He squints up at the woman, then shields his eyes with a raised hand and pushes back his chair. This one is prettier, and he likes her manner more than the other one. He remembers the first nurse ushering him away from his father’s bedside, insisting that the older man needed a wash and an afternoon rest, and pointing him in the direction of the cafeteria. Once there, he ordered fish and chips, with a portion of peas and bread and butter on the side, but as he took his place at the Formica-topped table he realised that he didn’t feel much like eating. He dialled Annabelle’s number, but the phone went straight to voicemail and so he quickly ended the call. He remembered that this morning he’d gone to the Mandela Centre for the application form, and deliberately tried to avoid Baron. He wondered if he should call Baron and let him know how his father was doing. He could even nip round to see him and have something to eat with his father’s friend at the pub, instead of consuming the rubbish that he had just bought, but he assumed that Baron would only expect to hear from him if his father’s condition took a turn for the worse. Baron was probably giving father and son some time together. He recalled staring down at the fish and chips and pushing the meal away from himself to the far side of the table. He let his head fall forward into the cushioned pillow of his folded arms and closed his eyes. And now the young nurse is standing over him and waiting patiently for him to follow her back to his father’s bedside.
His father watches him take a seat on the metal chair and then he slowly twists his body to one side and places the brown envelope back on the bedside table. The older man grimaces with the effort, and the new nurse gently massages the underside of his arm where the intravenous drip is needled into a thin vein. Having done so, the nurse stands with her arms crossed before her and watches carefully before speaking to the son in a half-whisper.
‘I’ll be going off duty at midnight, but I’ll stop by from time to time before then. It’ll be all right for you to stay so long as you’re both quiet. But don’t overdo it. He’s weaker than he thinks.’
He nods appreciatively, but it is only after she has turned and started to walk away that he realises he still hasn’t raised the subject of his father’s eyesight.
‘Why is the girl whispering?’
‘It’s getting late and people are sleeping. She’s just trying to be respectful of others.’
‘You want to sleep?’ His father looks hurt. ‘You want to sleep, then sleep. I don’t be stopping you sleeping.’
‘I’m not tired. I was listening to you.’
‘Well, I was telling you about meeting this man, Dr Davies. You remember?’
‘I remember. The college lecturer.’
‘Well nearly a month pass by since I have the meeting with this Dr Davies, and one night I find myself sitting with the fellars in the pub when suddenly Baron fold up his newspaper with a big performance and he stand and push the thing into his coat pocket. He announce that he gone for the night. My eyes follow him across to the door and I watch as he leave the pub. This is the third time this week that Baron get up from the table for he can’t listen any more to Ralph shooting off his mouth about what he will do to the next teenager who try to push him off the pavement. Ralph return from the bar with three pints of bitter balance in his two hands and set them on the table before he drop back down into his seat. My friend continue to talk as though he don’t notice Baron gone. As Ralph lift the new pint to his mouth, I can see the bruise on the side of his face where the English boy punch him in the head. “You know,” he say, “they still have pubs in this town that don’t let us in at all. We barred, and like I tell you, don’t bother going to any dance club without a girl, coloured or white. They don’t care what kind of girl you bring, but what they don’t want is no single coloured man prowling around the place sniffing up the women. They believe all this inter-racial business begin in the dance hall, but what they can’t deal with is when the English girls begin sniffing back and that’s when you hear them start talking about not wanting a country full of half-castes. They think all of us is ponces looking to prey on a piece of white thing that we give a drink to, or a bit of dope, then we breed them and put them out on the street. Well, you know that’s what they saying, don’t you?” I’m listening to Ralph, but I hear the speech already because every night since Ralph start seeing an English girl who work on the buses, my friend getting drunk and loud and saying the same thing over and over. Tonight, as he walking the girl back to her place from the bus depot, the girl’s brother ambush him and Ralph beat the boy and take a knife from him and pitch it down a drain, but not before the boy thump him hard. The girl decide to stay with the brother, who shouting that he going get Ralph and calling him a coon and a sambo and other things that Ralph say he can’t understand because the accent is too thick, and Ralph seem upset that the girl would want to stay with the brother even though I tell him that blood is thicker than water and he should realise the brother don’t mean nothing and the boy is just trying to save face. Every night since Ralph get sweet on Doreen from the bus depot my friend drinking too much. Ralph say the brother have big sideburns like he think he a man, and he wear stupid thick, thick shoes, but Ralph claim that he show him who is the man and he is sure the boy not coming back for a next beating. Ralph empty his pint in one and my friend move to get up from the seat but he fall back. “Jesus Christ, man, you know these people want a colour bar here so why they don’t just get on with it and make it legal. But where does that leave the Cypriots, you tell me? They let them run a café here and there and everywhere, but are the Cyps coloured people? They look coloured to me, don’t you think?” I watch Ralph lift up his paper mat out of a puddle of beer, and then he put down his empty glass on it. “They seriously think they can lynch me? They think they can do me like Little Rock? Don’t make me laugh. I know them, smiling at us at work and then ignoring us when they see us in the street. Man, I know them, I know them good, and if I can’t walk home a decent girl like Doreen in peace and quiet then what the hell is going on, you tell me that? Man, this place is a joke.”
