The Travellers and Other Stories (6 page)

These days Daddy's hand is a rather shabby thing but I still like it—the knuckles are faded and worn like the bald patches on a much-cuddled teddy bear, or an old leather sofa. It has grown old like he has, softer and more comfortable as he has settled into the gentler rhythms of his retirement. His reading, his gardening, his cooking. Our life here in this house.

I found it profoundly upsetting that he could appear in front of anyone, even me, without this part of himself; that he could emerge so incomplete one morning from his bedroom.

Unless he's faking it.

Is that possible?

Peter thinks so.

He thinks Daddy is pretending. He thinks Daddy is a naughty, scheming, selfish, mischievous old bastard who is having us on.

Is that really possible?

Dr. Ray says no, absolutely not. He says there is no way on earth Daddy could be pretending. He says gravely that the prognosis is very poor, that there are rough times ahead and we must be prepared for that.

Peter and I met last summer, a year ago now, and the bizarre thing is that it was Daddy's hand, in a way, which brought us together.

Peter had been walking past the shop and seen the set of Finch, Pruyn Shakespeares I had in the window. He came in and said he wanted to buy them; he said he'd never seen anything like them, he loved all the different colours. I said I liked them too. I would have said anything, really, to get him talking, to keep him in the shop—this tall, thin man with short, thick, toffee-brown hair, untidy in a checked cotton shirt and jeans. Younger than me, I guessed—late twenties, maybe thirty. (In fact Peter is exactly my age, thirty-two.)

It was true though, the colours of the plays were pretty—they all looked very handsome in their various linen boxes:
Othello
in purple,
Twelfth Night
in bright lime green,
Hamlet
in black,
Titus Andronicus
ominous in red. I straightened the books into a neat tower,
Titus
on top.

‘Ooh,' I said. ‘Gory.'

Peter looked blank and that made my heart leap—the thought that his buying the books had been an excuse, a pretext, to come into the shop and meet me, that he'd seen me through the window, sitting in the low armchair behind the little round table in the corner, and decided he had to come in.

‘Titus,' I said, tapping the red linen box with the tips of my fingers. ‘He chops off his own hand. His enemies tell him that if he sacrifices it he will save the lives of his sons.'

Peter raised his eyebrows.

‘And?'

‘It's a trick. The old man loses his hand and his sons die anyway. A messenger brings him the boys' severed heads.'

Peter sucked in his breath. ‘Ooh,' he said, smiling. ‘Gory.'

I laughed stupidly, too loudly. And because I wanted to keep him there, I blurted out the next thing that came into my head.

‘My father only has one hand.'

Peter's charming, open smile faded. He tipped his head to one side in a gesture of polite surprise. ‘Really?'

I thought he'd go then. After this intimate and unasked-for detail. Unsavoury, possibly even a little grotesque. I cursed myself and waited for him to scoop up his books and make a quick exit, but he stayed and I told him about the night my mother left home and Daddy slammed his fist through a thick pane of glass in the French windows at home. I told him how from my bedroom I heard the tinkle of the glass and went down in my pyjamas to find him crouched in a lake of blood on the little patio at the back of the house, his hand with its upturned fingers sitting some distance away, like some large pale flower growing up out of the dry soil between the flags; next to it, a huge slab of plate glass, like the blade of a guillotine.

‘Jesus Christ,' said Peter.

He stayed. I made us coffee and he sat in the low chair in the corner and watched while I sold six books to four people.

After that everything happened with what I suppose you might call indecent haste. At two-thirty in the afternoon I closed up the shop, threw the tarp over the table of books out on the pavement, and reached for Peter's arm as we ran across the road in front of the traffic, onto the promenade and down the steps to the beach, where I sat behind him, my arms under his cotton shirt against the tight warm skin of his belly.

He asked where I lived. I held his wrist, separated the index finger from the others, moved it along the horizon and down to the coast road.

‘There. The little pink house.'

‘Just you?'

‘Just me and my father.'

Peter has been to the house hundreds and hundreds of times since then. For seven months he has been living with us, and now it seems Daddy can't remember who he is.

