The nurses were even worse. Vampire-pale, stony-eyed, at visiting times they moved from bed to bed, weirdly vibrating, avid for the drama and tears: the ICU was better than East Enders or Corrie. They hated my father for grimly recording each cracked window, jammed radiator and empty light socket, every little oversight and cruelty, everyone’s names: after his red Silvine notebook had mysteriously vanished he hid its replacement inside his pillow. They hated me for my lack of obvious grief: my diffidence cracked just once – when they offered me pre-bereavement counselling and I burst out laughing. After that, eyes averted, they stumped past us, as if crushing hideous vermin under their thick soles. Whatever happened to the bow-tied doctors who used to work the wards like game show hosts, the ward sisters like opera divas, the Hattie Jacques matrons? Whatever happened to the student nurses of my youth – vivid, tender, blithe as spring throstles and self-parodically hot to trot…though seldom with me?
The hospice was high above Wharfedale, the last house before the moors. As I left the car I got, as always, a tang of ozone, although a hundred miles from the nearest coast. It was a wool baron’s Italianate mansion, converted, ringed by immaculate parterres, pulsing and blaring with crude life and colour: where were the bosky, bowering cypress and yew? The residents were never seen outside, though today I glimpsed lemur-like flittings in the sunporch shadows.
The hall’s darkness enveloped me like squid’s ink and I groped towards the window lights’ tiny lozenges at the top of the mock-baronial staircase, toe-kicking each invisible riser. Halfway up, the Pain Management Team – three grinning boys in luminous white, like a tumbling act – passed me in mid-air, breasting the front door with one more kangaroo bound. The oak bannister I’d cowered against was strangely warm and yielding: time rubs off hard edges, makes things kind – old buildings are the best to die in, or die into. ‘It’s bad luck to be the first to die in a house,’ my grandfather had said, just before he was.
My favourite nurse was on station: the one who, by nightlight, had rubbed my father’s back with toothpaste instead of muscle relaxant and hadn’t stopped giggling about it since. Above the ligature-tight chain of her St Christopher her soft, wet face beamed perpetually on her ‘ressies’ – as if, in dying, they were essaying some much-loved party piece. She winked and wagged her finger at me, knowing that I carried a whisky bottle in my poacher’s pocket. She’d got my number: a dinosaur, whose pain took an age to reach heart or brain. It had been three months after my mother’s funeral when, traversing the ridge away from Ingleborough, I looked back to recognize, in the mountain’s beetle-browed profile, her dead face.
My father’s grey hands lay in a plate of untouched food. On the white traycloth was a line of crimson splashes – lung blood – like a restaurant critic’s five-star recommendation. His pills were laid out ready – the doomed fleet he was about to launch on his bloodstream. His eyes opened and his arms elongated to reach the t-bar above the bed, to give the illusion that he was raising himself in welcome, his fingers fluttering on the metal like a flautist’s. The more he wasted away the heavier he got: it took two nurses to cross-lift him, tightening a plastic sheet or straightening a pillow were major undertakings. His head looked to be getting larger, doming, with a strange metallic sheen: his arms seemed to retract into his sides, his legs to fuse: it was as if impotence and anger were turning him into a lethal projectile, a shell in the breech ready to be fired into the infinite.
I gave him a slug of Chivas Regal and poured the rest into his empty lemon barley bottle. ‘Ah, Jeepers Creepers,’ he said, ‘Jesus Lethal!’ – he always pretended to forget its name – ‘Still, you don’t have to be able to say it to be able to drink it.’ He rested his bristled chin in the plastic drinking trough, as if taking the liquor through his pores. I’d turned him on to Chivas in those days when in every bad, bold photo of the Stones Keith Richards seemed to be finishing a bottle.
I’d swapped my Red Army watch for the huge self-winding Timex, dying on his motionless wrist, that now slid, its metal strap ripping out hairs, along my arm. The fluorescent hammer and sickle seemed to be affecting him – he spent the last of his strength on raging against capitalism. Or maybe it was a symptom of the cancer or his finally admitting the anger he’d always felt. I remembered watching Tebbitt, white-plastered like a pierrot, being lugged out of the bombed Grand Hotel and, as his teeth bared in an equine grimace of agony, I had seen my father respond with one of his rare smiles. It obsessed him that it was the Navy – out in The Falklands, with inadequate air-support – that had saved Thatcher’s bacon: that the dead sailors of the Sheffield – ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ – had bought her two more terms. He told me that after VJ Day, when he was CPO on a carrier ferrying ex-POWs out East, the demob-happy crew had stopped saluting and taken to calling each other ‘Comrade’. The Captain had asked him whether his life would be safe when they got back to England. After my father had reassured him they’d shaken hands and toasted the future with rum – but the ship’s postal election votes were still mysteriously lost in transit. At the time they’d all laughed at their officers’ ludicrous fears of mass purges and seizures of assets: ‘But now,’ he said, ‘I wish we’d done just that.’
As my father had observed, his ward was like a convention of Delius impersonators, copying the James Gunn portrait of the dying composer – right down to the tartan blanket over the knees, the fleshless left hand gripping an arm-rest, the right pointing to the floor. Even Mr Siddiqui – wrapped in the pearly aura of death – somehow pulled it off. In the next bay was a kid of no more than twenty, spending his last days reading Coleridge. Impossibly attenuated, his extremities jumbly-green and blue, he lay among propped-open copies of Biographia Literaria, the poems, the letters, volume one of Holmes’ Life – he would never read the second. He hadn’t been amused by my father’s rendition of The Ancient Mariner or my tale of chickening-out of following the mountain-mad poet’s series of ledge-jumps down Broad Stand. With heavy emphasis he slowly dragged his bed curtains across, breath singing in his throat like an Aeolian harp.
I gave my father the latest bulletin on Halifax Town – kicked out of the league to the hospice of the Vauxhall Conference – and told him how the cheating kraut Klinsmann had signed for Spurs and, after a series of spectacular goals followed by ironic swallow-dive celebrations, become a national hero. He looked reproachful, as if such jokes were out of order at this time. We sat in silence. There wasn’t much I could do for him – just bring in whisky, swap watches, lend him my Walkman and Jelly Roll Morton tapes. I could give him no handy hints for the afterlife unless, God help us, ‘The Divine Comedy’, ‘The Human Age’ or ‘Hellzapoppin’ proved to be reliable guides. Stephen Crane wrote of ‘the impulse of the living to try to read in dying eyes the answer to The Question,’ but I didn’t have any questions, not even lower-case ones.
He flapped his hand towards an unopened jiffy-bag on his table. I prised out the staples with his fish-knife. A video cassette fell out, followed by a postcard of the Bismarck on fire, with the message, ‘Hope this cheers you up and reminds you of those good times – STAN.’ They’d been boy sailors together on HMS Ganges – ‘and he hasn’t changed,’ my father always said. Stan’s spare time was spent at reunions, the Navy was all he ever talked about – my father pitied, despised him: ‘The war’s never ended for him, like those Japs they keep finding in the jungle.’ Now he just rolled his eyes and sighed. I’d known little about his own war: as a child I’d found, worn and lost his medal ribbons…once he’d casually mentioned that the shrapnel roaming his body had first passed through that of his best pal.
I held up the video. Songs that Won the War: on its cover searchlights over a blitzed London picked out the enormous grinning face of Vera Lynn about to snap up a passing Heinkel. He rolled his eyes again, spoke faintly. I put my ear to his mouth, then rocked back deafened