ON TUESDAY EVENING, three days after I’ve left him in Ward 19, my mother rings while he’s asleep to say that I’m not to know this, that I must feign amazement and let him be the one to tell me, but he’s home. I wait till ten for his call, but it doesn’t come, so in the end it’s me who rings and she who answers and he who picks up the extension by his bed. For years now, when you call one of my parents, you speak to both. In the early days, before extensions, he got himself an earpiece, so while my mother stood with the phone he’d be there listening alongside and shouting comments until in the end she gave up and changed places and he took over. Then came British Telecom, and a phone in every room, and dialogues for three voices.
‘You’re home, Dad.’
‘I thought that might surprise you.’
‘He wanted it to be a surprise.’
‘Well it is a surprise. How you feeling?’
‘A bit better now. Sharp pain under the scar, but you know that old theory—if a child has tummy pains, put a penny on its umbilicus and tie a bandage round.’
‘He says it’s working a treat.’
‘You have a penny on your umbilicus?’
‘Not a penny, a tight bandage. And I’ve slept fourteen hours today.’
‘He needs the rest.’
‘That’s good,’ I say, though it isn’t and he doesn’t, not on that scale. My father sleeping fourteen hours a day? The man who reckoned he needed only six hours and a couple of catnaps? Come on .
‘I’m glad to be back.’
‘He’s among his own things, that helps.’
‘Great.’
‘But no one else knows I’m home yet and I’m not telling.’
‘He wants them to go on thinking he’s in hospital.’
‘Why?’
‘So they won’t visit me, that’s why.’
I listen to his faded voice, and remember part of my conversation with Dr Taggart—‘Can he die at home?’ ‘I don’t see why not: your mother’s a doctor, and there’s nothing more we can do for him in hospital’—and wonder if this is where we’ve got already.
‘So you’re on the mend.’
‘Aye, home now, can’t be bad.’
‘And he’s got me to look after him.’
‘Can I can come up and see you?’
‘You’ve just gone back. You don’t want to bother.’
‘He’s still weak: he needs to take it easy.’
‘Soon, though.’
‘When I’m better.’
‘When he’s stronger.’
‘Too true.’
Three days later, a red sun sinking over Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, I’m on the InterCity north again. The call had come this morning, while he was asleep: ‘Better make it this weekend,’ my mother says, ‘just in case: I don’t think it will be long.’ Not long; it is only ten days since the cancer was confirmed.
Wynn, my brother-in-law, picks me up at Skipton station. ‘Bad do,’ he says. He hasn’t been allowed to see my father yet—not flesh and blood. I tell him he must come in the house with me, but when we get there it seems to be shut up, derelict or in mourning. Thick curtains are drawn in the downstairs bedroom, and two plywood boards have been stuck over the front door glass. ‘It’s always like that these days,’ says Wynn, ‘to stop people looking in.’ Never mind that the house stands in an acre of ground and is reached only by a long drive: there is still the postman, the milkman, the passing salesman. My father is taking no chances.
He is sitting in one of a pair of green reclining chairs that he bought a quarter of a century ago, the venue of his catnaps. The chair has a lever at the side to tip yourself back and bring up the footrest. Now, though, he’s perched at the edge, leaning forward, head on his chest. He wears a pink shirt and green cardigan, nothing else. There is a white handkerchief bunched up between his thighs—his modesty rag, or figleaf. The bottom buttons of his shirt are undone, and his belly swells from it, a pregnant woman’s belly, even down to the brown bisecting line that runs from top to bottom through the navel. I look again and see this isn’t a line, but the zip of his scar (my three-year-old nephew is similarly deceived at first sight: ‘What’s that railway track on Grandpa’s tummy?’ he whispers). There is a little hernia bulge pushing through just above the navel, like some small object left beneath a carpet.
He shakes our hands wanly, raising his head a moment. ‘As you can see, I’m bloody awful. From a fit seventy-year-old to a doddery ninety-year-old in a couple of weeks.’ It’s said not self-pityingly, merely to confirm that he too has grasped this indisputable truth—we mustn’t pretend we can’t see it.