We've talked it over several times with Dr. Ray, Peter doing most of the talking. Peter's tack is always the same: aren't all these things my father is doing—the shuffling walk, the fear, the confusion, the memory loss, the egg, his hand for God's sake—aren't they all things he could have read up about, aren't they all the sort of things he knows he's
supposed
to be doing?

Dr. Ray is tired of this line of questioning. Last week in his surgery he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked weary and irritated. He has known Daddy for years and he seems upset by what's happening.

‘And why would he want to do that, Peter?'

‘Because he hates me.'

Peter said it with one of his simple, charming smiles. A man stating a self-evident truth that only a fool would not accept. ‘He wants to get me away from Lucy. He wants Lucy to stay and me to go. He's trying to scare me away.'

Dr. Ray began collecting his things together—various pens and a half-eaten sandwich, the loose papers scattered across his desk. He in turn had the look of a person speaking to someone who is not quite with it, not quite the full shilling, themselves.

‘I don't think so, Peter.'

It's true though, what Peter says about my father hating him.

At thirty-two years old I am still his
darling girl
, his
Lou-Lou.
For twenty-six years it has just been the two of us and that, I suppose, is how he wants things to be.

He has been difficult about Peter from the start. From the very first day I brought Peter home to meet him he has been difficult. I think he sensed immediately that this was it, that Peter was The One. In the months before his behaviour began to change there were already signs—very clear signs—that he would prefer it if Peter were not around. Petty, childish things—never passing on Peter's phone messages; repeatedly booking only two tickets when I mentioned there was something I wanted to see at the Plaza; cooking only two mackerel when Peter came for supper and making a great drama about dividing them into three portions.

It does seem almost possible now, when Daddy greets Peter with the thin bewildered smile he has acquired lately, that he is only pretending not to know him—that this is part of a plan, a strategy. A kind of mad theory, if you like, that if he behaves as if Peter is a total stranger, as if he has no recollection of ever having met him, then Peter will eventually go away, he will vanish and it will be just the two of us again, together like before.

That, or the belief that if he makes himself troublesome enough, enough of a burden, he will simply frighten Peter away.

Peter and I talk about little else these days.

I have taken to waking him up in the middle of the night to go over some incident that has occurred during the day—the smallest things: a brief moment, for example, when Daddy's drifting stare has seemed to harden, when there is a weird clarity in his eyes and they appear to be fixed malevolently on Peter, and then he blinks and the impression is gone, lost. We talk until the early hours about how curious it is that his symptoms only began around the time that Peter moved in, and how much worse they have become since we started talking about looking for our own place. Again and again we analyse what has become known as ‘the tongue incident'—when I caught him in the mirror, sticking his tongue out at Peter, all the way out, like a gargoyle. What sort of action is that? Is that a sign that he has lost all notion of what is appropriate and acceptable behaviour? If so, why was he doing it behind my back? We argue about the £90 a week I'm paying Frannie to come in for a few hours a day to keep an eye on him while Peter's at work and I'm at the shop. Peter says I might as well be flushing the money down the toilet. I say, yes, I know, but I can't bring myself to
not
do it, I can't let go of the possibility that all of this might somehow turn out to be real.

We discuss his cooking.

The chaotic, unkempt, inedible dishes he insists on producing several times a week.

Daddy took up cooking when he retired. He enrolled in a class at the Adult College and found he enjoyed it. He was quite good; he picked up the rudiments easily—a basic white sauce, short-crust pastry, a good chicken stock—and he soon acquired a repertoire of simple dishes: lasagna, shepherd's pie, moussaka, toad-in-the-hole. Shortbread, Bakewell tart, apple crumble. Before long he was cooking for the two of us and in the evening when I came home from the shop there was always some interesting smell coming from the kitchen when I turned in at the gate.

These days his moussaka arrives on the table with the aubergine slices sticking out at odd angles through a stiff floury sauce, all black and crispy and burned. His shepherd's pie comes drowning under a tide of watery gravy spilling up across crazily zig-zagging furrows of mashed potato.

