Quilt (3 page)

– Sit down, please.

I see from the identity card on her chest that she is called Mary. But it’s too late. Everything is so too late. I hear myself saying: We could walk around this, inspect it, dance or run from every angle, stand on the chairs, the desk, crawl inch by inch up the walls, don’t speak to me, Mary, I’ll never see you again, we know that, you’ll never see me or me myself. By requesting I sit down, Mary, you have destroyed the world.

In the event, she doesn’t do a fine line in gentleness, something brittle and hard in the voice. My father is dead. Yes I can read, but: they don’t know how he died.

She’s very tensed up, conscious that this is her duty, the one who has been singled out. (
You
tell him, Mary.) As the senior nurse on duty this morning she braces herself, treading the shaky border between compassionate delivery of the news and adminstrative care to minimise any suggestion of negligence, any possible grounds for litigation.

– I’m sorry to say, she begins, speaking at last, long after the end. I’m sorry to say your father passed away in the night. We tried calling you a number of times, and the police also tried to contact you.

– Oh, I say, oh.

(We’ve tried to contact you more times than we care to remember: that line, telephoning home and I don’t hear.)

– The phone is downstairs, I didn’t hear it, I never heard a thing. Did the police phone or did they actually call at the house?

– I believe, she says, they came to the house.

This has to be a lie, I think, or at least highly unlikely, since the front door is directly below my bedroom window and the doorbell is piercingly loud, inside and outside the house. What does it matter, not sure I understand you, you can, can you explain please? Your father fell out of bed in the night, there were no witnesses, the only other people in the room were two gentlemen, one of them is blind and the other has learning disabilities, brackets hanging in silence so neither could give evidence in a court case should you find yourself meditating on the idea of mounting one brackets. A nurse had checked the room only a little while earlier, brackets a silent barrage of questions, as in a game of hangman the gallows steadily rising: a little earlier than what?
when? how do you know if you don’t know, as you say? earlier than his death, you mean? or his dying? there’s a difference, isn’t there? brackets, but evidently he fell out of bed and bumped his head, brackets and couldn’t get up in the morning that is certainly singsong merrily on high what we are both thinking, brackets. The nurse on duty brackets name not supplied, no night letters for her brackets found him, unfortunately, on the floor, brackets brackets: why were there no brackets attached to the sides of the bed as there often are in hospitals, precisely to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen brackets brackets brackets exclamation mark query. Interrogation mark today and from now on, because, how many times does she say this I wonder, is it only once, and couldn’t get up in the morning, because there were no witnesses and, does Mary this virgin speaker say
and
or
or
, or if not
or
something like
in any case:

– There were no witnesses in any case we don’t yet know the cause of death. I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a post-mortem.

I have no notion when, how or why the nurse leaves me, perhaps it is to inform the police so they know to stop calling me, stop telephoning home, stop calling round, like a herd of storm-troopers, at any rate she leaves me in this night letter slowly stop disintegrating into thundery light stop pointing out the dark green object on the table with the words:

– There’s a telephone here. If you want to call anybody, please feel free.

So this is it. I am the winner of some competition, or runner-up, my consolation prize, however long I want to make phone calls courtesy of the National Health
Service to whomsoever I please, no expense spared, no bourn ruled out. He’s where? I want to ask. And did the blind man not hear anything? Unable to move I make my way mentally through the door, down the corridor, to the room, and I see the blind man and the gentleman with learning disabilities and there, in the corner, the bed empty, remade already, without the lightest trace of previous occupancy.

Nary Mary quite contrary: call someone, yes. In Tibet for instance, my father always had a fondness for Tibet. Calm caves and mountain monasteries. He never went there, but it’s the thought that counts, nary that. Or in Madagascar. Or is it
on
? An island so immense: does anyone say
on
England? Never went to Madagascar either, no matter, all the same, any random number, put me through, chance following the international country code, speak English, no, not a word, nary that, all awry, telephoning home, no, never mind, already impossible, hallo, my father has died, he’s gone, given the world the slip, I am sorry I can’t linger, Tibet, I haven’t phoned Madagascar. So many calls to make, call alarm system that is me, not in, not on, no one dead-end no answer, not a word. I remain, unmoving in my seat.

