“What’s going to happen to your mother?” he said.
“What d’you mean, happen to her? Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“After I’m gone.”
“Oh, Dad, for heaven’s sake. It’s only an examination, a precaution. You’ll be fine, you see.”
The veins on the back of his hand were like maps.
“Dad.”
She took one of the hands and held it against her mouth and his fingers smelled of waste and decay.
“What’s going to happen,” he said, “to your mother?”
The hospital was close to the city center and from a distance seemed to have been made from sections of Lego by an unimaginative child. The interior was low-ceilinged and lit by strip-lighting from overhead. Staff walked briskly along corridors, while visitors stopped to peer at the neatly engraved directions, white and green. They shared the lift with an elderly woman sleeping on a trolley, tubes running from a pair of portable drips into her wrist. The porter whistled “Mr. Tambourine Man” and smiled at Lynn with his eyes.
The nurse would have made two of Lynn and left room to spare. She called Lynn’s father pet and told him she’d look after him, promised him a nice cup of tea when it was over. “If you’d like to have a word with Mr. Rodgers about the endoscopy,” she said to Lynn.
There were flowers on the desk and a wooden bowl, polished and stained to bring out the natural grain. The abdominal registrar wore a white coat and suit trousers and tennis shoes on his feet; he had octagonal rimless glasses and an accent that had never shaken seven years of public school. He greeted Lynn with a firm handshake and a glance at his watch. “Please,” he said, “sit down.”
Lynn opted to stand.
“What we’re about to do,” the registrar said, “is take a little look inside your father’s colon. We do this by means of a fibreoptic tube, an endoscope, which is passed along the bowel.” Lynn felt her stomach clenching at the thought. “As procedures go, it can be a trifle uncomfortable, but it need not necessarily be painful. So much depends upon your father’s attitude. And yours.”
“He’s terrified,” Lynn said.
“Ah.”
“He’s convinced he’s dying.”
“Then it’s up to you to convince him this is not so. Be strong for him.”
“If you do find something,” Lynn asked, “what happens next?”
Another glance towards the watch. “If we do come across what appears to be a growth, then we may decide to take a biopsy, have a closer look. After that we’ll know more.”
“And if it’s cancer?”
“Then we’ll treat it.”
He was wearing a white overall that tied at the back, sedated but awake.
“Don’t fret,” the nurse said, “I’ll hold his hand all the way through it.” She laughed. “There’s a TV screen in there, he can watch what’s happening if he wants.”
Lynn thought it was unlikely: her father wouldn’t even sit with her mum and watch Blockbusters. She went downstairs and sat in the WRVS canteen, chatting about the weather with a middle-aged volunteer who assured her that the jam tarts were homemade. Lynn bought two, cherry and apricot, and a cup of tea. The walls were decorated with paintings done by the children from the local First School, bright as hope and full of life. The pastry might have been home made, but the fillings were out of a tin. She was wondering, if anything did happen to her father, how they would ever manage. Accumulating all the reasons why, whatever happened, she shouldn’t apply for a transfer, return home.
“Your father’s fine,” the registrar said, back in his office. “Complaining a little of the discomfort, but otherwise, absolutely fine. A character.”
Lynn gulped down air: it was going to be all right.
“There is a blockage, however. A small growth.”
“But …”
“We’ve taken a biopsy while we had the chance.”
“You said …”
“One definite thing in his favor, if it does turn out to be cancerous, it is pretty high up in the bowel. Easier, once we’ve snipped out the offending part to join the rest together and leave things functioning pretty much as normal.” He looked at Lynn to see if she were following. “No call for a colostomy, you see.”
All the way home, her father stared through the window at the edges of buildings blending with the gathering darkness, memories of fields. Several times Lynn spoke but got no answer, secretly pleased, not wanting to discuss what sat heavy between them, waiting to be discussed. The car radio drifted through talk of the recession and ethnic cleansing and the rise of the German Right. Lynn switched it off and stared along the tracks her lights made in the lightly falling rain.
Her mother had made a meal, cold ham and salad, halves of boiled egg, each with a teaspoon of mayonnaise on top, thick slices of white bread and butter. Tea.
“Stay the night, love.”
“Sorry, Mum, I can’t. Early call.”
At the door she held her father close till she was sure of the beat of his heart.
Rain fell more heavily, bouncing back from the black shine of tarmac, swishing across her windscreen in a wave whenever another vehicle sailed past and suddenly she was crying. From nowhere, tears ransacked her face and she began to shake. Clutching the wheel, she leaned forward, peering out. A lorry swung out behind her and as it passed the slipstream dragged her wide. Her mirror blazed with the glare of headlights and a car horn screamed. Blinded, Lynn struggled to regain her lane as the wind gusted into her broadside. Mouth open, sobbing hard, she felt the car begin to skid and when her foot tried to find the brake it slid away. With a jarring thump, the nearside struck something solid and cannoned forward, Lynn’s seatbelt saving her from the windscreen but not the steering wheel, blood and tears now stinging her eyes.
Thirty-eight
One of the good things about Blue Stilton, Resnick was thinking, ripe enough it had a flavor that would survive no matter the company. This particular piece, the last of a chunk he had brought back from the market the other side of Christmas, he mashed down into a slice of dark rye bread before layering it with narrow strips of sun-dried tomato, half a dozen circles of pepper salami, a piece of ham, a handful of black olives cut into halves; a second slice of bread he rubbed with garlic before buttering and setting it on top. There were tomatoes in the salad box, a nub of cucumber, several ailing radishes, the last of an iceberg lettuce which he shredded with a knife. Somehow he’d allowed his stock of Czech Budweiser to run out, but near the back of the fridge he knew was a Worthington’s White Shield in its new-shaped bottle. In fact, there were two.
Of course, he had still not bought the CD player and the Billie Holiday box set sat on the living-room mantelpiece gathering dust, an expensive rebuke. Resnick placed his sandwich on the table near his chair, watchful that one of the more adventurous cats, Dizzy or Miles, didn’t jump up and start nibbling round the edges. He pulled one of his favorites, the Clifford Brown Memorial album, from the crowded shelf and slipped it from its battered sleeve. Music playing, he poured his beer, careful not to let the sediment slip down into the glass. Half of the sandwich he lifted towards his mouth with both hands, catching the oil from the sun-dried tomatoes on his tongue.
The Penguin Guide to Jazz was proving good reading, fine for dipping into, interesting as much for who was left out as who was included. Branford, Ellis, and Wynton Marsalis, but not Delfeayo. Endless sections devoted to European avant-gardists who recorded hard-to-get cassettes in Scandinavia, but no room for Tim Whitehead, whose quartet Resnick had seen recently in Birmingham, nor the altoist Ed Silver, so much a part of the early British bop scene and Resnick’s friend.
Resnick set down the book and reached for his glass. A couple of years back, he had talked Ed Silver out of severing his own foot from his body with an ax, taken him into his home, and kept him company long into a succession of nights. Resnick listening to Silver’s reminiscences about gigs he had played, recordings he had made, promoters and agents who had cheated him out of what was rightly his. The day, speechless, he came face to face with Charlie Parker in New York; the night he almost sat in with Coltrane. All the while easing him off the booze, encouraging him to regain a grip on his life.