Quilt (2 page)

Scholars seem perplexed by the word itself: how are they to translate Plato’s ray? It has them in a spin, as if it were narcolepsy reified, as if in a reality haze,
language in drag, drugged, dredging up first one creature then another, out of a dead language a new respiration. It’s elementary: the stingray, says one, the electric ray, says another, the torpedo, the flat ray, the numbfish, the narky, the fish that numbs or narcotises.

For Pliny its narcotic qualities were reckoned a cure for headaches, the ray palliatively at play in the migraine. Pliny also knew, and so therefore very probably did Plato himself, that the torpedo ray or narcofish does not numb or paralyse itself. Still in this image of self-numbing there is the strange thought of autoimmunity, a couple of thousand years early. Socrates is the rascally ray, experimentally auto-narcotic. Whatever he may say, the ray remains. It is nature’s way, nature awry. Socrates looks like the flat narcofish in the sea, says Meno. (Regarded, at least by some scholars, as a reference to his snubnose, we are thus offered a rare glimpse of Socrates’ physical appearance.) And then Socrates is like the ray in relation to what he does to others. He numbs mind and mouth. The ray in Socrates generates aporia. The ray is the figure of the already. It’s what Meno knew all along, in an eerie way, the ray of hearsay, the paralysing figuration of all knowledge as recollection.

Down small familiar country roads I race in the late afternoon sun, finding the store still open and acquiring the relevant items. My father will be pleased, I think, he’ll appreciate my having tracked down the very thing, or not, perhaps no. No, this morning for the third time, why the fairytale precision, the cockcrowing fabulous knowing,
for the third time in as many days, first over the phone the day before yesterday, then to my face yesterday, and then this morning a third time he said:

– I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

In the devastating lightnesses of his language,
ghost-train
supersonic in the airy turquoise gulf, for twenty minutes with a cold beer in a cliff-top garden hanging over the sea I sit wondering at his words. He makes euthanasia sound like a woman, or man, old as the hills. To be exact, this morning he said:

– I have begun to think that there may be advantages to euthanasia.

It’s like a pitiless game, euthanasia keeping a step ahead, having a better hand. On the phone and then again yesterday it was word for word the same:

– I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

Back at the hospital he is asleep but a nurse asks me along to another room to have a chat with the doctor. The doctor tells me she has examined my father and is concerned about his condition.

– Obviously he’s feeling not too special, she says, in one of those euphemisms I imagine she reserves for the seriously ill.

She has given him an ECG and discovered his heart rate is twice what it ought to be; no wonder he isn’t feeling too special. Also there appear to be some signs of jaundice, she tells me, which could mean, if there is cancer, it has reached his liver, but could mean a variety of other things. It’s too early to say for sure: gallstones, for example, can produce a similar effect. But for the moment, she says, she has prescribed something to slow his heart down and hopefully (yes, she uses the word in
that hopeless way) make him feel more comfortable. She proposes keeping him in for the weekend and seeing how he is on Monday. He already has an appointment booked for next Friday to have a barium meal x-ray at the main city hospital, some twenty miles away. Cancer has been a suspicion for some time. For the past three or four months, he has complained to me of back pain but has refused to see a doctor about it.

Special beyond speciousness of words: my father has not been to the doctor’s, let alone a hospital, in more than thirty years. I try to take positives from this conversation with the doctor: perhaps it is not cancer after all, perhaps it is primarily a heart problem, the medicine she has prescribed will steady him no end, and he’ll be feeling much brighter in a day or two. The way a life shifts, paths reconstituted, scopes collide. Another thing, yes, collapsed. The ECG, she says, shows that my father probably had a heart attack about two years ago, around the time, in other words, of my mother’s death.

– Silent heart attacks are not uncommon, the doctor explains.

Typical of him to say nothing, I think, to have a heart attack and not even notice. I go back to the ward to find him awake but drowsy. The blind man’s wife is now present and the man with learning disabilities has taken his chair out through the french windows and is sitting in the sun. I tell my father about the ECG, the heart attack and steadying medicine. I’m not sure how much he has been told while I was away or how much he understands. Things are becoming so complicated. His face seems difficult of access, like approaching a mountain moving in fog. Yet his eyes are open as a child’s. I feel I am the only
person in the world who really knows how to address him, how to be heard. And I experience this as something at once always felt and never registered till now.

Words for my father, to and of my dearest funniest Biblical father, dropping away. My beautiful father: tears starting once more to bulge in my eyes, I fight them off, order them back, this madness of lachrymosity. Lachrymimosa, as if I touch with words in my head and they shrink back, military tears standing to attention, veteran characters, starry-eyed, medalling, at a touch transported, bright young things just starting out, awaiting orders, ready to leap. What has made it possible in the past between us, to keep away weeping, all these years, is gone. Because it is going it is gone already. In his esoterically Buddhist way, he has always stressed the joys of silence, the turns of taciturnity. To tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky was never an option. Conversation with my father has always been a minimalist art. And from his eyes in all these years unwitnessed, it now occurs to me, even a tear of sadness shed. Unshed: the mountain of my father’s face, seen now going, the haunting cataracts.

