Dan strode through the care home, wanting to get to his father’s room as quickly as possible. He hated visiting the place. The residents were nice enough, and he knew that everyone there had a story to tell, but the care home’s quiet atmosphere amplified how far his father had fallen.
Dan’s father had been a servant to the trade-union movement, spending late nights in the family kitchen planning campaigns, his evenings lost to secret meetings in smoky pub back rooms. Dan had grown up with talk of revolution, of strikes and protests, tales of battles in the Yorkshire coalfields and poll tax protests in the capital, hearing his father’s anger in the crash of his fist against the kitchen table.
That fervour had become spent as his father got older, the trade union battles lost one by one, until all he had left were memories of defeats and frustration at a changing world.
A stroke had weakened him, withered his left arm and confined him to a wheelchair, the man who’d once seemed so fearsome, now broken. A shadow of his former self.
The corridor was long and dark and too warm, the aromas of the meal that had just been served filling the building, steamed vegetables and meat, the peace broken by the clatter of someone clearing away plates.
An old woman was sitting at the end of the corridor, staring out of a window. She turned towards Dan but didn’t respond to his greeting as she turned back to the view.
His father was in room twelve. He knocked. The television was on too loud so he knocked again, not wanting to scare him. The television went quiet and a familiar gruff voice shouted, ‘What?’
Dan sighed and went inside.
His father was sitting in a wheelchair, a glass in his hand half-filled with cider, the squashed plastic bottle on a bookcase.
Dan raised the bag he’d brought with him. Four more bottles of cider.
‘Put them over there.’ His father gestured with his glass towards a cupboard in a part of his room designated as a kitchen, although it amounted to nothing more than a microwave and a kettle, a small fridge on top. He spilled cider on to his shirt.
Dan put the bottles away and sat down. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m stuck in here. What do you think? Do you want a drink?’
‘I’m driving.’
‘Got your eye on some of the posh stuff, more like.’
‘Good wine doesn’t give you hangovers.’
‘I didn’t know it was medicinal.’
Dan smiled. His father infuriated him with his bloody-mindedness, but he knew he’d inherited many of his traits. Stubbornness for one, and a willingness to fight.
His father took a drink and said, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I was passing.’
‘You don’t just pass. You call in when you want help, especially when you bring cider.’
‘Can’t a son seek guidance from his father?’
‘I knew there was something. Go on, what is it?’ He raised his glass. ‘I guess you’ve paid the admission fee.’
‘Pat Molloy’s packing up at the end of the month.’
His father raised an eyebrow. ‘Is he now? Why’s that?’
‘He’s ill. Cancer.’
His father looked towards the window, with a view to a small patch of grass and a fence. ‘Cancer’s a bitch.’
Dan had lost his mother to cancer, and he’d seen her decline taking its toll on his father.
He turned back to Dan. ‘The town will be missing a good man. He’s served us well.’
‘Yeah, he’s hinted before that you used to send work to him.’
‘It was rough back in the eighties. Everyone was against us. The courts. The police. If someone local got into trouble, we sent them to Pat. He didn’t always charge. With Pat, it never seemed like it was about the money.’
‘Pat is one of a kind. And it changes things for me too.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Pat’s retiring because of his illness, which will leave me without a job if the firm closes. That was always your focus when a mill went to the wall, wasn’t it? The jobs.’
His father blushed. ‘Some fancy lawyer isn’t the same as someone on the bottom rung losing their only hope for a good job.’
‘Not even when it’s your son?’
‘We move in different worlds and you’ve sold out. What do you expect me to say? What’s next? The Freemasons?’
‘My job is the same as Pat Molloy’s but I don’t get the same pat on the back?’
‘Pat is different, because he had the upbringing to do something much better with his life, but he chose us.’
Dan sighed. He didn’t want to get into an argument. ‘Perhaps I just wanted to say hello.’
‘Some time with your old pa?’ He pointed towards the bottle on the bookcase. ‘Pass me that and I’ll give you all the attention you need.’
Dan stood up and went for the door. ‘Get it yourself. And for your information, I’m thinking of taking over. How will you like that? The son of Highford’s biggest peoples’ champion becoming a boss?’
His father didn’t respond at first. Dan went for the door, but just as he was about to go through, his father said, ‘You’ve earned it.’
Dan stopped and looked back into the room.
His father smiled. ‘It’s a different world today, and you’ve somehow got to make your own way in it. Just promise me one thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘Treat your staff well. Don’t chase every penny. Look after your people. That’s all we were trying to do.’
Dan sighed. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but if it happens, I will, don’t worry.’
His father raised his glass. ‘Don’t slam the door as you go.’ There was a glint in his eye.
Dan laughed and shook his head. His father did that to him. Whatever words he used to lash out, he always ended with something softer, revealing the father he could be.
Once Dan got outside, he had a view of the town and for the first time in his life he knew he could end up being tied to it. He’d have a business, a stake in the place beyond a family history, all so permanent. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
His apartment wasn’t far, down a long hill and over an old stone bridge. As Dan pulled into the yard, the cobbles rattling his wheels, his phone beeped to tell him that he had a message. He parked in his space and read.
It was from Jayne. It didn’t say much. She included an address a few miles away.
He thought about the bottle of wine he’d picked up at the same time as his father’s cider but realised it would have to wait.
He keyed the address into his satnav, backed his car out, and headed for the motorway.