“I get out of breath,” he said. “Have a look in the utility room. Kitchen. Turn right. Bunny Wallis. I was in the year above.”
There was a garden chair, a bin liner of unwanted clothing and a broken bedside lamp. Maybe she did remember. “Chubby Checker” they called him. She hadn’t talked to him once in five years. She wondered if this was all their fault in some obscure way. She grabbed the orange cord snaking out from under the ironing board and pulled. She said she’d bring it back as soon as she’d finished.
“Whenever you want. I’m not leaving the country.”
She bought him four bottles of Black Sheep Ale as a thank-you. Only when she was standing on the doorstep did she realise that it might not be medically appropriate but he just smiled and said, “Don’t tell my mother.”
“Does she live here?”
“It sometimes feels like that. Do you want a cup of tea?”
She said yes and was sent to make it. He remembered enough about her to be flattering—that she and Abby had run away to Sheffield, that she had a signed photograph of Shane McGowan—but not so much as to seem creepy. The milk was slightly off but he was good company. He gave her a Panzer captain from the Afrika Korps together with a magnifying glass so that she could see the details in the face.
She was going to say how much her father would like it, the neatness, the precision, but she didn’t want to think of the two men as having anything in common, because in half an hour Bunny had asked more questions than her father had asked in two months.
He said his mother had put him on a penitential diet about which he could do nothing, so she came back a few days later with a box of chocolates. His doctor would probably not be happy but it would make a change from the broccoli and the Brussels sprouts.
When she was five years old Leah’s mother had taken her to the gravel pit to watch her drown Beauty’s new kittens. It was a long walk and Leah cried the whole way, hearing them mewl and struggle inside the duffel bag. Her mother said it would toughen her up. She laughed as she held the bag underwater, not out loud but quietly to herself as if she were remembering a funny story. She wanted Leah to know what she was capable of. It was so much more efficient than hitting her. After that she could make Leah feel sick inside just by narrowing her eyes.
When they had guests her mother called her “darling.” So how could Leah tell anyone? It was fathers who abused their children. Cruel mothers were the stuff of fairy tales.
Bunny didn’t find her attractive at first. She was oddly shapeless, a skinny girl carrying too much weight. Her hair was flat and there was something sour about the expression into which her face fell when she didn’t think she was being watched. But she woke something which had been going slowly to sleep inside him over the past couple of years. He pictured her naked, moving through the house, perched on the armchair, wiping herself on the toilet, standing at the sink. He could no longer get an erection let alone masturbate so there was no relief from these images and every fantasy left a small bruise on his heart. She was kind and bought him sweet, sticky things. They never talked about his weight and she understood the tyranny of mothers. Five minutes into their second meeting he realised how badly he needed her to keep coming.
The first carer Leah met was a pinched Polish woman who didn’t offer her name and acted as if Leah were not in the room. She treated Bunny like a recalcitrant child with whom she’d been saddled for half an hour. Leah could see him flinching as she dried his hair. The second, Deolinda, was a big woman from Zimbabwe who kept up a steady stream of stories about the latest episode of MasterChef, about her uncle who had been tortured by the police back home, about the proposed landfill site in Totton…Then they were replaced by two different carers who were quickly replaced in their turn, and Leah could see that Bunny would prefer someone dour and ill-tempered if only they stuck around and knew where the shampoo was kept, took care of the models and made him a mug of sugary tea without being asked.
Her father went to the Wainwright and drank a half of Guinness three nights a week. Her father played the Blackbyrds and the Contours. Her father wore a green V-neck sweater or a red V-neck sweater. Her father smoked thirty cigarettes a day standing under the little awning outside the back door. Her father put the big plates on the right and the smaller side plates on the left and insisted that all knives pointed downwards in the cutlery basket. Her father recorded TV travel programmes and watched them at convenient times—the Great Wall of China, the Atacama Desert, the Everglades.
She hadn’t hated him when she was little. If anything she had thought of him as an elder sibling who was keeping a low profile for the same reasons she was. But now, looking back? How could you turn away from your own child? She said, “You never stuck up for me.”
Her father said, “Your mother was a difficult and troubled woman.”
She said, “That’s not the point.”
Her father said, “I think something went wrong after you were born.”
She said, “That’s not the point, either.”
He never understood that she was asking for an apology. Or perhaps he understood but didn’t feel an apology was appropriate. Either way, if you had to ask then it counted for nothing.
One morning Bunny’s mother crouched on the far side of his bed and retrieved a crackly, transparent punnet which had once contained twenty Tesco mini flapjack bites and which Leah must have forgotten to remove the night before. “What in God’s name is this?”
He said, “I’ve got a friend.”
She said, “Do you know how hard I try to keep you healthy?”
After washing up and hoovering she returned to the living room and said, “Who?”
He said nothing. He had leverage for once and wanted to savour it briefly.
“Well?”
“I used to go to school with her.”
“What’s her name?”
He was surprised by how upset his mother was, and worried that she might go to Leah’s house and confront her.
