When I was quite sure that Colin was asleep I drew the curtains, put on a lamp and began to put my things together for school in the morning. I had just closed my briefcase, set my alarm for six thirty and got into my nightie when I realised I was thirsty again. I’d been thirsty all evening, after the packet sauce Maisie had poured so liberally over that wretched chicken. The more I thought about it, the more thirsty I became. A glass of water from the bathroom had no appeal at all, but the idea of a pot of tea, all to myself, began to beckon as invitingly as a mirage in a desert.
Don’t be silly, Jenny. It’s after eleven, I said to myself as I pushed my feet into my slippers, tiptoed to the door and listened. There was no sound at all in the house. Even the central heating had stopped clicking. Encouraged, I crept soundlessly downstairs. As I reached the foot, the telephone rang. My hand went out for it so quickly I hardly realised what I’d done as I lifted it to my ear.
‘Jenny?’
The voice was quiet yet familiar. For a moment, I didn’t recognise it.
‘I’m sorry if I wakened you. Mavis and I have been talking and she insisted I phone you . . . and I think she’s quite right . . . and you won’t be upset with me . . .’
Harvey. A Harvey who’d been talking to Mavis. Surely he wasn’t going to apologise for his part at lunchtime or this morning. And yet his tone sounded distinctly chastened, as if he really did regret something he’d done.
‘No, of course I won’t, Harvey,’ I said, still confused.
‘I’m afraid, Jenny, Daddy’s had another heart attack. He’s in intensive care, but he’s quite stable. Mavis felt you would want to know tonight, though there’s nothing any of us can do till the morning. He’s heavily sedated.’
I sat down on the telephone bench and looked at the dappled shadows on the hall carpet. It’s the chestnut tree on the main road, fluttering across the light from the lamp standard, that makes the pattern, I thought. Then the words sunk in and I wondered whatever I was going to say next.
‘Are you all right, Jenny?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m all right,’ I said very quietly. ‘Is Mummy there with him?’
‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘She’s much too upset. She’s gone next door to Mrs Allen and taken a sleeping tablet. I’ve told her I’ll ring the Royal at seven thirty for a full report. Would you like me to ring you too, Jenny?’
‘Yes, Harvey, I would.’
He said something quite kindly about trying to get some sleep and I asked him to thank Mavis for persuading him to ring, that I’d rather know. I put the phone down and wondered quite how I’d come to be sitting here beside it when the call came.
It seemed a long time later when I opened the reminder pad at the card I’d sellotaped to its back cover the day after we’d moved in. ‘Helen’s Bay Taxis,’ it read. ‘Anytime. Anywhere. Distance no object.’ It sounded like the lyric for a popular song.
‘Taxi.’ A woman’s voice. Abrupt. With a strong Belfast accent.
‘I need a taxi to the Royal Victoria, as soon as possible. Can you manage that?’
‘Name and address?’
I had to spell out most of it for her and it seemed to take a long, long time. There were noises in the background. Surely she wouldn’t say they couldn’t do it after taking so long over the details.
‘Ten minits be alrite?’
‘Yes, oh yes. Thank you . . . oh, and could you ask the taxi man not to ring the bell. I’ll be watching for him.’
‘Aye, surely, I’ll tell ’im. Goodnite now.’
‘Goodnight.’
I stood up, took a deep breath and ran silently back upstairs. I dressed in the clothes I’d left out for the morning, put my make-up in my handbag and reached for my briefcase. As I shut the study door quietly behind me, I realised I ought to leave a note. I grabbed a sheet of A4 from my desk and wrote:
Dear Colin,
Daddy is ill and I’ve gone to the Royal. I won’t be back, but you can contact me via Bob Dawson when you want to sort things out. Talk it over with Maisie. I bet she’ll say ‘Good riddance’. Good luck with Derry.
Jenny.
As I came down the stairs I heard the whoosh of tyres. I picked up my handbag, remembered I’d almost no money and cursed myself. Long ago, after being caught in Birmingham without the cash for a ticket home, I’d carefully hidden £25 in an evening bag in my dressing table. But I couldn’t go up and get it now. I’d just have to manage.