Love in a hut become: Innocence, in a shed. My father’s shed, the small wooden edifice close to the house, humbly under lock and key, more or less unused now for several years, stuffed with a thousand tools and layered with sawdust, buried worktop, variety of vices, drills, files, knives, holemakers, hammers and chisels and axes and a hundred sandpapers, place of canny retreat. The years roll call back:

– Where’s Dad?

– In the shed.

Smallest room not in the house, tears unshed knowing not where. To shed – I shed tears for my father, shed past and present strange word I don’t say, only think, his word, his place, separating separated, parting from apart forever a part, to shed, the shed a shade, as if for the eyes, from all other eyes, in the shed sad, shade sad said, where’s Dad.

The funniest thing about the shed, the funniest thing about the whole house, the house beside itself, is the electric cable my father set up to run to the shed, at a height of perhaps seven feet, like a miniature telegraph wire, many years ago inadvertently severed by his wielding a ferocious hedge-trimmer, then almost as quickly mended not by replacing the cable but enclosing the damaged section in a transparent plastic bottle, shedding the house, shed or house on a drip-feed. Shedding tears for my father my English shadow, shadow words shadow wards, I, a doll with real tears, take his hand, holding hands, his breathing hard, as if he had permanent hiccups, a hiccius docius, hocus pocus, a struggle aspiring to expel air, right a blockage, surface a summit, or summat, his joky occasional pronunciation of some words, summit like that.

I tell him about the new pyjamas and underwear I managed to buy.

– How long am I going to be here? he asks, as if he hasn’t heard anything anyone’s said.

– Two or three nights and then we’ll see how you are, I say, with luck by Monday you’ll be feeling stronger and better.

They’re bringing round dinner now, cauliflower cheese followed by custard trifle. Breathlessly in tortoise
slow-motion, pausing as if at every other moment to hiccup and every time falling short, he ingests perhaps three half-mouthfuls of the cauliflower cheese, once one of his favourite things to eat, so simple he even knew how to cook it himself. Perhaps three half-mouthfuls, a couple of sips of water, nothing more. I notice there’s a radio fixed in the wall above his bed and it’s almost news time. At home in recent years he has spent a good deal of time watching TV, dividing the time between 24-hour news programmes and, in the evening, a string of soap operas. I ask him if he’d like to hear the news. He shakes his head:

– There isn’t any these days, he says, it’s all just terrorism.

I sit with him quietly as he drifts, nods off then wakes, clear-eyed. While he sleeps I try to read one of the books I’ve brought along to the hospital. I wasn’t sure how long I might be here. Then he wakes again. I rest my hand on his. Up starts the theme-tune of the first of the soaps, on a TV that must be in the adjoining room. I decide to see if I can’t get a nurse to provide a television for him.

– So that, I tell him, you can watch your soaps.

– No, he says flatly, I don’t want to watch them, they’re not interesting any more.

Already he’s drifting off again, then coming to once more, innocent as a little boy.

– I’m going to go now, I say. I’ll be back in the morning around ten and hope you’ll be feeling better by then. Have a good night’s sleep.

– See you, mate, he gasps, propped up in the bed.

He’s held his right hand up in a kind of final salute and gives me a smile, as I make my way out. My father’s smile:
he has often said how difficult it is for him. Laughter yes, in the past great waves of laughter, groaning writhing openmouthed, and yes, tears, of course, he would laugh to tears, tears of engulfing comedy. But to round his face up into a full and simple smile he is not able. With the result that there is no midway stopover between a somewhat straining almost sheepish half-smile, ghost or studied intimation of a smile, and at the other extreme a widemouthed beaming bordering on the maniacal. It is to this wavering accompaniment that I depart.

In the middle of the night the phone rings. It rings and rings, but I don’t hear it. The hospital calls. Then the police call.

I get up in the morning oblivious, shower and breakfast, and I feel even faintly upbeat. I managed to get my father into hospital, where he’s being properly looked after. Put aside thoughts of the silent heart attack, the disaster of the past, thumping on. The drug prescribed by the doctor will with luck stabilise this and in a day or two he’ll be much perkier. The other doctor, the one who came to the house the day before yesterday, surprised but comforted me when he suggested Dad might benefit from taking some antidepressants for a while. Well looked after all might be well.

I picture arriving, my father awake bright-eyed propped up, very glad to see me, and I walk through the main entrance of the hospital quite clear about where I am going, along the corridors down to the ward, making to walk by the desk staffed by nurses on duty, with only
the thought of seeing my father in mind. But a woman, with long dark hair, a nurse is standing in front of me, asking would I follow her, back down the corridor. Expressions on other nurses’ faces suggest they know who I am, even though I don’t recognise them. She opens the door to an office and shows me in. And then the light, there is no light, only so-called natural light suddenly awry. As if it were a magical trick, a party piece: How did you do that? I almost ask aloud. But to whom: the nurse, my eyes, the light itself? The room in absolutely bizarre light, with a couple of chairs, a desk and computer,
filing-cabinets
with nurses’ forenames on different drawers: it is a telegram. Transparency’s night letter, stop. Catastrophe of the eye, stop.

I’m not going to tell the nurse not to open her mouth but I imagine, before and after, the unprecedented encounter in this poky little office, a lapidary telegram, as if the light preserved in stone, a miracle. I have never seen anything like it. I could literally cry out, My God! Look at the light! What’s happened to the light?