What Dad Wanted

I followed her into the house. The smell of hospital met my nose and I listened to the gasp and pump of the machinery that was keeping the old man alive in the room that was now his final resting place.

She was in the kitchen. The kettle was singing. It was one of those white plastic rapid-boil things, shaped like a jug, perched on a base that allowed it to swivel. Through the plastic window in the side, I could see the beginnings of bubbles forming on the element at the bottom.

I put my bags down on the floor.

She was putting teabags into mugs; one for me and one for her.

“I can do that,” I said.

“No,” she replied, “it’s fine.”

She moved past me to the fridge and as she opened the door I said, “Let me,” but she ignored me.

I stood waiting to feel welcome. I knew it wasn’t likely to happen, but all the same I waited.

The mugs were white and wide. The shape of them reminded me of the red and white plastic mugs in the picnic hamper that our parents had had since the early ‘60s. The mugs were made from cheap porcelain and the white was almost grey, the glaze poor. The kettle boiled and snapped itself off. She poured the boiling water into the mugs. I was still standing, my bags at my feet.

“So how long does he have?” I asked.

She stirred and lifted out the teabags, one by one, depositing them on a small dish kept specifically for that purpose.

“Not long. A week. A month at most.”

“And the doctor is happy with him being here?”

“Yes. It’s what dad wanted. The Macmillan nurse comes every day.”

“So you have help, then.”

She had put milk into each of the mugs and now handed one to me. She didn’t have to reply, I knew it was the wrong thing to say as I said it. Her expression was blankly hostile.

She sat on one of the wooden chairs. She didn’t invite me to sit, so I remained where I was, standing in the kitchen like a child summoned to see the head teacher.

She sat with her legs crossed away from me, her shoulders curving her round so that her back was beginning to show. She stared through the kitchen window at the snow that lay on the garden.

“Is it alright if I sit?” I asked.

“Suit yourself,” her shoulder said to me.

I pulled out the chair closest to me. The legs scraped on the tiled floor with a sound that was the big brother of fingernails scraping down a blackboard. I sat.

I watched steam rise from the surface of my tea. There was an oily film floating on top, as though the mug hadn’t been washed properly, or washed in dirty water. She was taking the hospital-at-home theme too literally. I blew against the liquid, causing a mini tsunami to rise up and then subside repeatedly with each exhalation through my pursed lips.

I took a sip and scalded the roof of my mouth.

The room where Dad now lay was just down the hallway from where we were sitting. I imagined him propped up on pillows, linked up to machines by tubes and wires. She had probably set the room up so that he was facing the window; so that he could look out on the street.

I remembered him sitting in his chair, one hand clamped around the remote, newspaper dangling from the other, sleeping as the news droned on. That same room, with the green draylon suite and the coffee table inlaid with tiles. Back when it used to be a living room.

“His stomach looks like a beach ball,” she said, still not looking at me. “The tumour is so big that it looks just like someone stuck a beach ball under his skin.”

“Can’t they cut it out?” I asked.

She looked at me then. “No,” she said. “They can’t.”

I looked down at the mug of tea sitting on the table in front of me. She got up abruptly and opened one of the drawers. She pulled out a coaster and slapped it onto the table, catching the side of the mug and making the copper brown liquid slosh from side to side.

“Don’t put your mug on the table,” she told me, “it’ll leave a ring.”

I lifted the mug and slid the coaster under it.

I thought about asking if I should go in to see him. It felt like I ought to go in there. The thought of it made me feel sick. I wanted sleep. It had taken four hours to get there, driving non-stop along the motorways in the snow and the dark. Fat flakes had drifted into the beam of my headlights like cartoon ghosts wearing startled expressions.

I knew I should go in to see him, even though he would be sleeping, or drugged, or comatose. It was my filial duty to stand by his bedside and let him know I was there. Just in case he decided enough was enough in the night, and died thinking I hadn’t cared.

I looked at the mug sitting on its coaster. When I looked up, she was staring at it too. She looked small and deflated. Crumpled, even. The instinct that told me to go into the death room also wanted me to get up and go to her, give her a hug, tell her lies like “It will be alright,” but I resisted it.

I remembered when we were younger, playing in the back yard; some adventure that had gone wrong, because she had fallen and grazed her knee. She had cried without wanting to and I had let her. With her hair tied back, she looked like that same child. Her face in its sleepless grief was falling backwards in time and she seemed to be that same child trying to be brave but crying all the same.

“I’ll go and unpack,” I said.

I stood up and picked up my bags, taking them upstairs, refusing to look at the closed door that separated the living from the good-as dead.

I took my bags into the spare room. The covers were turned down on one of the beds and clean towels were laid out on the other one.

I put my bags beside the towels and left them there. It was too soon to unpack. He might go in the night and then there would have been no point in unpacking. I wanted to deny my presence in this house for as long as I could manage it.