I looked around me, as if there were something I might have forgotten, but no, clear in my mind that only one thing mattered at this moment, I went to the door. As I put my hand to the catch, I saw a shadowy figure on the other side and opened it hurriedly, in case he should press the bell.
But I need not have worried. The man who stood there had his hands in his pockets, his eyes firmly on the ground. For a moment I didn’t recognise him. Only when he looked up at me and said, ‘Father?’ with an upward jerk of his pale blue eyes, did I realise it was Ernie Taggart.
‘Afraid so,’ I said.
He reached out his hand for my briefcase. ‘I heard yer call when I was waitin’ at me brother-in-law’s. Soon as I heard ye, I thought, that’s the father.’
He marched me down the drive so quickly I could hardly keep up, put the briefcase in the back seat and me in the front.
‘Is he bad?’
For a moment I couldn’t speak. There was something about his hasty, minimal utterances that carried more real sympathy than yards of Colin’s sympathetic flannel.
‘Not good, Ernie. They say he’s stable. But I’m not so sure.’
No wonder I hadn’t recognised him, I thought, as I looked across at him. His face was so clean it almost shone, his hair was sleeked back, and he was wearing a navy suit, with a bright Fair Isle pullover underneath. But the suit still hung on him, like his overalls, as if he had inherited it from someone much better covered than he was.
‘Don’t let the bad leg worry ye,’ he said, shortly. ‘I’m a gude driver an’ I oney need that’un fer the brake. Will I put me fut down?’
Hours. Was it only hours ago Daddy had asked the same question. And I had said no, because I wanted his company for as long as possible crossing the small, private space between Rathmore Drive and Myrtlefield House.
‘Yes, please, Ernie. The sooner I get there the better,’ I said, as the tears sprang to my eyes and poured unheeded down my cheeks.
The dark clouds that cut off the moonlight as I stood drinking my glass of water in the kitchen at Loughview had built up in the hours that had passed. Now, as we moved swiftly into the city, rain came sheeting down. Gusts of wind caught the car on exposed corners, buffeting it and sending the raindrops streaming across the top of the windscreen out of the reach of the wipers.
There was little traffic about and not a soul in sight as we swished through the empty streets, the gutters streaming. We stopped at traffic lights, the only car at notoriously busy junctions. We drove on over the myriad reflections of shop windows, road signs and pedestrian crossings into yet more dark and deserted streets. Beyond the windscreen, the world was chill and unwelcoming, bereft of all comfort.
‘Will ye stay all nite?’
My tears had dried on my cheeks and Ernie’s eyes were fixed firmly on the road ahead. I swallowed hard and moistened my dry lips.
‘Yes, I’ll stay. If he’s no better in the morning, I’ll ring school and ask for some time off.’
‘Are they dacent about that in yer place?’
‘I don’t know, Ernie. The headmistress seems a very cold person. But she’s very fair. You can’t always tell, can you?’
‘’Deed no. There’s many a one would surprise ye when things is bad, like yer father,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘They’ve rooms now fer close fam’ly. Ye’ll maybe get a wee sleep whin ye’ve seed him and set yer mind at rest.’
I found myself smiling. I liked ‘seed’ as the past tense of ‘see’. It made me think of my job, the work at Queen’s Crescent, the books I carried in my briefcase. Work with words and with the understandings only words can carry. How very strange that such a thought should come to comfort me, speeding through this empty, hostile world.
‘I’ll certainly be better when I get a look at him,’ I replied, grateful to find words again after the tearful silence that had come upon me.
‘Nat far now. Am takin’ ye to the Falls Road entrance. It’s not as far ta walk wonst ye get in. Ye coud walk miles in thon place.’
For all Ernie’s thoughtfulness, it still felt like miles when I did start walking down the familiar corridors, the tap of my heels echoing back from tiled walls, their vibrations speeding ahead of me to collide with the parked trolleys and the closed doors labelled in large letters. The further I walked and the nearer I got to my destination, the more endless they seemed. By the time I arrived, cold sweat was breaking on my brow. I pressed the bell and waited for someone to come and let me in.