There is a small milk stain on his lip and chin, and he keeps trying to belch. ‘I feel so full, though I’ve not eaten for weeks. The things I need to help me belch I don’t fancy at all.’ But he tries, over the next hour: a sip of fruit juice; an egg beaten with sherry; a swig of my mother’s Liebfraumilch. ‘Swig,’ he says, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, ‘funny word, swig.’ Under his head is the red tartan blanket that he’s had since my childhood, maybe since his childhood, that we took to the annual point-to-point races at Gisburn, and on other outings, and spread out for the creaking picnic-basket. As we talk, a circling talk of family, Christmas, local scandal, his eyes remain closed and he seems to be asleep, but then he pipes up and it’s clear he’s been taking it all in. He has his hands folded behind him, but sometimes he removes them and holds them raised above his head, right-angled at the elbows, palms flat, as if supporting some great weight. From time to time he asks me to make minute adjustments to the rug behind his head, to double-fold or quadruple-fold, to raise or lower. I stand behind his thinning head, and catch the grass-and-earth reek of the rug, and remember lying wrapped in it myself, late at night, coming home in the back of the Alvis, the murmur of my parents’ voices from the front, my eyes closed just as his eyes are now, the luxury of being borne swaddled and trusting and unseeing through the night.
Suddenly he tips his chair forward. The handkerchief scrunched between his thighs falls to the floor, and I see his penis scrolled up in its sac, a sad little rose, no engorgement. I remember how big it seemed when I saw it as a child at the swimming baths, and how I looked forward to being an adult so I could have one that big too. I think how as adult heterosexual males we rarely see each other’s penises and never see each other’s erections—least of all our fathers’ erections—and I catch myself grieving that he may never have an erection again. Then I think how embarrassing these thoughts are. I pick up his modesty rag and hand it to him and he stows it gently back in place.
When he talks, his conversation is of a characteristic count-your-blessings kind.
‘I’m bloody lucky, you know. I have you here, and Gill next door, and Pat and Mummy. Marvellous.’
Or: ‘If our purpose on this earth is to make it a better place for our children, then we haven’t done badly.’
Or: ‘I’m a little better today than I was yesterday. And yesterday than the day before. And the day before than the day before that.’
He talks himself up like this all evening. He extols the virtues of the new portable telephone he bought for 129 pounds just before going into hospital—‘you can take it two hundred yards down the garden—it’ll be useful when I’m lying out in summer, or next back-end when I’m raking leaves.’ He tells me about the new headlamps he’s ordered for when he’s fit to drive again, for when he goes back to hospital to have his stitches out in a couple of weeks. There is tenacity in all this denial, some deep will to survive, and we collude in it. My mother teases him—‘We’ve not had him climbing any hills yet, but tomorrow maybe’—and runs her fingers through his hair. I imagine him reaching Christmas at any rate, two and a half weeks away—wrapped in his red tartan blanket smiling bravely while the children open their presents, sad to think there may be no more Christmases but appeased by the joy and continuity around him. I had come up half-ready to spend longer than the weekend here, but there’s no immediate panic. At ten he goes to bed, tottering off like a toddler in its mother’s high-heeled shoes. I ring my wife and tell her to expect me the following evening.
*
I wake next day around six-thirty, my father’s deep voice rising comfortingly from downstairs, an echo of my childhood and all its other morning noises—the door unlatched to let the dog out for a pee, the row of milk sentries set chinkingly on the window-sill, the kettle crescendo-ing on the Aga. I read and then run a bath and bolt the door. For the past week my stomach has been bothering me, slight pain and swelling, as if—just as my father had claimed to feel belly pains when my mother was in labour—I were trying to share his cancer, the ties that bind, my filial couvade. But today I’m feeling better. The hot water laps over my stomach and thighs. I think of the behind-locked-doors furtiveness of adolescence, and the thought, or the soapy water, arouses me, because I’m hard now, and start to masturbate, wondering if this is wrong and something I should feel guilty about, in the midst of death and with my father downstairs, but wanting the escape, reluctant to let the feeling pass. Now little white snakes swirl in the water, and Sylko threads snag against my skin. They turn to jelly first, then dry on me in a flaky glaze. I get out and swill the bath with the shower-head. The sky is a misted blue over Pendle Hill, and sheep are passing slowly over the cold fields.