“How often does she come round?”
“Now and then.”
“Every week?”
“I have a friend. She brought me some biscuits. There’s no reason to be upset.”
She punished him by not coming round for five days but found, on her return, that Leah had done the housework in her absence, and marked her territory by leaving four crumpled Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut wrappers on the draining board.
She should have gone to London with Abby and Nisha and Sam straight after college. She’d be living in a flat in Haringey now, taking the Piccadilly Line to an office in Farringdon or Bank, winding down on a Friday evening with Jägerbombs and chicken tikka skewers in the Crypt. She might be married to someone halfway human. She might have children.
There was jubilation on Facebook when she confessed that her marriage was over, perhaps a little more jubilation than she wanted. She didn’t go into detail. Nisha said, “Get your arse down here. You are going to die in that place.”
Why didn’t she pack her bags? Was she dead already? Did the memory of that close-knit foursome at school seem less rosy now that there was a real possibility of her joining them? Or was it Bunny? He was funny, he was kind, he was grateful. For the first time in her life she had someone who needed her, and she couldn’t imagine sitting by the boating lake in Ally Pally or walking down Shaftesbury Avenue knowing she’d abandoned him to a life that was shrinking rapidly to a single room four hundred miles away.
Bunny liked her to read the paper out loud. He liked to beat her at chess and lose to her at Monopoly. They watched DVDs she picked up from the bargain box in Blockbuster. Often she would bring a cake, take a small piece for herself and make no comment as he worked his way through the rest. Sometimes she would go into the back garden to smoke and come back ten minutes later smelling of cigarettes. He yearned for her to lean over one day and push her dirty tongue into his mouth. Could you ask someone to do that kind of thing? Just as a favour? Because the thought of nev
er being kissed again tore open a hole in his chest.
One evening when they were watching a documentary about Bletchley Park Bunny’s mother let herself in. She called out a casual hello, hung up her coat, came into the living room and said, “So we meet at last,” as if this were a surprise. “I don’t think Bunny has ever told me your name.”
“Leah.” She didn’t hold out her hand.
The two women swapped pleasantries for a couple of scratchy minutes then his mother said, “You bring him biscuits.”
“Sometimes,” said Leah.
“You know you’re killing him.”
“They’re just biscuits.”
“I’ve looked after my son for nearly thirty years.”
“You don’t like me coming here, do you?” said Leah. “You want him all to yourself.”
His mother straightened her back. “I just don’t want him spending his time with someone like you.”
Bunny knew he should intervene but he was not in the habit of telling either of them what they should or should not do, and in truth he was flattered to find himself being fought over.
“Someone like me?” said Leah. “What does that mean, precisely?”
Bunny had imagined this argument many times. He had always wanted Leah to win, but now that it was happening he wondered if his mother might be right after all. Leah was not his wife, not his girlfriend, not a part of his family. She could abandon him tomorrow.
His mother stepped close to Leah and said, quietly, “You little bitch. I’ve got your number.”
On the table beside the sofa there was a diorama of five British soldiers surrounding a crashed Messerschmitt, the dead pilot slumped forward in the smashed cockpit. Bunny had spent five weeks making it. His mother swept it off the table and walked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
It was the end of summer, but instead of cool winds and rainy days a thick grey cloud settled over the town so that the air felt tepid and second-hand. Two children at the end of the street were killed by a police car chasing a stolen van. Nasir Iqbal and Javed Burrows. The rear wheels lost traction on the bend and the vehicle mounted the pavement knocking over a brick wall behind which the boys were playing cricket. He knew their names because they were painted on the street in big white letters. The driver of the car and his colleague were spirited away before the family and neighbours fully understood what had happened. The next police officers at the scene were greeted by a volley of stones and glass bottles and one of their cars was rolled onto its roof.
There was a small riot every evening for a fortnight. Through the curtains Bunny saw the blue lights of police vans and heard whoops and explosions which sounded to him more like people celebrating a victory than mourning a loss.
He decided that for the time being he wouldn’t leave the house. He did not want to find himself surrounded by an angry crowd in search of an easy target. But when the streets finally became calm once more he found he was still afraid. He told himself that he would go out when he felt stronger, but even as he was telling himself this he knew it wasn’t true.
She got back from work one Wednesday evening to find her father sitting at the dining table with his palms flat on the placemat in front of him as if he were engaged in a one-man séance. He was wearing his red V-neck jumper. He looked directly at her and said, “My trouble.”
“Your what?” said Leah.
“My trouble leg,” he said, slurring his words.
She assumed he was drunk but when she came closer she could see that the left-hand side of his face was sagging. She tried helping him to the sofa so that he could lie down but he couldn’t hold his own weight and she had to hoist him back onto the chair. He was unable to say how long he had been in this state.
The ambulance took twenty-five minutes to arrive. Her father seemed completely unbothered by the gravity of the situation. The paramedic slipped a line into the crook of his arm and held it down with a fat crucifix of white tape. The siren was on the whole way, a dreamy mismatch between the antiseptic calm and the speed with which they sliced through the world.
