I’ve watched a few people when they’re asleep, and they’re all the same: old-looking, or dead. I probably ought to have felt depressed at this, though at the time I felt oddly comforted, and in a strangely satisfying position of power. Also, I was usually more worried that they were about to wake up and start screaming. (I’m not a murderer or a rapist or anything; I just wanted to look, but I can reveal that people most definitely don’t like waking up in the middle of the night to find somebody staring at them from a half-metre or so away. Or even a whole metre.)
Hol is right, though: Guy has aged the most since they made those films, because of his illness. Back then he was probably the best-looking of all of them; I mean that if there was some absolute, objective standard of human beauty or handsomeness that applied across both genders, then he would have scored higher than the others. He was a golden boy then, all flowing blond locks and sparkling blue eyes, lithe and graceful and with the best voice too. The others looked like kids in comparison.
‘You sure you’re going to be okay?’ Hol asks. ‘When Guy goes. Will you be able to look after yourself?’
‘Oh yes.’ I nod. ‘I’m sure I’ll miss him, but I’ll be fine.’ It’s odd, though, because when I say this sort of thing I always get an image of myself living here alone, in this house, just me, all by myself, and that’s not what’s going to happen, because the house is going to be demolished to make way for more quarry, and I know this, but still; that’s the image I have of my life after Guy dies.
Also, I think I still find it hard to believe he’s actually going to die. I’ve watched him get worse and worse over the last few years and I’ve usually been present when the medics have delivered their sombre assessments, but even though everything points to him being dead in the next few months, it seems some part of me can’t accept it’s actually going to happen. I think it must be quite an important, if deeply buried, part of me, because otherwise I’d feel more. I mean, about him dying soon. As we stand, I mostly feel numb, and I’ve yet to break down, yet to cry properly, yet to feel any terror or impending sense of doom. Maybe that’ll change once he’s bed-bound and immobile, or in a coma, or at the moment he dies. Or later. Maybe this strange numbness is just a survival mechanism, to let me cope.
It has all made me question what I really feel for my dad. I love him, I suppose, the way you have to love your mum or your dad, the way people expect you to, and I’m grateful to him for looking after me by himself all these years, but I don’t love him twice as much; I don’t love him with all the love he might expect to be his, plus all the love that a mum might have got as well. Maybe it never works like that anyway.
Sometimes I think I love him only because he’s there, because there was never anybody else around. I once watched a TV programme about a bunch of ducklings who’d become imprinted, immediately after hatching, on a pair of red wellington boots; they treated the red wellies as if they were their parents, following them everywhere, and always expected to be fed by the person wearing them. Maybe that’s the way I love Guy.
Dad’s hinted more than once that when it seems like he’s being horrible to me, it’s just to toughen me up and get me ready for living by myself, or at least without him, and even to make me look forward to him dying, rather than getting all tearful about it.
Though, frankly, Guy being who he is, that could just be an excuse.
‘I mean, you’ll get money, won’t you?’ Hol asks, wiping hair back from her brow again. ‘For the house. There’s money coming to you, isn’t there? There isn’t anybody else.’
‘Not that I know of,’ I tell her.
‘I mean, there’s the money I’ve got for you, obviously, but there’ll be more from the house. A lot more. Should be fairly serious money, I’m imagining.’
‘There will be some,’ I confirm. ‘If he leaves it to me.’
‘Good.’ She nods slowly a few times, staring at me. I feel that perhaps she didn’t really hear the second sentence. ‘Good,’ she says again, and sighs. ‘You look tired,’ she tells me. ‘You should go to bed.’
‘I can’t, until Guy’s gone. He needs me to help him get undressed and into bed and that sort of stuff.’
‘Oh.’ She seems to think about this. ‘None of us could help him, no?’
‘Hmm.’ I try to make it look as though I’m thinking about this, even though I know the answer perfectly well already. ‘Probably best not. Unless it’s me or Mrs Gunn he kind of gets upset.’
‘Huh. That’s tough.’
I shrug. ‘Thank you for the offer. This tape.’