But my mother, fetching me tea, is close to tears.
‘I’m worried, love. He woke at six and was violently sick—nasty brown stuff, what we call foetal vomiting.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, it’s basically sicking up your own excrement. It’s usually a terminal sign.’
‘But he seemed all right.’
‘Yes, but he took three sleeping-pills in the night, so he says, and he’s all doped and doolally now. I need your help to move him.’
He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his favourite hunched-forwards position to get wind up. He’s out-of-breath and looks a decade older than last night, his eyes yellowed over and misty.
‘How are you, Dad?’
‘Bloody rough. Pig sick.’
‘But you were bright enough last night.’
‘I was that.’
I swing his legs up on to the bed, and then my mother and I take an arm and an armpit each and try to slide him up on to the pillows. It’s like moving a heap of rubble, and when we finally get him there he’s asleep at once. We don’t know whether to believe his story about the sleeping-pills or if this is a sudden catastrophic decline. My mother shows me the sheet he was sick into, the dark brown stain on it, not smelling of shit, but looking like it.
We consult his chart, pages 622 and 624 of an old ledger he has torn out so as to record his regime of pills and injections and food intake—the old workhorse. He has drawn extra rules down and across the chart, so densely that it looks like a pools coupon: Redoxon, Amiodarone, Heparin, Valium, Maxolon, Diconal, Paracetamol, Frusemide, Periactin, Complan, Eggs, Cereal, Chivas Regal, Water. It’s neat and fanatical, just like all the other endless lists and diagrams and instruction sheets he’s compiled over the years, and with the same message: he’s in control. But the last few entries are in my mother’s writing, not his: he can no longer hold a pen. And we can’t tell from his notes how many Diconal he had earlier in the week and how many should be left—there are forty-seven in the bottle, but did he really take three in the night?
He is still asleep at eleven, when a car draws up. A middle-aged man gets out, the car bleep-bleeping as he locks it. An AIREDALE HOSPITAL plastic identity tag pendulums on his lapel: the consultant, Dr May. My father has looked forward to this visit for days and wakes at once, rousing himself from death, talking lucidly about exactly which drugs he’s taken, how many milligrams, and how he thinks a change in dosage will help his progress. Dr May listens, takes his pulse, checks his temperature, taps his finger against his chest.
‘Your back now,’ he says, which means moving my father forward off the pillows. I hold him by the wrists and palms, feeling their gentle jolts and convulsions, the life in him flickering like one of his old cine films.
‘We need to give you some more Frusemide, Arthur, which will help you get your appetite back. And there’s a little water on your abdomen, which is pushing your diaphragm up and making you nauseous, so I’ll give you something to get rid of that. In a couple of days your guts should be working better. I’ll visit again then.’
But this optimism is for my father, not us. Dr May has seen the sheet, and in the dining-room he tells us: ‘It’s not good. He’s very poorly. We’re talking days, I think, not weeks.’
‘You think it’s faecal vomiting, then?’
‘It looks like it.’
He bleeps his car door open and drives away. Faecal vomiting, I realize she just said, not foetal . Had I misheard it earlier because I didn’t want to hear it right, because I wanted associations of birth not death? ‘Foetal’ had made me think of meconium, the black stuff during labour when a baby is in distress, the shit in the womb which midwives and doctors recognize as a signal for a forceps delivery or Caesarean. My father’s, too, is shit voided into a stomach, violating places where it shouldn’t be. He, too—the great moment approaching—is a baby in distress.