shee-shee-shee
.
Driving to dad’s, I play the same music. Off The Wall from forty years ago. I start it at the seventh roundabout so it will last until I see him waiting outside the flats with his terrible milk eyes. I set off at seven-thirty every time. I take the same route every time. I look for the same gap in the skies.
Right now, a diversion.
A police officer, waving the line of us towards endless dog-leg B-roads. I should have expected this because it’s the end of summer, a last chance for tourists to look for the sea view instead of at the blind bend, smashing up their people carriers and the people they are carrying. Today though, I’m afraid of it – I don’t mean the spill of families across the blood-oil tarmac – I mean I’m afraid of delay, of each second bouncing off the dash saying go back go home go back go home making me squeeze the steering wheel hard just to keep still you’re halfway there grow up sit still but I can’t I’m doing it I’m going back I’m nudging forward-reverse-forward, pushing against inches of space like a toy car bodging a three-point turn – only now I’m being waved on, I have to go properly forward, I have to follow the others following the waving arm, and I do one of those smiles reserved for complying with police officers as I’m kangarooing out of first and into dark unknowable holloways, pausing MJ to make sure ‘Rock With You’ will be playing as I reach the terrible eyes.
*
We’ve come up in the lift that has a fold-down seat in case you decide an elevating plastic stool is where you’d like to have your heart attack. He pretends it’s for my sake that we never take the stairs. Along the first-floor corridor, corkboards offer a timetable of sad endings:
Tuesday: Amputation Care with Raymond.
Thursday: Mickey’s Auctions, communal lounge (bring a loved one’s jewellery).
Sunday: Tea and balloons in the pop-up gazebo with Zoe on Planning Your Fun Funeral!
Dad slaps his pockets for the key. Further up, a door opens. A big man comes out, sees us, makes a squeak and goes back in.
.
We’re in dad’s flat. It hits me as we go along his hallway. Stale ancient man air. Breath and skin and oils leaving their surfaces with nowhere to go but into the cushions and the carpet and the walls and now into my hair and nostrils. I can’t blame his being alone for the terrible air. She was as bad, in the end.
My dad is going to die soon – even he won’t pull the wool over this news.
Every time I visit – he’s doing it now look – he fills the kettle RIGHT TO THE TOP. It takes so long to boil. My stomach changes gears as the moulded jug starts shaking, dribbling into final heaving sobs so that I want to put my arm around it, but I’d get a scald and I am ridiculous.
He shuffles across the kitchenette while I empty the box of food. Tins of soup, boiled potatoes, peaches, peas, red salmon. Packets of pink wafers, fondant fancies, foil-wrapped mini Swiss rolls – a little treat, a moment of joy for the palate, soft landings for precarious teeth. I stack the things in the bread bin alongside the pink wafers, fondant fancies and mini Swiss rolls I brought last time, then point to the instructions for fish fingers and oven chips. I buy the same food every time. He never glances at any of it yet always checks to make sure I’ve shut the rusted fridge-freezer. His brain is sharp. He tells me every time, tapping his head bones.
‘It’s all alright up here.’
Dad is ninety-one. This is his sheltered-housing flat. Look at this light-pull that’s actually an emergency bell ready to receive the lunge of someone about to die. My dad is going to die soon – even he won’t pull the wool over this news. I stand by the mantel clock. One hundred and eighty minutes to go. I do this every two months. I live an hour and a half up the coast. He tells me not to come, pretends it’s for my sake, because of my back with the driving. We talk on the phone twice a week, me shouting into his deafness, him overlapping with, ‘There’s something wrong your end – hello? hello?’ I could swear on the phone. I could say all the Terrible Words in the dictionary. Only, I’ve never been a swearer and he is ninety-one, and he might hear, he’d be hurt and I’d feel awful, and there are too many fucking words to choose from.
The clock is brown plastic. It belongs to mum and is in the shape of Muttley, the dog friend of Dastardly. It has an alarm: Muttley’s wheezy laugh. She used to set it off as I came through the door. Her dark eyes would light up, her mouth would crease. She was very immature.
Dad wanders in with a mug, bashing into the side table like a carthorse with blinkers. He has glaucoma but still drives. He’s going to kill someone on the road but I can’t worry about that.
‘Here, love, enough milk?’
He looks where I’m looking, presses Muttley’s head and Muttley dies in the middle of a shee-shee-shee.
