Jonathan Lee - High Dive

The nurse who’d suffered the shouting bout was coming back down the corridor. As she passed Dr Haswell she said, ‘Too young.’

‘What?’

‘Coffee, right?’

‘Hot water and lemon,’ he said.

‘Black coffee,’ she sang.

‘Hot water and lemon.’

‘With milk, then.’

‘Can you stand it,’ Dr Haswell said, ‘if I just have water and lemon?’

‘Tea,’ the nurse said with a skimpy smile and promptly disappeared.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just — Monica, the ward nurse. She’s nuts, that’s all.’

‘Pretty.’

‘Do you think?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, and coughed to let him know that the subject was now closed. ‘So, is he OK?’

‘Oh, she’s fine. When I said nuts —’

‘ He . My dad.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Standing tall Dr Haswell offered a friendly frown and proceeded to pinch the bridge of his nose. ‘Mr Marshall got that artery unblocked, as you know. I’m not expecting any major problems.’

‘How come he’s a mister rather than a doctor?’

‘Marshall?’ Dr Haswell checked over his shoulder, then fell into a whisper. ‘Power. No longer needs it. But your dad’s comfortable, currently.’

‘Why did he get moved off the ward?’

‘He’s lucky. It’s not a reflection of medical needs, as such. Hotelier, right?’

She nodded. The nod used up the last of her energy. The lighting in this corridor was weirdly unrelenting.

She’d been in the ward late last night. Her father had been sitting up after the operation, the operation that everyone here seemed to prefer calling a ‘procedure’, but conversation had come only in woozy bursts. Waking this morning she’d felt a shadow of that post-exams feeling — empty, achey, somehow caught in an anticlimax — and also a small sense of wonder. It seemed amazing to her that a whole week behind the reception desk at the Grand could contain so few achievements when, here in the hospital, in two hours flat, a clogged heart could be unclogged.

‘Complications,’ Dr Haswell was saying now. ‘That’s the main thing to watch out for. That and instilling a healthier lifestyle. The heart’s a tricky muscle.’ He paused for a moment and his brows became depressed. ‘We need to keep an eye on things, but a couple of days will be fine, I should think, and your father really is in the best possible hands.’

Freya watched as Dr Haswell, clipboard tucked under one arm, glanced down at his own palms. She allowed herself a moment of quiet outrage at his arrogance. Someone needed to tell him, without unnecessary offence, that Brighton was unlikely to play home to the medical profession’s best possible hands. That it was, in fact, unlikely to play home to the best possible anything. That his hands, moreover, were not scuffed enough, not torn at by sufficient experience, to be classifiable as Best Possible or even Best-in-Breed. How old was he? Mid-twenties? Straight out of medical school, even. But it was true, too, that despite his youthful looks Dr Haswell gave off an aura of expertise. There was something about the set of his forehead, about the sophisticated mahogany furniture of his face, that suggested cloistered learning. Medical knowledge, definitely, but also other areas Freya had little experience of. Skiing. Multiple gym memberships. Birthrights, etc.

‘Your dad said you’ve recently been celebrating some great exam results? Sounds like congratulations are in order.’ He glanced down at her bare legs, as if these were owed the better part of the commendation. ‘With A levels like that you could pursue medicine, I suppose.’

‘Not really,’ Freya said.

‘No?’

‘Didn’t do sciences.’

‘Ah,’ the doctor said. ‘Yes, you need to be able to do the maths … Your father’s already been mentioning some VIPs the hotel is hosting in a couple of weeks. Something to aim for is always good. Hollywood types, I expect?’

‘Politicians.’

‘Ah, right … The conference?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, he’s got age on his side.’

‘Has he?’

‘He’s not even middle-aged yet, not really.’

She thought about this. ‘He’s forty-five.’

Dr Haswell lifted his clipboard and tapped it. ‘Yes, exactly.’

She popped another piece of Hubba into her mouth. Her father’s snores stopped and started again. ‘How long does the average man live to?’

‘The average? I forget. In the UK, seventy-seven or seventy-six, maybe.’

‘He’s over halfway then,’ she said.

‘In a sense.’

‘He’s very much in the middle of his ultimate age, in all senses. Fast approaching the final third, in fact.’

‘Well —’

‘Listen, Anthony,’ she said, and watched his brown eyes go wide. It was a good trick. People always forgot they were wearing name badges. It was the same at corporate functions at the Grand. ‘I’m just doing the maths.’

Anthony Haswell grinned and looked away, his eyes tracking back to her with cautious warmth, and there came from inside the room a groan combined with a creak. ‘Welcome,’ her father said, ‘to the not-so-grand hotel.’ You could tell he’d been waiting for a chance to use the line.

Wandering around the Grand in a dark suit and clean white shirt, making mediocre jokes and taking control of minor crises, her father could still look handsome. In here, under bright lights, wearing a tight short-sleeved tunic thing that appeared to be made of paper, he simply looked old. For how long had his eyes looked this grey? When had his ears become fluffy? Pale, pale. She could smell fag smoke on his skin as he beckoned her forward for a kiss. His lips were cold on her cheek.

She thought it best to hold his hand. A big hand, full of rough knuckles and veins, klutzy as a crab. She held it. Holding her dad’s hand felt weird. She slipped from his grip and poured him some water. Her leg was jigging up and down, no reason.

‘So how come you look like a dead person?’ she said.

He sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Frey, you get it from your mother.’

‘What?’

‘Blunt when nervous. A reluctance to beat around the bush.’

‘The only thing.’

‘What is?’

‘It’s the only thing I get from her.’

He coughed and winced. The wince was sizeable but the cough was small, way short of a proper hack, a kind of diet cough that seemed to admit he wasn’t as good at getting stuff out of his throat as he was at throwing stuff in. Last night she’d put a toothbrush in her mouth and cried. She’d felt angry with him, and sorry for him, and then tired and confused, and now she was a bit defiant again, or an aimless combination of everything.

‘Your mother said once, after half a lifetime of accusing me of beating around the bush, and urging me to cut to the chase, that she’d discovered from a fellow Linguistics lecturer, an Australian guy, that it was actually, etymologically speaking, essential to do one before the other.’

‘Huh?’

‘In bird hunts. It was important for participants to first beat around the bushes. Because only then could other participants cut to the chase, which meant to catch the quarry in nets. Something like that, anyway.’

‘Right.’

‘Beating about the bush is of course the more popular variant now.’

‘If I admit that this is gripping, can we talk about your health?’

A seagull squawked outside and they both looked up, with curious choreography, at the room’s tiny window. The sun, not knowing what was appropriate, had risen this morning as usual. The weather couldn’t last. The stinging drizzle and leaping foam would return, people hunkering down into the collars of their coats, that special British wince reserved for walking in the rain. A gold test tube of light extended from the sill to a far corner of the floor. Freya felt a little hot, a little woozy. She crossed and recrossed her legs, blew upward at her hair. A kid rode past the window on a bike, no hands. A blur of wheels, the click-click-click of Spokey Dokeys.