Tony Parsons - Starting Over

‘Not dead yet then?’ he said.

I looked at my watch. ‘It’s still early.’

He smiled. ‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.

‘Our story?’ I said.

Keith nodded his enormous head. ‘Why you were on that roof. Why a canteen cowboy was out chasing naughty people. Why you were in the car instead of my twelve-year-old partner.’

I thought about it. ‘We were going to lunch and we saw uniformed officers in need of assistance.’

He leaned back in the hospital chair. It creaked in protest, not really designed for the likes of Keith. ‘Yeah, that might work,’ he yawned. He popped a fistful of grapes in his cakehole, and ran his weary eyes over me.

‘Nice grapes?’ I said.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate – you want one?’

‘No, you’re all right.’

And then he got this sly grin, and pulled out the unwrapped packet of Low Tars.

‘For emergencies,’ he said, and I nodded my appreciation as I slipped them deep inside the pocket of my dressing gown. He held out the grapes.

‘So – how are you feeling?’

I chewed a grape and it tasted of nothing because of the drugs. Under my stripy pyjamas I could feel the scar on my chest pulsing. It was not the heart that I felt. You would think it would be the heart. But it was the scar.

‘Never better,’ I said.

Keith laughed, shook his head. ‘Hard, aren’t you?’

I smiled. ‘Harder than you,’ I said.

He snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was cutting me some slack. Apart from eating my grapes, he had a lovely bedside manner. I appreciated him coming. I knew it wasn’t just about getting our story straight. But I was a bit sick of people feeling sorry for me. I rolled up the pyjama sleeve on my right arm. Keith narrowed his eyes.

‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.

I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’

He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.

‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.

‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’

He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain and defeat from me. Keith only stopped laughing when he saw my wife.

Lara stood in the doorway of the hospital room, holding the flowers and the DVD player, and staring at us as if we were a pair of big stupid kids. I looked at Keith, his meaty head hung low, and felt like blurting, ‘Best out of five, Granddad?’

But I stifled my anarchic laughter, and said nothing.

There was a soft knock on the bedroom door and Ruby came in with a look of shy delight, carrying a breakfast tray.

I blinked back the fog of sleep as the smell of fried bacon filled the room. I could have sworn I had been awake all night long, fretting about how much time the doctors had given me, but I suppose I must have slept just before I was due to wake up. Ruby placed the tray on the empty side of the bed, where her mother slept. Orange juice. A still steaming mug of tea. Bacon. Two fried eggs. An incinerated sausage. ‘Welcome home. I cooked your favourite,’ she smiled.

Lara came into the room, already dressed, rubbing some sort of cream on her hands. The smell of my wife’s hand cream mixed with the smell of my daughter’s breakfast. They did not mix very well. We all looked at the tray, Ruby’s smile slowly fading.

‘That looks really good, darling,’ Lara said briskly. ‘But your father’s not meant to eat –’

‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, cutting her off as I snatched up the knife and fork. I grinned at my daughter and her face brightened. ‘You’re right. My favourite. Best meal of the day.’

Ruby frowned at the plate. ‘The sausage is a bit…’

‘Looks like a good sausage,’ I said, sawing into it.

‘Sausages are difficult,’ Ruby said. ‘Because they’re so thick.’

I nodded, not looking at Lara. But I could sense her folding her arms and choosing her words and getting ready to restore order. I didn’t need to look at her face to know what I would see there. And of course she was right. But she was also completely and totally wrong.

‘Any brown sauce?’ I asked, spearing my cremated banger.

‘Ah,’ Ruby laughed. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’ And she went off to get the brown sauce. Daddy’s Sauce, they used to call it when I was her age.

I looked at Lara as I chewed on my sausage. She smiled thinly at me. It was difficult for her. I knew she had my best interests at heart. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of reason in a screaming nuthouse. Calm, rational, quietly infuriated.

‘Have you been listening at all to these doctors? Have you heard a single thing they’ve said? Do you really want to clog up your arteries with the same old junk that you’ve been –’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, gulping down the badly burned banger. It left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But the bacon looked good. Tender, juicy.

‘It’s not fine. It’s stupid. It’s self-destructive. It’s just…’ She shook her head, as if she was giving up on me. But I knew she would never give up on me. ‘Is it because you’re afraid of hurting her feelings? Her feelings will be a lot more hurt if…’

She turned her face away.

‘Lara,’ I said, ‘come on.’ But she didn’t respond as I morosely sawed a piece off the bacon. Ruby came back with the brown sauce in one hand and little transparent shakers in the other.

‘Salt and pepper,’ she said. ‘I forgot that too.’

Lara turned on the pair of us. She put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder.

‘Your dad can’t eat this stuff, Ruby.’ Her words were gentle but insistent. ‘He can’t put salt on his food. Never again. Do you understand? He might as well put rat poison on his meals.’

‘Come on,’ I said. This was too much. ‘Salt’s not quite the same as rat poison.’

She gave me a frosty look. ‘You’re right, George. Rat poison would probably be healthier. There’s more fibre in it.’ She gave Ruby’s shoulder a gentle shake. ‘It’s great you made a meal for your father to welcome him home. It’s such a lovely thing to do. But, darling, you have to understand that things have changed.’ She looked at my breakfast plate and sighed. ‘He can’t eat this kind of stuff any more.’ The hand she had around our daughter dropped to her side. ‘It will kill him,’ she said quietly.

And I laughed. I had stopped eating, but now I began again. It was a bit cold by this time, and it got even colder when I smothered it in brown sauce. ‘One big breakfast is not going to kill me,’ I said, really tucking in.

‘You don’t want the salt, I guess,’ Ruby said, clutching the transparent pots to her chest, as if I might suddenly try to snatch them away from her.

‘Not necessary,’ I said, picking up a slice of toast, and feeling the slither of lavishly applied butter running across my wrist.

My wife and daughter stared at me as I jauntily consumed my big breakfast. As if they were obliged to watch this ritual. As if it was important.

As if they were witnessing the condemned man eating his last meal.

Ruby was in her bedroom.

I knocked, of course, and knocked again until I was given a half-hearted invitation to enter. There she was, at her desk, her head bowed before the computer screen as if in prayer.