The Fish Ladder (21 page)

I dismissed the professor’s vision, because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I had wanted to hear about romance and roses, success and plenty, and I was ill-tempered for the rest of the day. I have sometimes wondered if things might have turned out differently had I paid closer attention. Or if they turned out the way they did
because
of what I learned, so that my life became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many times in the years that followed I tried to forget what I had heard that day. It had amounted to a fifteen-year forecast. Shortly afterwards I had met Rupert, but the years slipped by and no baby came, and the
child born in your mid-thirties who would compensate you for the loss of a loved one
began to glow, ephemeral, persistent. Sometimes I tried to ignore it. If it was my lot to be childless then I should accept this fact, get on with it, and try to live a different sort of life. Because waiting interferes with living. I hoped, and I feared. I reached for her – I knew it was a she, I even knew what she looked like, down to the blue vein that curled like the tip of a vine from the outer edge of her eye. The prophecy became a hope that both sustained me and controlled me.

Twelve years later, when I was about to begin the IVF treatment that would result in my pregnancy with Evie, Dad told me that he had cancer. It was early one morning, still dark, in November, and he was sitting on my bed, holding a cup of tea that he had brought for me. My lovely father. He said: ‘Everything is going to be all right.’

Suddenly it was me who had a vision of the future, of the set of scales in which Dad was balanced next to my longed-for baby. Cassandra was blessed with foresight by the sun god Apollo, and then later cursed by him, so that no one believed a word she said. I didn’t want to be believed. There was no one I could tell. And yet I didn’t want to stop it; because I feared, at some level, I had agreed to it. The past grew insubstantial, the present began to seem unlikely, blotted out by a vision of a future in which that which I most desired, and that which I most feared, were – if Professor Mirza’s prophecy was correct – about to coincide.

One day, standing in our kitchen, Dad – uncharacteristically, for he was always warm, but not especially tactile in the way in which he articulated affection – wrapped his arms around me, and held me close to him, burying his face in my hair, as though through the act of inhalation he could somehow conserve my essence, imprint it on his soul. I could feel the boniness of his frame, pared by illness, and no matter how close we stood, or how tightly we embraced, the gap between us seemed to be widening, the pockets of air expanding, and then acquiring the solidity of Perspex. Dad felt like a fairy’s child that disappears when seen for what it is. I held in my arms a bundle of twigs and feathers, already splintering into dust.

There was a grace period.

The cancer metastasized into Dad’s bones when Evie was three months old. He lived another seventeen months during which the two became the closest friends, so that she still speaks of him with affection, even today.

Eight days before Dad died, the day an ambulance brought him home from the hospital, I watched a plane bank into a building. It was on a television in a shop. I was getting a few last provisions before Dad’s arrival. The fact that a portable television had been set down next to the cash till was unusual. The staff were clustered round it. I saw matchstick people, clothes fluttering, jump from a collapsing tower. I realised, dimly, that something terrible had occurred, although my only thought was: I mustn’t tell Dad – he was such an
Americophile
. He had taught at the University of Princeton, and had charmed us with his tales, of Professor Einstein, and of John Nash, the brilliant mathematician who became quite mad, who wandered the quadrangle, his arms heaped with papers, and whose story was told in the Oscar-winning film
A Beautiful Mind
, which had just been released that summer.

My own beautiful mind was beginning to shift. It was a tent in the desert, full of lovely things, but the sand was getting in as the wind tore at the pegs, loosening the ropes.

After Dad died I had found a torn-off piece of lined A4 paper. It was in a file marked
Kate
, among the school concert programmes and a lock of my baby hair tied with a turquoise ribbon. There were a few lines of poetry, written in blue ink in Dad’s beloved, looping hand, and they told of a dream he’d once had. Of how that dream had now come true, and was here, beside him. At first I thought he’d written it himself. Later I discovered it to be a misquotation of some lyrics of a song called ‘Long Ago And Far Away’ by Ira Gershwin.

