Brond Read online

  The blasphemy decided it. I would go and apologise to the man, and had started to dress when I found I was, and the stairs ran under my feet as effortlessly as an escalator.

  I knocked on the closed door, and then leant my head against it for coolness.

  ‘Ohahah!’ Jackie Kennedy cried on a sweet apprehensive note as my poor head fell through the open door into the cloven warmth of her bosom.

  ‘Are you an entire eejit?’ she asked, with something more than an idle curiosity.

  I stared sadly at her as she removed herself from me.

  ‘Are you all right? You’re a hideous colour.’

  ‘Oh, I’m well. I’m fine. Would you call my landlord, please?’

  ‘Dear God! Your landlord? It’s five o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘It would only take a minute.’

  Suddenly tired beyond tiredness, I nodded forward on to her breast. Upright, I might have slept in its musty comfort like a baby if one hand needing support had not fallen astray just as the inner door opened. The restful glow of the lamp was split by a white finger stretched from Kennedy to our tableau of innocence.

  Terrified by the muscles of his cheeks in profile, I called out, ‘Don’t be upset, dada, it’s only me your own little gossoon Oedipus,’ and fell backwards out of my own poor mimicry of a Belfast accent, overtaken until I could feel falling no more.

  TWO

  Not that I had ever been in anything you could call doubt about the nature of my own true father. Careering in slow motion up in bed, on impulse I checked to see if he had changed out of his boots before coming to town to visit me.

  ‘Whit’s up? Ye’re no tender still?’

  ‘Not at all. I was just easing myself.’

  He stared down at his feet as if he had been reading my thoughts. If he had been wearing his boots, they would have carried an edge of dried sharn in each welt as a souvenir from the byres of Trailtrow.

  ‘Aye . . .’ he said without looking up. ‘Ye’re over it then?’

  ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Well. That’s fine.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Looking after you all right?’

  ‘Oh, sure. They’re . . . fine. No problem. If you have to be in hospital, this must be as good as you’ll get. On the National Health at least.’

  ‘I’ve never been in hospital,’ he said, changing the subject. It was a rule of my father’s not to discuss politics. I had never asked him why he had that rule. There had been a time when I had been wee and you did not question your father’s rules; and a time when I had been older and learned to keep the questions to myself; and there had been a time when I did not care why he had made one rule or another for himself. Shifting up in one piece to hold straight the clamp of stitches on my belly, it occurred to me the time I was in now was the one where I wouldn’t ask in case he told me politics were not for the likes of him.

  ‘Lying in your bed at this time o day’s no for the like o me,’ he said grinning companionably.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ I groaned.

  ‘Whit’s up?’ he cried in alarm, starting out of his seat.

  Visitors all around looked at us. The man in the next bed, a saturnine barber with varicose veins, said something out of the side of his mouth. A girl laughed, but she was at the far end of the ward and it must have been about something else.

  ‘For God’s sake, faither, sit down!’

  He subsided without altering his unmasked concern.

  ‘Something’s wrang wi ye or ye widnae hae made that noise. I’ve heard a pig dee happier. Ye’d a pain that time, tell the truth.’

  ‘A wee pull on the stitches when I moved. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I wouldnae just take that for granted.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Times they’re careless devils in hospitals. They wouldnae hae left one o the wee dichtan cloots in ye?’

  ‘A swab!’

  ‘Just that. One o the wee cloots. I’ve heard o that. It could be inside ye festeran away.’

  ‘Come on, faither, don’t be daft.’

  He gave me an offended look and sat back pretending to study the bottle and glasses on the bedside cupboard. For an idiot second, it seemed to me his eyes had filled with tears. I must have been more ill than I had realised.

  ‘I’ve had a shake,’ I explained.

  ‘What was it they cried it? Not just your appendix . . .’

  ‘Peritonitis. Without any pain until it happened. No pain no warning, so I should be dead.’

  ‘You were lucky wi your landlady.’

  I thought about that.

  ‘Everybody said I looked terrible. I remember everybody saying I’d gone a terrible colour. It was still luck, though, that they called a doctor who put me in an ambulance instead of giving me four aspirin.’

  Somewhere in the middle of that my father lost interest.

  ‘I’ve never been in a place like this in my life,’ he said looking round. ‘It’s the work like. Out in the open in all weathers.’

  I had a rough idea of my father’s age, and an exact one that he appeared ten years older than he should. He had been serving a sentence to hard labour since he was born; eighth child of a farm worker and a serving lassie in one of the two rooms plus outside lavatory of a tied cottage half way up a dirt road. I imagined it as looking more or less like the house my sister and I were born in – less than half way up the dead-end road to Trailtrow home farm.

  ‘You’ve had your share o fresh air,’ I said.

  ‘And never a day’s illness.’

  We spent a while looking around. Only two visitors were allowed at each bed and there was an occasional bustle of folk changing place. The barber’s fat wife went out and a young woman came in instead, bringing a small boy. She sat just behind my father and I stared at her crossed legs until the barber stopped grinning and talking. She would be his daughter, I guessed.

  Abruptly, my father made the dry noise I recognised as his chuckle.

