He was a man of many yesterdays lately counted longer by the swollen corduroy of his corner couch. It had been his bed the better part of September and kept him up for the sighs of his friend. It was nightly: nurses followed by dignified doctor’s footwork rounding the balustraded corridors would arraign themselves about his bed, relate their evenings, and perform nothing new.
Then there came a scuffle, some serious scream, then silence.
He went to wait until tomorrow.
His friend was found lying in his bent bed, wheezing starchy tugs of breath to dog-ear the mess of letters about him. He splayed a folder where dated and pocketed carbon copies of sent letters were pinched out, read, dismissed and returned.
Since a stroke stole the sick-man’s hand, he had written all letters between the man and his family. It was common fact that writing on carbon was necessary to track any inferences supposed sent. In fact, both were of the men who smelled of the same soil and soap for seventy years until flaw and age bundled them off and had been in this free to such understandings.
‘Come,’ gestured the sick-man piously.
‘Are you good?’
The question was unpicked seriously. At last, the friend flatly said, ‘I’ve never been nearer.’
‘I’ll follow at earliest inconvenience,’ he returned in a hurried joke. ‘It was like that? What did you see?’
‘Little, enough.’ He became serious and warily hoisted a folded letter. ‘I need this sent.’
He looked it over and attended its writer with a roused, confiding frown before continuing through.
To my Daughter,
I know it both your birthday the fourteenth gone, and your daughter’s yesterday. Hope she’ll find this good for lollies and chapter books. Surely now she’s losing teeth enough to give the taxman a run for my money, so I hope it small-time and soon spent. If she asks, say sent by him who held her third, who tended that warmth along to the bill rolled in his hand while writing, returned.
It is a tender dream of mine that you as much as your child once smiled when candles were counted, not blown. I reckon it crooked to bellow memory a half decade dry to prove any inch of difference. In truth, I come not so new and knowing that. But I do and as a father first cry for all ungentle touches, lopsided churches, light steadied behind little lashes all owing to a man who wasn’t much but what he was.
I make my start, saying ‘sorry’, just so, and take it unfinished with me–
‘You’re joking,’ laughed the sitting man.
The letter was set in his lap.
‘I’m more than happy to give it.’
‘She’ll be happier to have it. But they won’t come.’
‘Why should it do that?’ he postured with an empathic frown as though moneyed with lofty facts.
‘And sorry? For the road?’ scoffed the other in turn. ‘It’d be worse to send having not said that earlier. You’d be putting everything else into what could’ve been.’
‘You read so far?’
‘And no further,’ he said though narrowing his eyes. ‘I–’
‘It’s hers to have,’ dismissed the friend. ‘At some time or another, all men are in the business of making their memory. So be it if it is so late. Now –’
He went on for a while with the blind handholding of a soul perched beyond its possessor’s sight. He spoke of reconciliation and recompense emptily. His words were lost in feeling and tearless croak.
‘Jesus, you can’t be serious,’ he interrupted. ‘I get wanting to do good, but it’s done. You had your situation. I had mine. She has hers. Who’s it to help harping on how you’ve cried over her? Unhappy marriage and not seeing her as she says you should? Men as we with choices acted to their ends are spurned having them or having them out.’
‘I know I’ve said so before.’
The man reclined loudly, then softened. ‘Isn’t you at all to grope at kindness, and so you shouldn’t feel bad at having overdone it.’
‘It’s hers to have. I won’t go otherwise. Yesterday, when I was nearly done for …’ His focus unfixed and his pupils greased their orbit before jolting to the shallow plunder of startled eyes. ‘… And you’re not wrong that it seems like it’s more for them or me but maybe it’s both … better to brave that harm …’
A pacifying smile was shown. ‘Now, until that second paragraph – that bill business was nice, truly – it wasn’t half bad. I stand by you not sending letters out every second day. And though I won’t hold it against you, it’s a little selfish nagging them now, their need no more, you in yours. Maybe knocking them down a peg by putting your puffs or pouts front-and-centre, who knows.’
