Page 45 of Road Trip to the Riviera
‘Shut up. I will see you at two.’ I could hear the smile in his voice and found myself grinning.
‘Yes, sir!’
Now I’ve woken again from a light doze to find a nurse standing over me, opening up a blood pressure cuff and fastening it around my arm. The cuff inflates, squeezing hard on my upper arm, and I can feel my pulse reverberating through my whole body. She nods and writes something down.
‘All OK?’ I ask, and she gives a brief, apologetic shrug.
‘No English,’ she says carefully.
‘Ah.Tout est… bon?’ I try, nodding at her notes.
Her mouth turns down a little. ‘Oui, je pense.’
I’m none the wiser.
I can say though that I feel a lot better, despite the wooziness from the medication. I’d been feeling a strange heaviness for a few days, a lethargy that must have come from having a fever and not realising. And that seems to have lifted. I’m hoping beyond hope that this might mean I’ll be able to get out of here sooner rather than later.
The next time I wake, a tray of food is being put on the wheeled table pushed over the top of my bed. I’m helped to sit up, and I stare at the offering in front of me. Some sort of stew, a yoghurt, a block of cheese and piece of baguette. There’s a carafe of water and I pour myself a glass and sip it carefully, only realising how dry my mouth is when the liquid begins to moisten it again.
The door has been left slightly ajar and I can hear the sounds from the corridor outside. A bustling, busy atmosphere, filled with voices, footsteps, the trundle of a metal food cart. Staff call to one another, and others pass, talking urgently on phones. Watching from my bed feels a little like sitting on a riverbank watching a rain-swelled river race past. All is movement, yet I’m outside of it, sitting still and watching the world go by.
I forgot to ask Hal whether he’d told Mum or Louis about my predicament and I can’t help but hope that he hasn’t.
I’ve protected Hal from Mum over the years, as much as possible. And I don’t think he knows how much she blames him for everything that happened back then. No matter how often I tell her that ‘it takes two to tango’ or argue that we were both very young, she’ll come out with barbed comments about Hal and how he ruined my life, then ‘swanned off’ as if nothing had happened.
If he calls her and tells her I’ve fallen ill, she’ll probably find a way to blame that on him too.
Dad used to tell me that Mum just needed a villain to blame for everything. ‘It was a shock back then,’ he’d tell me. ‘For me too. You were just a little girl to us. When you told us you were pregnant we were so worried about you, about your future. Mum blamed Hal because she couldn’t bring herself to blame you. Not when you needed our help.’
I’d nod, ‘But why does she still seem to hate him so much?’ I’d ask. ‘I’ve done OK, haven’t I? And she dotes on Louis.’
He’d look at me, shake his head, his eyes kind. ‘Your mum’s a complex creature,’ he’d say. ‘We all are I suppose. I don’t think she realises just how negative she can be about Hal. I think she’s come to appreciate him in her own way. As you say, he brought her Louis. But she can’t quite forgive him, nonetheless.’
As is often the way, thoughts of Dad cause a throb of pain in my chest. I put down my fork, stew barely touched, and lean my head against the pillow.
Dad was always the one, growing up, who was more tactile; the one I ran to with scuffed knees or tummy ache. Mum would arrange the doctor’s appointments, get the medicine. But he’d be the one brushing my hair gently from my forehead until I went to sleep.
I always thought that, when my father grew old, I’d be able to return the favour. Care for him when he couldn’t care for himself. But I never got the chance.
It was such an ordinary day when he died. I was at work, Louis at university. I’d had a missed call from my father that morning, but hadn’t got around to calling him back. I was at work and pretty confident he wouldn’t expect me to return his call until later.
When my phone lit up with Mum’s name, I remember feeling annoyed; she knew that I was working on a difficult case, that I was stressed. So when I answered, it took me a moment to gauge what was wrong.
‘Sarah, it’s your father,’ Mum said.
My initial reaction waswhat’s he done now?Mum often liked to complain about something Dad had or hadn’t done; she was an expert at picking fault. ‘Mum, I’m at work,’ I said.
There was a pause. ‘I’m at the hospital,’ Mum said. I realised for the first time that her voice was shaking. ‘Your Dad. He’s not well, Sarah.’
The next hour passed in a blur. Mum explaining as best she could that Dad had had a massive stroke; that they were treating him but that it wasn’t looking good. Somehow, I managed to get a taxi to the hospital; it was just two miles away from my office, but the traffic was stacked and the journey painfully slow.
Ten minutes was all that came between me and saying a proper goodbye to the man who’d held my hand through every difficult moment of my life. Ten minutes of traffic, ten minutes when I just wasn’t fast enough to enter the building, to find him.
When I got there, Dad was in a curtained cubicle, still in the resus area. They’d changed him into a white hospital gown, with a pattern of blue squares. One of his feet was sticking out from under the cover and I pulled the sheet down a little to cover it, my hand brushing one of his toes. It felt so very cold.
Mum was sitting by the bed on a blue plastic chair, her face pale and pinched. She looked up at me. ‘He wouldn’t have understood,’ she told me. ‘Even if you’d arrived. It was… I mean, his brain was…’
But I’d still have given anything to tell Dad one last time how much I loved him, how important he was. And no matter how much people tried to reassure me about that, I knew they couldn’t say unequivocally that he wouldn’t have heard me on some level.
