Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 24
O did as much as he could. He would get the afternoon off whenever he could so that he could sit with Father by the gas fire. That was all the old man did now; lie in his bed or sit in his chair. O would bring home videos from work, because Father still liked to have the TV on all day every day. He didn’t talk any more about what he enjoyed and what he didn’t enjoy watching, but O got to know what he liked, because there were some tapes he would watch over and over again with evident interest, keeping his eyes on the screen, not turning to stare at the wall which is mostly how he would indicate discomfort or displeasure at this time. He liked the stranger Hollywood musicals, The Pirate, for instance, and he especially liked Vietnamese, Indian and Chinese tapes; musicals, operas, police thrillers and ghost stories; silk flowers, white-faced women, gongs, cymbals and sickening violence done both for real and as farce.
When he couldn’t stand the television any more O would put on records that he liked and that Father liked too, so that they could listen to them together; Stuart Burrows singing ‘Dalla Sua Pace’ (the sleeve notes translated the first line of the lyrics as ‘When she is beside me’); then Billie Holiday, Brenda Lee and Sarah Vaughan, the albums on which they sing their versions of ‘All of Me’. When he did that Boy would come out of the kitchen and stand in the doorway and listen. He would ask O to put the song on again, and again, and all three of them would sit there in silence listening to the song four or five times over.
Father was so small and frail now, sitting there listening to the song, that Boy could have picked him up.
All of me, why not take all of me
Can’t you see,
I’m no good without you.
Often when they had been listening to her song O would go out and telephone Mother. He used to call her regularly at this time.
Once, while they were listening to it, Boy was cleaning the bath. O left Father alone in the living room; he just wanted to be with his Boy for a moment. They both remembered their first time together in the flat. It was the same song, but a different singer; and this time it was Boy who pushed O up against the wall, pushed his knee between his legs until it hurt him, bit him gently on the face. When they got to the line When I am beside… Boy balled his left hand into a fist and pressed it hard on O’s chest, right over his heart, so hard that the ring marked him, made a small bruise, like a branding mark.
Father sickened. He couldn’t go to the toilet by himself or eat easily now; Boy even chewed his food for him sometimes. His senility was so extreme that they had to fight the feeling that he was doing this deliberately; that he was somehow lying. But when the doctor had called he had told them that it would be just like this. To reassure himself, Boy looked up the description of angina again in one of his books: The patient will often try and describe his sensations by referring to a steel band tightening around his chest, directly above his heart; or he may clasp his hands over his heart and push inwards, like an actor making the traditional gesture for avowal. No one really slept any more, and even when the days were superficially calm, there was the constant anxiety; they were waiting for him to die. Both of them had flashes of feeling very close to murderous rage, the rage that makes people want to kill their children. O wanted to cram the old man’s mouth with food and choke him, to tuck him into bed with too many blankets and smother him, lift him gently into the bath and drown him.
The very last time that they managed to get him to the breakfast table, Father was in evident distress. Usually he would point at something on the breakfast table when he wanted it – if he needed milk in his tea, he would just point at the jug and say milk. This morning he pointed at all the things on the table in turn; but when he pointed at the milk jug he said, out loud, Boy; when he pointed at the toast rack he said Man; when he pointed at the sugar bowl he said Wife. And then he sat there with both hands on the table and said boy, child, mother, sister, wife, darling, baby.
The next stage was just as the book described it; the old man became aphasic, which means that even when he knew what he wanted, he couldn’t say what he wanted.
Then he sickened to the point where he couldn’t communicate at all, not even by looking or pointing; and when he got to this stage they knew it was nearly the end and they called Mother and asked her to come. The night she came he wouldn’t or couldn’t stop crying, and O was going out of his mind because he could see that his Boy was hurting so much. She arrived in a taxi, still wearing the silver dress and carrying a small bag with everything she needed. When O opened the door to her he whispered: ‘He’s just gone off.’
She came in, and kissed O on both cheeks. He whispered, ‘Boy’s in the kitchen. And I’m watching TV with the sound off.’
And then he took hold of her hand and said: ‘And now Mother’s here.’
They both laughed, quietly, and she said: ‘One: where can I change? Two: where do I sleep?’
Boy was so busy, scouring the kitchen sink, that he hardly had time to greet her. O and Mother just got on with it and made a bed up on the sofa and laid an extra place for dinner.
There wasn’t actually much that Mother could do; she helped with the vegetables and the dishes, but basically Boy did everything. He kept on saying, I can manage, I can manage. What she did do, quietly and unobtrusively, was to get O out of the house; she took him to The Bar. Then she’d leave Gary and the Stellas and me to look after him, and she’d go back to Boy. Also she got Boy to eat and drink; he was so busy providing and caring that he often forgot to feed himself. She would bring him cups of coffee in the night without asking him if he wanted them. One night she put a bottle of champagne on the table, saying, It’s your anniversary, it’s eight months now. The next night, when Boy was so tired he could hardly eat, she kept him talking, poured out another bottle of champagne, saying, Well, tonight is my anniversary, a private one. If you knew what we were celebrating even you would blush, boys, now drink up. The way she could get Boy to eat and drink without noticing it made O think that maybe Mother had been a nurse at some point in her varied career.