His friend could no longer look straight or swallow breath that wasn’t twice turned over. At last, he fell unconscious. The other didn’t see, or noticing, went on. ‘I am no nitpicker or ninny. Having seen, I see.’
He stood solemnly with the letter, fetched the carbon-pad and left.
Back in his room he felt at once an itch for remission. Redacted by the Venetians, shadowless midday gilded the window beside his bed but didn’t pass through. The ochre reeds of the lake could scarcely be seen to tine skyward like a painted picket-fence.
He sighed. He was heavy-hearted at his friend’s shift in mood and off-put by his decline – certainly not himself; the letter put that plainly. The letter checked again no further than first read felt that notion compound.
He set to writing.
A noble middle ground ought to be padded out. The second paragraph was excused, the third rewritten to a hint of apology at price of the daughter admitting first and principal fault but all felt too rich in sentiment and so he cast it aside exhaling fat with edges.
By length of life he knew himself privy to the secret discourse of all relations. Before, he had been the conscious, correcting hand – and so admired that article, mostly knuckle and cuticle now, and incensed by his similarity to the man next-door conceived to render his understanding with respect to his friend’s actual, not present feeling.
He took to it with a deeper end, and, in a remembered hand and mind wrote:
To my Daughter,
Yesterday I all but died and found things as I thought. Nothing except upended odds of lonely and mislaid hours. I saw no Father, no welcome. A great black chill, all that a room re-entered is not, remains. It is as you’d guess: bridge and catheters and comeuppance. Five-thirty tea, seven asleep in cubicle-cots by dose of doxepin.
I hear then the voice of my neighbours’ visitors: Carroll, a wife, and Richard, a younger brother. Their doors are open and flush in echoes of outwards remembrance. When they pass by, I see the stillness of their interest when my unhitched wallpaper and bare dresser are spotted, and hastily steered to a fair wind qualifying life as they’ve lived it.
And afterwards, silence.
Suddenly, he found himself thinking of old things unable to retrace his steps or stitching. He knew in his bathroom there lay toothbrushes head-to-toe – one winded, one wise – and elsewhere a fardel of hosiery, throw pillows, and spent potpourri. As everyone, he had idle parts he was at peace to hear nothing of – but heard, wished themselves known.
The pen lifted. An inundation of memories cast across his eyes and flung his head quickly upright to where the far wall was banded by sunset. He watched his murky shadow cast ahead while warmth sashed his scalp and felt with a trepidatious dryness of mouth that he was at sometime or another, not so dissimilar to his friend and leagues of others, too, overcome by an empathy of which he was both victim and omission – and wronged.
He wrote the rest and tartly hummed, ‘It is a fair share. Fairer.’
The rest was only read in writing.
Afterwards the carbon underside was pinched away, folded, addressed and sealed. He did the same with the other letter and sat them next to one another. He, of course, knew which was which, but through a tincture of ancient spite burnished in the dozen circuits of the sun since he had come here lonely, he shuffled the two until one was binned, and the other sent to the daughter.
He shut his eyes and steepled his fingers over his stomach to fall through evening with a smile. This dotting-of-i’s had squiggled his brow impishly in sleep. From his hands to his heart a vindicated coolness at having outfoxed fate coursed and stayed.
When drawing the blinds up sometime later he heard an exhale through the wall and hurried over.
His friend was alive and whimpering.
Sense was heavy; he heard the humidity threading his fingers and sterilised water and sage deafen the few steps between them.
‘I am done for!’ cried his friend, hoarse and still-hot though actually tearless.
Drawing not intimately near, he observed plainly, ‘They’ll soon be here, or it wasn’t meant to be. Wait a bit, wait.’ The friend still moaned and sputtered the same, and a trifle aggravated was told, ‘It’ll be the briefest ache.’
The friend’s limp hand pawed a thin paper, which was identified as the copy of the second letter slipped previously into the folder.
It was read wetly aloud.
