Bridge 4

Chapter Two
Homecoming

When we get back from the hospital, I have the awkward job of transferring Dad from the car into the house. I haven’t seen the studio for over fifteen years: Miracle’s roses are overgrown and woody with blackbirds skittering like rats at their roots and there is a large unexpected lilac tree clawing the living room windows. The rest of the cottages in the street seem brighter and somehow in better focus.

Dad is still sleeping, so I move the packages sent from the hospital first. They are all done up in white paper or white cellophane and bound together with bright blue elastic bands, the type used by the postal service, which you sometimes get with special deliveries. Maggie used to store rubber bands, wrapped round an old spice jar in the kitchen, for ‘a useful day’. I wonder if it’s still there.

I get to the door before I realise that I don’t have a key and have to go back and frisk Dad for his. It’s in his top shirt pocket; one of the nurses must have put it there. He doesn’t stir as I search him.

I open the door, throw in the packages without even glancing around, and go back for Dad. It takes an age to rouse him. I think back to the nurses in the hospital: ‘Come on now Mr Farrington, just a couple more steps’; ‘You pop yourself up there and we’ll get you nice and comfy with a good old cup of tea’.

‘Come on, Dad,’ I mutter. ‘Just a few steps and we’ll get you nice and comfy.’

***

When we reach it, the inside of the studio is a shock; Sarah is everywhere. When I received her letter, I’d expected her to take everything with her. I’d thought that I’d come home to a shell scoured of her presence, echoing and draughty. It was as if she had just stepped out of the room. Her slips (she is the only woman I know who wears slips) are pegged out on a makeshift clothes line, suspended above the wood burner in the living room, crisp and wrinkled and ready to take her shape. There are bottles of nail polish and pots of cream thrust in amongst the volumes on the bookshelf. Only the collection of drooping cyclamen arranged around Dad’s bed (which someone has miraculously brought down the twisted staircase from the work room) seem to mourn her absence.

I get Dad settled on his bed, hefting his feet up after him. I slip off his shoes and pad his back with pillows, then leave him propped up in front of the TV like an infant, his catheter bag an unlikely comforter at his side. I need to see more of the house.

The curtain covering the stairs has gone and someone has painted the wooden steps pale blue. I recognise Sarah’s touch in the stencilled white and pink flowers that follow me up to the work room. Here there are boxes pushed against the far wall, boxes on boxes, piled to the ceiling. I can see the edges of canvases and tongues of worn drapes emerging through broken cardboard seams. There are symbols printed on the sides of each box in black marker pen, but I can’t decipher them. The rugs that used to pad the floor have been removed and someone has started to strip the boards. The wood feels thin and naked under my feet as I walk the room. I have a bird’s eye view of Dad on the bed below me through a large crack in one warped floorboard. He stares back at me, no recognition on his face, his blue eyes opaque, like egg whites just beginning to fry.

The attic room is obviously where Sarah has been sleeping. Her gypsy caravan paint scheme is in evidence again, flowers and what looks like tiny birds of paradise are pasted onto the dark beams. I fall into the metal framed double bed, pulling the duvet over me. The sheet is coiled and peeling back from the mattress; Sarah is obviously a restless sleeper. The bedclothes gasp out a sharp tang of her, unwashed hair and sleeping skin. Next to me, on the other side of the bed, are a litter of paperbacks, splayed open at various points: romantic fiction, Art History and a collection of Dad’s sketchbooks. I pick up one of the sketchbooks and look over the frantic charcoal drawings on the open page: pieces of a figure; the plotted points of an ankle; a breast, picked out with occasional gluey splashes of oil. I don’t recognise the model.

***

When I get back down to Dad, he’s sleeping. I take the remote from his hand and turn the TV down, then load the wood burner and try to kindle a fire. It goes out almost immediately.

Sarah has sent me a list of instructions for Dad. I fetch my bags from the boot of the car and fish out the folded A4 sheets, the front door still standing open behind me. They are longer than her letter by several pages. Dad’s needs, Michael’s to her, have been anticipated by bullet points each marked with a neat little biro star:

• The TV must be loud – Michael’s hearing is not as good as he thinks it is. Try his left ear if you have any trouble yourself.

• Keep bath water shallow and warm – test it before you let him in.

• The living room fire must be kept burning – he’s feeling the cold more and more.

It goes on: lists of foods that Dad can stomach, when to wake him and when to let him sleep, the pills that need to be swallowed along with meals and those that merit their own special times of day. Each point holds a dashed appendage clinging to the end, a qualification, an excuse, a ‘just in case’. Next to this I hold my own notes taken at the hospital, symptoms that would suggest another stroke or a urine infection, signs that things are getting worse.

I find a note at the bottom of the second page of Sarah’s constellations that tells me how to get the fire going. There is a collection of kindling in an old coal pail behind the stacked wood. Shavings from logs, pieces of bark and three dried orange skins, their petals still intact. I have a sudden memory of Dad peeling back strings of wood fibres with the edge of his hatchet. He always used to gather and chop the wood himself. According to Sarah’s notes a driver drops off a quantity of logs every month now, from the back of a blue pickup ( – don’t let Michael try and help him unload).

She’d spared me her cramped childish hand for the main event. Sarah’s letter was typed on Dad’s old machine, with it’s out of line e and faded y. No good for blackmail notes.

Patrick –

I know that we’ve hardly been in contact these past years, and for that I’m sorry. Though thank you for your Christmas cards. We both think and talk of you often.

Your father is ill. He’s had a stroke – maybe two – and there have been complications. He’s had to go into the hospital. You know how I hate those places – or maybe you don’t, but I hate him in them.

I’m so sorry, I really am, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t stay here. Michael needs someone to take care of him, but it can’t be me, Patrick. I’m no good at it any more.
I’m going to try to get in contact with Mabel and let her know what’s happening, but I do think that it’s you he needs. I think that it will be easier for a man.

I’m packing my things and leaving today. I’ve told Michael as best I can. He’s in St. Mary’s. You’ll need to go and collect him. You have to come back – back to your father. I know I can trust you, Patrick. I won’t be here.

– Sarah

I push the typed page in with the kindling, crushing her words, her apologies with dropped es and faded ys, and set them burning under two good dry logs. We’ll have a fire going in no time.