Nicholas Royle - Quilt

Mary comes back with two green plastic bags with little white name-sticker bracelets on the handles, my father’s belongings, and then I leave.

My father’s house is the family home of twenty-five years, a cottage dating back to the eighteenth century, situated half a mile or so up a single-track lane, standing in seclusion in an acre of what were once beautifully tended gardens and a small piece of woodland, with fine views of the valley below. In recent years especially, the garden has gone to wilderness. My father managed to cut the lawns in the immediate vicinity of the house, but beyond that the grasses, cow parsley, nettles, brambles have grown above head-height. Even his shed, only a few feet from the house, is inaccessible, with brambles and nettles and the side of a huge hedge overgrown across the door.

I drive back there with surprising calmness. I put the green bags of belongings down just inside the front door. I see someone at the hospital has written on a slip of paper the date, his name, the letters R.I.P. and a list of contents, duly signed:

1 pair slippers

5 pair pants

1 pair pyjamas

1 vest

1 Belt

1 jacket

2 Hankies

2 Jumpers

1 Polo Shirt

1 Pair trousers

Why do some of these words merit capital letters and others not? Did the nurse who wrote them unconsciously suppose, as the text went on, it would be more dignified for these articles to have caps, words cap in hand, begging not to be read too carefully, while also not to be overlooked? As the priest says, we bring nothing into this world and it is certain we take nothing out. Naked and crying we come, in darkness invisible go, leaving two green plastic bags as today’s riposte to Egypt’s ancient dreams, as if, as if

— I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that.

— Couldn’t I at least take my glasses? No one will notice I’ve got them on, and it’ll make such a difference if I can see. (Through the departure gates, not even a boarding pass.)

— No, madam, I don’t care if your name is Cleopatra, he’s already gone.

— There was something I had to give him.

— That’s what they all say. There’s always something: a bite for the journey, a few last words, a kiss, a clasp of the hand, iron grip, rip, no, rules is rules. Rip into the world under strict orders, nothing extra out, not a sausage. Try all sorts these days, seen some fine cases I can tell you. It’s no good, same as it ever was as far as we’re concerned, Up and down the City Road . Easy to see why you think you come in, In and out the Eagle , but just because you come in doesn’t mean, That’s the way the money goes , pardon me for singing, doesn’t mean you actually go out , like there is some plane for you to catch, or even any departure gates, Every time when I come home , it’s a lonely job this, I tell you, most people these days think of us as machines, I think I’m gonna be sad , no, in peace we say, daft, the rest likewise, She’s got a ticket to ride , I says to her I says ticket , you don’t need no ticket , it’s all free, completely free, not a bean, I says to her, But she don’t care , receding hair, wispy silverwhite and gray. Lovely man as a matter of fact: Pop goes the weasel .

Unless that’s wrong. Yes, I’m skipping. It’s still Saturday. The green bags don’t come till I pick them up on the Monday morning.

Now that he has died, I no longer know how long anything takes.

As if on stage, I try to say that minimal palindrome so close to ‘dead’ perhaps lisped from the start with that skip in view: ‘dad’.

I stand in the main room just inside the front door, the dining room we called it, though no one ever dined in it, dining died out before we moved here. I open the door to my left, it’s been a habit for two or three years now to keep doors closed in the house, part of his strategy for keeping mice out, or perhaps in, for the strategy has never struck me as very coherent, at any rate to minimise their movement. He has even constructed precisely measured, tried and tested, weighted rods of wood and aluminium for sliding into place once a door is closed, especially last thing at night, having discovered the little creatures can easily scoot under. I walk into the drawing room and draw my breath, absurd to reason, dining and drawing, all these dying words, rooms in tombs, for drawing breath, withdrawing-breath-room. I stare about this large and splendid space, with its oak beams and windows on three sides and fireplace on the fourth. There are armchairs and sofas, tables and sideboards, but most of all there is post. What a word. And now the tears come to my eyes for the first time since it happened, alone:

— These things happen from time to time.

The tears surge like waking up in Eden, in need of Eden. In the wings all this while, yet it was only yesterday they ran down my face as my father lay upstairs in his room, dying it can now be said, dying in neither the dining nor drawing room, can be said post , post saying past, all post past past the post. The room is almost knee-deep in junk mail, a choked sea of pointless post. My father never, so far as I know, sent any money to any of these scam-mongers, but he seems also never to have given up believing that somehow some day one of these proclamations that he was winner of the lucky draw, sitting in the lucky drawing room, would come true and a cheque for some huge amount of money arrive in the post. He would receive up to twenty items a day, meticulously open and read them, then replace the letters in their envelopes and annotate the envelopes with a summary of what the senders were promising, the amount of money they wanted from him first of all, the date of receipt, and the deadline for response. In the past six months the mounds have risen dramatically, he stopped bothering to throw the stuff away. But he kept up this barmy archivism, annotating and specifying dates. Now the post is so deep you can hardly cross the room, his armchair the solitary accessible island, humble sedentary fortress lapped by postal tides.

It’s Saturday morning, the day of my father’s death: he would have wanted details of the date and hour, the precise time. His obsessive love of time, his fascination with the hour meant manual, radio-controlled or atomic, battery or electric, clocks bought by mail order, watches received as so-called free gifts on the waves of junk mail, clocks and watches all over the house, the most accurate and reliable of all of course strapped silver on his wrist, bright bracelet of time as he stood in the kitchen day after day, year after year, at the appointed hour listening to Big Ben or the pips on the radio, checking his watch and commenting on how on or out of time it was. His love led me once, years ago, to the caustic comment that I could imagine his last words, on his deathbed, looking in my eyes and asking:

— What is the time, please?

The post is past. Words come away. Letters capsize. She is digression, syncopation, asyndeton, ontradiction. Her ‘c’ curls off invisibly, leaving the shoreline of a new language: ontra . She touches all the words, she’s amid them, mad as Midas, without a trace. Of course the matter is impossible:

— Everything you write about me, she says, is old and worn out. I am just a character in a book to you.