“What’s that noise? Mummy? Mummy!” I scramble from the calico and wood cot that Dad and I have been taking it in turns to occupy for the past four nights.
I reach the foot of her bed in half a step. The noise is rising like water filling a fire bucket.
“Help! Help her! Por favor!” I raise my voice to attract attention yet not wake the other fitful slumberers.
“Help her!” Louder now as consideration falls from priority. I reckon the other patients are comatose anyway.
Minutes pass as though time is pushing against a room-sized block of jello.
I fuss around my stepmother of thirty-one and a half years, thirty-two and a half if you count the year she spent as our au pair.
Smoothing her unwashed clumps of hair, feeling the natural oils coat my palm and the self-reproach of being too discomfited to try to play hairdresser to this fifty-six-year-old woman who raised me from the age of five.
The can of dry shampoo on her bedside locker is taunting me like an adulterer’s bouquet.
Mummy’s breathing is a hardship I would be willing to take on for her sake. This is something I can say because it is not possible on this earth.
The window of possibility to act on her direct request for help two years ago had passed by in my own Guinness fuelled haze.
Angry with her, I had even gone as far as to tell her I’d send her a crate of her favourite whisky for Christmas because she kept asking us to come for Christmas, and we couldn’t spare the few hundred pounds sterling for flights.
Finally, a diminutive woman, her skin faded-olive under the fluorescent tubes and her eyes tired beyond sleep, saunters into the room.
She continues her air of nonchalance as she rounds the side of the bed where I am and ushers me from her path.
I stand in limbo, an unprecedented situation causing my deafness, blindness, and inertia.
Seconds take hours before I think to phone Dad. I locate my mobile and take it to the corridor.
The irony of the situation does not escape my blurred attention. I had insisted he return to the villa only a normal hour earlier.
The spry and groomed father I knew and once idolized had been grey-skinned, silver bristled, and contributing to the overripe pungency of the room’s atmosphere. His eyelids had looked heavier than trap doors teetering on the cusp of slamming shut.
Pick up, Dad, don’t be asleep. Come on, c’mon, c’mon.
“Dad, you need to come back right now. Yes, right now. I don’t, I don’t …, I can’t explain. Come now, please!” He hangs up. I disconnect.
I return to the foot of Mummy’s bed.
My wits recover in fast forward.
The nurse is disconnecting the machines which should be monitoring this hollowed-out woman’s vitals.
I am struck by the incongruity of this vessel that once expressed a vital life full of spark and verve, a living being who ran after two small girls and their dad in the park, her home-bleached hair flowing in the breeze she had created.
“What are you doing? Stop, stop, stop!” I move to stop the psychopathic woman. But she gabbles something at me before turning her back and continuing to peel off sticky circles from Mummy’s chest.
The arid pauses, between the thirty-a-day Superkings Blue breaths, lengthen.
I realize the breaths are not breaths, more rattles like her will is dragging each commotion out of her lungs.
The rattle is getting looser, higher up in Mummy’s ribcage, it’s making a path to her heart. A tortuous din stills the nurse.
She takes my hand and squeezes it then leaves the room.
“No, no, no. Don’t leave. Please help her.” Please help her. But nobody comes. I sit on the cot. Why don’t they help her?
There’s a cell in my brain that knows what happened but I choose to pretend. I’ll stay here for a while. In the quiet. Protected by my fluffy unknowingness.
“Sarah, what’s happened?” Dad asked as he rushed, as much as his bad back shuffle would allow, into the room. His eyes on me until he dragged his head to the right, past the curtain and he saw her.
“Why aren’t the machines on? Oh. Teresa, Teresa!” He moves to the head of the bed and takes her hand in his, stroking her arm and hand, he bends forward to kiss her on the lips.
When he straightens he remains hunched. He’s my dad but less than my dad. The glint of hope is dashed and at that moment part of his life force went with Mummy, leaving a crushed bewildered mortal man.
Miles
I shouldn’t be here. I should be with her. “Hello Torre boy, hello, hello. Sit. Let’s get this collar on you, there. A short walk, boy. You’re the best antidote. Why wouldn’t you take to her? Maybe it was her aroma? Was that it, boy?” They say animals can smell disease. “To the beach then, shall we, Torre? “
She wanted to come here. She did. We decided together. The great British dream to retire to Spain! Thirty-six litres of Queen Margot Whisky, in one month. I was blind. Robbie noticed. Another man shouldn’t have to tell his friend’s wife to wash her hair and cut her toenails.
If she’d come out with me, we could have explored, had a second honeymoon, and eaten garlic prawns, soaking up the olive oil with warm bread. But no, no, she preferred to sit in her unused kitchen, at the tiny two-person table smoking with Margot while staring at Polish TV.
“Just me and you, boy, wasn’t it? Running around to the supermarket, fighting the Germans at the doors to get to the new goods first. She would have enjoyed the battle.”
“Hold on, boy, it might be Sarah. Sarah, what’s happening?” Oh, god, it can’t be good. “I’m on my way. We must hurry, boy. A run, that’s what we need.” Oh, god please let her live. Please.
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