At My Mother's Knee (47 page)

Suddenly I was scared. Everything I loved was crumbling
before me. I wanted to run away, to hide somewhere and
pretend that none of this was happening. What if my mother
died? What would we do? Life without her was unthinkable.
Was this my punishment for not sticking it out for the full
week at Sue Ryder's? If so, then God was one petty bitch.

My dad's sorrow turned to anger. He refused to come home
with me, not until he'd paid a visit to the doctor's and let his
hapless receptionist know exactly what he thought of her illjudged
prognosis. Aunty Chris, who had been waiting
anxiously at the house with my sister Sheila for us to come
back from the hospital, went after him. She said the entire
surgery cheered as he wiped the floor with
Dr Barlow's
receptionist. She was a harridan, there's no other way to
describe her. She saw the patients as a necessary evil, a bunch
of malingering time-wasters who had no right to bother the
doctor, and like revolutionaries storming the Bastille they
roared their approval at hearing this uncaring bully get a longoverdue
roasting from the local Robespierre, my normally
placid father.

Later that night, after Aunty Chris and Sheila had gone
home, I sat with my dad, both of us wrapped in a blanket of
despair. I could feel the room closing in on me, the atmosphere
unbearably claustrophobic. I wanted to scream out loud and
thought I'd go mad if I didn't get out for a while.

'Don't go out tonight,' my dad pleaded, seeing me changing
my shirt. 'Stay here with me.' I didn't know how to cope seeing
him like this, desperate and defeated, his eyes raw from
crying. He scared me and to my eternal shame and regret I
refused to stay, leaving him alone while I went for a drink in
the Bear's Paw. I didn't stay out very long. I regretted coming.
It felt wrong being in a club full of people whose only concern
was whether or not they'd cop off tonight. I left pretty well
immediately and went back home, anxious for news.

As I sat on the train I thought about how many times I'd
made this journey with my
mother
over the years, how many
conversations she had enjoyed with complete strangers on the
journey from James Street to Green Lane, expounding many a
crying shame, airing her opinions on subjects as diverse as
apartheid and varicose veins. She couldn't die. She was a
powerhouse, permanently striving towards a new goal,
whether it be the search for yet another 'little job' or a bus ride
into unknown territory to explore a church she'd heard about.
Inquisitive by nature, she still retained that thirst for knowledge
she'd had as a little girl and would try to infuse me with
it. Staring out of the window into the darkness of the tunnel, I
could hear her voice.

'By 1903 this was the first electrified line of its type in the
world, and it's still going today. I'm all for modern technology,
me. Marvellous.'
Please don't die, Mum . . .

There was no more news. All the hospital would say was
that my mother was 'peaceful'. She'd never been peaceful in
her life. I lay in bed, listening to my father worrying in the
room next door, counting the minutes until morning, waiting
in the dark for the phone to ring.

By 6 a.m. we were up and back at the hospital. There was
still no change. My dad sat by the bed staring intently into the
face of the woman he'd loved since he first clapped eyes on her
at an Irish dance, gently stroking her hand and silently willing
her to live. For the first time, I saw them not just as my parents
but as a couple very much in love.

There was no point me hanging around, my dad said; I'd be
better off at work. I disagreed but went, reluctantly, to keep the
peace. Halfway through the afternoon session I was called out
of the court and told once again by Joe Black to go home. This
time it was my dad who'd had the heart attack.

Sheila was waiting for me at the hospital. He'd had two
more coronary arrests and had been put on life support. 'He
told Father Lennon that he was going on a journey,' she said
through her tears. We thought it best to tell my mother,
who had recovered slightly but was still very ill, that he'd
caught a bad cold and was keeping away until it got better in
case he passed it on to her. She'd have seen through this feeble
lie in an instant if it hadn't been for the drugs fogging her
mind.

My dad was dying. The Irish relatives gathered round his
bed to say the rosary. He'd been taken off the life support
machine now; there was no point. It wouldn't be long before
he embarked on his 'journey'. The light over the bed cast
shadows across his face, every vein visible through his waxen,
transparent skin. I stood at the end of his bed, listening to his laboured breathing and the repetitive drone of the relatives as
they chanted the rosary. He sat up for a brief moment and
laughed. 'That bugger'll be all right,' he said quite clearly,
pointing at me, before lapsing into sleep again.

It was time to tell my mother that her husband was dying. I
hid behind a cupboard in the corridor as she was slowly
wheeled into the intensive care unit, frail and vulnerable in her
hand-knitted pink bedjacket, to say her last goodbyes.

