Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

The red chair was the only one. Lola went out to the main ward and borrowed another. She handed me a bag of apples and took a framed photograph out of her nylon rucksack. It was of herself and Jack and me, taken on last year’s summer holiday in Devon, the one that usually stood on the dresser in our kitchen. For once we were all smiling, looking straight into the camera, and now I noticed that each of us had a variation of Ted’s strong features overprinted on our own. She placed the picture on Ted’s locker, angled so that he could see it when he woke up. ‘I thought he might like it,’ she said, ‘if he wakes up when we aren’t here.’

The love implicit in the simple gesture touched me and I felt sorry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. ‘A very good idea.’

‘We’re all he’s got,’ she said matter-of-factly and this was the truth. There was no wife, not even an auntie, now, if you didn’t count Jean Andrews. I didn’t know who Ted’s friends were, if there were any remaining.

‘How is he?’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack’s head half turn at Lola’s question. He wanted to hear but didn’t want me to see him listening.

‘Holding his own,’ I said. I was afraid that even though he seemed to sleep, he might hear what we were saying. I would tell them Dr Bennett’s verdict later, out of Ted’s earshot.

Lola nodded. ‘Go and get a cup of tea, Mum and eat some fruit. I’ll be here.’

‘Do you want to come with me, Jack?’

‘No,’ he said.

I carried a polystyrene cup of tea out into the car park and sat in my place on the wall, sipping the tea and eating an apple. The traffic was heavier now, with after-work visitors arriving and a short line of cars waiting for a free slot built up at the entrance. I tried to recapture some of the comfort of my earlier unspoken dialogue with Ted, or even the sense that with the dying and the newborn and the passers-through we were part of a generous community, but there was nothing. I felt lonely and sad for him, and disappointed in myself.

But there’s still time, I thought. I can still reach him.

‘He woke up,’ Lola said when I reached the ward again.

‘Yes?’

‘We chatted for a bit, Jack, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah. He asked Lo about uni and me about school. He was okay. Then he just sort of shut his eyes and went to sleep again. He didn’t see the photo, though.’

This was a long speech for Jack. Hope began sliding through my veins. Outside on the main ward there were relatives gathered round the beds of the old men, two nurses were pushing a trolley loaded with pill bottles and checking lists of medication, and a woman in a green overall was offering tea and biscuits. It wasn’t over. In a week, maybe, Ted would be sitting up too and choosing a biscuit from the Tupperware drum. In another week or two I could be driving him home. I would bring him back to my house and slowly, slowly, we would learn a new language for each other. I could tell him that he had made me suffer when I was too young to deserve such treatment and he could explain to me what had made him do it. We would listen to each other and make sense of the unintelligible, and then slowly stitch up the weave of forgiveness.

Anything was possible. Everything was possible.

The three of us settled round his bed. On one side Lola stroked his hand and talked to him about her house-share friends at university, young people he had never heard of let alone met. She talked easily and I knew that Ted would like the sound of her voice with its regular gurgles of laughter. Jack flitted around the room. He leaned on the windowsill for long minutes and watched the birds coming to roost among the huge metal cylinders on the hospital roof, then turned away to pick with his thumbnail at a leprous patch of paint on the bed end. I sat still and watched the rise and fall of Ted’s chest. It already felt like routine to be sitting here. Was it only yesterday at this time that I had been walking through the shimmering evening to meet Mel?

Time passed slowly. The ward quietened as the visitors drifted away. I was half expecting it, but no one came to tell us it was time to leave. A new nurse, just arrived on night duty, came in to introduce herself and to change one of the packs of fluid that drained into Ted’s arm.

‘How is he?’ I asked softly, thinking of the monitors at the nursing station.

‘There’s no change.’

That meant there was no deterioration. I smiled my leaping gratitude at her.

At nine o’clock I told Lola and Jack that they should go home. It was over an hour’s drive and Jack had school in the morning.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ Jack asked.

‘I’ll stay here a little longer. Lola will see you into bed.’ I glanced at her over his head and she nodded. ‘Or if you’d rather, you can go to Caz and Graham’s.’

‘No,’ Jack said at once.

Lola bent over and kissed her grandfather’s forehead, then touched her fingertips to his lips. ‘See you later, Grandad,’ she whispered.

Jack touched the small steeple of bedclothes over his feet and snatched his hand back. ‘Bye,’ he mumbled. He followed his sister to the door and then hovered, torn between the impulse to rush back to Ted’s side and the need to keep his own distance from me and his sister. Sometimes Jack was so transparent I thought I could read his hurt and put everything right for him so easily; at others I was afraid I hardly knew him. ‘Bye,’ he said again. Lola was leading and he followed her.

‘Drive carefully,’ I warned automatically. ‘I love you both.’

‘Yes, Mum.’

I sat down yet again. An hour dragged by and Ted rolled his head on the pillows and feebly shifted his legs. The Night Sister suddenly appeared with the first nurse. They moved rapidly around him, checking his fluids, and the tubes and wires that led into him, and calling him by his name.

‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ My voice was sharp and loud.

‘There are some new signs. The doctor’s coming.’

I was squeezed out of my place at his side. Ted’s eyes were wide open now and I could see how much it hurt him to breathe.

‘Dad? Dad, I’m here … I …’

I couldn’t finish what I was saying because the doctor arrived and I was edged further away to make room for him. I stood obediently outside the room with my arms wrapped round my chest. The old men were mostly asleep although pools of light lapped one or two of the beds. I waited until the doctor came out again. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt under his white coat and a name tag that read Dr Raj Srinivasar. I saw all this in a split second. He indicated that we should step a little distance away.

‘Doctor?’

‘I’m sorry. The undamaged portion of your father’s heart muscle has been working very hard since the attack and we have been helping him as far as possible with drugs to stimulate the heart’s natural rhythm. But I am afraid even this is gradually failing him now. I think Dr Bennett explained?’

I bent my head. ‘Yes.’

It had been human but utterly vain to hope, of course. I wanted the doctor to go away and take the nurses with him, and leave the two of us together. Dr Srinivasar knew this, because when I had composed my face and turned back to Ted he was lying quietly, alone again, under a dim light. I closed the door of the little room and took my place in the chair once more. I thought there were fewer wires clipped to him now and the levels of liquid in the bags hanging over his head didn’t change.

He was awake and he didn’t look as if he was in pain. Keeping him comfortable, Dr Bennett called it. Ted licked his lips and his neck muscles worked as if to squeeze words out of his ruined heart. ‘You’ve been a good girl,’ he whispered.