Tag: Death

A Day In Southern England

The day started with me sitting on the lid of the cat’s litter tray after I’d taken it off to clean the base out. It cracked down the middle with a splintering noise. I don’t know why I did it, maybe it just seemed like the kind of thing that wouldn’t happen, defying the logic of my weight, the angle of meeting and the flimsiness of the plastic.

Outside the pet shop, with my new litter tray, in the huge carpark that had once been the home of Brighton and Hove Albion, I got a call from my youngest brother saying that Dad had had a fall the day before. The hospital had put in place end-of-life-procedure. I’d had to call him back, the connection was bad or it might just have been my clumsiness.

One thing after another. It was a warm and sunny day, the last day of June. Now I’d have to take the train across the country. That train ride was something I looked forward to, usually, but on a Sunday, in England?

I told my wife. She started to make preparations to come too, with our daughter. Another thing. Usually I go by myself. Look out the window, read, take a beer. But in truth it was rather lovely. The three of us, a kind of rural ride by train across the south of England on a green and sunny Sunday afternoon. Shoreham by Sea, Lancing, Worthing, Angmering, Chichester, an incantation along the crowded south coast; inland, Salisbury, where I’d jumped off a few weeks before on my last home visit, to see the cathedral, Warminster and its uncanny hill, Dilton Marsh, Bradford on Avon and memories of its Saxon church, Bath. England were playing India away off in Birmingham. The girls mocked me as I checked the score, so far so good, on the mustard coloured BBC app.

We were met at the station by my brother. When we got to the hospital Dad seemed as he had 18 months earlier after another fall: stony but visceral: bones, veins, paper skin with bruises and blotches. He roused himself and straightaway recognised my wife and daughter, ‘Ah! It’s you!’ He hadn’t seen them for two years. Then me: ‘Which one are you?’ I was the last to leave, ushered away by one of the nurses; I hadn’t thought of much to say.

At my brother’s we watched the cricket highlights together, sharing a beer. My daughter explored the garden. It’s got four or five ponds and she went off looking for frogs. We watched the coverage of Glastonbury (which flags, we wondered, might be unacceptable to wave there). I was deeply asleep and had no idea where I was or the time or what was happening when my brother came into my room. He’d got a call from the hospital. It was just after midnight and the two of us walked there through a sleeping village in Somerset.

The hospital appeared like an eerily lit alien presence, we were let in via a video intercom and were led by a nurse into a visitors’ room and offered tea. You’ve got to have tea, I thought, though I didn’t fancy one. There’d been a moment’s hesitation when we’d got to the ward as one nurse whispered to the duty nurse; in the dim light I could see a screen up round my dad’s bed. A little later a doctor came to see us: a young woman, blue uniformed, blonde, calm and good-looking to tell us he had passed away ten minutes before. She asked if there was anything we wanted to know and scanned our faces for any emotion. There was nothing to ask. We thanked her.

A while later another nurse came to see us, sombre but bouncy, somehow. The three of them had held his hand and stroked his hair, she said. We saw the body, still on the bed, in the ward, with the bleeping of monitoring machines and another patient’s rasping breathing going on. ‘I always talk to them’ the nurse said, ‘listening is the last thing to go.’

My dad died on 1st July, 2019, a little after midnight.

    Home: What The Magpie Knows

    Sparti 1982 IMG_1820The Magpie brings us tidings
    Of news both fair and foul . . .
    And she knows when we’ll go to our graves,
    And how we shall be born.

    ‘How did you choose your parents, Ste?’ He often called me that, Ste. He often just drawled out the vowel and left the ve unsounded. ‘Ha!’ He added a little harrumph for outfoxing me. But he rushed on. ‘I know how I chose mine; I made a mistake, I thought they were bohemians but they were Catholics.’ This time we both laughed, raised beakers of the same pink resiny stuff, made lurid in the poor fluorescent light of the basement.

    ‘You know Finn’ — he resisted the pun, for once — Finn the yoga teacher, he’s thin — ‘One of his Tibetan teachers told him that they know how to choose their parents. A lot of good it did them, some of them.’ Costello’s face was close to mine, opposite: square, handsome, just greying around the temples, lively eyes and a narrow mouth that seemed barely able to keep up with his intelligence.
    We were in the place where we’d tried to steal one of the tables from outside. ‘They’ve got enough of them,’ he’d said as we made our way down the marble steps into the cigarette smoke and the thick, dense smell of warm olive oil. And the Greeks, in knots of twos and threes, dun-coloured like old woodcock, raising the familiar cacophony that had once sounded like quarrelling. Neither of us remarked that here there were only men. One of them looked on unblinkingly as Costello tugged up a bit of his shirt, pinched an inch of flesh away from his lean belly and injected.

