Inside Grandad (5 page)

He stopped because his voice had gone croaky. The nurse was still smiling.

"Best you talk to physio," she said, and went back to her writing.

Fat chance, Gavin thought, with Mum or Gran there. He started reading
Model Boats
again, but almost at once Gran showed up, telling Donald over her shoulder all about Cathy Munro at work, and how she'd come in on her afternoon off just so Gran could get away and catch an early train to Aberdeen, which meant she and Gavin could go back by train and Mum didn't need to drive over. Gavin gave her his chair and moved down to the foot of the bed and started in on his homework. After a bit Donald got tired of listening to Gran and said he'd got to get back to Edinburgh and he'd like to see Mum on the way. Gavin said he'd go with him. He felt a bit guilty about this—he'd had Grandad all to himself for half an
afternoon, hadn't he? It was Gran's turn now, surely. But he couldn't help minding.

"Did they tell you anything?" Gavin said as they were walking out across the car park.

"Bit. I had a word with the physio. They're still working on the scans, so they're not saying anything definite yet, but I had a look too. They're not that promising, I'm afraid, Gav. I only know what I've been taught, mind, but even I can see there's a fair amount of damage. The actual damage would have happened pretty suddenly, but sometimes there are warning signs. They haven't got his GP's notes yet. Did he say anything about having the odd little blackout?"

"No, but he wouldn't. He might've gone to Dr. Moray, but he'd have kept it to himself. Does it mean he's not going to get better after all?"

"You can't say that. Chances are he'll get better, but maybe not as much as we hoped. Astonishing things happen, mind you, and he's a determined old bird."

"But, suppose it's only a bit better … or not at all… ?"

"Well…"

They had reached the car. Donald paused, jiggling the key ring up and down in his palm.

"Please, Don. I've got to know. Don't try and be kind, like everyone else is doing."

"Okay, kid. Normal form is they'll keep him in the stroke unit for a month, with the physios working on him, and at the end of that time they'll assess where he's got to. If he's made no improvement at all, or very little, they'll move him out to a
general ward, probably to the Kincardine if they've got room for him, so you can visit him easier. He'll be looked after there okay—it's a good little hospital—but the chances are he won't last long. If he's still making definite progress after a month they'll keep him on in the stroke unit, if they can spare the bed, and go on working on him. After that, there's a range of options, depending how much care he needs. He could go into a home with full-time care, or he could go home to Arduthie Road with some care coming in, or if he's done really well he could simply go home, though that would mean shuffling the house around so he's got a room on the ground floor, and so on. If you want me to guess, I should think you'd have him home in the end, with Gran working part-time and someone else coming in to cover for her. Right?"

"Thanks, Don."

They got into the car and drove off in silence. Gavin didn't feel as depressed as he might have been. He'd seen that gleam, that flicker of the real Grandad, behind the unanswering eyes. And Grandad had held his hand, known he was there. It was a bit like that moment down at the harbor when the seal had blinked at him as if it understood what he was saying, he thought. And then it had dived out of sight and you'd never have known it was there. But it had still been there, somewhere below the surface. And Grandad was still there too.

Perhaps Gavin was the only person who really believed that, he thought. And maybe that meant he was the only person who could get Grandad back. How? How to be alone with him for a while, day after day, when it would always be Gran taking Gavin to Aberdeen and Mum coming to fetch them … ?

"What's the physio like, Don?"

"Fine. Obviously knows her stuff, but human with it. They're a pretty good bunch on the whole."

"Do you think you could persuade her to tell Mum it's a good idea for me to be alone with Grandad some of the time ?"

"You want him for just yourself?"

"Course not. But …"

Gavin hesitated. Donald hadn't sounded disapproving, just amused and surprised, but he was right too, in a way. Maybe there
was
something a bit selfish about thinking he was the only one who could really help Grandad, get through to him. Still…

"I'm what he's used to, you see," he said. "We don't talk a lot, so he listens to me when I say something. Mum and Gran will just go and sit by his bed and talk and talk and talk, but that's no help because he's used to shutting them out."