It was the sister herself, a small square woman with the kind of chest that would accommodate a row of medals. I looked down at her and identified myself. She nodded abruptly, waved me into her office, sat me down and looked me over. I dropped my eyes, not able to cope yet with what I read in her expression.
‘Your father’s a very sick man, Jennifer. Do you realise that?’
I nodded, relieved, for I had begun to fear I was already too late. ‘I’ve been here before. Two years ago. I know about the spaghetti and the monitors . . .’
‘Good,’ she said firmly, with a hint of a smile at the mention of the ‘spaghetti’. ‘Would you like to sit with him? He’s heavily sedated, as you’d expect. He’s unlikely to come round before morning.’
I stood up, made it clear that I understood, and waited for her to lead the way. She paused, took up her case notes, and put them down again.
‘I’m afraid he is also on a ventilator,’ she said gently. ‘The breathing was erratic, even after sedation. There is also a kidney problem. We shall have to begin dialysis in the morning.’
‘Thank you for telling me, Sister. But I really would like to see him.’
‘This way.’
She turned on her heel and led me down the short, crowded entrance corridor, double-parked with equipment, linen trolleys, and oxygen cylinders, into the very large space that lay beyond. The lights had been dimmed for the night and the whole place glowed with a greenish hue. There were only four beds tonight in all that huge space, but as I ran my eye round, I caught sight of a young woman sitting in one of the glass-fronted alcoves. Our eyes met for a moment and softened in sympathy. In the bed where she kept watch a small blonde child lay asleep, its thumb in its mouth, its tiny body constrained by the mass of tubes and wires, the ‘spaghetti’, which could mean the difference between life and death.
‘I think this side will be easier for you,’ Sister said crisply.
I looked down at my father’s pale face. A tube hung out of his mouth on the right side, distorting it. The squarish machine beyond looked just like one of the drinks trolleys parked in the corridor outside, except that it made a rhythmic noise, huffing like a blacksmith’s bellows. Most of the usual tubes for hydration and medication were bandaged into his right arm or the right side of his neck. There were wires taped to his bare chest. They criss-crossed like a spider’s web, feeding into the monitors that printed their ragged messages across flickering screens. Beyond them, his left hand lay inert but intact, outside his covering of textured cotton blanket.
I sat down on the moulded plastic chair which had suddenly appeared and took his hand in mine. It was warm and mine were stone cold, so I took them away again and rubbed them together. When they were less cold, I took up his hand again and told him that I had come.
Minutes passed, each one so full of thoughts and memories. I watched his face, taught myself not to see the sad distortion of his mouth. I watched the monitors, well able to translate their messages, a language I had learnt in this same classroom two years ago. Figures that recorded the minute rise and fall of blood pressure, oscillating lines that continually created and then recreated mountains with foothills and unbridgeable oceanic chasms. A pattern, rock steady, despite all its variations. So stable. As my father’s presence had been throughout all of my life.
Time passed. My hands were warmer now than his. Hardly surprising, when the ward sat at seventy degrees and I was still wearing my three-quarter length winter coat. I slid it off, one-handed, so that I didn’t have to break the precious contact that had strengthened between us as the minutes had slowly turned into hours.
I closed my eyes for a moment and saw him smile. ‘Look,’ he said, laughing, and there on the hillside stood a lad, barefoot, the backside out of his trousers, which were short but still too long for him. I waited for the neighbour to appear. Sure enough, there he was. A big boy on an enormous horse, its back as broad as a table. ‘Wee Georgie Erwin,’ he called, looking down, and I felt cross. ‘How dare he?’ I said to my father. But my father just laughed. ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me,’ he chanted, singing out the old rhyme that all we children knew. ‘Don’t worry, Jenny. It’s all right. It’s all right.’
I jerked awake, his words still in my ears. It’s the warmth, I thought to myself, and the purr of the ventilator. Now I’d got used to it, it was rather soothing. Reliable, too, doing its job. Breathing for Daddy so that he could sleep in peace. And tomorrow, surely, he would feel better.