At first there were just two. A pair of heavy hands that did things and then suddenly could do nothing at all. Looking back there, I am aware that I am looking at his hands still, reading them as if to decide how much of me he needed, how much I could let go. We were a family of season watchers for whom summer could never be too long or too hot. Autumn and winter would come and his fingers would start to slow down, freezing solid like bunches of grotesque stalactites. I can see his hands like claws in the air trying to make a point at breakfast, angry at the papers, trying to lift a cup. I reach across and sugar his tea. The sound of the spoon on the cup.
Sta-lac-tites. I spell again slowly, bringing the past near. I am small once again, on a school visit, staring at cavern after cavern of limestone contortions, numb and ridged to the touch. I trail my hand against them just to be sure. I had just learned about metaphor and simile and felt unexpectedly sick. A favourite teacher told us that this was a magical forest of nature that we should carry in our minds forever – for nature had great secrets to reveal after all and only a mile beneath a prettyDerbyshireVillage. How picturesque she said.
The masquerade persisted for years as we would set off one Sunday a month in packed squashy Cortina cars, families balancing extra kids on knees, bound for one of Castleton’s car-parks. They were always full of Mr Longson’s yellow coaches that had got there before us and chatty queues for the ladies toilet by the National Trust bins. My childhood was full of backseat arguments about which way stalagmites grew and who had found the best piece of Blue John and what all those secret minerals were doing depositing things that drew thousands of visitors and made Sam Longson a millionaire before he was forty. I kept my mind tightly wrapped those times, never daring to ask why nature might leave things inside you that couldn’t be given back. Not ever.
And so I looked at my father’s hands twenty years later and faced up to the metaphors. I thought of Castleton with its ancient minerals and of the deadly secret deposits that even then were already trying to steal away his movement and his future.
Seasons were now irrelevant. His saucepans were too heavy. His coats impossible for him to put on. He would hold out his arms like a child when he wanted to go out and I would lift the material gently around him, buttoning him up against the cold and patting down awkward creases that would frustrate him.
I became aware of the weight of everything. I would pick things up even by myself at night, balancing this against that, trying out handles on doors, testing locks… Until you are ill you take the weight of your world completely for granted. And then suddenly you are surrounded by hostile, foreign things: coats; keys; shirt buttons; letters.
Each day for him was impassable without help, without others’ awkwardness, his pain; his familiar environment suddenly his arch-enemy. I went around detached from ordinary objects, angry that illness makes us know our separateness even before we leave.
The Doctors would try new things – of course. They were aware he was a young man and wanted a full life. They smiled. Of course Mr Wilson. No awkwardness here. Miss Taylor will write soon. A neat strip of perfectly new tablets. Keep a record please. We will monitor your progress with interest.
When the sore throat came it seemed so commonplace. It was a spring Friday. Bright yellow daffodils by the front door. Just a sore throat that was all. He promised to take aspirin and we would see him on Monday. Monday came and no, he couldn’t decorate our stairs for a week or so and broke a promise to my mother. I asked him to open his mouth and gazed into an angry scarlet cavern. I tried to imagine him swallowing and tried swallowing myself and couldn’t. He couldn’t manage the walk to the hall toilet. We improvised. My mouth tasted of sediment all the time. I knew it was fear and I felt I was becoming him, even wanted to be him-intimacy’s complicit gift of mimicry.
He heated up. And up. I held his wrist and he’d electrocuted me. We called his GP again-he wouldn’t meet my eye. They needed to carry out tests. He had his own room in the city’s new hospital. They said he needed privacy and they needed to be sure. My brother and I would catch the train and then a bus and would eat chips on the way there. We found a new routine.
And then they told us about all this tunnelling and scraping away beneath the skin. Erosion. Auto- immune activity. Bone marrow I heard. Cells eating away at themselves and no, as a daughter I was nowhere near enough to scrape out some of mine and put it in him. No where near at all.
I read Virginia Woolf’s diary to him, as I revised and read about her tunnelling process behind her characters. Metaphors again. There we were, nodding, aware of the inches between us, feeling our way silently around the possibility of an early death, an easy death. I write possibility. That is a lie. But you probably knew that too? I know you want to read this but those that say knowing helps are just rearranging their vocabulary.
After two weeks he started picking at the sheet with his right hand and I almost congratulated myself for noticing this odd habit. His hands again giving me a sign. A brave nurse bundled my brother and I into an empty laundry room one late afternoon in March and spelt out the life left. It felt oddly erotic, detached and completely sad and even today the smell of fresh washing leaves me agitated without feeling entirely able to admit why.
Your breath turned to brimstone and. sulphur. Your ghastly smile when we came in and our fragile proximity across the sheets. All speech had gone from you. This was like nothing at all. Think about it please-absolutely nothing at all. You calcified, eroded away in a month, mixed up in our earlier story about stalactites and deposits; you just eroded away at 105 degrees.
What shape fear takes can be a surprise; you are meeting something within when you believe you are meeting something without. I signed a formal piece of paper with a pen with a hooded nib. Black ink by myself, for a man who had always signed himself alone, no matter where he was or who he was with, or who he was trying to be. I felt like I had met Blind Pugh and stared, eyes streaming at a huge black spot of ink. That final dot. After a while the registrar gently took her pen away and then filed the paper and mother took me home.
Perhaps it is true that our destiny merely involves an old story rising up unbidden to meet us once again. We love to embrace ‘destiny’ and luxuriate in fate that brings us together happily ever after. But such connections can also be terrifying, especially medically, for if this connects with that, and that links to this, then there is a pattern, and patterns even awkward ones get to kill you in the end.
They do. They really do.
I have missed someone to argue with. I look back and know that talking was our best thing. I could never get the better of your words even when you didn’t believe in them and I suppose it has felt like fencing by myself. All foil… I do not know what you might think of some of my choices, but I make them anyway and sometimes I hope that I guess right. I try to listen as hard as I can, but your voice is locked miles and miles below in a strange white forest, full of shapes that seem to salute me. I hear just an echo of another echo- a hope without end.
Your going hurt, yet I cannot remember your last word.
Heartbreaking! X