CHAPTER FOUR
Tess drives home to change—she's dripping wet but elated as a winner, or a thief. She gets to her father's room later than expected. Howard is sitting on the floor in front of the television, which is turned up loud. On the screen a svelte young woman with close-cropped hair, apparently naked, straddles an oversized concrete wrecking ball, holding on to its chain and singing fit to bust as she swings in, and then out, of frame. Her father moves his head to follow the girl swinging in, and then out again. The image is startling and Howard looks startled. But also transfixed.
'Hi, Dad.'
He turns his face up to her and smiles.
'Darling.' He shakes his head. 'I don't know about all this,' he throws the TV a guilty look.
'Me neither,' Tess says. 'Let's get you up.' She holds out her hands and he clasps them, but stays put.
'Reminds me of your mother,' he says in a small, cracked voice.
Tess wonders whether the young woman's shaved head is what reminds him of her mother at the end, or whether he's feeling some kind of lust that takes him back to her. She doesn't want to leave him bewildered and alone in his disinhibition, but then again, there are probably places it is just not right for a daughter to go. And, as she looks at his face, he doesn't seem unhappy.
'Hi there.' The carer hesitates politely at the door. She is a cheery, solid young woman whose name Tess has forgotten. She has dreadlocks held back in a ponytail, several earrings in the cartilage of her left ear, and a tattoo of a woman riding a horse down one forearm. What these are signs of Tess does not know, for they are not signs intended for her.
'He loves his MTV.' The woman moves to help her father up. 'We watch it a lot, don't we, Howard?' she says to him kindly. 'Loves his iPad, too. Found him curled up in bed with it a couple of times.'
'Thank you,' Tess quickly reads her name tag, 'Ella.' Then she remembers she's left a bag of things for her father—his Donepezil prescription, Depends, some CDs—in the car.
When she comes back, Ella is in a chair pulled up close to her father's. They are tapping their legs to music coming from the iPad on his knee. Ella sings in a pleasant voice, carrying tune and beat—perhaps she's a musician, just jobbing here? Tess walks around behind them.
Over the dreadlocks on the one side and the white wisps of her father's hair on the other, she watches a young woman on the screen, sitting in a chair with her head thrown back, singing. Between her parted legs a man kneels, inching a white garter down her thigh with his teeth. Then the woman, insanely beautiful, appears in a bejeweled strapless wedding gown that makes her breasts look like cupcakes in a corset.
'Beyoncé,' Ella says. 'Whatever you say about her, an incredible talent.'
'Again, again!' Howard cries, tapping the screen. The singer appears again, this time in a see-through white teddy, suspenders and an impossibly tiny G-string, writhing on the bed with a flower in her teeth. Tess feels the jumbled, reversed order of things—first garter removal, then marriage, then anticipation—is perfect for her father. All mixed up, like life.
The tea lady appears in the corridor with a trolley. There had been a tea lady in Howard's chambers and Tess has the comforting thought that this must seem familiar to him.
Then she remembers.
'Just a minute!' She fumbles in her handbag, then passes the tea lady the Bar Association mug from the pool. The woman fills it from a large metal urn and Tess hands it to her father.
'Thank you, darling,' he says. She thinks he might, just, recognise it.
Tess kneels next to him.
'I'll be away for a week, Dad. I'll see you in a week. As I said, I'm going to London.'
'Have a good time in London,' Howard repeats the place name and she gets a sad knife-flicker in her heart of what it was like when he could keep track, from one day to another, of where she was. He holds her gaze and there is a moment when they don't seem to know whose turn it is to speak. Then he clears his throat and says, 'You turned out to be the best thing I never had.'
'What do you mean Dad?'
When Howard had started to lose his mind he compensated by imbuing the most ordinary statements with sphinx-like gravitas, so that 'Indeed,' or 'If you say so,' could fit any occasion.
'Dad?'
'You. And your brother,' Howard says firmly.
Howard seems to consider the issue settled but Tess's eyes tear up and she looks at the nurse, who is smiling too—a kind, closed-mouth, raised-eyebrow kind of smile by which she signals that this is an intimacy she probably shouldn't be witnessing, but then, what can you do?