A sense of perspective

 ‘Collect some stuff from my place, would you, love? The key’s in the usual place.’

I’ve been here an hour and already my dad’s dismissing me. His voice is gravelly, barely audible. He pauses for breath. He’s in pain, despite the drip, I’m sure. He closes his eyes and begins speaking again. It’s an effort, I can tell. He’s a sorry figure of a man, my dad. Pathetic, even. His chin nicked and scabbed, from shaving I presume. He wears a hospital gown that’s tied loosely, exposing his collar bone, the skin around it liver-spotted and blue-veined. I wonder how he’s been coping, suspecting he hasn’t. I feel a twinge of guilt. Don’t ever feel guilty, Angie, it’s a daft emotion. Nothing you can do about what’s done. That’s what he used to tell me.

Still, looking at him here, now, it’s a hard emotion to suppress.

‘You don’t still have a key, do you?’ he asks, breaking into my thoughts like a thief.

I’m holding his hand; I squeeze it gently. I smile at the thought of the key to his flat still being on my keyring amongst all the others that weighed heavily in my handbag. My front door key, back door key, the garage key, keys for work. Keys for almost everywhere.

But not my dad’s flat.

‘I don’t, Dad, no.’

He closes his eyes, attempting a smile. I don’t like seeing his pain. I look away, my eyes follow the patterns on the curtains in an attempt at distraction. It doesn’t work.

This time his hand squeezes mine.

We’ve not said much to each other since I arrived. We’re relative strangers.

‘Nothing like your own clothes to make you feel at home.’

I’m putting it off, I know.

I’ve been dreading him asking me to collect stuff for him ever since I got here. Dreading it. But I guessed he might. You tend not to bring much with you when it’s an emergency; just what you’re wearing, maybe a few other essentials picked up in passing by kind paramedics.

Why was I dreading it?

Who knows?

Only, deep down, I do.

I’ve not been to his flat for, what, thirty-five years? Must be. The last I saw of the place was the night Mum and me headed off in the middle of the night like emigres or refugees, bags packed as well as they could be in the dark, a nightie caught in the zip, dragging in the mud.

She didn’t want him to try and stop us.

We never went back.

Until now.

When I first arrived on the hospital ward, I headed for the last bed on the right as instructed, the one with the curtains pulled around it, heart beating, palms sweating as though I am the one facing an unpleasant procedure. Pulling the curtain back I glanced in, recognising my dad’s hands. That is a surprise, a jolt, after all these years. They rested on the white cotton hospital sheets, crisp and clean, but frayed at the edges. His fingers were touching at the tips, as though in prayer.

I suppose it’s his ring, in the main, that I know. A gold signet ring with his initials inscribed in a scroll. Had you not known the letters read JLJ you might not have made them out. The ring is loose, no longer cutting into the flesh of his skin as it had when I was growing up.

You’re too good a baker, Lil, he’d say to Mum, loosening his belt. You trying to kill me off or summat?

He couldn’t be all that scared of dying, I thought back then, as he carefully licked his fingers and ate every last crumb of chocolate cake from the plate.

Jack Lionel Jones. My father. The man with whom I shared, unbelievably, half of my genetic code. The distance between us has grown. It does, doesn’t it, with only minimal contact? A card for birthdays and Christmases (I have always been more reliable than him at this), that was about all now.

Are we estranged? I wouldn’t go that far, not quite.

But strangers, yes.

Here, now, am I focussing on his hands first because I can’t look at his face?

Yes, I am.

Be brave, love, be brave, he’d tell me as those hands pushed me away on my bike, or encouraged me to swim into the deep end.

So I am. Brave. I look up at his face. He’s asleep. Well his eyes are closed. I feel a moment of alarm. Asleep, or?

No, his eyelids flutter, his lips part and close, part and close. Again, there is the appearance of prayer. Or a conversation in a dream. Dad has always been good at conversation. His skin is surprisingly smooth over his cheekbones, high like mine. He looks weightless under the sheet. He’d once been a big man, now diminished, shrunken. Wisps of white hair stray onto his forehead. His face is pale in the artificial light. I wonder if the man I once knew so well is still in there, buried deep. Is he the same? His physical frailty alarms me. Dad convinced me people don’t change. He’d never been one for self-help, self-improvement. He’d never have countenanced the idea.

‘We are what we are, Angie,’ he’d say. ‘With all our foibles. Best accept ourselves and move on.’

I didn’t know what foibles meant.

Mum had decided she hadn’t wanted to accept Dad as he was after many years of marriage, and so she’d moved on, taking me with her.

A nursing sister had called me a few hours ago, in the middle of the night; one of those unexpected calls that drags you from sleep and sends alarm bells ringing. Rarely good news at that time of day. Usually I allow the answerphone to kick in to deter the scammers and cheats who are about the only ones to call my landline these days.