In the weeks following the funeral my life began to come apart. We had been living in a cottage that belonged to my brother, John. He had told me that we would be doing him a favour by living in it, through I suspected he had lent it to us so we could all be close to Dad. After Dad’s death Rupert and I had intended to move back to our own flat, in London, but the days slipped by.

I had always found solace in walking. It was something Dad and I did together. We had probably, over twenty-five years, followed every single footpath throughout the hills and woodland around our family home. As Dad became sicker I began to walk these paths alone, or with Evie carried in a backpack. But an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease stamped out all my wanderings. On the day after Dad’s death I drove over the border into Wales. Moel Famau, near Ruthin, was a particular friend. But when I reached Moel Famau the police had closed off the mountain with the same rustling plastic ribbons that they used to mark a crime scene. At home, the public footpaths across the fields, and the woodland tracks, and the hills were all out of bounds. There was nowhere that I could walk, except on asphalt. Six and a half million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered, with over eighty thousand animals being destroyed each week. Smoke drifted from their burning pyres, and the fires lasted for weeks. The foot-and-mouth outbreak would eventually cost the country around eight billion pounds. It cost me my sanity.

The descent began, not with sadness, but with an extraordinary rush of energy. One day I pulled the car into Mum’s driveway with over five thousand pounds’ worth of goods that I had bought that morning at John Lewis, including a hand-knotted Ziegler carpet, a set of steel pans, and a different-shaped Dyson to the one I already had. I had only gone to buy an iron. Mum came out to the car and asked if I wanted help unloading the goods, but I had simply shaken my head and said: ‘It’s all got to go back.’ I then returned everything to the shop the following day. But quite quickly my high spirits disappeared. After three months I went to see my doctor, convinced that I was suffering from over thirty listed side effects to a topical antibiotic cream and was astonished when he told me I was severely depressed. When I got home, after an indeterminate period of time, for my memory had grown poor, and my ability to concentrate laughable, I looked up the drug the doctor had prescribed for me, and found a set of contraindications not listed by the manufacturer, including suicide and murder. The rock star Michael Hutchence, who a few years earlier had been found dead in his hotel bedroom hanging from a door, was rumoured to have been taking this medication. So had a man in America who murdered his family and then killed himself. I disregarded the obvious fact that both these people were arguably unstable in the first place. But I didn’t take the pills. The doctor advised me to cooperate with my treatment before my ‘neurotic condition became psychotic’. It was already psychotic. I had seen the devil in the post office and almost caused a car crash in my haste to get away. I noticed that one of my neighbours had the horizontal pupils of a goat. Another lady, I observed, had an extendable neck, her skin like that of a turtle.

I was working on a screenplay at the time, with the Liverpool writer Alan Bleasdale. Because of various hitches the production had slowed down, which was a mercy, so the phone seldom rang. In a moment of lucidity I made a diagram, listing the writer – Alan – the name of the commissioning editor, the broadcaster, the production company, the fact that a director had not yet been appointed, the name of the project and a brief description of the plot, all joined by circles and arrows, so that – if asked – I could sustain a conversation, my forefinger tracing the lines on the paper, which I Sellotaped to my desk.

One morning I found myself staring at the bathroom sink, which was spattered with blood, my hands gripping the sides of the washbasin, a metallic taste in my mouth. Rupert was in the shower, holding his head in both of his hands, weeping. I had no idea what might have occurred, or what I had said, or done. I had deduced that the blood was mine, that it most likely came from a blood vessel in my throat, and that I had therefore, probably, been screaming. I no longer recognised my face in the mirror. In fact, I was terrified of it.

Another day, feeling tired, always so very tired, I decided to make a cup of tea, and then lie down, while Evie had her afternoon nap. I walked over to my bedroom window to close the curtains. In addition to the cup in my hand, there were five other cups, the tea in various stages of cooling, standing in a row on the windowsill. I touched them, the first was tepid, the last only recently made. I watched the sun as it vanished behind our orchard, tangerine and lilac, and I thought it beautiful. The birds had began to chirrup and stir, a last burst of activity before they settled for the night. I listened to the song of a blackbird, the ring-tone of a collared dove. I didn’t remember putting the cups of tea on the windowsill. I wondered how long it had taken to make them all. I wondered if it was me that had done it. For the first and only time in my life I understood why suicide might seem reasonable, even sensible, under certain circumstances.