And her biggest contribution was of course the money; she was still keeping them.
She kept herself immaculate even though she was sleeping on a made-up bed and had to do her make-up in the bathroom mirror. She went to work every night having had dinner with O and Boy at six o’clock. She changed into the dress and called a taxi and went to work with her cigarettes and her hair up. She said: ‘Goodnight, Boys.’
And every night O said: ‘Goodnight, Mother,’
And every night Boy came wet-handed out of the kitchen and kissed her and said: ‘Goodnight, Mother.’
For the last three days of Father’s illness, this routine broke down completely; Mother didn’t even come into The Bar. The three of them did nothing but watch over Father. He had stopped eating, Boy had stopped preparing food, and no one slept. They were just waiting, Boy waiting for Father to die, O waiting to support Boy when it finally came and Mother waiting to hold the two of them up should she have to. The television stayed on all the time with no one to watch it. It was almost winter; they kept the heating on day and night as the first frosts came.
When the death finally came it came quickly and was not expected, even though they had been waiting for it for so long.
After three days Boy was so exhausted that even he had to sleep. He woke at three in the morning; Mother and O were asleep as well; but Boy had set his alarm to wake him up at hourly intervals so that he could check on Father. As soon as he got out of bed he knew that something was wrong; the flat was freezing cold. He went straight to the kitchen; the pilot light on the boiler was out. He went quickly to Father’s room, where he found that the old man had dragged the duvet off himself, and was sleeping uncovered. His skin was pale and cold, his breathing slow and shallow. Boy immediately pulled the duvet back over him and shouted to wake O and Mother.
Boy knew it was hypothermia, and he gave Mother and O quick and accurate instructions while he himself wrapped himself around Father under the duvet, trying to warm him with his own body.
Mother called for an ambulance; it took thirteen minutes to arrive.
O put on his red towelling robe, then went straight to the kitchen and filled every saucepan they had.
Boy couldn’t actually remember if the correct way to restore body temperature in cases where the patient is not capable of taking a hot drink is submersion in a hot bath. He was afraid that the book in fact said, This is a dangerous and possibly fatal remedy, since it draws all the remaining body heat to the surface. But there was no time to find the book and check. He had to act.
In the kitchen, O found that they had run out of matches; he carried a piece of flaming newspaper from the gas fire in the living room to light the gas rings, and when he extinguished the newspaper under the kitchen tap the flat began to smell of burning.
He and Mother carried pans of steaming water to the bath; there was a pool of spilt water in the hallway.
When the bath was full (it took eight minutes) Boy began to lift Father out of the disarranged and dirty linen of the bed, to take him to the bath. He got him up in his arms and sitting on the edge of the bed all right; but then as he lifted him to a standing position he realised that something else was wrong; he could feel the sweat, he heard the change in the breathing, and he realised that the old man was in the middle of an angina attack. His eyes suddenly opened wide with pain and he was clearly terrified. His skin was now grey and his face began to discolour.
Force yourself to act quickly and decisively, the book said. You only have three minutes. Leave the door open and turn all the lights on so that the ambulance men can locate you.
Boy called for help again.
By the time he got out into the hallway, he could carry the old man no further. O fetched Mother’s wedding-present bedspread from their bedroom; they laid him down on that.
Mother took up a position at the door, watching for the ambulance.
All the lights were blazing.
The patient will probably turn his head towards the light, the book said.
Boy didn’t think; he bent over his Father and began to heavily, deliberately hit him as hard as he could over the heart. He hit him again, and again, and again, striking for his Father’s heart.
As death approaches, the patient will feel mortal dread; hold him as hard as you can, let him know that you are still there, let nothing frighten him. Turn off the television, the book said.
Then Boy did the last thing you can do; he leant forward as if in a passionate final kiss, he placed his mouth over his Father’s and he tried to give him his own breath.
When the ambulance men arrived, at four in the morning exactly, what they saw, framed by the open front door of the flat, with all the lights blazing, was this:
In the centre of the hallway floor, the naked bulb shining directly above his head, was a young man, holding a body in his arms. At first sight, the body looked small enough to have been the body of a child, though it was in fact the body of an old man. And the young man, because of the body cradled in his lap, and because someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders which looked like a blue robe, and because his face was cast down in the traditional posture, looked like the Virgin.
The Virgin is conventionally portrayed as being unrealistically young and beautiful. All the lines and bags of exhaustion are gone, suddenly erased from her face now that the labour is over (or the agony, for it is hard to tell if this is a nativity or a pieta; the traditional grouping of figures is the same for both scenes). In this version, the Virgin is cradling her miraculous child in the simplest of settings; her resting place is a blanket spread roughly on the humble ground. Kneeling by her side is an older man, sober-faced and draped in a scarlet robe. This is Joseph – wondering now whether this is indeed his child, his responsibility, wondering what their life will be like now, watching over the tableau with strange, sad, half-doubting yet loving eyes. His posture, leaning slightly forward with upraised hands, acknowledges that his role is to support the Virgin at this moment, but makes it clear that, although he is her husband, he may not at this moment touch her. The Virgin looks down at the face in her lap; Joseph gazes on the face of the Virgin.
