probably skewed in the maternal direction to begin with. Even once the lockdown was lifted, visits from the kids and their progeny were sparse.
He quickly came to appreciate that Kay had more than pulled her domestic weight—lightly, reflexively, without complaint. But the mundane tasks he’d imagined would grow insurmountable proved a salvation. Laundering his clothes, tidying the kitchen, and shopping for provisions filled and ordered his days. He grew to resent the intrusion of these monotonous chores only once his memoir got underway.
The project soon absorbed him to the point that he was even able to put out of mind his precarious (which was to say, disastrous) financial position. After taxes and his daily expenses, the whole of his monthly pension couldn’t service the enormous remortgage that had paid for the couple’s charitable contributions, generous parental support, and holidays. The state bereavement payment bought him some time, but once the pittance was extinguished he allowed the bank notices to pile up unopened. Living under the assumption that there was no future had become a habit.
Cyril was no Luddite, so he was hardly buffeted by stacks of spiral notebooks jagged with crimped, manic printing. Nonetheless, the size of the chapter files on his computer burgeoned. He was at least able to constrain the reminiscences about his wartime childhood and ascetic adolescence. (Rationing lasted until 1954. Now, that was “austerity,” a word much abused during the twenty-teens. He was no fan of the “bedroom tax,” but at least housing benefit claimants penalized for a spare room could still buy butter.) British television had long wallowed in the history of this era, and he was loath to further feed the nauseating nostalgia for plucky, resourceful, stiff-lipped England. But once he hit his professional years, his views on what did and didn’t work in the NHS consumed his hard drive like yeast eating sugar.
Under the working title Fit for Purpose, the manuscript might have remained marginally under control—although Cyril was already contemplating two volumes—when at around the 200,000-word mark he veered into Brexit and fell in a hole. He imagined that he could write himself out of it, filling the pit with his fecund opinions and scrambling up the other side. Thereafter, he planned to delve into the poor preparation, carelessly alarmist epidemiology, and disproportionate public hysteria that contributed to the coronavirus debacle. Finally, he would divulge to the reader the pact he’d entered into with his wife, then explore the many reasons why quitting life at eighty was so sensible (the case somewhat hampered by the fact that the author making it was eighty-two). In the closing pages, he would reveal the sorrowful outcome, thereby ending the memoir on a poignant and confessional note. But in order to reach this climactic bare-all, he had to claw through his exasperation with British intransigence in trade talks, the sentimental overvaluation of the fisheries, and the terrible yet ineffable spiritual loss of exile from the European Union.
Flailing through this digressive “chapter” that after reaching 120,000 words still showed no sign of having exhausted itself, Cyril began putting in longer hours, hunching over his computer with a cold bacon butty at elbow until two or three a.m. It was in the vicinity of this witching hour that he felt an odd palsy on the right side of his face, whilst his right forefinger had an unaccustomed difficulty reaching the Y on the keyboard. The print on the screen danced, and his extensive elucidation of the many challenges facing the European continent that could only be tackled through concerted supranational action—migration, terrorism, further outbreaks of contagion—no longer quite made sense. Arising for the eternally futile cure-all of a glass of water, he stumbled dizzily and landed on the floor. He had a splitting headache. Doctors seldom regard the copious advisories they dish out to their patients as having anything to do with them personally, so that if anything Cyril took longer than mere punters would have taken to conclude that, yes—it was an insult to a medical man who should have earned himself out of the squalid, quotidian ailments that afflicted the hoi polloi—he was having a stroke. But by that point he had lost command of his limbs, and he was nowhere near a phone.
* * *
“I figure we should pull the plug.”
“That ma
y be a bit hasty.”
“Well, what’s the prognosis? Is he ever going to recover?”
“These things are idiosyncratic. Though at your father’s age, the chances of significant improvement are slim. The damage was substantial.”
“It sounds like you think we should give it some time. Wait until he’s completely stabilized.”
“Wait? Wait for what? You heard the bloke. Chances are there’s fuck-all to wait for. In which case, get it over with. Pull the plug.”
“This is totally what he was afraid of. Like, it’s almost poetic. In some ways, this is the perfect revenge. Way better than him dying. Just lying there forever with nothing to do but contemplate his sins.”
