The Shouting in the Dark (26 page)

Late that afternoon the father arrives home in the back of an ambulance car, attached to a morphine drip. The mother goes out to meet him. They walk slowly into the house, he leaning on her arm, a nurse just behind them carrying the drip-stand. Ella watches from the front door. As he steps over the threshold she thinks of saying something, Welcome back, Sorry . . . But then the moment's gone. She says nothing. Because she isn't sorry; she doesn't welcome him back.

In the hallway he waves the nurse away.

‘You have other patients,' he tells her, ‘You have a home to go back to. Those little footballers to feed.'

‘Well, if you're sure, Mr B?'

‘I'm sure, I'm sure. Of course, as you'll know' – and he winks, Ella's sure he winks – ‘I'd feel a lot more cheerful, it would help greatly with my state of affairs, if Argentina weren't doing quite so well at this World Cup. Still, all things considered, for tonight I'm not complaining. I'll bear in mind we had a very nice chat in the car, we made our peace.'

Ella frowns at the mother. The mother shrugs back.

The nurse is Argentinian, she herself explains as they walk her back to the ambulance car. She and her husband are both nurses, they have brought their family out to South Africa for a year's joint training. She and the father discussed the finer details of the predicted Holland-Argentina World Cup final all the way from Durban.

‘He's a tough guy,' she says, pulling the car door to. ‘A real charmer.'

Unbelievable, Ella thinks, watching the ambulance car reverse out of the gate, that lightness she heard in the father's voice, a lift and glide of emphasis so playful the nurse sparkled when she answered him.

Two days later the call comes early from the hospital. The father has been booked in for an emergency operation to
address
his tumour, the urologist's word. I will make a final attempt to address the tumour. Both nights at home he spends on the yellow velvet couch in the living room under the portrait of his former wife, a corner of a blanket stuffed in his mouth. From her bedroom Ella hears the couch creaking as he turns, or at least imagines she can. It creaks nearly all night long. On the second morning he has detached himself from the morphine drip. It looks used up. He receives the urologist's phone call braced against the door jamb.

For the mother and the father the news about the operation comes as a lifeline. She moves with quickened steps, he gives himself his first shave in days. He calls his town-planner friend, Nobby Clark, ‘to look after a few matters in my absence. Vital to keep our discussions about law and order going.' Ella is not so sanguine. She will not yet hope against hope, which is to say, her own particular hope. She will not jump to conclusions. There still is something in the air, some unpleasant off-thing. Bad omens dog their path from the moment they get into the car.

To begin with, the father is no longer able to drive. For the first time it isn't physically possible. His belly is now so distended he can't fit behind the wheel. For the first time, when he gets in the car, adjusting the passenger seat as far back as it will go, he doesn't light a cigarette. The mother, sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide-open, makes her maiden drive to Durban.

Then there are the Indian mynahs. Screaming mynahs dive-bomb the car all the way out of Braemar, as if the family's going has offended them and they are trying to hold them back at the town gates. There's also Phineas. On Wednesday, hearing the father's news, Phineas said he'd look in some time on Friday, see how the boss was doing. On Saturday however he can't unfortunately come. There's a family get-together, his aunts, his grandmother . . . He's vague. Phineas is on his school holidays, like Ella.

‘I'm sure he'll be here early, he always is,' the father says anxiously from the passenger seat, scanning the road. ‘I'd like to see Phineas.'

But though they scout slowly down the township road to the very edge of Braemar, Phineas is nowhere to be seen.

All the way down to Durban the father keep his arms spread wide on the dashboard, planting a clear reflection of his white arms in the windscreen. Now and then he spits into the handkerchief he holds mashed in his fist.

The mother drives the car up to the hospital's main entrance. The father by now is ashen, looks half-asleep. There is no one at the reception desk. Help, Ella says into the two-way intercom. Quickly, please, a wheelchair. A cleaner in a pink-stripe seersucker uniform brings a wheelchair but there's no orderly available to push it. There's also a sheaf of forms to fill in. Ella pulls, tugs, drags the father from his stiffened position in the passenger seat into the wheelchair. The mother surrenders the car keys to a porter and sits down in the reception office to fill in the forms. After a few minutes, a nurse appears out of the vanishing point of a long grey corridor, plunges a syringe into the father's arm, then melts back into the distance.

