Gil breathed—a slow, rasping exhalation, and a too-long gap in which Flora waited, holding her own breath. She rested back in the chair beside his bed and closed her eyes, then was jolted awake by her father saying, “I haven’t seen you do any drawing today.”
“Do you want me to do one now?”
He closed his eyes again and she took that as a yes.
When she returned with her sketch pad, the charcoal, the rubber, and her rag, he said, “Sit me up.”
She lifted him under his armpits, the folds of skin nearly empty of muscle. She drew what she saw: his head and shoulders propped up by the pillows, his prominent cheekbones, the hollows below them, his eyes smudged by black, and all the creases and lines in his sallow face. The swelling had gone now, but some discolouration remained. She looked harder this time, recording how his eyes receded inside the cavities of his skull, his thin, downturned lips, the sag of skin under his chin.
“Do you remember when I found that whale’s head on the beach?” Flora said.
Gil opened his eyes. “A real whale’s head?”
“No, plastic or fibreglass I think.”
“A toy?”
“It was life-sized. I wanted you to hang it on the wall.”
Gil shook his head.
“But you must remember.”
“No. I don’t.” His eyes moved to Flora’s sketch pad. “Let me see.” When she showed him he said, “It’s good. I look like my father just before he died, as if parts of me don’t work like they used to and other bits have fallen off.” He smiled and pushed the bedcovers away with his good hand. “I need the toilet,” he said.
“Can I bring you the bedpan? Doesn’t Nan usually bring you the bedpan?” Flora was nervous of looking after Gil on her own.
“And I always refuse it. She’ll have me in nappies next.”
Flora didn’t tell him she’d seen a packet of adult-sized incontinence pants in the airing cupboard. She offered her arm and together they shuffled down the hall, negotiating the books. She waited in the kitchen, staring at the washing Nan had hung on the line. She put the kettle on, searched in the tin for biscuits, yawned, and stared out of the window again. After five minutes Flora pressed her ear up against the bathroom door and heard her father whispering.
“Daddy?” She tapped on the wood. “Are you OK in there?”
“I’m fine,” Gil called. “Go to bed, Flo. We’ll see you in the morning.”
“Daddy, it’s the afternoon.” She crouched at the keyhole, but it was blocked by hardened toilet paper stuffed there by a seventeen-year-old Nan when she had tired of her little sister peeping in. Flora stood and knocked harder.
“It’s just your mother,” Gil said.
“Daddy.” Flora rattled the handle. She glanced down the hall, worried Nan would return soon, worried she wouldn’t. “Please unlock the door.” She heard the bath curtain being pulled and a couple of seconds later the door bolt was drawn back. Gil had his toothbrush in his hand, a swirl of striped paste on the bristles.
He moved to the bath. “Look,” he said, one hand on the edge of the watermarked towelling curtain, the bath hidden. The toilet and the sink spun around Flora; the altitude in the room was too high, the air too thin. Her father drew back the curtain with a flourish, like a conjurer delivering his most celebrated trick. The bath was empty. But the magician didn’t notice his mistake, didn’t realise that the trapdoor hadn’t opened, that the coloured handkerchief was showing from his sleeve, that the rabbit had hopped from the stage.
“Do you see her?” Gil said, looking in the mirror over the bath. “Do you see her? There, beside the sink.”
Flora saw herself and an old man, half his face yellow, grey bristles sprouting from a sagging neck, his eyebrows wild. There was no one else in the room.
“Yes,” Flora said. “I see her.”
Chapter 32
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 23RD JUNE 1992, 4:15 AM
Gil,
We had another power cut last night. The three of us were in the sitting room when the lights flickered twice and then died. While Nan went out to the road I waited with Flora, holding her hand. She still doesn’t like being inside the house in the dark.
“The whole village is out,” Nan said when she returned. “I’ll get the candles.”
“Shh.” Flora gripped me. “Listen,” she said, with such urgency that Nan and I didn’t move, waiting for something. “There’s a noise,” Flora said, “in the kitchen.” And there was a slow creak, the sound of a footstep. “It’s the loose floorboard.”
“Which loose floorboard?” Nan said.
“The one in front of the cooker.”
I could hear the terror in her voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nan said, and marched up the hallway to find the candles, and of course there was no one in the kitchen.