Donald laughed.

"I suppose it's a point," he said. "I'll brood on it."

Gavin plowed on. He could hear from Donald's voice that he was being pushy about this, but he'd thought the whole thing through, over and over, and he couldn't have stopped it coming out, even if he'd wanted to.

"Don't try and tell Mum yourself," he said. "You'll just get into a row. But if you could get onto Dad and get him to say to Mum that it's okay for me to go over on the train after school. And then Mum and Gran wouldn't have to rush away from work but one of them could come over and be with Grandad for a bit and bring me back…."

"Okay, okay—you'll be telling the consultant what to do
next. Look, I was going to call Dad anyway—tell him about the scan. I'll see what he says."

"Great. You can e-mail me on Grandad's PC. I've got an address there. I'll write it down."

Gavin watched Donald roar away on his motorbike, then went in and got a take-away lamb stew out of the freezer. Mum always said supermarket instant meals were full of chemicals and stuff, but she'd stocked up with them for now, while they were having to go over to Aberdeen most evenings. Gavin guessed she secretly preferred instants to real cooking anyway.

The sound of the freezer door woke Dodgem from his normal stupor, so to make up, sort of, for wanting to have Grandad all to himself when he mattered just as much to Gran, Gavin took Dodgem out on the usual snail's-pace round to sniff at every other gatepost for doggie messages and leave his own messages on top of them. That left just enough time to go up to the attic and put a final coat on
Selkie's
wheelhouse.

fter all that it was Gran who really did the trick, but Don helped too. When she picked Gavin up from Mrs. McCracken's next day she started telling him pretty well at once about Katie Wilson who dispensed the medicines at Boots and what a bright kid she'd been—mad about chemistry, and getting a scholarship to Cambridge University and how everyone had expected her to go on and get to be a professor and win the Nobel Prize and so on, but all she'd really wanted to do was come back and live in Stonehaven and marry Bobby Wilson and have six children only she couldn't because Bobby, despite him being such a fine upstanding lad to look at, had a sperm count which was pretty well zilch, but they adopted anyway and seeing them together with the kids you wouldn't ever guess it if you'd not been told.

That lasted them till they got to the station. Gavin tuned most of it out, though other times he might have been interested because Tod Wilson had been in Arduthie Primary till last year, though Gavin hadn't had much to do with him, being a couple of years younger. Gran had to stop to buy the tickets and ask the clerk whether their cat had had kittens yet and had they found the homes for them because she knew some people they might ask, and that lasted till the train came in.

Then it was back to Katie Wilson and her friend Nan who used to work at Boots only now she worked in the dispensary
at Aberdeen General Hospital, and Gavin started paying attention, though he still had to sift out stuff about Nan's brother Tom who was a champion bagpiper only he'd married this Dutch lassie who couldn't bear the sound of the pipes, and so on. But by the time they reached Aberdeen he'd got all the stuff that mattered. Katie's friend Nan worked the early shift in the dispensary. The man who did the late shift was called Robert, and he lived at Catterline, just down the coast. The changeover time was five o'clock, so he'd be coming past Stonehaven on the bypass a bit after four o'clock. It wouldn't be more than a few minutes out of his way for him to come by the school and pick Gavin up and take him direct to the hospital.

"Oh, Gran, that's great!" he said. "Thanks so much! That was clever of you."

"Some use, sometimes, knowing one or two people," she said. "And I daresay you'll do Grandad more good than either me or your ma would. He's forgotten how to listen to me, you know. Trouble is, the more I say the more he doesn't listen, and the more he doesn't listen the more I say, and neither of us can help it somehow. Ah, well, I suppose it's better than quarreling all the time the way some folks do. Remember Betty and Bruce Stickling?… No, of course you wouldn't…."

The Sticklings lasted her all the way up to the ward and while they were waiting outside because there was stuff going on with one of the other patients. Gavin found he was thinking a bit differently about Gran now. He hadn't got how miserable she was, underneath, but there'd been something in
her voice just before she'd started telling him about the Sticklings….