The hospital has a large, square entrance foyer. Ella stands in the middle of it, the father in his wheelchair beside her. The foyer's blue linoleum floor is highly polished, gleaming, stretching away to the walls like the surface of an ice rink. She experimentally gives the wheelchair a push. It skims like an ice-block on warm steel. As he skims, the father twists his head back, glances up at her, his feverish eyes suddenly lively. She remembers how he looked at the Argentinian nurse. She holds back an instant but, no, he won't let her pause. He has caught her idea, likes the game. He strikes down on the wheels with his hands and at the same time, what the hell, she pushes, the wheelchair flies across the floor. She sets the wheels at an angle, the father slams down, she pushes. The wheelchair traces a loop halfway round the foyer, comes up short at the opposite wall.

So they carry on, pushing, striking, looping, each time making a slightly larger curve. The father begins to chuckle to himself in the back of his throat. It's like the pattern made by the motorboat that day Phineas took the father out on Victory Dam, Ella thinks, whorls within whorls, like in an ear. Each time he circles back round to her he looks as he did that day on the water, his head lolling to one side, that wide, hugely pleased smile on his face.

‘More, Ella, more,' he pants when it looks like she might stop. ‘Drive it again, please, one more time.'

Which Ella does he think he's talking to? she wonders. The lady in the midnight-blue dress? It's so rare he calls her Ella. But he won't let her pause and think.

‘Again, Ella, again,' he says in his hoarse whisper, his hands striking down on the wheels.

 

The operation takes place at six that evening. The father is back in the intensive care ward within the hour. It all turns out exactly as everyone had feared – everyone, that is, except for Ella. It turns out exactly as she was hoping, considering the omens. The tumour was larger than even the urologist had suspected. There's no further point addressing it.

That night she falls asleep with the sound of the sea in her ears for the first time in years. They stay over at a two-star hotel across the road from the hospital. From the hotel's windows the Indian Ocean is visible in thin blue strips between the tall buildings lining the Esplanade.

The next day they sit with the father in shifts: now the mother and Ella together, now the mother. Twice Ella sits with him by herself. His belaboured breathing fills the room. It's difficult to do anything but listen to it. Sometimes he pulls alarmingly at the tubes coming out of his wound but mostly his fingers work at the sheet, kneading the seam. His right index finger traces clockwise circles around a slub in the fabric.

At some point a dark bird, a pigeon or a mynah, thuds into the closed window, makes her jump. The father in the bed gives no reaction. She gets up and peers into the hospital courtyard below, to see if the bird has hurt itself and fallen, but her view is obstructed by the windowsill. She can't lean out. The window frame is gleamy with fresh paint, the latch stuck shut.

The second time she sits with the father he once opens his eyes and seems to gaze around the room. She tries not to look directly at him. Why would she? She's hoping against hope. Still she can't help noticing how very blue his eyes are in his sunken white face. How white the face is against the starched white pillow.

‘Ella,' he suddenly says, his blue gaze fixed on the ceiling. Though his lips struggle to form the word it can't be mistaken. Just once, the name Ella, though this time she's completely sure it isn't her he's calling. Always she's stood in the other one's way.

She thinks about taking his hand, stilling the fingers' restless movements, but her hands stay folded in her lap. What'll she do, she wonders, once he's dead, with this iron lock on her hands, her heart? But she can't yet let herself think this – can't allow herself to think of him as dead.

The air conditioning hums. His turning finger rasps on the sheet. His eyelids fall closed. Then, just as she is getting up to leave, he speaks.

‘Ella, stop,' he says, ‘Talk to me. Won't you drive that wheel again? In the Great World, there on Finlayson Green. Your whipped-cream voice. I've never forgotten. Go on, please, drive that roulette wheel again.'

 

Ella and the mother take their breaks from the father's bedside in the hospital coffee shop, the Red Gingham. The nurse on duty in intensive care has its extension number. At each of her breaks the mother orders a coffee with whipped cream. She lingers over the drink, spooning up the soft white peaks. Ella chooses from the range of beverages, now orange juice, now Coca-cola, now and again tea. She has spent long enough here, longer than the mother, to discover that the hot drinks all come out lukewarm, taste more or less the same.

