owner’s trick of enclosing the front garden with a series of tall hedges, obscuring the surrounding countryside. On a final visit before completion, while visiting the upstairs toilet, he had noticed a somewhat busy road in the middle distance, but, infatuated with the place, and too frightened to disturb at this late stage the serious business of property transaction, had put it out of his mind. Now he spends much time in the garden, trying to gauge exactly how loud that muffled roar is, trying to work out how he couldn’t have heard it before, and trying to think himself into Stella’s method of imagining it’s the sound of the sea.
‘I still think you should go back to sleep.’
‘I said: I’m awake now. Look, don’t worry about me. Did you sleep on the plane?’
‘No. You know I can never sleep on a plane.’
‘You should have flown business …’
‘That’s what Freda said …’ A momentary silence follows this: Harvey assumes she has taken the comparison with his father’s wife as an implicit rebuke, which he had not meant, at least consciously. There is an awkward pause, such as can happen even between couples who have been together for fourteen years, and for whom blips of silence are not generally registered. He waits, wondering if it might be possible over the phone, in another country, to hear the sound of the M2.
‘Well, anyway, darling …’ says Harvey, eventually, feeling the spasticity of words said to break such silences, ‘… I’ll call you later.’
‘OK. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
It is the truth, however fast it makes his heart dip.
* * *
My daddy seemed a bit better today. The nurses sat him up in bed, and they took off that see-through mask he usually has to wear over his mouth and nose. He didn’t have it on for ages (later on Mommy told me it was over five minutes!). He still didn’t say anything – the nurse had to put the tube back into his neck while he had the mask off, so that probably didn’t help – but Mommy told me to come over and hold his hand. It made me feel a bit funny, because I haven’t held Daddy’s hand before for so long. After a while I started to notice some of the weird things about it: how he’s got loads of these big brown patches (and some black spots) on the top side and how the bones seemed to be poking through the skin, so that it was a bit like holding a skeleton’s hand. The tops of his fingers (around the nails) look sort of yellow, like he’s bruised them or something, and his nails are really long too – I remember Mommy telling me that Daddy’s nails grow really quickly, and he always forgets to cut them – especially the thumb ones, which were so long they were kind of gross. You might think that nails wouldn’t grow when you’re asleep all the time, but they do.
Sometimes this happens, that Daddy’s skin and stuff makes me feel weird. I’ve noticed before that his skin isn’t like mine – obviously! – or Jada’s, or even Mommy’s, but I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I didn’t really notice it at all until Jada said to me that time that thing about how my daddy’s skin looked like it had lots of little holes in it. I said shut up, stupid, like I always do when she says something like that, something just meant to be nasty, but afterwards I couldn’t help looking and it made it hard to forget because I could see what she meant, sort of. His skin looks more like a net than skin; it kind of looks like bits of skin knitted together around all these tiny holes, like wool looks like close up.
His skin looks even more like wool now, because he’s got all these little white hairs coming out of it. Mommy told me it’s difficult for Daddy to shave now – well, it’s impossible for him to shave, but it’s not even easy for anyone else to do it! They’re so worried about cutting him. But he has lots of little white hairs coming out of the tops of his hands, too, even on his fingers, and he never shaved those even when he wasn’t in hospital. I suppose you would need a special kind of tiny shaver to do them, and I don’t know if you can even get them in any store. I got this really funny idea in my head, that I wanted to turn his hand around, and play round and round the garden with it, even though I haven’t played that for years, not since I was a really tiny baby – but still, when I thought about it, I remembered how I used to like it so much, the tickly feeling so nice, as the grown-up’s finger goes round and round, watching it and feeling it at the same time, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the bigger tickle up the arm. I didn’t do it with Daddy’s hand – I mean, I knew it’d be a stupid thing to do – and, besides, I don’t know if he can actually feel a tickle when he’s so ill and dying and everything.
After Mommy told me to hold Daddy’s hand, her cellphone rang, and she was on it for quite a while (you aren’t really meant to have your cellphone on in the hospital, but I think it’s OK for Mommy to keep hers on because Daddy’s so famous). I held his hand and tried not to think about how weird the skin on it was: I tried to look at his face instead, but that’s even weirder really, because Daddy’s cheeks hang really low, and his ears are so big (especially the bottom bit, the soft bit), and his nose is so long, that now because his skin is all grey his face reminded me of an elephant’s face. Which made me want to laugh at first, but I kept it inside, by holding my breath, which I can do for nearly a minute. Anyway, then I started talking, just saying stuff, things that were in my head: I said, ‘I love you Daddy’ and ‘I hope you get better soon, Daddy’ even though I know he’s not going to get better, he’s going to die, but I didn’t know what else to say – it would have sounded really weird to talk about him dying – but it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just good to say stuff. He can hear me. Mommy always says he can, even though he never says anything, or even nods his head or whatever. Sometimes she tells me to look in his eyes – Look deep into his eyes, she always says, because that’s where he still lives – and where you can see, she says, that he still understands everything. But his eyes were only half open, and what you can see of the inside bit looks really red – I don’t mean just at the bottom of the eyes, that bit’s always been really red on my daddy’s eyes, and kind of wet, and sometimes I used to think his eyes were bleeding, or that maybe, because he’s a genius, when he cries, it’s blood – God! So mad! That’s like something from Twilight (which Mommy doesn’t know I’ve watched – Jada showed me it at her house, her mom never cares what she sees on TV and stuff).
So then I just kept going, saying whatever came out of my head. Mommy was still on the phone and the nurses were moving around the room and that machine that Daddy is hooked up to all the time with the green lines on it kept on beeping, so no one was really noticing. I told him about Aristotle, my cat, about how he’s started to get really fat because while we haven’t been at home the whole time Noda – that’s our housekeeper; she’s from the Philippines – just leaves food out for him, like a whole tin at once!! And then he just goes over and nibbles on it all day like a cow eating the grass. I told Daddy about how last time me and Elaine took him to the vet, the vet said that he needed to lose weight otherwise he might get ill, and so we bought him this cat food they only sell at the vet called Seniors, which is meant for older cats – which he kind of is, too, even though he’s younger than me, six and a half, but you have to times it by ten, so that makes him sixty-five (which is way old, but still quite a lot younger than Daddy) – but it’s good for fat cats because it’s got less protein and stuff in it and that helps to make them thin. But all that’s like a waste of time now because Noda just opens the tin of FancyFeast and pours it all out for him to nosh at all day.
I felt a bit silly talking about Aristotle like this, because I didn’t know if it was the right kind of thing to talk about. I thought maybe I should be talking about something more grown up, but I couldn’t think of anything. I started to feel sad, because I haven’t seen Aristotle that much since we’ve been going to the hospital all the time, and I really miss him. He’s a really sweet cat, with black and white fur and a really cute little