My sister sat silently downstairs. I lay on the bed still in my overcoat and shoes, on top of the turned down covers. I wondered if she slept at the kitchen table. If she did, it would be sitting upright. No laying your head on your arms leaning over the table for our Karen.

My eyes closed and I could feel sleep threatening to overwhelm me.

I forced my eyes open wide, like I used to as a child. The lightbulb was an energy saver and I could hear its faint electrical crackle as I lay under its weary light. I kept my eyes open as wide as I could until they began to hurt. I blinked, feeling the dryness of my over-exposed eyeballs drag against the inside of my eyelids.

I didn’t want to go downstairs, but I knew that I had to. It was two in the morning. The house was silent but for the hiss and click of the respirator and the crackle of the lightbulb.

She was still sitting where I’d left her, but the cups had been rinsed out and left to dry on the draining board. I rested my hands on the back of the wooden chair and looked at her. She seemed a long way below me as I stood there wondering how to speak to this woman; this stranger. My sister sat and stared at the coaster where my mug used to be.

It was wooden and round with a cork inlay. The lip, I remembered, made your drink spill if you put it down the wrong way.

“These used to have a special stand,” I said, picking it up. “It had three rods poking up from the base to hold them in place.”

I was looking at the coaster as if it was a miracle of modern science.

Karen said nothing. Just kept staring at the table.

I sat down.

“So,” I said. “I suppose we’d better talk.”

She sort of laughed through her nose; a single derisive snort.

“Do you need any more money?” I asked.

“Does he have everything he needs?” I asked.

“I’ve got money,” I said. “I can help out.”

She sat silently staring at the surface of the table. She was smiling cynically, her lips twisted slightly at the corners. Only the balance of her top lip stopped it becoming a sneer.

“He doesn’t need to suffer,” I said. “We can make sure he’s comfortable right up until the end.”

I felt like I was talking about a pet, some dumb animal, not my father.

“Honestly, Kaz,” I told her. “If there’s anything he needs, anything I can get, just say.”

She looked at me and her eyes were black and hollow like distant storms brewing on the horizon.

“Is that how you sleep?” she said. “You buy yourself peace of mind?”

I didn’t need to answer. There was nothing I could say. I knew what she meant. I’ve always had this knack of coming in right at the last minute, just as the final scene is being played out, and mopping up the credit for things not my due. And I do sleep easy.

All of my deals turn on a well-timed injection of cash.

“Better get some sleep,” she said. “The nurse gets here at eight.”

“I think I’m too tired to sleep,” I replied. “I’d rather sit up and talk.”

“Not you,” she said. “Me.”

“Oh. Of course. Yes.” I paused. “We can talk in the morning.”

She left the room without another word.

I carried on sitting at the table, playing with the coaster. I listened to her footsteps on the way up the stairs and the creaks of floorboards as she moved around her room. Our parents’ old room.

After a while her movements ceased and all I was left with was the hiss and click of the respirator again. I found myself wanting a drink, but not knowing what drink I wanted. I thought about tea, and then thought about fruit juice. The smallest drop of water fell from the lip of the tap into the sink, and the noise made me wonder if it was water that I wanted to drink.

I didn’t want to think about what was behind the door of the living room. I had stopped thinking about my dad as a who. He was already a what to me by that point. A shell of a man being eaten from the inside out by tumours. For all I knew, underneath that thin covering of skin, there might have been nothing left of the man who had raised me. His body might have been taken over by an alien life form using his body as a host, waiting to conquer the world.

Somewhere far away was a whole other existence in which he was still him. Still that tall man with the big hands who relied on the youthful me to hand him a spanner at just the right point, telling me that I could read his mind.

I spun the coaster on its edge, hoping to make it twirl like a coin, but the edge was too thick and it just clattered down back onto the surface of the table.

Soon, I thought, I would be an orphan.

Years ago, I remembered, I had made an orphan of myself.

The house was different in almost unnoticeable ways. When I drove through the streets towards it, I expected to feel the same as I always did the first moment I stepped back through the door. But it wasn’t the same house.

It wasn’t just the addition of the hospital smells and the whirring machinery. It was in the colours of the walls, the lightness of the carpet, the new cabinets in the kitchen.

My sister had emasculated the place. The house that I remembered in shades of green and brown had become a paean to blond wood and vanilla tones. The reek of quick sale hung about the place.

And why wouldn’t she want to sell up as soon as he was gone? Who would want to carry on living in a place with memories such as were contained here? Even without the shadow of death clothing it in sadness, this was not a happy home.

I let the coaster fall to the table one more time, then stood up and began opening cupboard doors. I knew what I was after when I saw the bottle of rum. I pulled it down and poured a measure into a glass. In the fridge I found cola that made the sugar in the rum froth up and leave a scum on the surface of the drink.

I took a large gulp still standing at the fridge, then turned and sat back down at the table, taking both bottles with me.

