I stand at the foot of my father's bed watching him slip in and out of consciousness. His breathing is painful and erratic as saliva escapes from an opening at the bottom of his oxygen mask. I follow its path on to his neck and chest before it disappears under his pyjama jacket. The ward smells of sweat and shit and reconstituted mashed potato. I know this smell from my days as a hospital technician in Liverpool. It is the smell of the terminally ill.
The nurses move around quietly and easily because death is not something that should be hurried. Occasionally, my father will struggle to lift a hand, as though he is trying to reach something. I imagine that he is seeing angels, but he never was a religious man.
My mother has photographs of him from his time in the Lancashire Fusiliers. In one of them he is standing in Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong with his arms folded, showing the military insignia tattooed on his forearms. He is stocky and stands confidently amid the stilled rush of the market around him. People are suspended in their gestures: market traders hold their mouths open, bartering with eternity; shoppers are caught shifting from stall to stall. They all wear the sandals and straight-legged trousers of the British Empire in the 1960s.
He had first left his parents to join the navy, possibly as an escape from their tumultuous relationship. His mother had borne seven children, three of whom were delivered dead, including twins shortly after she married. She was sexually and socially na?, and, like many teenagers between the wars, had chosen to stay with a man with whom she was extremely unhappy. She was always very cold; and right up until her death she had insinuated that all of her children were the products of either duty or rape by her husband.
My father returned home from the navy after only six weeks. The army, however, was better suited to him and he stayed with it for ten years, rising through the ranks, though perhaps not as quickly as he might have hoped. He met and married my mother, a NAAFI girl, and while he was stationed in Hong Kong they had a daughter. Time in Berlin, Cyprus and Gibraltar followed before he left the army and they returned to his home town of St Helens. Another two years of service would have secured an army pension, but ten years was long enough for most and he took a job in a bottle factory before becoming a sales rep for a soft drinks company.
My parents, who married after only five weeks of knowing each other, divorced after ten years, when my sister was eight and I was three. There are two memories I have of my father before my parents separated. The first is of me lying in their bed, watching him undress and seeing his penis sway as he removed his socks. The second is of him returning with a Chinese takeaway late at night. Presumably I had had a bad dream and my mother had brought me downstairs. He had a plate of chow-mein, with noodles slipping around in black, oily soy sauce. Casually, he scooped some up and offered them to me. Thinking they were worms, I shrieked and ran away.
Occasionally, in the first couple of years after their divorce, he would visit, but gradually he stopped. He would promise to take us to Southport beach, or the zoo, but nothing ever came of it. One time my sister, who did remember life before the divorce, sat at the door of our council house in brand new clothes which she had picked in the shop, waiting for him to arrive. He told us that he would be there at nine in the morning but my sister was on the step at eight. She was still there at three in the afternoon. Her cheeks were red and sore with tears but my mother couldn't persuade her in.
When I was about seven I stayed with him for the first time. He lived in Plymouth and it was a grand holiday. The smell of the sea would drift up the street, and shire horses, rather than vans, would deliver barrels of beer to the local pubs, shaking the roads with their magnificent hooves. At the top of the dray, a tiny man with a leather cap and apron held the reins and I wondered how a figure so small could control such mighty beasts. We went down to Plymouth Hoe, where Drake finished his game of bowls as the Armada drew closer. We saw the Ark Royal and the heavy metal gates of the dock. My father bought prawns in a polystyrene cup and offered me some on the plastic lid, which I ate. I remember the sound of his voice explaining all the new things to us.
We visited him a few times after this, as he moved to London and then to Birmingham, but each time his eyes were redder and he said less and less. One time, in London, the three of us were waiting at Piccadilly Circus for a sightseeing bus when he became impatient and went into a pub, instructing us to wait outside. After an hour or so he came back out. Several buses had been and gone, but he was drunk so we just went back to his flat. He would often get angry and his face would become very red. Sometimes he would get mad and lash out at my sister, sometimes at me.
There are different types of alcoholic. There are the pathetic piss-the-bed types, who simper away into nothingness; there are the jovial happy types, who know the names of all the pub locals if not their own children; and then there are those who are angry. At various stages my father has been all three, but it is this last that I remember the most. Maybe there was more to him, maybe events have become exaggerated in my mind over the years and I have mis-remembered things. The insults, the name-calling and humiliation he poured upon me, my sister and my mother. I remember the violence. Children do. But isn't that the reason for it? When a dog pisses on the floor it won't do it again if its nose is rubbed in the mess. A little boy will soon learn not to approach his father if he is reminded not to often enough.
Now, I have become angry. The last time I saw my father was ten years ago, at my grandmother's funeral. We sat together in her bedroom, silently looking at old photographs. There was a picture of my christening, with him holding me: he is standing awkwardly, holding me at a distance; in the corner of his mouth is a cigarette, which he struggles to keep away from me. He is aware of the camera but misses the moment of the flash.
This is the only picture I have seen of the two of us together. As I looked, I could hear him sobbing but I didn't want to take the bait. "We can make it right," he said, "things will be better."
My anger is my own fault, and it is a fault. My sister has visited him, and they have exchanged Christmas cards. He never changed; all the effort has been on her part, but he has been grateful for it. She understands that however much he may have wanted to, he has never been able to change and she has accepted him for what he is. For me he became nothing more than a ghost upon my life. As children do, I had expected a great deal, and so the fall was hard.
After grandmother's funeral I decided I didn't want to play the game any more. I didn't want that feeling of waiting for him to turn up. I told friends and teachers that he was dead. I refused to recognise that he had had any influence upon my life whatsoever. I even invented stories about his death to delay paying the rent and to get extensions on my overdraft. Ten years on, my daughter, who is five, does not know that I have a father. The ghost has been easier to live with than the transience of the man.
As we are now, suspended in this awful room, I am struggling to recognise my father. The austerity is gone and his eyes, when they open, are placid rather than angry. The sudden spasms of his chest and the quaking of his fingers make me frightened for him, not me. Some months ago my sister called me and told me that he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. All the things I wanted to say I suddenly found it was too late to try. I wanted to shout back at him, I wanted him to see me grown up, independent, not stupid, a competent father myself.
There is a moment when I think he recognises me. His pupils expand as he registers my shadow obscuring the light from the curtainless window, then his eyes drift upwards, and once more he falls into sleep. At the sides of beds, wives are putting pur? food into husbands' mouths. Some are shaving them as they sleep, trying to keep hold of what there is of the last 40 years, before it finally slips away. Nurses drift in and out and doctors chat quietly to relatives. All the time I remain standing. I don't quite know what to do. There is a chair next to the bed but I know that if I sit on it I will stay a while and I don't really mean to, I am just passing. I have been momentarily caught up in this hiatus, but will soon have to move on.
