It is early in the evening when I receive a call from my middle sister informing me my father is being assessed in the regional casualty. Neither of us mention our mother who was admitted to the same hospital sixteen years previously. I remember the awkward moment when my father and I reviewed her chest X-ray on the ward. Both of us are medical doctors – my father now retired – but somehow we chose neither to see nor to mention the white shadow which overlay the blackness of my mother’s lung.
We have always been good at ignoring the obvious.
We are on speaking terms but my middle sister is the only one who regularly avails of this privilege. She calls him once a week.
It is unfortunate for my father that his favourite child lives four thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic.
I stop at his house on my way to the City hospital. There’s an impressive amount of dried blood splattered into tiny droplets on the hall carpet. These spots mark the site of his collapse and track his progress from the hall to the sink in the downstairs toilet. Over the next few days I spend several hours in efforts as unsuccessful as Lady Macbeth. Out, damned spot! Out, I say.
Before the Casualty nurses have even had a chance to acknowledge my presence, my father cries out. I have never seen him so grateful to see me. He is normally in command of these meetings; held on his terms, on his territory.
While he eats a cold Cornish pasty, unheeding of the pastry flaking onto shirt and trousers, I piece together the details of his diagnosis. His collapse caused by ‘fast’ atrial fibrillation.
My father expresses irritation at the hardness of the trolley and the impossibility of sleep in an area of ceaseless activity.
The Casualty Officer – standing casually by a mobile laptop – confirms my father awaits a bed on the Emergency Medical Unit – EMU for short. The last patient took seventy hours, he says. There is every likelihood my father’s admission will take longer. The Casualty Officer’s apology is perfunctory. If he cared once, he is careful not to show this now.
I am shocked, as much by my father’s transformation as by the sudden shifting of the foundations of our relationship. Previous certainties swept away by this sudden inversion. It is more natural to be his doctor than his son – to see things in terms of physiology rather than deal with the seismic cracks exposed before us. His weaknesses hidden for so long revealed by a single sleepless night in limbo.
He should be patient. He should wait in hospital, but he says he can’t stay here another three days. ‘It’ll be the death of me.’
Current exigencies – lack of beds and my willingness to look after him – persuade a reluctant Dr Farouk to release him to my care.
When we get home my father refuses to avail of the stair-lift which has been used only once before – to convey my mother to the upstairs front bedroom where she slept her last. This is the same room my father occupies now.
There’s a ticking clock in every room but this is a place where time has stopped. There’s a ghost on every landing.
On my first night I switch off the radiator. The valve turns, the indicator points to zero, but the radiator continues to blast out heat and more heat. I swelter.
The following afternoon my father is well enough to shower. I help him clean the dried blood from his head and neck. I wash his hair. Apart from the obvious wound on his right ear, he is almost back to his usual self. It’s good to see that he’s well enough to down a merlot.
My father refused to allow my mother home for Christmas. He considered that neither he nor his house were ready to accept her, and so we spent her last Christmas morning on the ward of the local Community Hospital. We were only five minutes away from ‘home.’ We sat around her bed sipping champagne from plastic cups, pretending to be a family united. Even then she expected this was only a prelude to her imminent departure, but we left her there returning to the house she never asked to live in, to the kitchen she never liked.
She must have been disappointed.
The next week goes well. I support my father’s routines as best I can. Each day I awake a little later, achieve a little less.
I return home on Friday, exhausted and irritable and much to my wife’s disgust, drink myself into a stupor.
On Sunday afternoon, I phone my father – my return next week predicated on whether he is fit to drive. He is fine, he tells me but he doesn’t like Sundays.
‘Why not?’ I ask him, thinking it has something to do with Sunday drivers or the number of cyclists on the road which I know he detests.
‘It’s like Disneyland.’
‘What is?’ I ask, mystified.
‘Sainsburys on a Sunday.’
‘Disneyland?’
‘Yes, excited children, everywhere. Unpleasant. It’s as if they have never been taught to behave.’
‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘It is. They should know better. They should know that Sainsburys has a children’s changing room. If their parents don’t like them they can always change them.’
I laugh. I take it as a sign of his recovery. It’s just the sort of joke my father would make. But I’m surprised by how much it still hurts me to hear it.
Am I too sensitive?
Whatever prompts this, I will never ask him and he will never tell me, and like all important things in my family, this too will remain unsaid and unremarked upon.
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