There are four small, mid-blue squares. In between each one is a navy fleck, creating a cross. There is a dot in the middle, forming the centre of a miniature window. Undulating fields of them spread outwards forever, hypnotically consistent. They are so tiny and so regular they become gaping chasms – and I fall into one after another, over and over again.
It is the pattern of a hospital gown.
I wore this gown once, and held the little, incredible hand of a very new baby, drinking in her details with my eyes and her breaths with my ears, forgetting my own, counting the seconds between, living years in the gaps – until I am only eyes and only ears and only hope and only despair detached from all other senses, floating, waiting, counting, falling.
In.
Out.
Now my dad is wearing this same gown.
They are turning the machines down, and off. And again I am listening, straining to hear that next breath, waiting, waiting. I am holding his hand, too. I have held this hand many times. And I am here, marvelling at the familiar spots and lines and creases, baulking at the unfamiliar tubes, resting on endless horizons and horizons of windows.
And in the spaces between, getting longer, the breaths, getting shorter, I am tipping over their sills and into their pale panes – down into memories and stories and bits I’ve filled in for myself all mixed up, like dreams.
In.
There is a small boy with a distended tummy and spindly limbs, who looks like a Toad because he is very poorly.
Out.
He is a bespectacled student who is half cocky and who twists his tongue between his teeth as he picks at his nails, but will never know he does this.
In.
He is a husband who will always like his womenfolk spiky and clever and funny, who wore a pink shirt and a Beatles haircut on his wedding day that I only know from pictures, who plays and challenges and shows up.
Out.
He is a dad, with two small blonde girls playing crackadown bridge on the floor, talking long walks in the woods with a dog he pretends not to like, but laughs and laughs when she jumps in leaves, on sledges, goes crackers through the daffodils, and who cries and cries when she dies.
In.
He smells of cigarette smoke, and his moustache tickles when he gives goodnight kisses. He spends hours convincing a small girl who can’t read, or add up, or sleep, or control her bad thoughts – that what she CAN do is draw. Until eventually she believes him.
Out.
He is playing on a beach, swinging children over waves in shorts and cagoules, throwing them in the pool, telling them they’re digging the golf ball sandcastles all wrong.
In.
He jokes away and pushes out monsters of all varieties, vaporising the snakes with suckers climbing in at night, trapping cats with red eyes in his wardrobe – and later slaying dead-eyed husbands with withering contempt.
Out.
He is on a boat, plunging in the foaming sea, drifting on a peat-black lake, pottering on a canal, messing about on the river. I watch his bare legs walking in front of me and realise we share calves.
In.
He rides in a Mondeo steed to the rescue, of stranded people and stuck daughters, be they over-tired, over-emotional, in pain, in peril – imperfect. He alternates bracing and tender, holding back hair, stroking backs, tidying rooms, sitting at besides, fixing problems, being busy – being there.
Out
He is in a restaurant, teasing a waiter, forgetting his handbag – and making everyone laugh out loud.
In
He relishes debate and games and words and knowledge and hilarity – at Friday night fish and chip dinners with a box of Lambrusco, at Christmas meals with neighbours, cups of tea with Grannies, holidays with friends. And when I am the one to make him laugh, I glow.
Out
He is taking a group of girls on holiday, singing the rude words to all the songs. It’s everyone’s highlight.
In
He argues with a deaf dog about who is at the door when he’s on his way to work, because it’s him, and she literally just saw him leave.
Out
He is joining a group of prickly work colleagues who don’t like the holiday temp – and they love him, and like her more because of him.
In
He is salt and pepper bearded, like a badger. He is telling bigger girls about the cancer that they don’t yet know won’t actually be the thing that kills him, but won’t leave him the same, either.
Out –
He is deep in conversation, his arms crossed over his braces, listening intently, nodding along. He lets out a sudden bark of laughter, and starts wildly gesticulating with his arms.
In –
His beard is white, and cats check it for mice. He plays pounce and builds them platforms, and rubs their faces with blunt, dented thumbs – thumbs that used to rub my palms as he squeezed my hand.
His is cold now in mine.
The windows reel past fast and slow, in a snail’s rush, and I am afraid when the tears mean I can’t see into them anymore. I am afraid I won’t remember. I am afraid of the windows ending.
When I am afraid, I still want my dad.
There is barely an out anymore.
In is sharp, shallow, a tiny gasp.
I look up from the windows and catch my sister’s eye. She has been looking through her own, I see.
We laugh, suddenly, grimly, without humour, at how funny he’d have found this. The darkly comic timing of the breath you don’t think will happen… that you don’t know whether to want or not.
The old dead cow trick, fooling the city tourists.
In –
This patchwork man, sewn together like Frankenstien’s monster operation after operation, slaloming around death for decades, is stitched together of so many different, rich and contrasting textures – gregarious and grumpy, funny and fierce, unflinchingly moral and twinklingly wicked, an extroverted introvert, the reserved life and soul of the party, a socialist at the coal board, a born engineer student of humanities, an intellectual who loved fart gags and silliness, a fan of Beethoven and bodice rippers, infinitely patient and easily exasperated, a lover of babies and boats, cats and crosswords, chicken conspiracy theories, sci-fi and cinema, a vehement disbeliever in God and midnight mice – a collector of projectors deliberately, and people unintentionally.
And all the windows crack and shatter
In an explosion of silence.
He is gone.
We are left to pick our way over the shards of broken glass, down the corridor, away from him. Bleeding.
Out – into an alien world without him in it.
*
I am home now, holding that first hand again, my daughter’s, much bigger now. It is strangely new, like I’m seeing it with my eyes freshly peeled. I listen for her breaths, out of habit, learning, because I have somehow forgotten what my own should feel and sound like. I don’t remember them hurting this much.
My knuckles stand out, my veins raised in rivulets of blue. They remind me of his. And I know with heavy inevitability and half hope that one day she will be holding my hand, when the skin is even thinner and the spots even browner, listening for my last breath in her turn.
I wonder if the hospital gowns will have the same windows. I wonder if she will fall into them, and what views she will see. I wonder if I am doing enough to keep the glass clear, to fill the frames for her.
I wonder if I will ever be loved the way I love.
I wonder what I will do without him.
Mumonthenetheredge 