  ‘That fool Thomson!’ My mind went blank then cleared. Thomson had come as dairyman. He had got the cottage my father had been wanting for years. It wasn’t an enormous ambition, but the in-comer Thomson was due the better house being a skilled man where my father was the general labourer, what they called in some parts of the country an orra-man – a do-everything man. ‘That Thomson! I saw him on the other side of the road last Saturday. I was in the town. He didnae see me mind, but I spotted him. Ye couldnae hae missed him wi his gloves an his driving jacket up tae his bum. Ye’d hae thought he’d never seen a farm end aa his days. I waited till he stopped at a corner an just roared over, Hey, then, Jacky, did ye mind tae muck oot the byre the morn? He pretended no tae hear but his lugs lit up like traffic lamps.’

  It was a relief when the bell went. My father jumped up at once, not waiting to be chivvied away by the nurses.

  At the bed end he hesitated. ‘I’ll tell your mother you’re looking fine then.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘She was right sorry she couldnae manage. She, eh, she . . . couldnae.’

  ‘Tell her I’m fine.’

  ‘Aye.’

  There was no danger of loving my mother to excess; and I could not imagine anyone ever being impressed enough by my father to hate him.

  If I had a problem, it was only that this pale thing I felt for my father might be what other people called love.

  There was no reason for me to expect anyone at the evening visit. I had scrounged something to read from the fat man on the other side of the barber. ‘Are you getting up to help?’ he had asked me after the afternoon visitors had left. He was pushing a trolley of teacups. ‘Up? Me?’ ‘They’re very short of staff. It helps if we all muck in.’ ‘I don’t take sugar,’ I said. He seemed to be a cheerful lunatic, and I borrowed a bundle of his paperbacks, sagebrush and gunplay on grey paper.

  I was hiding on the range from the barber and his visitors back for the evening when I saw Kennedy pa
ss between the swing doors. It was horrible luck that he had somebody to visit in this ward. I slumped low in the bed and read the same sentence twice over: ‘ “If any durnfool foreigner ever invades into these parts,” Paps said, “I just reckon the boys’ll take their rifles and head for those mountains back there.” ’ As the white man said to the Indian, I reckon this treaty ain’t big enough for both of us.

  Kennedy loomed into the corner of my eye. Would my stitches burst if I jumped out of bed and made a hobble for it?

  ‘I’ve brought you a bottle,’ he said, sounding very Belfast and aggrieved.

  ‘A bottle?’

  If he hit me with it, dear God, let it be on the head.

  ‘It’s a bottle of squash. You get thirsty after an operation.’

  He took the chair from the bed and pulled it up beside me.

  ‘It’s the anaesthetic,’ he explained, sitting down. ‘It dries you up.’

  ‘Thanks for the squash. Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  ‘That it’s all right. I mean if you meant it for someone else – I wouldn’t mind. Were you surprised to see me in here?’

  ‘You’re not still delirious, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m fine. They took it out.’

  I gestured ambiguously towards my middle.

  ‘You’re still sweating.’

  I dabbed and a line of sweat streaked my fingers.

  ‘You were sweating that night surely.’

  ‘I wasn’t well.’

  ‘You were not. Another three hours, the doctor told us, and you’d have been dead. The poison was pouring through you though you knew nothing about it.’

  ‘I had no pain at all. No pain, no warning – the surgeon said that on his rounds. I was lucky.’

  We looked at one another. I owed my life to them. I wanted to thank him, but I couldn’t remember Jackie’s proper name.

  ‘I was lucky you realised I was ill.’

  ‘That was easily told. Unconsciously you must have known you were bad. It was help you were after . . . unconsciously.’

  ‘I can see that.’ I tried to match his seriousness. ‘I only remember that whole day in bits. I don’t suppose some of it happened at all. I was at a . . . party.’

  ‘You’ve been to plenty of those.’

  He said it dourly. I wondered why he had come if he disapproved of me. Was it possible that Jackie had insisted that he come? The compliant husband; my stitches throbbed.

  ‘Fooling around is all right until you fail your exams, then the easy companions disappear. You’re on your own. Fellowship is all right, if you choose the fellows.’

  Kennedy as Polonius. Later when I woke, I lay thinking the poison might still be running like acid in my head.

  The place was quiet. The lights were shaded. Behind Brond’s head, I could make out the humped and muffled shape of the barber. Being right under the blankets must have made him feel safe. Brond’s shirt was white with faint yellow markings. As a child at Trailtrow, I had seen new drawn milk turning in a buttery churn. The barber lay dreamlessly still in the hot tent of his breath.

  ‘You were almost dead,’ Brond said. ‘They tell me you are making a good recovery.’

  A tall nurse in the uniform I now recognised as a sister’s passed between the beds. She didn’t seem surprised to see Brond, but glanced our way and went softly by.

  ‘It’s not the visiting hour.’

  My dry tongue filled my mouth.

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  His nose and mouth took on the coarse practicality of a surgeon, but he smiled and shook his head. I didn’t want to think of any other reason why he should be here at this time of night. He was a distinguished looking man – he might have a Nobel Prize for medicine. Perhaps he had invented a bedpan that would let you piss without embarrassment. I couldn’t use the ones they had in here. More poison to fester inside me.

