TWO

Not that I had ever been in anything you could call doubt about the nature of my own true father. Careering in slow motion up in bed, on impulse I checked to see if he had changed out of his boots before coming to town to visit me.

‘Whit’s up? Ye’re no tender still?’

‘Not at all. I was just easing myself.’

He stared down at his feet as if he had been reading my thoughts. If he had been wearing his boots, they would have carried an edge of dried sharn in each welt as a souvenir from the byres of Trailtrow.

‘Aye . . .’ he said without looking up. ‘Ye’re over it then?’

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

There was a pause.

‘Well. That’s fine.’

He sighed.

‘Looking after you all right?’

‘Oh, sure. They’re . . . fine. No problem. If you have to be in hospital, this must be as good as you’ll get. On the National Health at least.’

‘I’ve never been in hospital,’ he said, changing the subject. It was a rule of my father’s not to discuss politics. I had never asked him why he had that rule. There had been a time when I had been wee and you did not question your father’s rules; and a time when I had been older and learned to keep the questions to myself; and there had been a time when I did not care why he had made one rule or another for himself. Shifting up in one piece to hold straight the clamp of stitches on my belly, it occurred to me the time I was in now was the one where I wouldn’t ask in case he told me politics were not for the likes of him.

‘Lying in your bed at this time o day’s no for the like o me,’ he said grinning companionably.

‘Oh, Christ!’ I groaned.

‘Whit’s up?’ he cried in alarm, starting out of his seat.

Visitors all around looked at us. The man in the next bed, a saturnine barber with varicose veins, said something out of the side of his mouth. A girl laughed, but she was at the far end of the ward and it must have been about something else.

‘For God’s sake, faither, sit down!’

He subsided without altering his unmasked concern.

‘Something’s wrang wi ye or ye widnae hae made that noise. I’ve heard a pig dee happier. Ye’d a pain that time, tell the truth.’

‘A wee pull on the stitches when I moved. Nothing to worry about.’

‘I wouldnae just take that for granted.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Times they’re careless devils in hospitals. They wouldnae hae left one o the wee dichtan cloots in ye?’

‘A swab!’

‘Just that. One o the wee cloots. I’ve heard o that. It could be inside ye festeran away.’

‘Come on, faither, don’t be daft.’

He gave me an offended look and sat back pretending to study the bottle and glasses on the bedside cupboard. For an idiot second, it seemed to me his eyes had filled with tears. I must have been more ill than I had realised.

‘I’ve had a shake,’ I explained.

‘What was it they cried it? Not just your appendix . . .’

‘Peritonitis. Without any pain until it happened. No pain no warning, so I should be dead.’

‘You were lucky wi your landlady.’

I thought about that.

‘Everybody said I looked terrible. I remember everybody saying I’d gone a terrible colour. It was still luck, though, that they called a doctor who put me in an ambulance instead of giving me four aspirin.’

Somewhere in the middle of that my father lost interest.

‘I’ve never been in a place like this in my life,’ he said looking round. ‘It’s the work like. Out in the open in all weathers.’

I had a rough idea of my father’s age, and an exact one that he appeared ten years older than he should. He had been serving a sentence to hard labour since he was born; eighth child of a farm worker and a serving lassie in one of the two rooms plus outside lavatory of a tied cottage half way up a dirt road. I imagined it as looking more or less like the house my sister and I were born in – less than half way up the dead-end road to Trailtrow home farm.

‘You’ve had your share o fresh air,’ I said.

‘And never a day’s illness.’

We spent a while looking around. Only two visitors were allowed at each bed and there was an occasional bustle of folk changing place. The barber’s fat wife went out and a young woman came in instead, bringing a small boy. She sat just behind my father and I stared at her crossed legs until the barber stopped grinning and talking. She would be his daughter, I guessed.

Abruptly, my father made the dry noise I recognised as his chuckle.

‘That fool Thomson!’ My mind went blank then cleared. Thomson had come as dairyman. He had got the cottage my father had been wanting for years. It wasn’t an enormous ambition, but the in-comer Thomson was due the better house being a skilled man where my father was the general labourer, what they called in some parts of the country an orra-man – a do-everything man. ‘That Thomson! I saw him on the other side of the road last Saturday. I was in the town. He didnae see me mind, but I spotted him. Ye couldnae hae missed him wi his gloves an his driving jacket up tae his bum. Ye’d hae thought he’d never seen a farm end aa his days. I waited till he stopped at a corner an just roared over, Hey, then, Jacky, did ye mind tae muck oot the byre the morn? He pretended no tae hear but his lugs lit up like traffic lamps.’

It was a relief when the bell went. My father jumped up at once, not waiting to be chivvied away by the nurses.

At the bed end he hesitated. ‘I’ll tell your mother you’re looking fine then.’

‘Sure.’

‘She was right sorry she couldnae manage. She, eh, she . . . couldnae.’

‘Tell her I’m fine.’

‘Aye.’

There was no danger of loving my mother to excess; and I could not imagine anyone ever being impressed enough by my father to hate him.

If I had a problem, it was only that this pale thing I felt for my father might be what other people called love.

There was no reason for me to expect anyone at the evening visit. I had scrounged something to read from the fat man on the other side of the barber. ‘Are you getting up to help?’ he had asked me after the afternoon visitors had left. He was pushing a trolley of teacups. ‘Up? Me?’ ‘They’re very short of staff. It helps if we all muck in.’ ‘I don’t take sugar,’ I said. He seemed to be a cheerful lunatic, and I borrowed a bundle of his paperbacks, sagebrush and gunplay on grey paper.

I was hiding on the range from the barber and his visitors back for the evening when I saw Kennedy pass between the swing doors. It was horrible luck that he had somebody to visit in this ward. I slumped low in the bed and read the same sentence twice over: ‘ “If any durnfool foreigner ever invades into these parts,” Paps said, “I just reckon the boys’ll take their rifles and head for those mountains back there.” ’ As the white man said to the Indian, I reckon this treaty ain’t big enough for both of us.

Kennedy loomed into the corner of my eye. Would my stitches burst if I jumped out of bed and made a hobble for it?

‘I’ve brought you a bottle,’ he said, sounding very Belfast and aggrieved.

‘A bottle?’

If he hit me with it, dear God, let it be on the head.

‘It’s a bottle of squash. You get thirsty after an operation.’

He took the chair from the bed and pulled it up beside me.

‘It’s the anaesthetic,’ he explained, sitting down. ‘It dries you ^up.’

‘Thanks for the squash. Are you sure?’

‘Sure of what?’

‘That it’s all right. I mean if you meant it for someone else – I wouldn’t mind. Were you surprised to see me in here?’

‘You’re not still delirious, are you?’

‘No. I’m fine. They took it out.’

I gestured ambiguously towards my middle.

‘You’re still sweating.’

I dabbed and a line of sweat streaked my fingers.

‘You were sweating that night surely.’

‘I wasn’t well.’

‘You were not. Another three hours, the doctor told us, and you’d have been dead. The poison was pouring through you though you knew nothing about it.’