It took me a while to notice how bad it had become. I don’t think either of us saw each other clearly for a few months. And it wasn’t easy to tell what the grief was responsible for and what to blame the drink for. They seemed inseparable to me. I only know which came first.
He’d lost more weight. I saw bones in his face I’d never seen before. Everything about him was harder, sharper and smaller. He looked like he’d almost halved in size and now his beard seemed too big for his face, like it had started to take over. He wore the same clothes most days: a pair of old blue jeans with holes that were eating the rest of the material and a dirty green jumper. I shouldn’t say but he smelt. We communicated in grunts and nods and shakes of the head most of the time but every few days he would react like he’d remembered something important. His head would shoot up, or he would spin around quickly and ask me something like, ‘Have you got your lunch money?’ or ‘Have you cleaned your teeth?’ I would nod and he would look relieved and say, ‘Good … good.’ He didn’t clean his though. I touched his toothbrush each morning as I cleaned mine and it was always dry.
I don’t remember when I started noticing but it got to be that there was always a glass of whisky in his right hand. He held it low and to his side, almost behind his back, so that maybe I wouldn’t notice. When Mum was alive he used to buy bottles of beer, different brews with silly names, ‘Blond Witch’ or ‘Bowden’s Bathwater’, but he never came back with those now, just the whisky.
He didn’t neglect me. He always made sure there was food. He would ask what I wanted from the supermarket and I tried to be sensible. I asked for stuff I knew Mum approved of: carrots, peas, lettuce, leeks. It’s just that chips are easier. We didn’t eat together. I never really saw him eat much at all – a bite of bread or a handful of cereal. He did sit with me while I ate though: two fingers of whisky to my fish fingers and chips.
It wasn’t like I was invisible, he was trying, I could see him trying. See him mustering the effort from somewhere. He would shake himself together when I walked in the room and I would watch him try to pull all the threads together and attempt to focus. I could see him try and quell the steel splitting headache and swallow the queasiness away. He would lift his head and peer through the fog and try to arrange a smile. He still hugged me sometimes. It was great. Even with the smell. I don’t know how often he made it upstairs to bed. He never made the bed so it was hard to tell if it had been slept in. I saw him a few times, late at night, asleep at the kitchen table with a drop of whisky left at the bottom of the glass and his head on the table.
He was still always up before me, no matter how bad he looked. He would be sat in his chair at the kitchen table with the morning sun streaking through the greasy windows, spotlighting his grey face and bloodshot eyes. His shaky hands were always wrapped around a cup of thick black coffee and if his hands were trembling too much he would leave the room and come back a couple of minutes later, less jumpy. I knew he went for a drink and he must have known that, but neither of us let on. He didn’t want me to see him drinking too early that was all.