‘Hmm?’ she says.
‘It’s not a sex tape, is it?’ I’m really hoping it isn’t.
Hol laughs. She shakes her head once, or at least moves it. ‘No,’ she says. Though it could be ‘Oh’ that she says rather than ‘No’; it’s hard to tell. She’s still slurring her words. ‘It’s … embarrassing for other reasons … Nothing to do with sex.’ She smiles at me.
‘Fucking parliament of crows, vultures,’ Guy says as I tuck him into bed. ‘Fucking circling vultures, so-called friends.’
Guy is quite drunk. His eyes, looking large in his thinned head, appear glazed and don’t seem to be focusing well, pointing in subtly different directions as if he’s become part chameleon, though without the interesting ability to blend into the background through changing skin colour.
‘You did invite them, Dad.’ I check his meds. They’re held on the upturned lid of an old biscuit tin sitting on the bedside table. Only just held; they almost overflow. He has to take quite a lot.
‘Yeah, well, nice to have some normal people in the house for a change,’ he tells me. ‘Some decent company, adults I can talk to. The bastards are only here to gloat, though, watch me suffer.’
‘Why would they do that? They must have better things to do.’ I can see the opiate capsules have gone early; they usually do.
‘Because people are vicious bastards, that’s why. They don’t all run flow charts in their heads before they decide what to say next. They’re not all fucking Dr Spocks like you.’
I think about this. ‘I think you mean Mr Spock. After the character from the original Star Trek.’
‘Fuck off. You know what I mean.’
It has taken us even longer than usual to get up the stairs this evening. Usually it takes less than two minutes, with me helping Guy and him resting on each step, but tonight it took nearly three minutes. The others offered to help – especially Pris, because she used to be a nurse and still deals with a lot of old and mobility-impaired people – but it’s not really about numbers. We have applied for a stairlift device but there’s no word of it yet. Guy reckons if it ever does get installed it’ll turn up just in time to bring his coffin down the stairs, assuming he has the good grace to die peacefully in his own bed.
‘Anyway, they’re here because they’re your friends. They’re all busy people. They didn’t have to come.’
‘All right! I heard you! Take their side, yeah, why not; just you do that. Why support me, eh? I’m just your dad.’ He looks up at me from the bed. He lies half propped up against a slope of pillows and cushions because that’s the most comfortable position for him to sleep in. He stares at me. ‘You’re all just waiting for me to die,’ he says. ‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘Now, Dad,’ I begin, checking his water bottle on the bedside table is full.
‘I’m not an idiot. I’m not losing my mind. Fucking shitty horrible fucking cancer hasn’t got there yet!’ His voice has grown louder and a little higher in pitch. ‘I know you’re just waiting. I know you hate me. I know you can’t wait for me to go. I’m not fucking stupid.’ He makes a noise like a sob. ‘Don’t think I’m not fucking stupid.’
He means ‘Don’t think I’m fucking stupid’, not what he actually said, with the almost certainly unmeant ‘not’ in the phrase, which entirely turns the meaning on its head.
Up until as little as a few months ago I’d have pointed this out, because, well,
it’s just wrong. However, I am learning not to do this all the time. He’s very ill, and constantly either in a lot of pain or so loaded with opiates he struggles to think straight, so he deserves to be indulged. I recognise this. Also, picking him up on this kind of minor mistake only leads to further argument and vexation, and it’s pointless. I’m not dealing with a child still learning the ways of the world and how language works; he’s a dying man. There’s nothing to be gained trying to teach him new things or reinforce stuff he ought to know because he’ll need this information for his life ahead; he hasn’t got one.
And, of course, he’s right, in a way. I am waiting for him to die. I don’t necessarily want him to die (my deepest wish is that things could go on the way they were, just the two of us living here, minding our own business, like we did before the cancer got so bad and spread so far and he became so dependent on me), but knowing that his death is as close to inevitable as these things get, and not far off, makes me wish it was all over with sometimes. Apart from anything else, my knowing he doesn’t have very much longer to live helps make it easier to ignore the insults and curses and the general unpleasantness that him being in this state leads to.
