How had Moira been? Asleep or unconscious? He did not know the answer to that. Waiting to die? That was the correct answer, he reckoned, but it was one you did not give. Not in this family, anyway. Maybe not in most. Kelly didn’t know. He had never spent the night sitting beside the bed of a dying woman before. And he rather hoped he never would again.
‘The same,’ he said, eventually.
‘Ah.’ Jennifer smiled tenderly down at her near-comatose mother. Kelly stood up, stretching aching, cramped limbs. One leg had gone to sleep. He held on to the foot of the bed as he made his way clumsily over to where Jennifer was standing.
‘Thank you for staying with Mum,’ she said.
Kelly just nodded. He didn’t reckon he deserved any thanks. Not with his track record.
He stared down at the recumbent figure on the bed. He couldn’t explain quite what he felt. At that moment, he possibly loved Moira more than ever before. And yet, at the same time, he could barely recognise her as the woman he had shared his life with. She had changed quite dramatically since he had last seen her, only a couple of days earlier. She was so horribly thin, wasted really, and deathly pale. But it wasn’t that. It was more that the very core of her no longer seemed to be there. As if her soul had somehow already left her. She just didn’t seem to be Moira any more.
Then she opened her eyes.
Kelly felt a hot, sweet rush of shock course through his body. He realised then, that although he had not even formulated the thought, he hadn’t ever expected Moira to open her eyes again. But her eyes brought her to life again. She was back. Perhaps not for long, but she was back.
‘Good morning, darling,’ said Jennifer, sounding wonderfully normal, if a little more gentle in her greeting than she would have been were her mother well. That was, however, the only difference.
Kelly tried to wish Moira good morning, too. The words stuck in his throat. He could not bring himself to wish for her to have another day in this life in the state she was in. He did not wish to see her suffer any more. He hadn’t a clue what to say. He just couldn’t speak. This whole bedside scene seemed like a kind of charade to him.
He leaned forward and took Moira’s hand. The tears were pricking the backs of his eyes. He felt he did not have the right to cry, because he considered his behaviour throughout so much of Moira’s illness to have been thoroughly tardy. And yet he did care. He really cared.
‘You’re still here, then.’ Moira, quite incredibly, Kelly thought, managed a small wan smile. It seemed to him even more incredible that she had managed to speak, in an unreal hoarse whisper, forcing the words out as if they caused her real pain, which they almost certainly did. Then she winced and sank deeper back into the pillows. The effort of managing those few words, of making contact again with a world she had almost left behind, had obviously been extreme. She was awake, but she was even weaker than she had been the previous evening.
Kelly just nodded. He could feel his eyes filling up with tears. He was fighting to regain control. Jennifer turned to look at him.
‘You can go home now, John,’ she said, speaking to him almost as gently as she had addressed her mother. ‘Lynne and Paula will be here any minute. They’re just making some phone calls and sorting one or two things out, but they won’t be long. You have to work, John. Mum wouldn’t want you to stop.’
Kelly hesitated, ashamed of himself yet again when he realised how much he wanted to get out of that sickroom. But he mustn’t let that show. He really mustn’t.
‘No, I’ll s-stay, of course I’ll stay,’ he said.
Then he felt Moira squeeze his hand, and somehow she managed to find the strength to do so rather more forcefully than she had the previous night. Her eyes were closed again and, for a moment, he thought that the grip was just a reflex action. He squeezed back. It seemed all that he could do. Then Moira spoke again, eyes still shut, gripping his hand with more strength than he would have thought possible. The voice was even weaker than before, but the words were strong enough.
‘Go home, John, get writing, you idle bastard,’ Moira ordered. And she took her hand away from his.
Kelly’s throat tightened involuntarily. It was almost as if he were choking. He was finding it hard to swallow and even harder to breathe normally. He was very close to breaking down. He feared that he was going to make a complete fool of himself and knew that he would only embarrass Moira, who had never been one for displays of emotion.
‘I’ll see you both later, then,’ he muttered, as he headed gratefully for the door.
Once outside in the corridor, he could no longer control himself. The tears he had tried so hard to contain began to fall. The trembling and shaking he had experienced the previous night, when he had, for a moment, really thought that Moira was gone, overwhelmed him again.
He knew there was a gents’ toilet at the end of the corridor and he headed for it in a hurry. The tears were falling freely, rolling down his face into his shirt collar, and he was no longer able even to attempt to stop their flow. He broke into a run, nearly knocking over a nurse coming out of the room next to Moira’s. Afraid that she might try to speak to him, he did not pause to turn towards her, let alone apologise. Instead he ran all the faster, flinging open the door to the gents’ and throwing himself in. Only when he had managed to lock himself into a cubicle, did he finally let go. And then he just cried and cried.
Great sobs wracked Kelly’s body. All the pent-up emotions of the last few months poured out of him. He felt as if he was never ever going to stop weeping. And he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to.
For several minutes, Kelly just gave in totally to despair.
Eventually he did stop weeping, of course.
He dried his tears, splashed cold water on his red, swollen eyes, then set off for the car park, keeping his head down. He didn’t want anyone to see that he had been crying.
Once inside the little MG, he rummaged in the glove department for the battery-operated shaver he kept there. Kelly had been an on-the-road journalist for virtually the whole of his adult life, until just a few months ago. He always carried his passport and a major credit card in full working order. And he always had basic toiletries to hand. Old habits died hard.
As he ran the shaver over his stubbled jaw, he used his mobile to call Nick. He wanted to warn him of Moira’s deterioration. But even though it was not yet quite eight o’clock, there was no reply either from Nick’s home number or his mobile. However, Nick, unlike his father, was naturally an early riser and would already be well into his working day. He worked from home but, even if he was in, was inclined, Kelly knew, to ignore his phone if he was busy on the computer, which seemed to demand so much of his time.
Kelly left a short, sad message explaining that Moira was now in a hospice, and then contemplated what to do next.
He needed a cup of tea, he reckoned, before he could even think straight. His mouth felt dry and his tongue and teeth were furry. He also wanted to clean his teeth and have a quick wash, and he knew exactly where to go to achieve all three aims.
He started the engine, saying a small prayer as he did so, because he had left his mobile phone plugged into the car charger all night. The battery seemed to have remained healthy enough. The car started on the second turn. Kelly headed on to the Torquay road but pulled into the first lay-by not far out of Newton Abbot, where a mobile, roadside snack bar was invariably to be found just yards away from a Portakabin public convenience. Kelly visited the loo first and quickly completed his toilet before buying two paper cartons of tea at the snack bar. He sniffed them appreciatively as he ambled back to his car. Bob, the owner, made good strong tea with proper tealeaves and was always generous with the sugar.