“I’m sorry for what must seem like my sister’s cold-heartedness, Dr Evans, but there’s something of a backstory. She has her reasons.”
“Well, there’s no need to make any big decisions right away. So I’ll leave you to spend a few minutes with your loved one.”
A door closed.
“He was being sarcastic, right? He was totally being sarcastic.”
Cyril’s eyes fluttered open. There was a spot of water damage on the ceiling the shape of Norway. On the one hand he was curious what else his children might say when they thought their father was insensate; on the other, maybe he was better off not knowing. Yet croaking, “You know, I can hear you!” was clearly impossible whilst he was intubated.
Instead, Cyril waved an arm frantically to indicate to his visitors that the patient was awake. Correction: wave was what he intended to do, but in truth the limb continued to lie motionless, and the kids kept talking. He attempted to turn his head so that at least he could see his family, but that didn’t happen either. It was consternating to marshal the neurological commands one was never, ordinarily, even aware of issuing, and then to have them blithely ignored. The loss of authority was vertiginous. He might as well have been the President for Life of a small, cowed country who’d been abruptly deposed, and suddenly the terrifying dictator whose every whim had been slavishly executed on pain of death was a pathetic, no-account convict in dirty underwear whose edicts roused nothing but laughter.
“How long is that doc going to make us wait before deciding Dad’s completely vegged out?” Roy said. “Probate can take a while, and it would make a big difference to my circumstances to get the estate settled and the house sold off. Must be worth a couple mil by now.”
“Hate to break it to you, little brother,” Simon said. “But I swung by Lambeth the other day, just to check on the mail and that. Turns out they refinanced, and Dad hasn’t kept up with the payments, either. He hadn’t opened the envelopes, but he’s in the process of being evicted.”
“How can you be evicted from your own house?” Hayley asked in horror.
“It isn’t his house. It’s the bank’s house. And there’s more. I poked around his statements, and all his accounts are either down to spare change or in overdraft. In sum, Roy, there is no estate.”
“Motherfucker!” Roy exploded.
A wad of bunched-up bedding was poking uncomfortably into Cyril’s upper back, but he was powerless to rearrange it. His right hand seemed to regard the request to scratch a raging itch on his bum as positively hilarious. Experimentally, he made a concentrated effort to wiggle his toes, but when the sheet didn’t brush against them he could tell that they weren’t moving.
“The other thing I found,” Simon said, “was this huge, incontinent manuscript on his computer.”
“Incontinent” my foot! Cyril raged silently.
“The story of his life or something,” Simon continued. “You know, it was long enough to make a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel seem like a travel brochure. Though the section onscreen when he collapsed was like, believe it or not, hundreds of pages about the European Union.”
Hayley groaned. “Gawd. As if anyone wants to talk about the EU any more.”
“Still, I was wondering if we should rescue the files,” Simon said. “This magnum opus is the last thing he left behind. It might be of historical interest . . .”
“Well, it’s certainly of no interest to me,” Hayley said. “You can’t honestly imagine that any of us would ever read it.”
“Go ahead and print it out,” Roy said. “I’ve finally used up my lockdown stockpile, and I’m running low on loo roll.”
“What a typical vanity project,” Hayley said. “It’s so like him to go on and on like that—doubtless in the expectation that this turgid, self-aggrandizing tome will be published, and glowingly reviewed, and go on to become not only a bestseller, but required reading in medical schools. Maybe he was right in the first place, planning to bite the big one at eighty. He makes a crap old man. Being elderly is all about stepping aside and accepting you’ve had your day. In his whole life, Dad hasn’t experienced actual humility for five minutes.”
“Listen, do you think he left a living will?” Simon asked.
Of course there’s a living will! Cyril screamed. Middle drawer of the filing cabinet in the study, in the red flexi-folder at the front!
“Ordinarily, you’d think so,” Hayley said. “But he and Mum were expecting to do that whole theatrical double suicide thing, before it morphed into murder. He probably didn’t bother.”
“Bloody hell!” Roy exclaimed. “He’s blinking.”
The three ingrates gathered round their father’s bed and peered down. However under-affectionate his middle-aged progeny, it was a relief to see something besides Norway. Cyril blinked frenetically.
“Do you think that’s involuntary?” Hayley said.
