When I was well enough, I began planning my journey to visit Dad. It had only been a matter of weeks since he left, but as I began to gain the strength I had lost after so much bed rest, the need to see him intensified. I needed to hug him and smell his particular smell, to check he was all right, and see that he was being well looked after.
I dressed quietly and slipped out of the house when Stacey was on an errand, waiting nervously at the bus stop, hoping she wouldn’t come back early and find me there. I was reminded of when I took the bus to the circus, how I had wished Dad would see me and pull me back to the safety of Braër. I looked up at the house. It didn’t feel so safe now.
The bus took a slow, circuitous route, winding through country lanes I had never been down before. Throughout the journey, I held on to the pink feather, running it through my anxious fingers until it lost its silky feel. My head pounded, radiating out from the stitches on the top of my scalp, pulsing through me until my whole body ached.
Was Stacey home by now? Had she discovered I was gone? Let her worry, I thought savagely. A part of me hoped she would find the pillows wedged under my duvet, plumper than the real shape of my body. A part of me quailed at the thought of her anger on my return.
As the bus continued onward, I thought about the day Dad and I got hurt.
It’s strange, but I don’t remember the blood or the violence or the pain. I don’t even remember the man that touched me.
I remember green oak leaves floating silently down. I remember huge, velvet paws padding away. And I remember Dad’s fingers tenderly stripping the stalks off the reeds, the pieces sighing to the ground, where they stayed, like a trail marking where we had been.
Perhaps silence was what my father had craved when he hurt himself on that wall: a reprieve from the constant twisted assault of memories in his mind. Maybe he just didn’t want to be anymore.
Eventually, the bus dropped me off at the end of a long driveway, and I began to trudge between the leafy hedges. The stillness and silence suited my mood, and I wanted only to continue walking here forever, knowing as I did that each step was taking me closer to my dad.
I stopped walking. Briar View loomed ahead of me. My first impressions were of a sad, tired place. It looked like the house of someone quite grand who had passed away. It was vacuous and yawning. All the windows and doors were closed, and yet a smell—something between the brine of tinned tuna and the grease that coats old carpets—leached out from between the bricks. Its smell seemed to diminish the hope that had sprung up in me on the bus journey here.
I tucked the feather away and looked up to the first floor, where Dad resided. The windows glinted darkly in the sun. Here and there I could see the snowy heads of patients sitting within. It looked as if to live at Briar View you must be gray haired. I started walking up the ugly concrete steps.
A care worker showed me to a large day room with a selection of white-headed men in it. I recognized two that I had seen from outside, sitting in plastic chairs near the large windows, their hands occupied with knitting, the sharp needles sitting lifeless in their loose grip.
I looked for my dad, searching out his salt-and-pepper hair in a sea of white. He wasn’t there. I turned to the caregiver, and he pointed out a man sitting regally in a chair in the corner. I blinked. It was Dad. He sat proudly, his back a little straighter than the others, his chin a little higher. His hair was almost completely white.
A chair had been left for me. I walked over to him, unable to take my eyes off his hair. His face was paler than I remembered too. He had lost that ruddy glow, his skin taking on a damp pall instead. Someone had shaved him badly, missing a patch of stubble on his upper lip and nicking his chin. His cheeks looked virginal in their whiteness. I wondered if they had given him a tablet to change the color of his hair so that he might feel more at home among the white-haired men.
Because that was the sad thing: he did look like everyone else in there. I looked around the silent room. They all had the same look in their eyes; a look that made you realize they could see things you couldn’t, a common shared film playing in all of their heads. It was such a good film that one or two of the patients’ jaws hung open, saliva pooling behind their bottom lip, occasionally spilling over onto their chins and their necks and the gray bibs that they all wore.
I sat down in front of Dad, thankful at least that he didn’t have a heap of knitting in his lap.
“Hi,” I whispered, leaning forward so that my chair creaked. He looked up sharply at the sound, and I knew today was a day of fog. A gleam of sunlight caught the wound on his temple. The dressing had been taken off, and the newly formed scar tissue glowed red and concave through his grizzled hair, as if a slice of his head had been scooped out.
His eyes sought mine for a moment before settling on something just to the right of my face, near my ear. I moved slightly, willing him to look at me again, but his eyes dropped downward, breaking the spell, and I let out a breath of frustration.
Gazing round the room, I took in the wheelchairs, the oxygen cylinders. I let the tinny sound of Glenn Miller wash over me as an orderly fiddled with a CD player. A man in the corner was sitting in a chair, his overlarge skull in his hands. A nurse crouched by him, supporting him as he rocked backward and forward.
With sudden inspiration, I pulled Monty’s bell from my pocket and, leaning forward, placed it in Dad’s lap. His breath rattled in his throat, inflating his cheeks as he lifted an overlarge hand and let it rest precisely over the bell. It chimed quietly beneath the skin of his palm. He jumped imperceptibly and looked up suddenly, almost lucidly at me.
“Romilly?” he said, his voice unsure. His breath quickened, little flecks of snot shooting from his nostrils, his eyes flashing from left to right, from the bell to my face.
I smiled and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything, he stood quickly. His body unwound, his shrunken frame expanding, growing upward, no longer cramped by the clinical armchair. He towered over me, his head whipping one way then another like a bear disturbed in hibernation. The wound on his head flashed like a beacon, and then a huge bellow erupted from the bottom of his lungs, his eyes rolling backward, and his arms began to lift and swipe at the air. I jumped back in my chair, staring up in horror. Workers came running over, white-aproned and mechanical in their movements. They calmly pulled him down into his chair, where he sat, moaning to himself, little breaths of air puffing from his nostrils.
I stood up shakily, watching as the nurses worked their magic, stroking his leathery hands until the trembling began to slow.
“I think I ought...” I whispered lamely, pointing to the door, but no one turned to me. No one cared. I walked quickly across the room, my heart beating fast. At the door I looked back. My father was sitting in his chair. He looked at peace, almost as if it had never happened. He mouthed something as he stared at the wall. I turned to go.
As I walked back along the driveway, I imagined the tall hedges drawing together behind me, Briar View disappearing behind them like some mystical fairy-tale tower, holding my poor broken dad captive.
It wasn’t until I was halfway home, sitting on the bus, lost in thought, that I realized I hadn’t picked up the bell. I scanned my memory for it, trying to remember it falling onto the floor, but all I could see as I thought back to that room was my father’s great yellowing hand closing over it, and the sad echo of its chime as it was swallowed beneath his skin.