'Where's
Paddy
?' she was saying in a small anxious voice.
'Where's my husband?' I was unable to face her, incapable of
witnessing her grief, crouching on the floor in the dark at the
side of the cupboard, eyes closed and hands over my ears, desperate
to blot this heartbreaking image from my mind. She
stayed with him until the doctor sent her back to the ward. On
the way, she stopped the wheelchair to speak to me. 'This is
you, this,' she said accusingly. 'You've put him in there with
your shenanigans and your bloody carry-on.' Painful as it was,
I was glad to see that there were still traces of the old Eve.
Then she reached out and grabbed my hand, as if suddenly
regretting her outburst. 'Have you had your tea?' she asked,
wiping her eyes with a hanky that I noticed had the word
Laxey printed on it, a souvenir of happier times and a holiday
on the Isle of Man when she'd walked arm in arm with my dad
along the prom for a drink in the Empress Hotel. 'I'll get me
purse out of the locker and you can go down the Chinese and
get yourself some of that muck you like. And then get to bed –
you're the colour of boiled shite.'

My dad died in the early hours of the morning. He couldn't
face a life without my mother, and, thinking that she was
dying, slipped away himself. The doctor said that if he could
put cause of
death
as 'Broken heart' on the death certificate he
would have.

The normally inscrutable Aunty Chris, who loved my dad
dearly, was chain-smoking furiously in the corridor, looking for a victim to vent her anguish on. I felt much the same. If she
wanted a fight I was up for it, even though I knew she'd tear
me to shreds within seconds. 'You're coming back to stay at
ours,' she said, her voice cracking as she fought back her tears.
'And I don't want no bloody trouble either.'

I told her no, I was going home first, and ran off before she
could get her claws out.

The house looked as it always did, only unnaturally quiet,
my dad's pipe sitting on the mantelpiece, his football coupon,
untouched, on the arm of his chair. In the kitchen a mug and
bowl were stacked neatly on the draining board, evidence of
his last meal. I sat in the dark on the stairs, numb with shock.
My father was dead. Hard to take in at that age – at any age,
really. I found the sudden sense of loss overwhelming. There
were so many things I wanted to say to him, to thank him
for, and now it was too late. Was it my fault he'd died? Had
I brought on his heart attack? Years later, sitting in a cinema
in London watching Maximilian Schell's documentary
about Marlene Dietrich and hearing the lady herself recite
Ferdinand Freiligrath's poignant 'Love as Long as You Can', I
recalled that moment on the stairs again, and felt the same
overwhelming regret as I did then.

Oh love as long as day may dawn,
The hour will come,
You'll stand beside a grave and mourn
Whoever gives his heart to you,
Oh, show him all the love you own,
And fill his waking hours with joy,
And never make him feel alone
And watch your tongue as best you can,
A wicked word is quickly spoken,
'Oh God, I didn't mean it so'
The other goes away heartbroken,
Then you kneel down beside the grave
Forgive me please for hurting you,
Oh God, I didn't mean it so,
But he can't see and can't hear you,
He can't be welcomed back, somehow.
The mouth that kissed you oft before,
Can't say that all's forgiven, now . . .
He did forgive you, long ago,
But many hot tears fell, my friend,
About you and your bitter word,
Oh, he's at rest, he's reached the end.

Enough to bring a bloody tear to a glass eye, as Aunty Chris
probably would've said.

I was more than a little worried that the shock of my father's
death might kill my mother, making me an orphan at eighteen.
Lady Bracknell, or rather Tony's impression of her, sprang to
mind: 'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to
lose both looks like carelessness.'

'Please God, let her get better and I'll never be bad again.'
The old familiar petition that I'd employed since childhood
was brought into use again. I had a mental image of St Peter in
his long flowing beard and robes, standing in front of a pair of
ornate gates on a fluffy lump of cloud, holding a phone out to
the Almighty. 'It's Paul O'Grady, boss, he says he'll never be
bad again?'

'Tell him I'm not in.'

The phone rang on the little hall table that my dad had built
a lifetime ago, startling me out of my thoughts. I let it ring. It
was probably Aunty Chris seeing 'what I was up to', so I
ignored it and went to bed, getting into my parents' bed
instead of my own. I could smell them on their pillows. On my
mum's a faint whiff of Honeysuckle and setting lotion, on my dad's, cigarettes and sweat. I lay there in the dawn light, listening
to a solitary foghorn from a ship on the Mersey. It was
a surprisingly misty morning for September and it was chilly in
the bedroom. The phone rang again. Reluctantly, I went to
answer it.

'Paul?' It was Diane. 'How are you?'

'Well, me dad's dead and me mother's at death's door. Things
couldn't get worse, really.'

I could hear her sobbing at the other end of the line.

'Oh, God, they could and they have,' she said, catching her
breath.

'What do you mean?'

'I'm pregnant. You're going to be a father.'