Quietly he took her hand. She stopped what she was going to say and looked down at him, surprised.

"I'm sorry, Gran," he whispered.

"What about, darling?"

"Grandad not listening to you any more."

"No need, darling. We've had a very good life together, and I daresay it's my fault as much as it's his. He's a lovely man, I still think."

"Do you think you could tell Mum what you said—about it being good for him to be alone with me? I think she's still going to take a bit of persuading, you see. She'll say stuff about not knowing Robert, and so on."

Gran smiled, pursing her lips. Gavin could see her starting to plan her campaign.

Mum came and fetched them. She said Dad had called, saying he'd be home the weekend after next, while his ship was in port.

They picked up a pizza on the way home and microwaved it, so supper was almost instant. Gran didn't say anything about Robert, and it wasn't Gavin's turn to wash up, so as soon as he'd cleared his dirties he said he had homework to do. In fact he'd done most of it at Mrs. McCracken's, waiting for Gran, which meant he could go upstairs and start doing the last little bits of touching up on
Selkie's
stand.

Grandad had made it out of a bit of bookshelf he'd got out
of a skip, so there were a few tiny scratches here and there, and a couple of deeper ones. Gavin used a knife blade to squidge in a little ready-mixed filler from a tube, and while he waited for it to dry enough for sanding he thought about how to do the name. He was worried about getting it neat enough, and the same each time—once each side of the bow and again on the stern with the name of the home port, Stonehaven, below. The first thing, he thought, was to experiment on the PC to find letters that looked right. While he was at it he looked to see if there was anything from Donald on Grandad's e-mail. There wasn't, but there were several messages from Grandad's model-making cronies about different things. There was no reason they could have known what had happened to Grandad, but it still felt amazing that they didn't. He e-mailed them back, telling them, and asking them to keep writing, and printed their letters out to read to Grandad the next day.

Next morning while Gavin was making his sandwiches for lunch Mum said, "Gran's found somebody to drive you into Aberdeen after school. He actually works in the hospital, and he's going to call in at my office on his way past and I'll come up with him and make sure you meet up. I've got to say I'm still not entirely happy about this—I mean, it's not as if it's someone we know…."

"I bet you Gran knows more about him than his own mum does. Like Don says, it's a good thing she never went in for blackmail."

Mum laughed but shook her head.

"I'm afraid you can't ever tell," she said. "Men you'd've thought were absolutely safe …"

"I'll be really careful, Mum. And I'll tell you if anything at all funny happens. Promise."

"That's what I was going to ask you. All right. Now, they don't want kids wandering all over the hospital unattended, but I've talked to the ward sister, and she's going to leave a message with reception to let you go up. Her name's Sister Taylor, if there's any problems."

(That was typical Mum. Knowing how the system worked, thinking it all out and knowing what to do.)

"Thanks, Mum. That's great. It's what I really wanted."

"Yes, I know, darling," she said, turning away. It was the way she did it, more than anything in her voice, that told him. She didn't want him to see her face, because that would have told him that since she'd talked to Donald she was beginning to worry about him hoping too much. (That was typical Mum too.) Perhaps Donald had told her stuff he hadn't told Gavin, or perhaps she was just worrying because she was like that, worrying about how much he'd mind if Grandad didn't get better, and the more he hoped and hoped the more he'd mind. She was right, of course, but it wasn't going to be like that. It absolutely wasn't.

Robert was a tall, thin man with sunken cheeks and bushy black eyebrows. His big, bony fingers were yellow with tobacco, and his noisy little Datsun reeked of smoke, though he had the windows down, and Mum must have spoken to him
about not smoking because he kept one a bit open all the way to Aberdeen. He drove almost as fast as Donald and didn't talk at all. He took Gavin up to the hospital entrance and waited for him to get out.

"Thank you very much," said Gavin as he opened the door. "That's wonderful."

"Glad to help," said Robert. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Yes, please, if that's all right."