Now he’s putting thick bread under the eye-level grill with his thick fingers. He used to be stocky with massive eyebrows and a powerful walk and is smaller now, his muscles wanting to lie low, but even in the tottery gait there’s a strength squaring up to spite his body. I go to the photographs in their pound-shop frames, swiping a thumb across the glass – why is everything in this flat sticky? – and suddenly he’s behind me.
‘Lovely isn’t she, that face.’
‘Mm.’
‘Shame you take after me.’
He scans random corners for something to show us, to prove he’s been living, that he is alive, and turns to mum’s cabinet: here’s a tin Churchill holding an ashtray; a porcelain ballet dancer from some bombed German factory; a dozen fossilised fish bones that Ted gave her; a clay sculpture of three hills and you just know the hills are a mother and two children. Dad peers into the shelves.
‘They’ll be yours, all these. Or I might sell everything.’
I scream and hope it’s only happening inside, and blink away the grey lines appearing out of nowhere – the toast is burning, he’s going to burn to death one day but I can’t worry about that. I tap his arm and point to the grill.
‘Alright, love, I can see it, I’m not daft.’
He’s under the smoke detector waving a dirty teacloth.
‘Dad, let me help.’
‘Oh, sit down, I’m doing it my way.’
I mouth the Terrible Words. Perhaps he sees my ribs go in. Anyway, he tries his light voice.
‘You’ll mess up my system you will. Now just sit there, daft thing, relax a minute. Here’s today’s paper, read the paper.’
While he deals with the barbecued bread, I make a show of stretching my legs and carry on to the bedroom. On the dressing-table, an Open University pin; rings for her tiny fingers; the last photograph of Ted; a play programme with ‘Peaseblossom’ underlined and three exclamations marks next to my name. Here on the wall, Native Americans. Mum was northern with olive skin and the story went that a mysterious ship ran aground near Southport and soon babies were being born black-haired and dark-eyed. The story changed, it was the Spanish Armada, it was a bunch of canoes from Canada blown off-course on a spring tide, each adaptation accepted by us – by mum too, I think. Sometimes she asked us to call her Shawnee or Cheyenne, sometimes it was Conchita or Dancing Water, sometimes it was Barbara Brown-Feather, sometimes she wanted to be any other name and it was funny at the time. Now through the velvet gloom I watch myself, small for seven, in a dress with gingham fishes. I’m on her bed in the late ’sixties in a house of corrugations and green-gloss skirtings, sitting with a book of feathered people. Mum leaning in to turn the pages, cologne ghosting her wrists as she touches the head of an elder woman who isn’t going to give in, you can see it look, in the rise of her chin. Mum, lifting my face.
‘Never be cruel, sweetheart.’
.
He calls me in. I come to the leather armchair that used to be beige, now charcoal with gunk yet cleaner than when she was here. Then it was sordid. The carpet still shines where her slippers slid forward-back, feet swelling maroon. Once she was beautiful. Soon he’ll sit opposite on the only dining chair. It will be like an interview with nobody wanting to ask the questions. For now, I shout into the kitchenette useless news of the diversion and he shouts back that he’ll do me a route map for the home leg.
We were being too gentle and I was scared.
‘I know every road, you know. I know every road like the back of my hand. I’ve been driving seventy years, I’ve never been lost, I know every road.’
Did I scream, just then?
Here he comes, carrying the plate and the knife. Opening the jam like a waiter presenting the wine. This is what is left. Dead mum dead brother but a dad alive, be grateful.
.
I’m eating the toast and when dad opens his mouth I’m already nodding so he won’t need to ask if it’s OK. Only, this leaves him with nothing to offer, his face shuttering against ricochet silences while I take about a hundred years to reach the last bite, and then this happens: the face starts to shift. Raises its eyes, fixes slow watery blinks onto mine, it’s trying so hard, this face. Plumping its folds with nervy oxygen, elasticating its closed lips until the shutters ping off and here’s a smile, just for me.
‘Toast OK, Smudge?’
Oh – Smudge, his pet name for me, long-forgotten. I swallow the scraped toast and runny jam and the two-bag tea that’s too strong but I like it, and something is OK and I copy his smile, then see a new photograph. This one, look, doesn’t fit its frame. He must have shoved it in, not even seeing who it is, a scene so faded that the black and white is trying to colour itself. It’s mum, falling around inside an unthoughtful frame, trying to get back her colours. I bring it to dad who squints nods pretends then goes off to write his reverse route map and into his back I whisper, ‘I hate you.’ I don’t know why. I do know this black and white day above the sea in a different century, on a different planet.