Instinct, whatever, encouraged me to answer.

‘Angie Jones?’ the voice said. ‘Sister Bartlett, Ward 4, Southampton General. I need to speak with you about your father.’

My father? It took a moment for the realisation to kick in. My stepfather, the man Mum had married once the divorce came through, who I’d been close to, had passed away five years ago. I loved him, not least, for making Mum happy. It took a second to process who she meant. My brain was foggy, only moments earlier I had been deeply asleep.

‘Your Dad’s had a fall. We think he may have a fractured hip. He’s not on our danger list, but he’s been asking to talk with you, and the doctors would like to as well.’ There was a pause. ‘He’s been asking for your mum, too.’

‘Mum’s gone,’ I told her. ‘Three years ago. I did let him know, but he didn’t come to her funeral. Maybe he’s forgotten.’

I was sharing too many details. Details she wouldn’t wish to know, wouldn’t matter to her. Words were coming out in a tumble as I tried to process what she had told me. Dad’s had a fall. He’s been asking for me. Asking for Mum.

There was a pause when I stopped speaking. This wasn’t her business, I was quite aware.

But it was mine.

I didn’t go on to tell her that I lived in Mum’s place. I’d moved in to care for her when she needed me, and I was glad to have done so, to offer her some comfort. I’d never moved back out, which is how after all this time Dad had my number, just my landline. It was chance he did. I’d tried to give him my mobile, but he hadn’t wanted that. Mum had passed our number to him after we’d left, once the dust had settled. There were things they needed to communicate over, occasionally. Me. The divorce. Stuff.

I think I heard the nurse sigh, maybe yawn.

‘I’ll be a couple of hours,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, ending the call.

And now, here I am, back at my childhood home, the one I once shared with my parents, for the first time in years.

I’m looking for pyjamas and glasses, maybe a book. I have a list.

‘The glasses might be in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Thats where I fell, I think, hope they aren’t broken, pyjamas in the bedroom. Book, well there’s books everywhere, you know.’

Yes, there had always been books everywhere.

‘Your dad, always got his nose in something,’ Mum used to complain, before we left. ‘A book, newspaper. He’d read anything.’

‘Hmm?’ I’d reply, dragging myself away from the text on the back of a cereal pack.

‘Never mind,’ she’d rummage noisily amongst plates, spoons, knives in the washing up bowl, her frustration apparent. I’d ignore the disturbance, carry on reading, my spoon held inches from my mouth.

I find his key with ease. It’s underneath the doormat, as ever.

‘That man’s one big security risk,’ Mum used to say after we left, but before we moved in with my stepdad. It was one of the litany of complaints she had about Dad. ‘He’ll get robbed, mark my words.’

She’d sounded exasperated, but concerned too.

‘I think they’ll be disappointed, Mum,’ I’d reply. ‘Think someone got there before them.’

‘Don’t start me on mess,’ she’d indicate the jumble of stuff on our dining room table.

I’d change the subject, and straighten my school books, pens, paper and other detritus. Screwed up notes, tissues, empty biscuit wrappers.

I hesitate in front of the dark red door. The colour was the same as the day we pulled it to behind us, creeping away, not wishing to make a noise. Dad slept like a log. That sense of dread had returned. The one I felt in hospital. I have no idea what I’ll find. Well, I do have some idea, an inkling.

Deep breaths and in I go. There’s some resistance behind the door. I push harder, squeeze in and pick up the piles of local freebie newspapers, post, including catalogues and bills, not much else. I carry them through to the kitchen.

There’s that thing, isn’t there? If you ever re-visit your childhood school after a number of years. Things look so small. You doubt the chairs will bear your weight. You crouch over the tables, your back aching. You can’t believe you were ever that tiny.

This is how I find my dad’s flat. The rooms appear miniature, but, yet, everything seems distant. The table the three of used to eat meals at, how did we ever crowd around that without clashing cutlery?

Although there were clashes, many of them, in the couple of years before we left.

I add the newspapers and post to the pile that is already there. The table is more paperwork than formica. Dad can’t have eaten there for ages. I pull a chair out from under the table, the one I always sat at, my back to the window. The legs are spindly, they always were, but loose now too. Dare I sit on it?

I ease myself down. I need a moment or two.

I glance around. So little has changed. What was I expecting? A complete overhaul? Hardly. Mum had been the one who would return home with paint charts, scraps of wallpaper, ideas and plans.