    ‘Twice a day, Ste, twice a day.’ It was a kind of invocation.

    ***
    I’d wanted to go alone, he knew that, but he’d had followed me out of the spiti, the flat we shared with the others on the edge of town. Lena was cooking that night; ‘She’ll only make a meal of it,’ he’d said. Mostly he talked about the day — the bloody oranges, Andreos our overseer, ‘How much d’you think he makes out of us?’ — but I sensed he really wanted to know where I headed when I wandered off by myself.  We went my usual way via the poste restante. There was a letter for me, from my mother. First time, it was always my father who wrote on behalf of the family. Nothing from Isabel.
    Costello didn’t bother to check: ‘I wouldn’t want them to write to me,’ he said, ‘Unless there was money, a lot of it.’ He couldn’t raise the will to make it sound shocking. In the restaurant, the letter sat there, unopened; I knew what it must say, that my grandmother, my mother’s mother, had died.
    He gossiped on about the Dutch girl; he hardly ever talked about her by name. He was proud that he spent much of our working day chatting to her while me and Hari, her boyfriend, were picking the oranges. ‘You and Hari, up the trees like monkeys!’ There was relish and irony in his sardonic voice, which could never quite cancel out his feeling of wonder at the absurdity of it all. He told me again what we all knew, that her parents were Sannyasins. They meditate in a group in her house. Open marriage.

    ‘I asked her if they always wear orange, she said it’s more like pink or purple. So, Ste, how did she get parents like that?’

    ***
    ‘Lena and Frank say they’re going home for Christmas, they want to be back in time to sign on. There’s a life! They’re like an old married couple anyway, off in their own little room.’ Then he added, ‘What about you?’ I was staying. I was glad, though I didn’t say so, that I didn’t have the money for the Magic Bus back. I ordered more retsina.
    There was a surge of half-hearted jeering. We looked up at the tv screen suspended in a low corner, near a grimy pavement light; it showed England, seaside towns I seemed to know, battered by gale-blown seas, lashing rain and great snowdrifts. Even the cars were disabled. The Greek men looked agreeably at one another: hardened by life in Laconia they mocked any discomfort for far away, so-called great, Anglia.

    ‘Ha! I bet they’ll blame Maggie!’

    As we were leaving a waiter came after me, imploring ‘Phile! Phile!’ Stupidly I’d left the letter behind. We’d taken another half carafe and Costello had talked on: about trying to outwit his diabetes and all the authorities back in England who connived in its attempt to quell him.

    ***
    I have the letter in my hand now. I found it while going through my mother’s things after she died; she must have taken it from the small horde of stuff I kept in the box room I used when I stayed. There was no sign of the letter that had eventually come from Isabel (‘I love Huw but I want you too’). I doubt it would have passed my mother’s censor and she would have felt free to destroy it.

    My mother’s letter, in a hand like that of a 16 year-old girl, lays out, unaffectedly, the death of her mother in a run down dock town on the Clyde. She recycles the words of the pastor who said ‘She was a good woman.’ I feel struck: there’s no doubt I chose these people, but how and why?

    There is a rap at the door, ‘Are you alright in there?’ There’s pleading in my father’s voice, ‘Are you looking for something?’

    ***
    Costello stumbled briefly on the steps as we left. ‘Damn! I’ve forgotten my torch.’ His nighttime blindness always startled me. On the pavement that night I couldn’t tell if he could see me at all. ‘You should see my piss in the morning, Ste; it’ll be solid.’
    We stood alone on the broad pavement of the empty dark street; a few spindly street lamps doing their best to form shadows. Shut up shops stooped beneath the dull glare of the utilitarian flats above. No moon; a chilly December in Sparta.

    I took one of his arms, tentatively, as though under instruction and  manoeuvred us into the direction of the spiti, home, then, closer, linking my arm through his. And, for a while at last, I felt the cool, stern compassion of five-fingered Mount Taygetus.

     

    © Submitted to the Creative Future Writers’ Award 2019 run by New Writing South on the theme ‘Home’: it got nowhere. Ah well.