*
We were on the clifftop by the Head. It was Mothering Sunday and we’d taken a picnic on the trolley bus after church. It was cold but we put a bedsheet down, mum straightaway sitting and ironing her skirt with her hand, though the skirt was uncreasable. Ted was in his Boys’ Brigade gear. He was running, his hair yellow, his face red, his arms out wide.
‘Biplane mum! Mum! Biplane!’
Mum wasn’t joining in and we didn’t understand – she always joined in. So my brother went round and round on his own, then after such a long time dad threw off his coat, lifted him onto his shoulders and they looped the loop towards the cliff edge until dad’s foot found a rabbit hole and Ted made his first solo flight, cracked his nose and didn’t cry.
We ate our sandwiches while dad told us about the very first air show with its races and stunts and gentlemen fliers; about the plane that crashed trying to land on a chalk mark, breaking the pilot’s neck to bits right where we were sitting. Dad jumped up, his side-eyes on mum.
‘Least he did try. He didn’t sit around in his only tie, he had guts, that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to get our guts and by summer we’ll have a car, a job, we’ll be on the Up like these Americans. There’s going to be Americans this summer on the moon – the moon Ted! – nothing’ll be the same after, you can’t get higher than that.’
We looked up but it was only the day-moon not ready to shine. Ted played catch with me and whenever I missed he yelled,
‘You can do it, Vivi!’
and I never could do it but always believed him for the way that he said it.
Usually up on the Head we’d be climbing over mum like cubs or spreading her thumb and forefinger to draw a biro heart in the space between. That day though, she had her long legs folded under, or perhaps they were trapped – yes, that’s what I saw – mum’s legs thinking they could pierce the soil, carry her down right through the cliffs then place her on the sand and walk her to the sea, but they didn’t think of the layers of flint and tropical sea plants and ironstone doggers; of the sixty million years blocking their way.
I was still looking at dad taking her photograph when the ball smashed into my ear and he shouted, ‘Ted, she’s seven for God’s sake!’ Ted’s lip wobbled so I ran over and shook his hand like I’d seen in a cricket match and he laughed and let me give him a Chinese burn. Mum told us to settle down. She put her palm inside my sock and rubbed the grass stain. Dad had the News of the World but kept blowing on his hands. I asked mum to please not rub any more and had to keep saying it until she stared at the hole in my Sunday sock, kicked off her good shoes, shoved a fingernail between her toes and made a rip in her tights. I held my breath then saw the silver in her eyes and walked my fingers up the ladder, pulled her arm around, lay against her heartbeats of 4711 cologne and thought that as long as we stayed here, there was nothing to worry about.
As we got ready to leave, another boy went past high on a man’s shoulders. Ted ran to his kitbag, brought out the tissue-paper daffodil he’d made at Sunday School and offered it to mum with a salute. Dad stepped forward, pulled him in, kissed the top of his head while she smoothed the squashed flower. We were being too gentle and I was scared. It was time to go but we lay back, all four of us, like we’d dropped from the sky.
Later that day, dad disappeared. Ted said it was because of owing money to big men, then saw my face and said that really he was in America training to be an astronaut. We lost our house and everything in it except for the cabinet of things, and lived without dad in a prefab where Ted heated our beans while mum was at work. When dad was allowed back to earth she became watchful and we did too, only we didn’t know what we were watching for.
.
I never look in the bathroom mirror but now I do catch myself, too old look, for a denim jacket, summer dress, fringed ankle boots, too old for this pretend festival costume, for being the daughter of a living person. If he’d paid his bills – if you’d paid the bills, dad, not spent the money on whatever-it-was, not kept running off with the lies. If you’d just stayed on the moon.
Her tablets are on the end of the bath, after two years. This floor is sticky. When he dies the council will blame me for the dirt. He wouldn’t let people in. They offered a wheelchair, an oxygen tank. He said they were interfering. They offered a home hairdresser, optician, chiropodist. He said he’d take her to those places himself. So she never had her hair washed or her nails cut or outdoor shoes or reading glasses. He never took her along the prom for a blow past the beach hut that was ours until it wasn’t. Never took her out for an afternoon to find joy with that gang of friends she’d gathered along the years, people from the outside edges who’d turn up at peculiar hours to deliver monologues on how it was all going wrong, mum giving each one her attention, a bit of improvised pudding and sometimes a shimmy around the rug to the record player if she had the breath.