I feel, if I might, shoved off to the littlest, likeliest place for such a soul as mine. You in your toady grown-up tears – send often, come seldom – your near-nesting false, your letters rot, your yuppie, plaid-bred hubby – whoever him or younger, in-arms. Which comes from out of wedlock whatnot so I shouldn’t feel so much, and in-fact do not, but still she is kept so close to your chest – her handprint and lowercase name stink sedative and a blind teeing-up. Your latter-day good, as, mind you, loved as a girl when apology was in order, still works wicked. I am throttled by the lint of that kindness. But I shouldn’t say, as well I have learnt from the women of the world that I am similar enough to deserve respect, but I do.
This is that.
Though I go, it’s not with a weight, a word for you or yours. Come or come not; wherever tomorrow takes me we go together.
Your Father
He had been austerely admiring his handywork while his friend was actively shrivelling, and seeing this, didn’t try confession, but petitioned gratitude.
‘It is awful. At my worst I wasn’t that,’ spat the friend, and from beneath his covers drew out a second letter. He possessed it a while, then whispered, ‘Worse, what then is this? Both are better facts of the other. But here,’ pointing so the other would see, ‘is where I saw heaven, and if there isn’t that there is nothing. It was never itself. It was this.’
‘I don’t have a clue,’ came a whisper and was at that, even by the intervening dimness suddenly and serenely understood.
‘If you’d read a hair more it’d all be different. Look, the sun has set. It’ll start soon.’ He swallowed a defeated huff. ‘Here. Read the rest. So far, you’ve heard but haven’t listened.’ He swivelled leftward to pass it over and flagging by the effort put his cheek to his hard pillow and dearly tried to weep again. Murmurs of sore memory were eased or waxed by the trawl of his breath. He finally uttered, ‘If they were not to come, I hoped you might. I won’t have that now.’
The letter was taken curtly and thrown on his bed while he fumbled for the light. He cursed when it couldn’t be found, and so lumbered over to the further edge of the bed where moonlight allotted a pocket.
–hoping that it, punched thorough with your having heard it, is a private infinity to qualify my being there. So did yesterday I dream of you. Mine more rub shoulders and run amok – this was memory.
When you were born I gave being a better man a burl. Once, we went for a drive during high February. Us three on the front seat, skin stuck to vinyl with windows cranked low, laughing looking ahead. We stopped and went to the bakery where you smiled between your mother and me with the second enamel of a coffee scroll. You ran between the bubblers at either end of the oval giggling and getting sick, and while summer’s heat went high and grass passed to pale ears, you sat in sight of your parents and winched a flowering weed of all its sour worth.
I am reminded of a friend of mine. I cannot do as he’d do and hold out so long or so surely. All turns silver about him, and I see myself. For you, in this, I’d hope to sever it all. Close the loop with kindness, though late and less, in kind.
The two steps to heaven are back and home. The lilies are finally in flower and must be seen to be believed.
Your Father
He steadily raised his heavy head and felt tears sluice atop his lap. His hands shook and were pale. The vastness of oblivion pressed his soul flat. The moon above the lake looked like a pearl knocking on the netherworld’s mirrored door. All spectres were nested in the dialect of locksmiths and linnets – sheer, soundless as the seal after prayer’s end. He felt the closeness of corridors and the flutter of pale moths beat his eyelashes in awakening. He too had things to say. He had heard the same life and shared the same dream. He became painfully conscious of the silence next-door and thought that if that make of man was betrayed fair-chance he was done for.
He heard a sniffle, a choke, a sigh.
He stood with the gusto of camaraderie but the pallor of penitence, turned to the door, and listened. For the longest while there wasn’t a sound, then stirred the twisting of a handle, a hurried hello, a slump, a starting-over in unsure tone, warm nearing and rightful belonging until four voices were wreathed to one sound lighting the jamb.
Once as a child he sat in the crook of a leafless eucalypt looking to the low horizon. That might’ve been a beginning, but he hadn’t ink, paper or person.
Rind of deep July night wailed while he felt himself trundling along the mortal crease, door ajar, lake alight and with the weathervane portending some farsighted way he lapped the turf there and back for the stuff that ought wrap him and her in the gauze of a descended future, not sit in cast-die silence – as the crow flies.
She remains in the margins of his dreams dustless.