Peter thinks this is the crassest, most ridiculous part of his pantomime. Every horrible misshapen offering—each one of them is deliberate, staged, part of the act. A charade. He says he has known people with this illness and he's sure this isn't what it's like, he doesn't care what Dr. Ray says.

We talk about the times when Daddy is strangely lucid. What are they all about? Why would he suddenly decide to seem okay?

If he were really losing his mind, would he suddenly start talking to me fluently as he sometimes does about the distant and recent past, about his old career, about my schooldays, about how much he still misses my mother? About the rain that hasn't let up since Monday, and how he hates the soft squeaky sound of Frannie's crêpe-soled shoes on the kitchen floor when she's here during the week?

Would he go out into the garden like he did last week and divide the astilbes and replant half of them quite sensibly in the shade beneath the flowering cherry in the front? Would he engage me in a thoroughly normal discussion about what I thought he should try in the area of dry shadow under the bay window by the front door—some Lilyturf maybe?

Would he carry on with his reading? Wouldn't that be something he'd have lost his grip on by now? And yet his appetite is undiminished, voracious and eclectic as it has been all through his retirement. He is always asking Frannie to take him to the library so he can exchange his books for new ones. In the course of the last week he has read
The Warden
and
Framley Parsonage. Get Shorty
and
Maximum Bob.
Margaret Thatcher's memoirs.
Great Expectations
,
Catch-22
, and John Keegan's
The Face of Battle.

Maybe he's heard somewhere that sufferers sometimes experience a kind of reprieve, says Peter. Or maybe he simply can't keep it up all the time, maybe he just decides he wants a break sometimes. Maybe there are some things he just can't bring himself to give up, maybe he's just not a very good actor.

I've spoken to Dr. Ray about these things on the phone.

‘Is this unusual?' I've asked him. ‘Is it strange that he should have these islands of clarity and competence?'

I can sense the doctor's irritation on the other end of the line. His answer is always the same: that we know very little, really, about exactly how the brain dies.

There are times when I wonder if Dr. Ray isn't in on the whole thing.

This past week, ever since the morning he came down without his hand, my father has been very much worse; he seems to have gone into a very steep decline, a sort of free-fall where he appears to be in a state of almost perpetual bewilderment and anxiety. He clutches my arms when I get up to leave the room for the briefest time, and when I come in he is sitting there on the sofa, very still and upright on the cushions, like a frightened bird.

Today Daddy has been behaving very badly. He refused to get dressed this morning and when I went in to help him he pushed me away quite roughly. He struggled when I attempted to get his vest on over his head. It was very upsetting.

I could feel Peter looking at me.

‘Leave him alone for a bit,' he said, taking my hand. ‘He'll be down.'

Sure enough, my father appeared about half an hour later. He had dressed himself, after a fashion—shoes but no socks, shirt not properly tucked in—and once again he had neglected to put on his hand.

Peter rolled his eyes.

‘Here, Daddy,' I said, pulling out a chair, ‘Come and eat some breakfast.'

Later, it being Sunday, we went for a short walk on the promenade, the three of us together, my father in the middle, shuffling along, gripping my arm tightly all the way as if he thought he would fall down and die if he didn't hold on to it.

Back home I put the joint in the oven and laid the table. Dr. Ray had brought over some plums from his garden during the week and Daddy said now that he wanted to make one of his tarts for pudding. Behind his back Peter pulled a face and put a hand to his throat as if he were gagging on something vile.

‘You do that, Daddy,' I said. I was exhausted after another night without sleep, picking over with Peter the details of my father's behaviour, looking for all the things that could be deemed suspicious, inauthentic, trying to figure out what's going on, if he's up to something. I said I was going up for a short rest before lunch and left the two of them in the kitchen, Daddy already busy sifting flour into the big brown mixing bowl, Peter putting away the last of the breakfast things. He winked at me, a bright, encouraging keep-your-pecker-up-girl wink, and said he'd bring me up some coffee in a little while.