I know there’s a kind of human who can take a single moment and make it better just by living it.
Then it became just the two of them in this sheltered-housing flat where he never allowed me to take away their stinking clothes and I can’t worry about that, I have to sit on the toilet lid or I will faint. He calls out as he goes past.
‘I do miss her you know, love.’
‘Fuck off!’
I don’t know if he hears.
*
In the lounge he’s rubbing his hands together. And it just comes out.
‘Fancy a drive dad, up to the Head?’
Immediately, he teeters over his slip-ons; reaches for his keys. I shake my head. He nods.
‘Alright, love, you drive.’
In the lift he tells me the route to take while I drag the Terrible Words to a pillowy place where I am a nice person, where I see he never talks to anyone except for his wife at the burial ground, looking left to blather at her ashes, then right for a few seconds with my brother’s bones. I want to go home. Maybe I was the same before: maybe I was counting one hundred and eighty minutes even then. Watching her sink skew-whiff into the sofa. Then I’d glance at Muttley before taking the stairs two at a time, driving away, using Off The Wall as a carpet-beater to whack three hours of dirt out of the air. Today it won’t budge, this film perma-staining my surfaces, because I am the running-away one. I was the one not able to bear the sight of her smiling and let down, but I did bear it every time – the neglect and squalor I left her with – because I was without courage, because I didn’t grab the stinking clothes, I didn’t take her visiting, didn’t ask this man descending now on the plastic stool of death, What Did You Ruin Us For? And I am still without courage, building instead a library of silent swears, blood bulging with the nameless crimes I can’t seem to throw at this elderly stranger. Only, between floors I see mum waiting week after week to spread her thumb and forefinger for the biro heart. I see her listening for the chance to set off the alarm as I arrived. It wasn’t for Muttley she shone, was it.
He’s following me down the corridor, puffing out his cheeks, arms pistoning like a marathon walker, and doing a jokey boy’s voice.
‘Wait for me, wait for me!’
What’s he doing, is he having some sort of brain event? That would be better than this: he’s being grateful and suddenly I don’t know about hate and I don’t know about love. I know about things left too long to boil, things too hot to ever touch. I know there’s a kind of human who can take a single moment and make it better just by living it. Look at this, years and years ago in the New Forest tearoom: the four of us being quiet and good, islanded from the tables of Hampshire ladies in their immense hats. Then mum taking a mouthful of scone, leaving a big coil of cream on her nose and when we see she’s done it on purpose, three of us laugh until the tears plink off our lips so that she whispers, ‘We better go, we’re causing a kerfuffle.’ So we drive past the gorse and the heather and the wild ponies and the verges of women holding out armfuls of gold. Me, mum and Ted in the back singing, dad trying a smile in the rear-view of his Zodiac – he’s been invited back, he’s got a job for now, he’s on the Up, it’s one silver moment, you can’t get higher than that, yet this one meets me outside the flats of terrible milk eyes and punches me in all the spaces.
We’re at our cars. He’s opened his boot and is holding a travel blanket, demonstrating how to put it around the shoulders, white hair flying like underwater weeds. He’s wearing a sour shirt and grubby trousers oh but he’s naked and afraid. I’m allergic to wool. I don’t remind him. He drapes it over me. I let it prickle and stab. Suddenly I move in, catching him out with a hug. I do know about hate, yet into his chest I say,
‘Shee-shee-shee,’
and hold onto him and hold on and hold on and hold on until he says,
‘Don’t be daft, Smudge,’
but he holds on too.
.
.
Kerry Hood is a writer of short fiction and plays. She received the Society of Authors’ Arthur Welton Award, was shortlisted for their Tom-Gallon Trust Award as well as winning third prize in the Costa Short Story Award and The London Magazine Short Story Prize. She won Words & Women Award, Frome Festival Prize and Cinnamon Press Prize with the title story in Patria & Other Stories. Longlists include BBC National Short Story Award and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She’s published by Bristol Prize, Bridport Prize, Brick Lane Bookshop and Words & Women, with work broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Play commissions include Soho Theatre, Ustinov Bath and Bristol Old Vic.
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