In spite of all this I thought I was doing fine, but could tell from the faces of my friends and family that this probably wasn’t so. The fact that I could understand that there was a gap between what I felt and what I saw gave me hope. But I could not trust my senses. Sometimes the walls shifted, or bulged. My greatest fear was that I would go to sleep and wake up mad. Or madder. Evie – the fact that I had to care for her, to feed her, wash her, attend to her every need – was my reason for persevering. She had to be looked after from one moment to the next. She forced me to inhabit the present.

It was a priest who engineered my recovery. I had taken to parking outside the local Catholic church when I went to visit the doctor. The car park was usually empty, except when there was a Mass, and it was easier to negotiate than the crowded surgery car park. One day I knocked on the door of the presbytery, although it had been over twenty years since I had set foot in a church, other than for a wedding or a funeral. The priest invited me inside, and we sat at a table, a glass of water in front of me, while I tried to tell him why I was there.

He looked at me warily, as though at a dog that was known to bite. It was a look to which I had grown accustomed. But the priest was not afraid – of me, or of the condition that I attempted to describe – and this gave me confidence. I found myself telling him how, on the last day of Dad’s life, I had watched his spirit leave his body, leave our home. It had begun before dawn. I was sleeping in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, a baby monitor at my side, so I could hear Dad breathing in his hospital bed downstairs. Suddenly I was awake, the sound of his voice, the vowel sounds flattened and torn by the monitor. There were no words to speak of. The pain in Dad’s bones was almost impossible to relieve. Morphine sedated his mind, but it could not reach into his bones. The day before, I had implored the nurses to leave Dad unwashed, instead of trying to move him, and had smoothed clean linen napkins on either side of his face rather than changing the sweat-soaked pillow. The last word I had heard him utter was
torture
. But now I was too tired to get out of bed. I meant to go to him. I knew Mum was there, resting fitfully in a bed adjacent to his. I could hear her even sleeping breaths crackling through the baby monitor. My sister-in-law, Maria, and I had divided the days and nights into shifts, had taken it in turns looking after Dad, because he didn’t want a full-time nurse, none of us wanted a full-time nurse, but I had not slept, other than in brief snatched moments, for five days. I forced myself out of bed and down the stairs, holding onto the wall of the stairwell for support, unable to locate the banister in the darkness. When I got to Dad silence had closed over him, the agony passed for now, his breathing deep and even. I sat next to him and held his hand. Tentatively. Everything hurt. It was the 19th of September – his father’s birthday – and I told him this. I felt that he could hear me. Rupert had shaved Dad’s face the previous afternoon, and his skin was smooth and soft. ‘No hair on face,’ Dad had said. I went to the fridge and opened a bottle of Sancerre. I used cotton wool soaked in cool wine to wash Dad’s lips. He could no longer swallow. I cleaned around his teeth and gums with a wine-soaked Q-tip. I poured a glass for myself. It was then that I noticed the light. At first I thought I was mistaken. The light was like the aura around a candle flame, or a street lamp in fine rain. It was orange, and seemed to be emanating from his body. I could only see it from certain angles. As the day uncoiled, the house murmured with people. Dad’s breathing remained strong for hours at a time and then, quite suddenly, it would falter, the gaps between each tattered inhalation growing longer. The suspense was extraordin­ary. Someone brought the Port of Liverpool Tide Table. We consulted the charts, compared the times to the changes in Dad’s breathing. ‘He’ll go out with the tide,’ Maria said. At lunchtime we called my brother John, who came from work. But the waters turned again and Dad’s strength returned, seamless as the river’s bore. So confident were we of his alignment with the water that John went back to work, and returned just before the next high tide, which was due in the early evening. When the tide turned again, Dad’s family were gathered about him. Seconds yawned between each breath. The gaps between in-breath and out-breath grew longer. The room had filled with people. At one point there were nineteen of us in the house. The district nurse called by.