Around these central figures, in this particular version, there are no assembled saints or angels; the artist has imagined that the scene takes place at the dead of night and for your eyes only. There are no saints, no hermits, no knights of the Church Militant, no confessors or prophets, no ranks of faces; but as always in these compositions there is one face which turns to look out of the picture at you. This is the figure of the donor (the person who paid for the picture) standing in the foreground of the work with a strange mixture of pride (for this figure is wealthy, well-dressed, and proud of it) and humility (for it is acknowledged that wealth alone could not buy the role of witness at this scene, which is a privileged one). The donor both intervenes and intercedes between the holy figures and you, the spectator.
The donor in this version also doubles as the other traditional attendant figure in the composition. This is St Anne, the Mother of the Virgin, the woman who rejoices in her own child’s great role in history with a half-seen smile of maternal wisdom. Her smile is also full of pain, for she has seen both childbirth and death before, beginning and ending. She stands right on the edge of the central family grouping. But now that she sees the ambulance men have arrived, the donor has stepped back, stepped away, taken a place right at the edge of the composition. This is the moment at which she turns to look out of the picture. Look, she is turning now. Mother is turning towards you in her silver dress, Mother is turning to welcome the ambulance men, Mother is turning to look at you, you, one of the arriving crew or gathering crowd; turning in her silver dress, which in this light and at this hour of the morning does indeed look strangely like a robe embroidered with seed pearls; and the scarlet bathrobe, in this light, does indeed look like a robe worthy of a saint; and the bedspread on the hall floorway looks like a carpet rich, rare and costly enough to be a worthy resting place for the Virgin and her child. Mother turns, and in her dual role of donor and St Anne, indicates the tableau on the hall floor with a small movement of her hand.
She says, Look at that. The Holy Family. Virgin and Child with St Joseph and Donor.
She says, You can look now, it’s finally finished. She says, Look, there’s nothing more I can do.
And now Mother walks away, she shuts the door; she shuts the door in your face, she shuts out this strange sight from the eyes of the gathering crowd of neighbours. She shuts the door from the outside, not from the inside. She shuts the front door and she goes along the walkway and down the five flights of stairs and away into the city at dawn without even taking her bag or any money.
Cupboards, shelves, cabinets, papers, you can keep them. I leave you my toothbrush and my nightie and my overnight bag; and I leave you my words of advice and my generous allowance and my maternal wisdom; I leave you my sense of humour and my years of experience and my feminine guile; I leave you our early evening suppers and my late night drinks and your uncleaned baths and your unwashed dishes and your two weeks of ironing; I’m taking all the jewels, both the real and the fake.
Mother
The ambulance men dealt with everything quickly and carefully. Surprisingly, even when they realised that these three men had lived together as a family, though unrelated by blood or marriage, they said nothing and apparently did not think the situation worthy of comment.
O made all the arrangements on the phone the next morning.
And when they were left alone, these two, who had such a sense of occasion and had invented so many ceremonies, hardly knew what to do. For how long should you sit in mourning, for how many nights do you watch when you are unsure of what it is you are trying to let go of or say goodbye to or keep hold of?
Boy pulled off Father’s ring before they took him, and wore it with his own. He didn’t eat for three days. This seemed appropriate, but hardly adequate as a sign of mourning.
It was a miserable funeral; miserable and quick. There were only a few of us there. I saw Boy crying like I had seen the man crying at their wedding. O held onto him, but Boy said, Don’t try and stop me from crying. Boy said, I am not crying because he’s dead. I am crying for the life he led. And it isn’t my fault and it wasn’t his fault but I wish there was somebody to blame, if he wasn’t to blame then who was to blame, who was it, oh, I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them.
As I said there were only a very few of us there – after all, we had never even met this Father. The really strange thing was that Mother wasn’t there – but as we found out later, she didn’t even know when the funeral was or where. O had left a message for her at The Bar, but they didn’t know yet that she hadn’t got it.
I made myself go but I shouldn’t have. I am not good at funerals. Sometimes when I remember, I remember there being so many and so close together … This was not one I needed in addition to all that. Weddings, divorces we could do in style and no trouble, but it’s hard for me to have a good funeral. Other people at that time used to try and tell me that funerals were good, were good for you, that it was good to say goodbye in public, but I could never feel it myself, I was always so angry. I just used to stand there listening to the crying and I always thought I could hear someone swearing under their breath. People say I should not be so sad and in fact I have seen friends smiling and embracing as they cry and be glad somehow that our boys had such lives. But I don’t see it. I suppose I can’t forgive any of it. And so I couldn’t cry with Boy, but I was used to crying like that, I knew what he was crying for, that woman knew what she was crying about. When I heard Boy saying what he said I promised myself I’d remember his words and use them myself sometimes later, I won’t cry because he’s dead, I’ll cry because of the life that he led, and I know, because he told me.