  My thoughts chattered above an attentive stillness which was fear.

  ‘You don’t remember where you saw me before?’ Brond asked.

  I shook my head. I denied it. That had been part of a dream when I was sick.

  ‘That interesting evening at Professor Gracemount’s—,’ he began.

  The breath I had been holding sighed out.

  ‘It comes back to you.’ It was not a question. ‘We had a long talk.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You told me your ambitions. So, hearing you were ill . . .’

  My ambitions? How could I believe that? I had never put them into words even for myself.

  ‘I found you interesting.’ He spread the bundle of paperbacks on the locker and picked one up. ‘I hoped for something more interesting than this.’ By one corner, he shook it gently at me. ‘This is commonplace.’

  Even studied in this shadow-pooled light, it couldn’t be mistaken for the cover of a cowboy story. I had taken the paperbacks too much at first glance and face value, and wasted an afternoon on sagebrush that could have been spent on more intriguing stuff. Inside the blubber, the fat man had hidden shallows.

  ‘Pornography,’ Brond said, setting the book aside on a note of dismissal. ‘That’s a natural interest at your age, but even in such things there is a hierarchy. I read something once in that line which struck me very much. The man who wrote it was clever and impecunious and young. Like his friends then in Paris, he put that side of his imaginings on paper for money. They pretended to themselves it was done cynically. The truth was not so simple.’

  At the far end of the ward, a hard painful effort of coughing began. Like a stone in a pond, it rippled to us in a muted disturbance of sleep mutterings and sighs.

  ‘He wrote of a man and a woman facing one another across a table. Now and then, she reaches out with a finger and gently strokes him. Their only expression is a certain placidity. They are very tranquil, but then they are drugged. Perhaps something in the eyes if you were able to look very closely. He is a masochist and she is torturing and degrading him. When it is over, there is no blood, no business for the police, no hospital bills to meet. It struck me as an improvement on this world.’ He nodded thoughtfully, ‘They shake hands very correctly, or perhaps they go off together and have tiny cream cakes with black sweet coffee.’

  I looked at the books I had got from the fat man on the far side of the barber. Both of them had nagged me to get up; no doubt so that my wound could tear and get adhesions like the ones they bore as veterans.

  ‘It’s not mine,’ I said. ‘That book. I borrowed it.’

  ‘You are right,’ he said briskly. ‘You are right. It is better to live in the real world.’ He didn’t say it as if he believed me, but as if it didn’t matter. ‘A student needs books – and money. A student needs time to think about what he needs. He needs to travel. It’s possible for a young man of your ... background not to understand how important that is.’

  ‘I have my grant,’ I said. My side had begun to ache; the warnings the surgeon had spoken of, coming too late to be useful. ‘And I’ll get a job in the summer vacation.’

  ‘I will help you. I will find something for you,’ Brond said.

  ‘No! ... I can get something for myself.’

  ‘You have determination. That’s good. Character achieves more than brains, if one has to choose. Finish your degree and I’ll find work for you to do. I might have a career in mind.’

  ‘I know what I’m going to do,’ I lied in fright.

  ‘Don’t be too determined – that’s a false pride. I’m not such a stranger as you imagine. I have a friend in the place where you lodge. People’s lives become connected. Take help where it’s offered and be a successful man.’ He laughed quietly. ‘That young man in Paris . . . When he was twenty, he had never slept with a woman. One day he stripped himself naked, beat his flesh with a leather belt and felt such joy! At last this is something real, he told himself. Now I join the real world.’

  When he
had, gone, all the sounds came back, chiming glass and a voice scolding out of a bad dream. The barber was awake. Round his eyes the olive skin furrowed as he watched me from his ambush of pillows.

  Yet hours later as I started awake, it was Kennedy who had disturbed my dreams, one hand on the chair as he tick-tacked some mysterious emotion.

  ‘It’s long years since I’ve stood in a hospital. It must be . . .’ Down the length of the ward, evening visitors were streaming to the door. It was surely time for him to go. ‘We’d been married a year and Val was going to have a child. She had to come in for rest because she had high blood pressure. We lost the baby. I was sure it was a son, but I never asked.’ All the visitors were gone. Kennedy hesitated in isolation. I disowned him. ‘She was in a side room because she was on the danger list. She had a tube into her arm. After that we couldn’t have children.’

  I closed my eyes as if in pain; overcome by weakness – though, naturally, not unsympathetic.

  ‘I can see you’re done with tiredness.’

  I heard him move away and opened my eyes. He had stopped at the end of the bed.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ he said.

  In the middle of the night, sweating out of sleep, it seemed to me his story about Jackie – he was the only one who ever called her Val – had been a kind of blackmail intended to make me see her crotch as out of bounds forever to my hand. When I woke up in the morning I saw things differently. He had opened the door when I was sick and resting my head in the shelter ofher breast.

  Prostrate at seven in the convalescent morning, avoiding the barber’s eye, all I needed was a father.