Robert nodded, waited for Gavin to get out, and reached a long arm across to close the door. Standing at the entrance to let a wheelchair out, Gavin looked back and saw that he hadn't driven off but was finishing lighting a cigarette.

Mum's arrangements worked. The woman in reception knew about him, and let him sign in and gave him a pass saying he was going up to the stroke unit. When he got to the ward there was a woman he hadn't seen before standing by Grandad's bed. He waited in the doorway, watching, not sure whether to go on in. She was gray haired but not all that old, with a soft, rather anxious-looking face. She was wearing the usual hospital overall, so she wasn't a nurse, but she didn't look quite like a doctor either. She seemed to be doing something with Grandad's right arm—the one that had kept fidgeting about—bending the forearm slowly up, saying a few words, waiting, and then laying the arm back down on the bed. Another few words, and wait, and she started to do it again, but this time she happened to glance up and saw Gavin in the doorway. She smiled again, finished the process, and came over.

"You're Gavin," she said. "I'm Lena. I'm the physio. I was talking to your brother about you this morning. Hi."

"Oh, hello," said Gavin. "Do you want me to go and wait outside till you've finished?"

Lena almost laughed.

"No, of course not," she said. "I want to talk to you. Your brother says he thinks you might help."

"Oh, great! Anything, if you'll show me how. So far I've just been holding his hand and telling him stuff—the sort of things we'd talk about at home."

"That's all useful," she said. "Come and see."

She led the way over to the bed, back to where she'd been before, so Gavin went round to the other side. Nothing seemed to have changed. The blue eyes were open, gazing blankly at the ceiling.

"Hi, Grandad," he said. "I got a lift over. That's why I'm early. This is Lena. She's the physio. She's trying to help you…. Is it all right if I put his specs on? He can't see anything without them. I mean, if he's confused already … And it makes him look like
him
, except for his mustache being so short."

"Can't hurt now, I suppose," said Lena. "We took them off before, because otherwise he'd have had them off and probably dropped them on the floor and broken them, but now … I expect you noticed when you came before that his right arm— this one—wouldn't stop moving about, but he wasn't doing it on purpose. That's called ataxia—it's fairly normal, and as the patient improves it tends to quieten down. But in your grandfather's case it seems to have stopped overnight, and that is a bit unusual…."

"It was quicker than that," said Gavin. "It happened when I was here."

"Tell me."

"Well, I was standing where you are, leaning a bit over the bed so he could see me, and telling him about… er, well, stuff that had been happening. I'd got hold of his hand to stop it fidgeting about, though it was still trying to, and I was stroking it on the back with my thumb because that seemed to help, but I wasn't noticing about it because I was thinking about what I was telling him, so I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but all of a sudden I realized it had stopped trying to fidget anymore. And it wasn't just that. He was actually holding my hand."

"Holding it?"

"Yes. I mean … Look."

Gavin held his right hand out, palm up, laid his left hand around it, and curled his left fingers gently down beside his right thumb.

"I was holding his hand like this—it was the other way round, actually, but I can't do that on my own hand—anyway, Grandad wasn't doing anything—hadn't been, I mean—but then …"

He curled his right fingertips up against the far side of his other hand.

"… I felt them first, actually, pressing against my hand—not hard, just a bit, and it was only for a moment. Then he let go. They weren't pressing any more."

"You're sure? You don't think it might have been something you made happen. By gripping his hand tighter, for instance?"

Gavin experimented with his own hands.

"No, it doesn't work like that. Look. The fingers sort of
squeeze together, but Grandad's were loose. I'm sure they were."

He waited. Lena didn't say anything for a bit. Then …

"That's very interesting. You say it was only for a moment?"

"Well, I'm not sure when it started. You see, I was telling him this stuff and I was actually looking into his eyes, and … they
changed.
There was something—a sort of glint—I don't know—perhaps I only imagined it—it was just for a moment, and … and … well, I kind of knew he was there, listening, him, Grandad … I'm sorry…."