If I faced a lifetime of this, or let’s say ten more years – or maybe just five, or even two – I think I’d kill him, or myself, or run away.
I point at the biscuit-tin lid of drugs. ‘Have you taken the purple ones?’
‘What?’ He glances, then winces with the pain that must have come with the movement. ‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘You should wait until I’m here before—’
‘Oh, shut up. I don’t know. What are they?’
I pick up the pack. ‘Larpeptiphyl,’ I read off the label.
‘Stupid fucking name. Stupid as the names in that idiot game you play all the fucking time. I think you make half of these up. Is that really what it says? Let me see it.’
‘Here.’
‘Well, where are my glasses? What am I supposed to do with … What have you done with my glasses?’ For the last couple of years Guy has needed glasses to see things close up. He is vain about this; he would have had laser surgery on his eyes to correct them instead if he’d been well enough.
‘I haven’t done anything with them,’ I tell him. ‘Last time I saw them they were round your neck.’ I wish they were on his head; that’s where they would be in a sit-com. ‘They’ll be in a drawer probably …’ I go to open one of the bedside cabinet drawers but he flaps a hand at me.
‘Never mind. You’ve worn me out with all this bollocks. Just let me sleep.’
I look at the pack of Larpeptiphyl, counting the empty, punctured blisters. ‘You need to take two of these.’
‘Trying to make me overdose now, are you?’
‘No. You haven’t taken the ones for tonight. See?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I counted.’
‘You counted,’ he says, as though spitting the words. I pop the purple pills from their little clear plastic bubbles. ‘Yeah, that’s all you can do, isn’t it? Count. That’s what you’re good at. That’s all you can do: just count. You don’t even have the people skills to be a fucking accountant, do you? I wasted my fucking life on you. I don’t know why I bothered.’
‘Here.’ I offer him the pills one at a time and hold the water glass to his lips as he leans forward and up and gulps everything down.
He seems to choke, and splutters. ‘All right! Don’t fucking drown me!’ He collapses back amongst the pillows. His lips look livid against the pale skin of his face. They’re a sort of strange purple-brown, like the lips of giant clams on the Great Barrier Reef. I wipe the glass, top it up from the bottle.
‘I think that’s everything. Are you all right now?’
‘Of course I’m not fucking all right! Do I look fucking all right? Look at me!’
‘I meant—’
‘You meant can you fuck off with a half-clear conscience and play your stupid fucking game and leave me to die, that’s what you meant.’
‘I think it’s time we both went to sleep.’
‘Put to sleep,’ he mutters, though his eyelids are fluttering with tiredness. ‘Put to fucking … yeah, you go. Just leave me,’ he says, voice fading. ‘Fuck off.’ His eyes are closed now. ‘Oh, fuck … I’m sorry, son,’ he says, sighing, eyes still closed, lids fluttering. ‘Shouldn’t talk to you like that. Know you’re just trying to help. You shouldn’t listen … You’ll be better off without me.’ He sighs again, as if it’s his last breath easing out of him. ‘You go. Have a nice wank. Wish to fuck I could.’ But he can’t even manage the hard ‘-ck’ sound; the word comes out more like ‘fuh’, and while I’m still tidying up the lid of drugs he relaxes at last and with a long sigh his breathing slows and his face goes that slack way, mouth opening a little, giving him that look that people get, so that he seems even older, or already dead.
I stand over him for a short while, looking down at him as he sleeps. Then I put the light out, turn the night light on, and leave.
I don’t go out much. I never liked having to go to school every weekday and it’s a relief that that’s over. I didn’t hate school; I learned things and even met one or two people I still keep in touch with, plus I was too big to bully efficiently – and I have been known to lose it and lash out – but I always hated leaving the house.