Yes. This house was not a happy home. Her choice to stay was something my brain refused to comprehend. I had fled these walls as soon as I was able. I took my fortunes elsewhere and wrestled them into a life that, if it didn’t bring me total joy, at least didn’t wrack me with pain. The echoes of childhood were stored in a tin box at the back of my memory.

The man who lay dying in the room down the hall once roared through this kitchen, wearing my sister’s cardboard witch’s hat. It had been Christmas, the time of year we all loved to hate, or hated to love, or something that wasn’t enjoyment. He had downed almost a pint of whiskey; the bottle bought surreptitiously from the off-licence up the road; he had left the house to buy cigarettes. He had downed half the bottle on his walk back home.

His hat, he thought, was a set of horns. He imagined he was a bull. He charged at the wall and the cardboard point crumpled on impact. He bellowed and my mother wept silently, seated at the table where Karen had been sitting before. My sister, ten years old, had stood in her nightgown in the doorway. She had come downstairs to see what the noise was.

Our father had flung the hat at her.

“It’s crumpled,” he had slurred. “Sorry.”

My mother had gone to my sister and taken her upstairs, one arm wrapped around her to protect her. When I asked her, later, as adults, if she remembered that night, she had said no.

The hat had been left on the floor where it fell and I, fifteen and at the beginning of my adult strength, had been left to face my father. He had staggered towards the hat, but his balance was poor and he stumbled forward. I jerked forward to catch him and he had raised his arm, beginning to swing his fist as though to hit me. His reactions were too slow, and pinning his arms within mine had been easy. Dragging him to the living room and putting him onto the couch had been harder.

In the morning, he hadn’t remembered a thing.

That same man was lying a short walk away from me. I could hear the artificial breathing of the machine that was keeping him alive.

I finished the first drink and poured myself another.

In a lot of ways, there was little difference between us. I had no wife or children to bully, but I had the same sense of a life unfulfilled. I had the same taste for liquor that switched on and then off again as frustration rose. I had the same need to withdraw from the world by whatever means possible.

Sitting at the table, I thought about my own kitchen four hours away. The empty house and the privacy of my life on pause until my return. I swirled the booze in the glass and drank some more. God knew when I would be back in my own place, at the centre of my own life again.

From what Karen had said on the phone, it wouldn’t be that long; but I knew what a stubborn bastard the old man could be, and I didn’t count on being out of there much before a week was up.

It was cold. I was still in my overcoat, but the warmth from the central heating was fading. I stood and went over to the boiler, searching for the control. It was on the wall beside it, and I pushed the button that would bring the heating system to life again.

I stood in front of the boiler, listening to the rush of the gas and the sound of the burner, my posture that of a man standing before a log fire warming his hands. The noise of the gas burning covered over the sound of my dying father’s mechanised lungs.

I listened as the radiator in the kitchen began to tick, the fluid inside it heating up, the metal expanding slightly, unnoticeably, radiating heat into the room.

The ticking of the radiator speeded up, and it seemed to me as though it were ticking my life away. I shuddered. I had the feeling that I had grown so cold that I would never be warm again.

I remembered my sister at fifteen lying on her bed sobbing because our father had rubbed the make-up she was wearing from her face with a face cloth soaked in scalding hot water. I had been home for the vacation, still teenage enough to feel disaffected by sudden proximity to my family again, but adult enough to know that I didn’t have to choose this as my life. I was wrapped in pseud’s clothing and too disdainful of suburban family life to offer any sort of comfort to my sister.

I was beginning the process of becoming an orphan.

Mum dying a year later helped me on my way. Karen passed all her O-levels, trying to make her dead mother and her absent father proud; proving to herself that I was not the only genius in the family.

I wasn’t anyway. Our family doesn’t possess any geniuses. I think, though, that in not choosing the same career as Dad, I was supposed to be something better than what I am.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting to become warm again, I listened to the sounds of fake living in the room down the hall, and I wondered whether, even in death, he still felt disappointment.

I wondered if he even knew that I was there.

My sister slept on upstairs while I drank my way through her rum. The man I had never wanted to be and yet seemed incapable of avoiding lay dying only a few metres away from me.

If there was one thing that I knew I could do, it was beat him at his own game.

It took my whole life to walk those few metres from the kitchen down the hall, past the room that contained the swollen body of the man I had already killed years ago.

I stood in front of the fuse box, high up on the wall by the front door. I was tall enough to reach up and pull the clear plastic cover down on its hinges. I flicked the switches methodically, breaking each circuit in turn until I found the one that silenced the machinery up the hall.

It took only a few seconds to end it.

I left the switch flicked down.

I left my bags on the bed in the spare room.

I left five hundred pounds in cash on the kitchen table.

I left my sister with a life she was free to live as she wished.

I left the house a legitimate orphan.

It’s what Dad would have wanted.

© J R Hargreaves January 2007