To follow this yarn you have to go back into what is called deep time (as if there were any means of doing so). Once upon a slime, before the creation of the Andes, prior to the earliest fossils (naturally, cartilaginously, not a leg to stand on in that department, today any more than of yore), over 220 million years ago, ranged the ray. No
yarn without ray: long before the dinosaur, or anything of ragged claw. Anticipatory of the pterodactyl, but how softly, how irenically! And in the sea, the sea itself so strangely kin: for what other creature so accurately mimes or seems already shadowing it, the seeming flatness, swell and roll, the curl and lapping of its wave-wings? In the sea, in the seas, though not ceaselessly. For it came to pass that the Andes were raised up and waterways earlier radiating into the Pacific met up with nowhere to go, the Amazon now reaching into the Atlantic through other hydraulic routes. It was party time. As it became increasingly difficult to juggle life between the Pacific and the brackish or freshwater, as the great sea was gradually, over millions of years, sealed off, the ray developed the capacity to tolerate and finally make itself at home,
chez
the ray, in freshwater. The anal gland ceases to function. There is scarcely any urea in its blood. A ray without urea in its blood and tissues is not one to get in a flap for salty waters. Ray segregation accordingly: freshwater over that side, marine over this. And all of this, keep in mind, took place in what is called deep time (as if there were any other).

Mary comes back with two green plastic bags with little white name-sticker bracelets on the handles, my father’s belongings, and then I leave.

My father’s house is the family home of twenty-five years, a cottage dating back to the eighteenth century, situated half a mile or so up a single-track lane, standing in seclusion in an acre of what were once beautifully
tended gardens and a small piece of woodland, with fine views of the valley below. In recent years especially, the garden has gone to wilderness. My father managed to cut the lawns in the immediate vicinity of the house, but beyond that the grasses, cow parsley, nettles, brambles have grown above head-height. Even his shed, only a few feet from the house, is inaccessible, with brambles and nettles and the side of a huge hedge overgrown across the door.

I drive back there with surprising calmness. I put the green bags of belongings down just inside the front door. I see someone at the hospital has written on a slip of paper the date, his name, the letters R.I.P. and a list of contents, duly signed:

Why do some of these words merit capital letters and others not? Did the nurse who wrote them unconsciously suppose, as the text went on, it would be more dignified for these articles to have caps, words cap in hand, begging not to be read too carefully, while also not to be overlooked? As the priest says, we bring nothing into this world and it is certain we take nothing out. Naked
and crying we come, in darkness invisible go, leaving two green plastic bags as today’s riposte to Egypt’s ancient dreams, as if, as if

– I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that.

– Couldn’t I at least take my glasses? No one will notice I’ve got them on, and it’ll make such a difference if I can see. (Through the departure gates, not even a boarding pass.)

– No, madam, I don’t care if your name is Cleopatra, he’s already gone.

– There was something I had to give him.

– That’s what they all say. There’s always something: a bite for the journey, a few last words, a kiss, a clasp of the hand, iron grip, rip, no, rules is rules. Rip into the world under strict orders, nothing extra out, not a sausage. Try all sorts these days, seen some fine cases I can tell you. It’s no good, same as it ever was as far as we’re concerned,
Up and down the City Road
. Easy to see why you think you come in,
In and out the Eagle
, but just because you come in doesn’t mean,
That’s the way the money goes
, pardon me for singing, doesn’t mean you actually go
out
, like there is some plane for you to catch, or even any departure gates,
Every time when I come home
, it’s a lonely job this, I tell you, most people these days think of us as machines,
I think I’m gonna be sad
, no, in peace we say, daft, the rest likewise,
She’s got a ticket to ride
, I says to her I says
ticket
, you don’t need no
ticket
, it’s all free, completely free, not a bean, I says to her,
But she don’t care
, receding hair, wispy silverwhite and gray. Lovely man as a matter of fact:
Pop goes the weasel
.

Unless that’s wrong. Yes, I’m skipping. It’s still Saturday. The green bags don’t come till I pick them up on the Monday morning.

Now that he has died, I no longer know how long anything takes.

As if on stage, I try to say that minimal palindrome so close to ‘dead’ perhaps lisped from the start with that skip in view: ‘dad’.

I stand in the main room just inside the front door, the dining room we called it, though no one ever dined in it, dining died out before we moved here. I open the door to my left, it’s been a habit for two or three years now to keep doors closed in the house, part of his strategy for keeping mice out, or perhaps in, for the strategy has never struck me as very coherent, at any rate to minimise their movement. He has even constructed precisely measured, tried and tested, weighted rods of wood and aluminium for sliding into place once a door is closed, especially last thing at night, having discovered the little creatures can easily scoot under. I walk into the drawing room and draw my breath, absurd to reason, dining and drawing, all these dying words, rooms in tombs, for drawing breath, withdrawing-breath-room. I stare about this large and splendid space, with its oak beams and windows on three sides and fireplace on the fourth. There are armchairs and sofas, tables and sideboards, but most of all there is post. What a word. And now the tears come to my eyes for the first time since it happened, alone: