The Flower Arrangement (5 page)

“What about him?” Margaret touches the glass over Phil's face with a fingertip.

“Don't talk to me about that fella. I put him through college. You know what he did with his degree? Pulled a bloody rickshaw. He's a motorbike courier now. With an IQ of a hundred and forty-five.”

“He looks happy.”

Phil was born happy. A C-section. He was pulled out of his mother's belly like a rabbit out of a hat. The first thing he did was pee all over the pompous obstetrician, and when the nurse handed him to his father to hold, he was smiling. Ted half expected him to wink.

“Is he married too?” Margaret asks.

“Are you joking?” Ted snorts. “He's had a string of girlfriends. It was like bloody Miss World at home till he moved out. A herd of leggy beauties trampling up and down the stairs, but he won't settle. He's twenty-bloody-seven. I don't know what he's waiting for.”

Margaret puts the photograph back and swings her legs up onto the bed. She moves the oxygen tube out of the way and tucks her head into the space between his chin and his shoulder. “Don't you?” she asks.

And suddenly, he does. This is what his son is waiting for, the feeling of fitting perfectly against another person, like the parts of a two-piece jigsaw puzzle.

He turns his face so he can press his lips against the crown of her head. “
Miluji tě
,” he whispers.

“
Miluji tě
too!” She rubs her nose against a patch of stubble on his Adam's apple. “You missed a bit. But I like the aftershave.”

“It's for you.”

*   *   *

“What's for me, Dad?”

He opens his mouth and pain slams into his chest like a juggernaut. He claws for the morphine pump, and by the time he can breathe again, he is too worn out to speak.

“Look.” Lara holds a bunch of small flowers close to his face. His cheek touches the damp velvet of something that smells of the garden and rain. Pansies. The name comes from a French verb. To something, he thinks, but to what?

Margaret used to press pansies. He'd pick up a book, years after
she'd gone, and the wafer of a dried flower would slip out and slice open the scar she'd left like a scalpel. He feels for the pump again.

“Dad?” He hears his daughter's voice from a long way off. She sounds frightened.

“Gone to sleep again,” his son says teasingly. “Lazy bugger!” His voice softens. “But you look like you haven't slept for a week. Come on. Let me buy you a hospital canteen-achino, a.k.a. the world's worst coffee. We'll let him rest and come back later.”

Do what your brother says, Ted thinks. Lara puts her hand over his and he squeezes her fingers. Something is wrong with her hand—what is it? He can't quite figure it out and is losing his train of thought, then suddenly it comes back and he knows. His daughter is not wearing her wedding ring. Maybe she took it off to wash her hands, he thinks. But no. He remembers her telling him she had it resized so it wouldn't slip off in water. She never takes it off.

He tries to remember the last time he saw his son-in-law, his mind stumbling back through the fog of days and weeks. It's June now, isn't it? Or is it still May? It must have been April, because he was still having chemo. Could it really be that long ago?

Lara was working so Michael drove him to the hospital for his appointment and he decided to have the conversation, the one that he, who had never been afraid to call a spade a spade, had been tiptoeing around for five years. Even then, when time was running out and the drugs had about as much chance of winning the battle against the cancer as Watford had of beating Chelsea, he found himself putting it off till he was settled into the leather armchair in the crowded day ward with the catheter leaking poison into his arm.

His son-in-law was hovering beside him. He was a hoverer, Michael. Always trying to slip into the background. “I'll go and get you a paper.”

“Wait!” Ted said, too quickly, too sharply. “There's something I have to ask you.” Michael looked uneasy. He was shy to the point of
reclusive, a man who'd be happier digging over your entire garden than having a conversation with you.

“Man to man”—Ted lowered his voice—“is there a problem with you and Lara?”

Michael's eyes almost popped out of his head. “A problem? No! What do you mean, a problem?” He said it the way you might say, “Well, of course there is, any fool can see that.”

“I mean that if you two can't have children, you know, the normal way, well, there are, you know, other options. IVF. Surrogacy. Adoption.” Suddenly it felt good to be talking about a new life here surrounded by all the bald heads and gray faces, the lives hanging as precariously as the trembling silver drops in the IV bag over Ted's own bald head.

“No, there's no physical problem”—his son-in-law flushed—“as such.” He was twitching like a mackerel on the end of a line but Ted could not let him off the hook: this was too important.

“Good. I'm glad to hear it. Look, I know the two of you will never get over losing Ryan, but that shouldn't stop you trying for another baby. Life is short, Michael, and time is moving on.”

Michael's phone rang and a nurse came over to tell him to take his call outside. He mumbled something and hurried, well, fled really, out into the corridor. Ted watched the door swing behind him and it crossed his mind, like a flash, that there was a problem, a real problem between Michael and Lara. Something that had nothing to do with losing Ryan or having another baby.

*   *   *

His life is like a leaf caught in the bare branches of his bones. Pain is trying to shake it free but he can't let it. He can't die, not now, not if Lara's marriage is in trouble. He has to hang on somehow to look after her.

Margaret is there again, a red blur that won't settle. Why is she wearing that coat? It's summer outside and it must be nearly eighty
degrees in here. He puts off pressing the pump despite the pain, waits till he can squeeze the room into focus. She is flicking through the crooked line of Get Well cards on the windowsill.

“There's an untapped market out there for Get Worse cards,” she says drily. “Stuff the Hallmark crap. Say it like it really is.”

Something stinks. His nose traces the stench to a bedpan covered with a sheet of paper towel on the metal trolley by the sink. A nurse was called away earlier and forgot to come back for it. The smell of shit and the shame of it are too much.

Margaret turns when the pump beeps. “You should be careful with that stuff.”

“Jesus Christ! Give me a break, will you? I've got inoperable lung cancer. I've got secondaries in parts of my body I didn't know existed until a few months ago. And my daughter's marriage might be on the rocks.”

“A wise man told me once”—her eyes are mocking beneath her fringe—“that if you get into bed with self-pity, you're the one who ends up getting screwed.”

“Fucked.” His voice is sharp. “I said fucked, not screwed. And I'm not sorry for myself. I'm sorry for Lara.”

He was wrong before. Phil is the sorted one, not Lara. A mother dying at any age is difficult for a girl, but he can't think of a worse time then twelve years old, when she needs her mother most. He did his best. He turned away from his own grief and poured his love and support into her. He was her protector till Michael came along, and now she might need him again.

“I can't die,” he says quietly.

“Oh come on!” Margaret laughs softly. “She'll survive without you. That's what children are designed to do, you know.”

He wants to storm out of the room the way he used to back when they rowed, because they did row sometimes. But he doesn't even have the strength to put his hands over his ears to shut out what she says next.

“Get over yourself.” She shakes her head. “You're going to be
pushing up the daisies pretty soon. Wallowing in self-pity and pickling yourself in morphine isn't going to change that.”

“Get out!” He tries to shout but his voice comes out as a faint whisper. “What are you even doing here?”

“You tell me.” She walks to the door, tall and slender and beautiful and alive. So alive that it hurts to look at her and he has to find the pump, press it with his thumb.

He hears her voice as he drifts away on the sea of morphine; she is mocking him. “Aren't you going to say ‘I love you' in Swahili or Urdu, Ted?” A pause. “Aren't you going to say good-bye?”

*   *   *

He never could say it, not while Margaret was dying, not even after she was dead. He tried. He stayed in the small room where she had spent the last four weeks of her life. He sat beside her until it got dark outside, until her hand was stiff and cold as a windowpane on a frosty morning. From time to time one of the hospital staff came along and tried to reason with him, but he would not be separated from his wife. The lights in the ward went off and still he sat there. He told her he loved her over and over, in Dutch and Danish and Polish and French and Thai. But he couldn't say good-bye.

Margaret was buried on the tenth of January in the red coat he had bought her for Christmas, the one she would have loved and had never got to wear. He wanted her to be warm in the afterlife, which he knew made absolutely no sense. There were other things that made no sense. He kept on buying her flowers. That first Friday after the funeral, he drove into town and walked down from St. Stephen's Green to the stall on Grafton Street. He only meant to look, but before he could stop himself, he had bought a bunch of white roses.