‘By the time the summer reach, and the nights are warm and long, Ralph start to carry on bad and he encouraging me to do the same. I press up even harder against the girl, like I trying to drive her into the tree, and as I do so she reach down and open up her coat a little wider, and then her legs, and then the girl begin to liven up her cold performance and start to maul me like she must think I’m her pet monkey. She whisper crude things into my ear but I know she just want me to finish quickly so she can be on her way. Eventually I peel away from the girl who quickly close up her coat and ask me if everything is all right, but a part of me want to laugh because how can everything be all right if I leaning up against a tree in a park with a young girl to whom I just pay cash money in exchange for a few minutes with her body? Everything is not all right and, although this is the third time that Ralph sweet-talk me into coming to the park with him and looking for skirt, I already know that I won’t be troubling with this type of business no more for it’s no good for a man like me. I going have to reason with Ralph about this woman-against-the-tree caper, and about the fact that I paying half the man’s rent to sleep on a mattress on the floor, yet every Tuesday and Friday, when Mrs Jones’s husband on night duty, he put me out in the hall with a blanket and Mrs Jones pay him a visit and collect what Ralph like to call the “extra rent money”. I starting to feel that if I going do any serious studying then I must find a place by myself, and maybe it’s time to give Ralph back his privacy, so I start asking around to see if anybody know of a room that I can rent. It seem like everybody in the factory, and everybody in the pub, saying the same thing about how is only prejudiced landlords in England, and these same landlords who insist on “European Only” keeping back the coloured man from progress because without a decent place to live then we can’t bring over our wives or girlfriends and start to live properly. Every coloured man in England is waiting on decent housing to open up, and in the meantime every coloured man not only putting up with prejudice at work, but when he try to find some place to rest at the end of the day he meet more big problems there. The girl finish buttoning up her coat, and I watch as she unwrap a piece of gum from its foil paper and then fold it into her mouth as she speak. “What about the money? You haven’t paid me yet.” She push a finger into my chest. “You lot have to pay a coloured tax, didn’t anybody tell you that?” The girl must think I straight off the boat, so I remind her that I already paid the damn money and she should just fix up herself and move on. When I turn to leave the blasted girl grab hold of my arm and start talking about how she have three kiddies and no money, and then she bite down on she bottom lip and her eyes begin to water, and I thinking about maybe giving the girl another shilling but I’m wanting to ask Ralph first in case it mess up things for the other fellars. That’s when I hear Ralph’s voice, and I turn and see him pelting toward me, and three white boys chasing after him, and so I turn and start to run. After a minute or so I look back and see that Ralph decide to swerve off to the right and my friend running down the hill toward the main road and the three boys following him and nobody following me, but I still run until I reach the small stone wall that surround the park, and I jump the thing and I pleased like hell to see plenty of traffic and people everywhere. I stop to catch my breath and then turn up the collar on my jacket and I start to walk fast, but I taking care to keep my head down. I don’t know where the hell I am, but I too frightened to stop and ask any question and so I just keep walking. Eventually I see a bench near a bus stop and I take a rest for a minute and then realise that I’m looking upon a canal. I like the quiet water, but the noise of the traffic troubling my head, especially when a bus pull up at the stop. For maybe an hour I just sit and stare at the water, and wonder if once I figure out where I am if I should go seek out Ralph at the pub, or maybe he gone back to Mrs Jones’s house, but I know for sure that my friend bound to be at one of these two places and I want to make sure that everything all right with him because the three white boys running seriously hard after Ralph.