‘We will decorate, one day,’ Dad would say, always putting it off, and never happy to ‘get a man in’. But that idea left with us. I can touch the wall from where I’m sitting with my right hand. The wallpaper is the same. A floral pattern that was dated when we left. Retro, almost, if it weren’t peeling away in the corners, dull from years of grease and steam. The splatter of gravy is still there, the one Mum flung at Dad (and missed) when he was late home for his tea once too often. I trace the flowers, the leaves, with my fingers. Roses.

I used to trace my fingers over them back then too, especially when arguments were in full flow. It was a distraction. It’s good to try and distract yourself when you’re uncomfortable, I find. One rose in particular is especially grubby. That would be my doing, despite Mum shouting

‘Fingers off the wall, young lady,’ whenever she spotted my transgressions. Dad would wink at me from behind his paper.

The sense of dread and awful anticipation I felt is easing. I stand up, make my way into the living room. Another blast from the past. Besides one easy chair being at a slightly different angle, little has changed. Is the TV different? It could be, but maybe not, too. I can’t recall. Things don’t look so small in here, not quite so distant. They are becoming closer. Memories are returning. Dad and I doing the pools together – we never won. Playing cards at Christmas – fierce competition between Mum and Dad. Mum usually won. Too much gin on Christmas night – the pair of them – the only time they ever drank it. Eventual tears, hugging, going to bed when the sun began to rise. Dancing together, the three of us in the front room. Dad twirling Mum, but including me too, throwing me high, always catching me despite the pretence he wouldn’t. Mum blushing when he kissed her. Don’t be such a softie, you only love me for my cakes.

Then things falling apart. The fights, the shouting. Dad finding out about the man who would become my stepdad.

I never really understood how that had come about. Mum never spoke of that process. Her complaints about Dad once we’d left were, I can see now, were relatively trivial.

Then us leaving.

Us leaving.

The flat is almost exactly how we left it, just without Mum and I there.

I sit in Dad’s chair, pick up the TV remote, but I don’t switch it on.

Instead, I think.

It dawns on me that Dad has sent me here on a mission. He always was one for playing games. He wants the pyjamas, the glasses, the book, but that’s not the main purpose of this visit.

When I first arrived I created the distance between myself and my childhood home. I made it smaller, kept it at arm’s length. But then the familiarity of the place crept in, got under my skin.

That was the purpose of the visit. To get under my skin. But more than that.

To see Dad for who he is, for who he has always been.

He’s not changed.

The pools coupons; they’re long gone, of course. But the books, the papers, the mess. They’re still here. The essence of him.

There’s a certain comfort in the mess. As far as mess is concerned, I’m my father’s daughter. He’ll know I feel that comfort too. He was always good at second guessing what I felt. He didn’t like Mum and I leaving, of course he didn’t, but things weren’t working out between them. Something had to give. And, on the whole, the state of the flat tells me he’s been okay. Better than he might have been. He wants me to see this, not just how he is now, a frail man in hospital who may have more wrong with him than a broken hip, I suspect.

Sadness overwhelms me. I cry. No, I sob, huge deep sobs. I’m crying for the time we’ve lost. Why has it taken me so long to come back?

The answer to that isn’t simple. Reluctance on my part after years have passed? Things Mum said? Settling into our new life? All of those things.

But Dad too. He was distant once we’d gone. He and Mum never spoke once the divorce went through. I’d call him, he’d not chat for long. The great conversationalist he’d once been had disappeared.

My dinner’s burning, love or I need to see a man about a dog.

The crevice created by Mum and I leaving had been too wide; too deep. I thought he hadn’t wanted me to reach across it to him. And I don’t think he did, for a while. There was anger on his part too. Anger with Mum. Anger with me for leaving him. I was 14 by then, old enough to understand the consequences of my actions. Not that I think I had. I don’t think I’d thought our leaving would be permanent. We’d left once before, briefly, but had returned.

But not this time.

And once we were both ready to talk it was too late. Too awkward. We still called, for a few years, a couple of times a year. Daft conversations.

You’re going to uni, eh?

I’ve changed my job.

How’s your Mum?

But eventually they stopped too. The pauses between the words too long.

But now I’m back.

I go into his bedroom. Same blanket on the bed. Photos of Mum and I on the bedside cabinet. No tears, no tears. Pyjamas on the floor, of course. His glasses here, next to the pyjamas. Maybe this is where he fell, right here, not in the bathroom.

I gather up his bits and pieces and I make to leave, closing each door behind me, until I reach the front door.

My emotions shift. Sadness is still there, of course, but there’s something else too, something on the periphery, that I can’t grasp hold of. Relief? Contentment? A sense of resolution?

I return to the hospital, to Dad. The gulf of the years we’ve missed has closed slightly, maybe not entirely, but it’s narrowed.

I’m going back to spend time with the man with whom I share half of my genetic code.

He cared for me once, he still does. it’s my turn to care for him.