The last time I ever spoke to Dad on the phone he was weeping. It was a cold November morning. Dark outside. In the distance I heard car doors slamming. The transportation had arrived to take him for chemotherapy. He could not walk the ten yards to the car. He had had the operation. And he had had the radiotherapy. This was the last ditch.
A glioblastoma multiforme is a hideous cancer in all respects. From one doctor’s description of ‘red and yellow’, I imagined it suppurating with pus and blood. An image on Google shows what appears to be a brain with frostbite. It is blackened around the edges. Another shows sections where a tumour has dug in, seeping custard and raspberry. Wet.
The glioblastoma multiforme grade IV grows rapidly. It invades and alters neural function and, left untreated, is lethal. The silent areas of the brain allow tumours to become large before any symptoms arise. Prognosis is poor. The median survival for patients presenting with this type of cancer is about four months with surgery, and nine months when followed up with radiotherapy. One article remarks that prolonged treatment is futile and hospitalisation should be kept to a minimum.
After that final call I flew up to help collect him from hospital. I had my daughter with me, who was ten weeks old. We were accompanied by a family friend, as my mother could not bear to go.
Let us call the friend Susan.
In retrospect, as visiting companions go, she was not a good choice. Perhaps something had ‘happened’ between her and Dad. There had been a time when they went out together, presumably because she was attempting a Christian conversion. If this were the case wires would have inevitably got crossed. I’m guessing something embarrassing ‘happened’ because every time she invited the family round, Dad was militant and slept. Slept in any chair she waved him into, bolt upright, and almost as soon as he sat down.
As I lumbered down the Glasgow Western’s windowed corridor I carried the baby in her car seat, shifting the weight from one arm to another. It was a long walk, the walls punctured by regular rectangles of safety glass. They offered views onto the wards either side. Elderly men, tucked in, ghosted each bed.
Behind me I could hear Susan struggle as she tried to keep up. She had been talking of death the length of the dual carriageway. Now there was only her breath and the rasp of her nylon tights.
Through the safety glass I searched for Dad’s face.
We had passed the fourth door before I recognised him. He was the only man fully dressed and sitting up in a chair. He gazed through the exterior window at another building that cast a shadow across the room.
As we entered, the other patients, who were still tucked up, peered at us over the turn of their sheets. My father looked round with the smile of someone who was not sure who we were. Dumping the baby on his empty bed I kissed him, and for a moment he looked bewildered, his brow wrinkled with questions he was too afraid to ask.
I thought this latent confusion was because of the baby. He didn’t think of me as a parent, but as a child. Yet it was to Susan that his eyes slid, tripping over the remains of the brain tumour and the hole it had left.
‘You’ve got your hat on, Dad,’ I said to ease the atmosphere. ‘Everyone will think you’re about to escape.’
His face relaxed. It was banter he was used to.
Susan busied herself with Dad’s possessions, her backside protruding from his locker, putting things on the bed beside his bag. Her actions seemed dubious, and he reached for the small holdall.
‘I’m just packing your bag, John,’ she shouted.
The baby whined. A nurse, in white, appeared.
‘What a wee one,’ she said, stroking a cheek. ‘Not often we get new babies like you in here.’
The baby wriggled in her car seat and began that yawing cry that would soon become a roar. Relieved to have something to do, I slumped into a chair and hauled out a breast. All the men watched with frank curiosity as the baby’s breathless whinging gave way to silence.
‘Beautiful baby, Mr Doyle,’ the nurse said. ‘Is she your granddaughter?’
‘Yes, John,’ yelled Susan from the confines of the bedside locker. ‘A new granddaughter.’
But he was more worried about his bag, clasping onto it tight. As the nurse took a turn with the rest of the patients, Susan pulled one edge of the bag towards her. She stuffed it with pyjamas, a tangerine and yesterday’s newspaper. Dad’s thin hand stretched to keep hold of the other end, exposing the hospital tag looped at his wrist.
As I continued to feed the baby another nurse arrived with a clipboard. She wore blue. My father shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He seemed to be dodging something at eye level that we could not see. The blue nurse looked from me, to my father, to Susan.
Even though Susan was slumped on the bed, wheezing from the packing exertion, she had an air of authority that we seemed to lack, for the blue nurse addressed her.
‘Two pills before breakfast for the next four days.’
‘Is everything all right, Dad?’ I asked loudly, for I could see he didn’t have his hearing aid in.
‘Something’s fallen,’ he said.
‘I can’t see anything.’ I tore the baby from my breast and placed her on the bed. ‘Shall I have a look?’
‘It’s my hat. Can you see it?’
His hat was on his head, but I knelt down, nevertheless, to look where he was gesturing.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said from the floor. ‘Maybe it was a tissue or something, because your hat is on your head.’
‘Oh.’
The nurse in blue peered over her clipboard.
‘Mr Doyle?’ she said.
Dad looked up benignly.
‘So we’ll see you for your second course in a month’s time.’
My father was now stooping, his hands waving above the floor as if to clutch at something. I placed my hand on his arm.
‘Don’t worry. You’ve still got your hat. What is it you’re seeing?’
‘Something dark,’ he mumbled.
I picked up the baby and threw her against my shoulder. With a loud burp she emptied milk down my back.
‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked.
‘She’s at home getting supper on.’
The nurse in white broke off her tour of the beds.
‘Mr Doyle, you’re not leaving us already?’
She held out her hands and I passed her the baby, the warm wetness of the milk on my shirt already turned cold.
‘She’s a wee doll, isn’t she?’ She leant down so my father could see my daughter’s face. But Dad was trying to get up. He had heard the word ‘leaving’, and uttered by someone in uniform, it provoked action that my words – ‘escape’, ‘car’, ‘home’ – had not.
Yet co-ordination was impossible or he had not the strength for it. One hand was white as it clutched the arm of the chair from the exertion of trying to get to his feet. Each time he found a foothold on the smooth floor, he slumped down again, as if pushed. Susan bustled out to find a wheelchair.
‘It’s a long walk to the car,’ I said to him. ‘Better to get some wheels.’
Meanwhile the nurse walked the baby round from one patient to the next. I found it easier to watch her progress rather than make conversation with Dad. She sat down on the edge of one bed and the man’s face lit up. His hand moved awkwardly out from beneath the coverlet. With extreme concentration he reached out his old, shaking fingers to stroke a curled and tiny fist.
Wheels located, the nurse dropped the baby into her car seat and together we braced ourselves against the bed to heave Dad into the wheelchair. He reached out for his bag.
Between the telephone conversation in the early darkness thirty-six hours before and the Glasgow Western, my father had slipped out of reach. Like a boat watched from shore.
I picked up the plastic bottle of pills. It was light. I had imagined intravenous torture, patients honking into buckets beside the bed. But this treatment appeared humane. I tucked the bottle in beside my daughter and belted her in.
Susan and I battled out of the hospital, carrying the car seat and hauling the wheelchair between us. The chair had all the effectiveness of a defective supermarket trolley. Dad clasped his bag on his lap.
When he squeezed into the hatchback it was with a horrible groan. Though he was now thin, he still filled the space, his hat pressed against the roof of the car, knees locked uncomfortably against the dashboard. He took a deep breath when we closed the door, as if he were having to make himself small, and asked again:
‘Where’s Mum?’