A sick heat. It's ironic that I am writing about a character cruising through the Red Sea in the summer of 1953 in my ongoing novel and imagining the torments and delights of the Egyptian sun, while England is shimmering in a heat haze – at least at the moment.
I have been sorting through letters and poems left by my mother and visiting my father in a care home periodically. My feeling towards him are very complicated. I love him but he has always been emotionally inarticulate – cut off. Now, he is living in a kind of hell. It is not a kind of hell. It is hell. His wife died suddenly. He is living in one room, virtually, in a care home many of whose residents have dementia. He has never had the words to express his feelings (words were my mum's thing); even less so now.
I saw him on Sunday. I drove him to a pub for a meal, lifting him in and out of the car from his wheelchair in the sweltering heat. His mind seems to have deteriorated a bit more each time I see him. On Sunday, he could not remember what had happened and who had visited him the day before. He could, however, remember going to school by tram from his house in Northfield to the centre of the Birmingham, when he was a boy. I say remember. He could not convey the tactile qualities of the experience of travelling on an electric tram in the 1930s – I suppose most people couldn't, but they could have a crack at it. I know that he was unhappy because he felt unloved by his parents. But he has never actually told me this. He has never actually told me anything. Where my father should be is a massive hole – a void. Now I am peering into it.
I feel sorry for him. I touch his shoulder and say that I love him. I do love him but we cannot talk to each other, in the meaningful sense of communication. I never will be able to talk to him, because we speak different languages. He speaks engineer's language – practical, understated. I have never esteemed that way of being. I can understand it but it is alien to me. I only realised about halfway through our meal in the dark, wood-panneled pub (too expensive for my dad to feel comfortable in) that he was deeply depressed. Obvious really. Why wouldn't he be? But then my dad spent most of his life depressed. Enthusiasm was my mum's thing.
I am back home now. I drove back from Kidderminster, I felt utterly exhausted and emotionally emasculated after my trip, as if my soul had been frozen in liquid nitrogen. I had been in the dark, inexpressive world of my father. God I am a screw up.
More from Chapter Eight
I felt with my hands a table and chair, a bedside cabinet and a firm, narrow mattress. I must have been confined, I surmised, in the smaller bedroom in Coral’s suite. I tried the door handle. It gave way. Thank God. Should I open it? On the other side of the door, in all probability, was an enemy with terrifying powers. I knew that I, too, possessed psychic abilities, although I had never cultivated them. In the past, I had experienced astral projection; I had even changed my physical form in a tussle with an evil enemy. The problem was, I did not know, intellectually, how to call upon these techniques – my adoption of them had been instinctive. Perhaps practising magic was like flying. Since my first moment at the controls of Avro 504, flying had come perfectly naturally to me. My instructor had joked that I had not needed lessons; on my first circuit I had performed manoeuvres that normally took hours of painstaking practice to perfect. At the conclusion of the lesson, I had brought the Avro down, without his assistance, in a perfect three-point landing that drew applause at the edge of the airfield.
It was time. Slowly, I pushed open the door. Again, Coral’s living room was illuminated only by a glowing red headscarf. There was a faint scent in the air, Coral’s perfume, and something else – like the ripe, fusty smell of an overheated sick room. A large shape floated into focus. Coral’s couch had been pulled out into a double divan. It was covered by a glistening sheet. White was her favourite colour. There was nearly always something of that hue on or near her – a stole, a towel, a quilt. I was utterly spent. My body felt as though it had been pummelled by hammers. I feared, from a more urgent pain, that the cartilage in my shoulder that had been damaged in Paris was torn again. A blind, physical need propelled me towards the bed, whose sheet covered a long shape.
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