He drove across the city to the graveyard. He wanted to rip the petals off and scatter them on the ugly mound of dirt. No. He wanted to claw through the dirt and climb in beside her. But he had to make a choice right then, before it was too late. Grief for his wife or love for
his children? Which was it going to be? The living or the dead? He started the engine. He drove home. He gave the roses to Lara. He chose love.

“Your wife's a lucky bird,” the old man who ran the stall used to say, handing over a bunch of roses or gerbera or freesias. Ted didn't have the heart to tell him that his wife had not been lucky and the flowers were his way of trying to heal his daughter.

*   *   *

The morphine is still humming through him but the pump has gone, he guesses because he is too weak to press it. The IV is gone too. This is a kind of euthanasia, though that is not what they call it. He is dying, like a forgotten plant might on a windowsill, of dehydration. Everything is closing and fading, the edges blurring. His legs, which haven't moved for weeks, are now restless; his hand, free of the IV line, shoots out and knocks the photograph off the bedside table. He dreams of bringing a frosted glass of wine to his lips, a tumbler of cold water, but he would settle for a drop licked from the tap over the basin.

Someone moistens his puckered lips with a cotton swab and he swims through the whirling darkness up to the surface. A gurney squeals outside the door and he hears himself moan over the boom of his heart, then he hears his son's voice.

“Dad, it's okay. I'm here.”

“Lara,” he manages to say through his parched mouth.

“She'll be in later.”

He concentrates his whole being into the three words. “Michael. Splitting up.”

“She told you he left?”

No, Ted thinks, you just did, you Muppet. He opens his eyes, or maybe he just imagines that he does. Because there, instead of his grown-up son, is the five-year-old Phil in yellow Peter Rabbit pajamas, with Rory, the grubby stuffed lion he used to carry everywhere, tucked under his arm. Ted used to have to wash Rory in the middle of the
night, then tumble dry him and put him back in bed beside Phil before he woke up.

Phil stands on tiptoe to put the cotton swab into a dish on the table and takes Ted's hand. He is not smiling. His dark eyes are serious beneath his jagged fringe. “Listen to me, Dad,” the child Phil says in Phil's adult voice. “You don't have to worry. I'll look after her, I promise.”

*   *   *

Margaret is wearing a hospital gown. She lifts the ends and does a twirl. He sees a flash of her bare bum in the gaps between the ties at the back as she spins.

He can't move. Can't speak now. But his mind, for once, is clear. She's not here, he tells himself. I'm just imagining her.

She cocks one eyebrow and marches over to the bed. Taking his hand, she slides it up under the cotton gown and presses it against her belly. “Are you imagining this?” The tips of his numb fingertips brush inch by inch along the raised seam of a Caesarean scar.

Why did you have to die of a stroke? he thinks when she is lying next to him. Do you have any idea how often I've had to hear that word?
Diff'rent Strokes
. Golf strokes. The backstroke. Stroke of genius. Strokestown.

“I'm so sorry,” she sighs theatrically. “I should have died of something much more exotic. Like trypanosomiasis or Chediak-Higashi syndrome.” There's a pause. “Yes,” she says, “I can hear it when you laugh inside.”

He laughs again in his mind when he is telling her about five-year-old Phil's solemn promise to look after Lara.

She shrugs. “What's so funny? He's been doing it for years.”

The penny drops. He thinks of Phil, at two, in the months after Margaret was gone, plodding up the stairs one at a time to hammer on the locked door of his sister's bedroom.

“Kitoons!” he'd demand. “Kitoons!” and he wouldn't budge till Lara had dried her tears and come out and brought him downstairs to watch
Scooby Doo
or
ThunderCats
.

He remembers Phil as a teenager standing thigh-deep beside him in some river for whole afternoons, handing the rod to him when he got a bite because the sight of the hook caught in the mouth of a trout made him woozy.

Phil last summer, traipsing around the golf course in his head-to-foot bike leathers, insisting on playing eighteen holes though he couldn't care less about his handicap. It was just an excuse to spend time with his dad.