My main exercise is walking round the garden. From my bedroom window I can see a large part of my regular walk. My bedroom is on the opposite side of the house from Guy’s and looks out to the north-east, over the back garden and the trees towards the wall and the quarry. My regular walking route takes me from the kitchen door, curves away to skirt the rear of the garage and the sides of the outhouses, passes between the vegetable patches, disappears into the rhododendron clump, crosses the lawn at a diagonal, veers past the weed-choked bowl of the long-drained pond, weaves between the trunks of the trees – mostly alder, ash, rowan and sycamore – before arriving at the remains of the old greenhouses and the tall stone wall defining the rear limit of the property.
The wall is about two metres high but there is one place where a pile of stones at its base and a projecting piece of ironwork a metre up allow you to climb it and see over the top and into the quarry. On the other side, there is only a metre to two metres of level, sparsely grassed ground before the earth falls away. The quarry is at least forty metres deep, stretches back for over a kilometre and widens out in a giant, irregular bowl shape nearly half a kilometre wide. It is tiered, with stone ramps for trucks cut into the different levels; big rocks line the edges of the clifftop roadways to stop trucks falling in. The bottom is a series of flat arenas on different levels, the lowest filled with green-brown water. The rock is the grey of old warships.
At the far end, where the remains of the hill curve round like cliffs, with just a small gap giving a glimpse of the agricultural land beyond, there are some tall, gawky structures made of rusting iron. A few stand like upside-down pyramids on skinny metal legs, while others sprout wonky-looking conveyor belts that straggle across the ground like fractured centipedes, disappearing behind piles of stones sorted into different sizes. It’s been years since I saw anything much move here. I can remember when piles of rocks undulated along the conveyor belts and dust rose from the stone piles as the big yellow vehicles swung across the ground, scooping up stones and dropping them again. When the wind was in the right direction you could hear distant clanking and thudding noises.
Back then, twice a week, most weeks – after the sirens had sounded for a couple of minutes, usually at about two in the afternoon, so that I experienced it only when there was a school holiday that wasn’t an everybody-else holiday – there would be that sudden quiver that shook the whole house and made the old servant-summoning bells in the kitchen ting faintly. It rattled the windows in their frames and once or twice made dust drift down from cracks in the ceiling. The noise of the blasting charges came a second or so later, because the shock wa
ves propagate faster through rock than air.
The local crows and the rooks from the nearby rookery would already be in the air; other birds reacted to the detonation rather than taking the warning of the sirens, and went flapping and panicking into the skies, chirping and calling. The corvids made sounds it was hard not to think of as contemptuous, or just as laughter.
Then there would be another, longer, rumbling sort of shaking; this was the curtain wall of stone that had been shattered free from the bedrock, falling and slumping to the ground beneath. More tinkling and rattling. A noise like a heavy, distant crump came and went. The sirens shut off half a minute later.
I used to watch from my room, when I could, when I heard the sirens, and a couple of times I was able to be at the back wall, standing on the footrest of the loop of iron projecting from it – even though I was banned from being there for safety reasons – but I only once ever saw the explosions and the falling face of rock, from my room, when it was raining and the view was slightly misty. The blast was far away, near the end of the quarry where the rusty structures were, and disappointingly undramatic: just some small vertical bursts of dust appearing suddenly from one or two of the half-dozen blast holes on the ledge above, then the cliff collapsing along a thirty-metre front and briefly flowing like a mush of dirty ice, spreading out across the ledge beneath and quickly coming to a stop, with more grey dust that quickly joined with or was defeated by the mist and rain. I was watching through binoculars, but still saw hardly anything. Even the shake the house got from that blast was sub-standard; the kitchen bells stayed silent.
The machine that drilled the holes for the blasting charges looked excitingly like a complicated anti-aircraft gun, tipped up near the edge of a cliff, producing dust in dry weather. Sometimes you could hear it, working away.
My return walk takes me from the back wall via the other clump of rhododendrons, skirts the lawn on its western edge, loops round the remains of the summer house with its fallen-in roof and broken windows, and reaches the house along the side of the old flower beds and the terrace, with its kinked, uneven stone balustrade and its weed-outlined flagstones, roughly a third of which have suffered significant cracking.