Tony Parsons: One For My Baby

Day and night mean nothing now so we take shifts. I take over from my father around two in the morning. It must be like this when you have a baby-blinking back the sleep in the middle of the night, struggling to stay awake as you perform your various duties. It would have been something like this for Rose and me, if we had been lucky enough to have our baby son or daughter. Except this is the other end of the story.

I do not believe that my nan is going to die tonight. It’s too soon. It will surely go on for a while yet. She doesn’t seem to be in enough pain. The pain in her side, that unimaginable pain from the tumor, appears to be easing. She is taking no medication. Her mind is clear. She looks peaceful.

Her hair on the pillow is silver streaked with gold, the result of a quick dye job that my mother gave her to lift her spirits. Her eyebrows are not crooked because my mum has drawn them on. She breathes out, closes her eyes.

I sit in a chair by the side of her bed, dozing off although I am trying not to, slipping in and out of an exhausted sleep.

And then her voice pulls me back.

“Mum and Dad,” she says.

“You want-should I get them?”

“My mum and dad.”

“Nan?”

“They’re here.”

“Are you okay? Do you want-”

“Alfie?”

“Here I am.”

“Hold my hand, Alfie.”

“I’ve got it.”

“You’re a good boy.” Her chest lifts and she slowly exhales, seeming to let go of the fear, the pain, the longing to stay. “You’re trying your best, aren’t you? I can see that.”

“Nan? Can I get you anything?”

“I don’t need anything. But thank you, love.”

I can’t tell if she is sleeping or not. A light seems to be creeping into the room. It’s not night any more. The impenetrable blackness is fading away. But how can it be over so soon?

“I love you, Nan,” I say, my voice choking up, my eyes suddenly filling. “I love you so much.”

Why didn’t I say this to her earlier? Why did I leave it so long? Why haven’t I been telling her this all my life?

All those days when I had other things to do. All those times when I had somewhere else to go. And I could have been with her.

Thanking her for loving me.

“It doesn’t hurt now,” she says, her voice soft and calm.

“That’s good.”

“Just stay with me.”

“I’m here, Nan.”

“Stay with me, love.”

The school is not so different from the one where I taught, the packs of boys pouring out of the gates instantly identifiable as the toughs or their natural prey, with the great mass in between acting harder than they really are, laughing and taking swipes at each other with their battered backpacks, swaggering with a cockiness that begs to be seen as confidence.

What makes this school different from the Princess Diana is that there are girls here. Their presence changes the atmosphere, charges the air. Some of the girls look like children still, but others are more like grown women, women who are young enough to get away with long hair and short skirts, women who are aware of their power over the roaring, unformed boys who swarm around them. They pass me by at the gates, these girls, some of them raising an eyebrow and smirking, evaluating me and dismissing me in an instant. Then I see her. She is not part of any pack.

“Plum?”

Her face reddens.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got my car. I’ll drive you home.”

She walks with me to my car, ignoring the jeers of who’s-your-boyfriend, Plumpster? and I-don’t-fancy-your-one-much, Plumpster. When we get in the car, I make no move to turn on the ignition.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to tell you in person.”

“Tell me what?”

“My nan died.”

“She died?”

“Early this morning. I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I know she meant a lot to you. And you meant a lot to her.”

Plum stares straight ahead, saying nothing. I grope for all the usual consolations.

“She was in a lot of pain toward the end. So we can be glad she doesn’t have to suffer anymore. She’s at peace now.”

Plum says nothing.

“And it was a long life, Plum. One day we will learn to be grateful for her life. Not sad about her death.”

“She was the one person…”

“Plum? Are you-”

“The one person who I could be myself with. I know my mum wants me to be prettier. Lose weight. Do something about my hair. All that. And my dad wants me to be stronger. Tougher. Harder. Not get pushed around. Stand up for myself. All that.” She shakes her head. “And the kids at school all want me to just crawl away and die. Just crawl away and die, Plumpster. But she was the one person who just accepted me. Who didn’t care.” She laughs. “Who actually seemed to quite like me.”

“Your mother loves you. Come on, Plum. You know she does.”

“But loving someone’s not the same as liking them, is it? It’s not the same as just accepting them for what they are. Love’s all right, I guess. I don’t know too much about all that. I’ll settle for just being liked.”

There’s a lot to do.

It’s good that there is a lot to do.

Because my grandmother died at home, the police had to come to the house. They were there after the ambulance men, who were not needed because it was too late, and the doctor, who officially confirmed that she was dead, but they came before the undertaker and his assistant, who gently invited us to wait in the living room while they wrapped my grandmother’s body and removed it from the house. It seems strange that my nan, after spending so many years living alone in her little white flat, should suddenly provoke this house full of people.

My father and I are spending more time together than we have for years. We register the death together, sitting silently in a waiting room full of happy couples there to register the birth of their babies. Then we go to the undertakers, or the funeral directors as they call themselves these days, and choose the coffin, decide on the number of cars, make arrangements for the funeral.

It’s still not done. We go to a florist and order our wreath, choosing a big one from my parents and me rather than three little ones-red roses, my nan’s favorite. Then we have to talk to the vicar who will conduct the funeral service and he is cold and sniffy because my nan only went to church for weddings, because she was an old girl who didn’t see much point in the church unless it was for a celebration, unless it offered a chance to look and marvel at some young bride in her white dress.

Finally we go to her little white flat. And although we have been gently led through the bureaucracy of death-everyone, apart from the vicar, kind and understanding, taking our credit cards with what looks like a genuinely sympathetic expression, telling us where we need to go next, pointing us to the next stop along the chain-there are no guidelines for what we should do in my grandmother’s home.

Within these white walls there is the evidence of a lifetime. Clothes, photographs, records, souvenirs brought back for her from Spain and Greece and Ireland and Hong Kong. My father and I stare at it all helplessly, unable to decide if these things are treasure to be cherished forever or rubbish to be left out for the trashmen.

Her things.

I want to keep them all, but I know that’s absurd, impossible. The clothes can go to Oxfam. Perhaps some of the furniture. We decide that I will keep the records, my father can have the photographs, but even that is not simple.

My dad opens an album of ancient black-and-white photographs from before he was born, and although he sees the faces of his mother and his father and his aunts and uncles, their grown-up faces shining through the smiles of when they were children, many of the people in the album are complete strangers to him, people he never met, with names he will never know. Not now.