He decided that for the time being he wouldn’t leave the house. He did not want to find himself surrounded by an angry crowd in search of an easy target. But when the streets finally became calm once more he found he was still afraid. He told himself that he would go out when he felt stronger, but even as he was telling himself this he knew it wasn’t true.
She got back from work one Wednesday evening to find her father sitting at the dining table with his palms flat on the placemat in front of him as if he were engaged in a one-man séance. He was wearing his red V-neck jumper. He looked directly at her and said, “My trouble.”
“Your what?” said Leah.
“My trouble leg,” he said, slurring his words.
She assumed he was drunk but when she came closer she could see that the left-hand side of his face was sagging. She tried helping him to the sofa so that he could lie down but he couldn’t hold his own weight and she had to hoist him back onto the chair. He was unable to say how long he had been in this state.
The ambulance took twenty-five minutes to arrive. Her father seemed completely unbothered by the gravity of the situation. The paramedic slipped a line into the crook of his arm and held it down with a fat crucifix of white tape. The siren was on the whole way, a dreamy mismatch between the antiseptic calm and the speed with which they sliced through the world.
When they arrived at the hospital her father was partially blind and there were many words he could no longer say, Leah’s name being one of them. It was the length of time he had spent sitting at the table, so the doctor said. However long that was. After the golden hour the odds went through the floor. Leah wondered if he had realised that he was being offered a neat, uncomplicated exit and had decided to take it, because God forbid that he should ever find himself bedbound or incontinent or needing to be fed by someone else.
He had the second stroke just after midnight.
She sat in the hard glare of the relatives’ room looking at a shitty painting of a fishing boat and a lighthouse. It was the lack of justice which hurt most, the way his cowardice turned out to have been such a good game plan, the possibility that he had never really suffered.
She took a taxi back to the house but couldn’t sleep, repeatedly dropping off then crashing back into wakefulness convinced that her mother was in the room.
She rang in sick the following morning and went round to Bunny’s house. She wasn’t sure he understood but he held her while she cried and that was enough. She told him about the kittens. She told him how her mother had called her “a mistake” and “a disappointment.” She told him how her mother had made balls of lard and peanuts and hung them from strings outside the dining-room window in the winter for chaffinches and coal tits and robins. She told him how quickly the MS had progressed, how she wasn’t allowed into her mother’s bedroom during the final months, how her mother died and how Leah kept forgetting this because nothing in the house had changed.
Bunny said, “I hate my father. I haven’t seen him for twenty years. I have no idea what he looks like. But every time there’s a crowd on TV I find myself scanning the faces, looking for him.”
She told him that she had trouble sleeping. He said she could move in upstairs if she wanted, and tried very hard not to show how pleased he was when she accepted the offer.
She took Bunny’s old bedroom. He hadn’t been upstairs for a long time. The rusted hot tap in the sink no longer turned and there was velvety green fungus in the corners of the bathroom window. On the dusty sill sat a pair of rusty nail clippers, a dog-eared box of sticking plasters and a little brown tub of diazepam tablets with a water-blurred label.
The first night she drank whisky in warm milk to get herself to sleep but was woken a couple of hours later by Bunny’s snoring. She lay motionless in the half-dark. The gaps between his snores were growing longer and she could tell that something was not right. She went downstairs and pushed the living-room door open. Bunny now slept on an adjustable bed which had replaced the yellow sofa bed. The smell was rank and cloistered. She drew the curtain back and opened the smaller window.
He was lying on his back, his skin unnaturally white, his arms swimming as if he were underwater and struggling to reach the surface. His breathing stopped for three, four, five seconds then restarted like an old motor. She wondered if she should do something. His breathing stopped again. And started. And stopped. Suddenly he was awake, wide-eyed and fighting for breath.
“Bunny?” She took his hand. “It’s Leah. I’m here.”
It was the fat around his throat, the doctor said, the sheer weight of his chest, the weakness of his muscles. If he carried on sleeping on his back he would suffocate. He had to remain propped up twenty-four hours a day.
Towards the end of the second week she returned from work to find that he had soiled himself. That morning’s carer had not turned up and he could hold on no longer. She smelt it as soon as she came in. She considered quietly reclosing the door and going back to her father’s empty house. Then Bunny called out, “Leah?”
She stepped into the living room.
He said, “I’m so sorry.”
She filled a plastic bowl with hot water. Soap, flannels, toilet rolls, a towel from upstairs. She helped Bunny roll onto his side. His flesh was raw and spotty and covered in large port-wine blotches. Some of the shit was on the sheet, some of it was wedged into the crack between his buttocks. She used wads of toilet paper to scrape most of it off, dumping the shit and the used paper in a plastic bag. She unhooked the corners of the cotton sheet and the plastic mattress protector beneath it and bunched them up, using the material to wipe him clean as she did so. She put the sheet in the washing machine and the protector into a second plastic bag.
It wasn’t as bad as she had expected. This was what she would have done for her children if life had turned out differently.
She dipped the flannels in the soapy water and wiped him, lifting the flesh to get into the folds. She towelled him dry and left him to lie on his side exposed to the air for a while. She put the flannels and the towel into the washing machine with the sheet. She bleached the plastic bowl. She remade the bed with a clean sheet and a new mattress protector from the cupboard in the kitchen. She dusted him with anti-fungal powder then let him roll back into his usual position.
He said, “You are the kindest person I have ever met.”
She found a letter from the council lying on her father’s doormat saying that the tenancy had come to an end with her father’s death and unless representations were made the house would have to be vacated by the end of the month.
She took the records to the Oxfam shop in town. “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson, “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension, “Nothing Can Stop Me” by Gene Chandler…She brought a small cardboard box home from the Co-op and filled it with the only possessions that seemed worth keeping, objects she remembered from her childhood, mostly — an owl made of yellow glass, a box of tarnished apostle spoons on faded purple plush, a decorative wall plate with a view of Robin Hood’s Bay. She locked the door and posted the keys through the letter box. She stowed the cardboard box under the bed at Bunny’s house.
It was a Friday after work. She’d just come out of Boots and was passing Kenyons en route to the bus station. The two women were sitting at a table in the window. She could see immediately that they were from out of town by the way they held themselves, the way they owned the space around them. The woman facing her had sunglasses pushed up into an auburn crop, tanned shoulders and a canary-yellow dress to show them off. Leah felt a little stab of something between envy and affront. The woman caught her eye. Leah walked away in embarrassment and five steps farther down the street realised that she had been looking at Abby and Nisha. She was about to break into a run when Nisha emerged from the doors of the restaurant. She blocked Leah’s path, looked her up and down theatrically and said, “What the fuck happened to you, girl?”