When they arrived at the hospital her father was partially blind and there were many words he could no longer say, Leah’s name being one of them. It was the length of time he had spent sitting at the table, so the doctor said. However long that was. After the golden hour the odds went through the floor. Leah wondered if he had realised that he was being offered a neat, uncomplicated exit and had decided to take it, because God forbid that he should ever find himself bedbound or incontinent or needing to be fed by someone else.
He had the second stroke just after midnight.
She sat in the hard glare of the relatives’ room looking at a shitty painting of a fishing boat and a lighthouse. It was the lack of justice which hurt most, the way his cowardice turned out to have been such a good game plan, the possibility that he had never really suffered.
She took a taxi back to the house but couldn’t sleep, repeatedly dropping off then crashing back into wakefulness convinced that her mother was in the room.
She rang in sick the following morning and went round to Bunny’s house. She wasn’t sure he understood but he held her while she cried and that was enough. She told him about the kittens. She told him how her mother had called her “a mistake” and “a disappointment.” She told him how her mother had made balls of lard and peanuts and hung them from strings outside the dining-room window in the winter for chaffinches and coal tits and robins. She told him how quickly the MS had progressed, how she wasn’t allowed into her mother’s bedroom during the final months, how her mother died and how Leah kept forgetting this because nothing in the house had changed.
Bunny said, “I hate my father. I haven’t seen him for twenty years. I have no idea what he looks like. But every time there’s a crowd on TV I find myself scanning the faces, looking for him.”
She told him that she had trouble sleeping. He said she could move in upstairs if she wanted, and tried very hard not to show how pleased he was when she accepted the offer.
She took Bunny’s old bedroom. He hadn’t been upstairs for a long time. The rusted hot tap in the sink no longer turned and there was velvety green fungus in the corners of the bathroom window. On the dusty sill sat a pair of rusty nail clippers, a dog-eared box of sticking plasters and a little brown tub of diazepam tablets with a water-blurred label.
The first night she drank whisky in warm milk to get herself to sleep but was woken a couple of hours later by Bunny’s snoring. She lay motionless in the half-dark. The gaps between his snores were growing longer and she could tell that something was not right. She went downstairs and pushed the living-room door open. Bunny now slept on an adjustable bed which had replaced the yellow sofa bed. The smell was rank and cloistered. She drew the curtain back and opened the smaller window.
He was lying on his back, his skin unnaturally white, his arms swimming as if he were underwater and struggling to reach the surface. His breathing stopped for three, four, five seconds then restarted like an old motor. She wondered if she should do something. His breathing stopped again. And started. And stopped. Suddenly he was awake, wide-eyed and fighting for breath.
“Bunny?” She took his hand. “It’s Leah. I’m here.”
It was the fat around his throat, the doctor said, the sheer weight of his chest, the weakness of his muscles. If he carried on sleeping on his back he would suffocate. He had to remain propped up twenty-four hours a day.
Towards the end of the second week she returned from work to find that he had soiled himself. That morning’s carer had not turned up and he could hold on no longer. She smelt it as soon as she came in. She considered quietly reclosing the door and going back to her father’s empty house. Then Bunny called out, “Leah?”
She stepped into the living room.
He said, “I’m so sorry.”
She filled a plastic bowl with hot water. Soap, flannels, toilet rolls, a towel from upstairs. She helped Bunny roll onto
his side. His flesh was raw and spotty and covered in large port-wine blotches. Some of the shit was on the sheet, some of it was wedged into the crack between his buttocks. She used wads of toilet paper to scrape most of it off, dumping the shit and the used paper in a plastic bag. She unhooked the corners of the cotton sheet and the plastic mattress protector beneath it and bunched them up, using the material to wipe him clean as she did so. She put the sheet in the washing machine and the protector into a second plastic bag.
It wasn’t as bad as she had expected. This was what she would have done for her children if life had turned out differently.
She dipped the flannels in the soapy water and wiped him, lifting the flesh to get into the folds. She towelled him dry and left him to lie on his side exposed to the air for a while. She put the flannels and the towel into the washing machine with the sheet. She bleached the plastic bowl. She remade the bed with a clean sheet and a new mattress protector from the cupboard in the kitchen. She dusted him with anti-fungal powder then let him roll back into his usual position.
He said, “You are the kindest person I have ever met.”
She found a letter from the council lying on her father’s doormat saying that the tenancy had come to an end with her father’s death and unless representations were made the house would have to be vacated by the end of the month.
She took the records to the Oxfam shop in town. “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson, “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension, “Nothing Can Stop Me” by Gene Chandler…She brought a small cardboard box home from the Co-op and filled it with the only possessions that seemed worth keeping, objects she remembered from her childhood, mostly—an owl made of yellow glass, a box of tarnished apostle spoons on faded purple plush, a decorative wall plate with a view of Robin Hood’s Bay. She locked the door and posted the keys through the letter box. She stowed the cardboard box under the bed at Bunny’s house.