During the times the mother's with the father, she reads W. S. Maugham's
Collected Stories
, the fat purple collection that was a gift from Ko. It's an uncomfortable and faraway world, that Ko says Maugham got. She can't work out why he and the father missed it like they say they did, this atmosphere of testy suspicion that weighs on each one of the stories. Late in the afternoon she leaves the book open on the table to step out onto the coffee shop balcony for some air. When she returns the book has disappeared. The waitress on the till has seen no one come or go, other than Ella herself. She sits and waits but the book is not returned.

At five that evening, the phone on the counter throws out a soft pirrup. The mother and Ella are at a table drinking tea. Neither of them gets up. You should go at once, says the waitress, he's on his way.

Not true, Ella says to herself skating her flip-flops back to the ward, can't be true. She's hoping against hope. But the room tells her something different, the hollowness, she feels it at the door. Someone has already taken leave. The mother goes in ahead of her. She hears her cry as if from a distance, ‘How can it be, that we've missed him?'

There is a very still white hand lying on the sheet, the usual square hand but with the moving fingers now bent into a claw. The mother takes the hand. Ella stands beside her. She looks around at the dusty pink walls, all the details. The drip-stand no longer hooked up to the bed, the two flies on the windowsill she hadn't noticed before, the fuzzy patch on the glass where the bird hit it. Then, at last, when she has looked at everything else, she looks at him down there, this short, narrow parcel of a person, the mouth slightly agape, the finger indentations in the pale chin where the nurses have tried to push it closed.

The mother is led away by a nurse. Ella sits down in the chair she vacated just an hour or so ago. She doesn't take her eyes off the parcel in the bed. He will stir shortly, there's no doubt. He will open his thin lips quite suddenly to speak, as he did earlier, talking about the Great World, taking her by surprise, like the ventriloquist's doll in the park used to do. It's always this way with him: important to guard against bad surprises.

But nothing happens. Time passes. For the first time he fits in with what's expected. It's all over – like you always said it would be, she thinks at last. The parcel in the bed gives no response. There's no life in him, there really is no life. She has hoped against hope. All around she can feel the hollowness, an expanding circle of silence that is stitched to the world at its outer edges by the sound of rush hour traffic on the nearby street.

At the crematorium Ella leaves the formalities early, almost as soon as they've started, and steps outside into the yellow late-winter light. No one looks up or appears to mind. The formalities, she knows, are planned to be brief. A man from the Durban Missions to Seamen is due to say a few words about the father's charity work. There will be nothing about God or the afterlife – just as the father wanted it. Ko promised to fly in for the service, perhaps to recount one of the adventures from the old days, but he doesn't show up. Present at the funeral are the mother, the Missions to Seaman representative, the undertaker, the father's doctor looking shifty, Tom Watt and Nobby Clark standing close together, staring at their feet – and the daughter. The paunchy undertaker keeps checking his watch. At the point that Ella steps outside, the Missions to Seaman speaker is already puttering to a halt.

Ella walks along a tarmac pathway leading to a memorial wall at the lower end of the crematorium garden. The wall is inset with alcoves, some sealed, some open, filled with dry leaves. Halfway down the pathway is a concrete bench with a good view of the crematorium's two chimneys, the heat mirage dancing over them. To sit she has to yank down the tight underarms of her blue velvet dress but still it rides up at the back. It's her one good dress, bought years ago, at the time of the last Eisteddfod.

Now that he's gone, nothing of him must remain – this she's making sure of. She fixes her eyes on the chimney. He must be reduced to dust, crushed to powder – cremulated is the word, she's looked it up. She's better off without even the memory of him. Unless she has a clear picture of the crematorium furnace doing what it's meant to do, she will not be easy in her mind; part of her won't believe that he's gone. At 850 degrees Celsius the human body is reduced to ashes in about an hour, says the
Winkler Prins
encyclopaedia. So while the mother talks to the funeral guests out in the sunshine – Tom and Nobby off to the side, Tom blowing out smoke – she'll sit here and watch the mirage over the chimney.