Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘So,’ she said. ‘I mean, what’s the situation?’ Information, please. Information.

He shifted a little in the bed. ‘Everyone has off days, Frey. I’m already feeling better. Aspirin, it turns out, is a lifesaver. Aspirin! It can’t be bad if the thing they’re giving me now is aspirin. The procedure —’

‘The operation.’

‘Was a success.’

There was silence for a while. The word ‘success’ seemed to take his thoughts off on a tangent.

She waited a while and then said, ‘Dad?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know Grandad? Your dad?’

‘Used to,’ he said, smiling weakly again.

‘Am I right in thinking …?’

He hesitated. ‘Heart attacks are very common things, Frey. You’ve got to die of something.’ He scratched his head. ‘Poor choice of words.’

‘Right.’

‘But he was — it was a different situation.’

They sat in silence.

Ordinarily her father could talk at length about any number of subjects. His main complaint over the last few years was her silence, the more refined allegation being that when he asked her about herself — on the way home from school, over breakfast, on the drive to work — she became what he called an elective mute. What he didn’t realise was that after school she was all talked out, and in the mornings she was deliriously tired. They were completely the worst times of day to catch her.

He was particularly obsessed, recently, with the idea that she should go to university. And yet in her eyes he was a living example of the fact university wasn’t everything. He’d never got a degree, but alongside his diving and all those random jobs he used to do, teaching and tutoring and dive-coaching and the extra money from moonlighting as a concierge in that New York hotel, he’d managed to listen to radio programmes about almost everything. He was, for her, a bearer of information: the next exhibition at the Booth Museum, upcoming rates at rival hotels like the Metropole. When he was healthy his blue eyes shone. Those eyes knew things, knew and knew and knew. He could fix a car and unblock a pipe, he could say ‘You’re welcome’ in Swahili and ‘Train station’ in Mandarin, he could recite passages from that Tristram Shandy book her mother had given him in a special edition. He could reel off the first 200 digits of pi. He didn’t seem to see any value in these abilities, but Freya did. She was, though she’d never dream of saying it out loud, impressed by him. And if in life he’d failed to live up to the expectations he’d had of himself, which was what her mother always described as Your Father’s Big Problem, then it seemed to her that those failures related to the real world, not to his education, and therefore fell short of proving that university was worth doing. He’d never actually been to China, or places where they spoke Swahili. He never made it past class six of a language course. You couldn’t always say that he was good at finishing things. Around two-thirds of the way through executing a long-cherished plan he appeared to get massively bored. He’d begin unblocking a pipe on floor four of the Grand — save the hotel some money on a plumber — and then, when an extra hour of work would have completed the job, he’d tire of the task and call a plumber. He’d buy himself some discount jogging gear for Christmas, spend New Year’s morning doing pre-run stretches, and then make himself a coffee and act like the run was done. He never seemed apathetic about a thing until the exact point at which he was apathetic, and then the thing was dead to him forever.

‘They’re running some further checks on my heart,’ he said. A quick spurt of words like he was overcoming a stutter.

‘I know.’

‘OK.’

‘OK.’

‘OK.’

It was going to be OK, wasn’t it? She looked at him.

There’d been a girl in History who’d overcome a stutter. They’d made a thing of it at school assembly last December, and when she got up to give her speech about overcoming a stutter, guess what. Yep. Awful awful. It was so awful Freya had given her a bar of chocolate afterwards, a bar of the size you usually only find in airports. Giant Toblerone. ‘Snow-Capped’ limited edition. The sharp peaks were probably not that good for the roof of her mouth (the roof of the mouth and the tongue’s relationship to it were apparently key to the overcoming), but it was a gift and, like all gifts, it was the thought that counted, and failing that the resale value. The playground at Blatchington Mill was a vast black market: caffeine pills, candy sticks.

She asked him if it was still serious. He said probably not. She asked him whether he’d have to have another operation after the tests. He said they’d know more in a couple of days.

‘Even if they do their tricks with another artery,’ he said. ‘Even then, it’s no major thing. It’s like clearing leaves from a gutter, a different gutter.’

‘So your veins are gutters, in this analogy.’

He pursed his lips. ‘It’s like fixing a bit of wiring, Frey.’

‘Wiring, though — it’s complex.’

‘You’re thinking of the Napoleon Suite. That was down to a bad electrician.’

‘What if these electricians are bad?’

‘Who?’

‘The doctors.’

He seemed to consider this closely. ‘They’re expensively educated.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Their vowels. Their assumptions.’

‘This is bad. This is, I mean, heart attack, I mean — fucking hell.’

‘Appears I may have eaten a few too many fatty foods,’ he said.

‘Yeah, no shit.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘the digestive system is working well.’

‘You’re not funny, Dad.’

‘You’re not funny either, daughter.’

They went on like this for a while, touching on the dangers of Mrs Peachsmith’s driving (she’d given Freya a lift here last night) and whether it was possible to blame his current health on the stress induced by Lady Di’s abuses of refuse-collection etiquette. Di lived opposite. She’d been putting her bin bags on the Finch household’s section of pavement each Tuesday. Once or twice under cover of night Moose had moved them back to their proper place with notes attached. Last week a response had arrived taped to the windscreen of his Škoda: ‘ This car belongs to a very silly man .’

She asked him if the nurses were treating him well. He said yes, of course, NHS, brilliant brilliant. They’d given him this amazing little room to recuperate in. Loads of privacy. It was a word he kept using: privacy. She thought of Susie and her lectures on private life vs public life, apathy vs activism, on terrorist attacks and the distinction between victim and witness and culprit, and her dad said with fake cheeriness that there was a TV lounge somewhere down the corridor. Strictly, this wing was probably for patients with unaffordable private health plans. Lucky.

‘How did you get that Marshall guy to move you here?’

‘There are various ways to get an upgrade, Frey. As a front-desker you should know that.’

‘Shouting?’

‘Come on. Shouting sometimes works, fine, but then the front-desker resents you, don’t they? Items like your fox drape may go missing … Anyway, saying nothing — that never works. And being quietly rude is the worst of both worlds. Best method?’ He shifted in the bed and winced. ‘You tell the person in charge that you appreciate how busy they are, but you’d be hugely grateful for anything they could do for you, and then you give them a tip.’

‘You gave the doctor a tip ?’ She was a little bit appalled and a little bit impressed.

‘Voucher,’ he said, yawning. ‘Twenty-five per cent off doubles. Keep some in my wallet at all times. Only applicable during low season, of course.’