“Hard to say,” Simon said. “It could be a twitch.”
Cyril blinked hard; stopped; blinked frenetically again; then stopped and stared. He was new at this, and unsure of the protocol for “appearing to blink on purpose.”
“Figure there’s someone still in there?” Roy said.
“Wow,” Hayley said. “That is sick.”
“Dad?” Simon said. “Is that you?”
Blink-blink-blink-blink-blink.
“Dad?” Simon said again. “If you can hear and understand me, blink once for yes, and twice—or cancel that. Blink twice for yes. Obviously if the answer is no, you’re not going to answer at all.”
Blink-blink.
“I know it sounds cruel,” Hayley said. “But there’s something, like, delicious about this. If he’s really with it, that is, and not in a comatose fog. I mean, you can really contemplate your sins now, can’t you, Dad?”
* * *
Cyril had never known that it was possible for time to pass so slowly. A mere half hour presented a vast temporal desert; he pictured himself dragging over dunes weighed down with equipment and wearing boots full of sand. Aside from occasional visits from nurses, and far more occasional visits from Simon, the most dutiful of the three, he lived without markers—that is, the firm junctures of an ordinary day that gave one purchase on its passage. Fed intravenously, he ate no meals. Hydrated by tubes, he sipped no bracing breakfast coffee or four p.m. tea. They’d installed a catheter and colonic irrigation bag, and he’d never appreciated before the welcome punctuation and purposeful urgency of visits to the WC. He could only sleep with drugs, and then only for three or four hours. Morning, afternoon, and evening were abstractions. Weather was irrelevant. A nurse sometimes turned on the television, but because he couldn’t control the channels or even turn it off, the drivel rapidly decayed into one more torture.
Back in the day, he had savoured opportunities for reflection—sitting in contemplation on the Tube and deliberately choosing not to read, or enjoying an unexpected break in his workday when one more patient was a no-show and he could be alone with his thoughts. But now being alone with his thoughts had become his full-time job. Keeping something circulating through his head was a burden. Having once fancied himself something of an intellectual, he grew deeply disappointed by the limits of his mental athleticism, for his cerebral workouts resembled less Olympic gymnastics than clumsy c
lambering on a climbing frame. It was official: he didn’t have a creative mind. (There, he yearned to tell Hayley. How’s that for humility?) He could resort to memories of emotional occasions, but even highlights like Kay’s acceptance of his marriage proposal or the rousing tributes at his retirement party were fragmentary, like old silent films with jagged motions, silly captions with too many exclamation marks, and flecked film. He doubted that his powers of recall were unusually weak. Human memory was atrocious. At best he could vividly conjure only instants captured in still photographs. Not only did he rapidly tire of the few photos on his private hard drive that he could mentally double-click, but the images began to distort, until faces in his wedding pictures looked leering and grotesque.
Why, on examination, his precious recollections of his wartime childhood didn’t stand up to scrutiny either. During Operation Pied Piper in the autumn of 1939, his mother had evacuated to Kent with Cyril as an infant. When for months on end the sky didn’t fall, she returned with her baby to Birmingham. By the time German ructions began in earnest, the newly intrepid Betsy Wilkinson was leaving her firstborn with her younger sister during the day, the better to help manufacture munitions. Although the bombings in Birmingham were ferocious, she chose aiding the war effort over the safety of her family and refused to evacuate a second time—a decision Cyril had always lauded. Yet his jumbled images of that period were full of anachronisms; in one much-revisited snippet, whilst on leave from the Italian campaign, his handsome uniformed father put a reassuring arm around his son in the sitting room as they watched television. Why, Cyril had even fancied that he retained flashes of that original evacuation to Kent—he’d stored glimpses of hurried kisses on a train platform, a gracious family waiting with chocolate biscuits on the receiving end—but for pity’s sake, he’d only been eight months old. His vivid “recollection” of his mother’s insistence on dragging her unwieldy yet beloved sewing box to the air raid shelter in the middle of the night had a female voice-over: what he remembered was being told about it. All the Blitzy crashes, booms, and dust in his mind had been constructed from family lore, embellished with every retelling. The bombings had been real enough, but his memories of the assaults were fraudulent.
Should We Stay or Should We Go Page 10
