Cleaning Up (32 page)

He gave a half smile at Young’s cod Geordie. Young was impossible to like even when the prick made the effort.

Young gathered up his folders making ready to go and Darrin turned towards the door.

Young called out to his back, ‘oh yeah, one thing has come in, from the Barrington. I almost forgot to tell you.’

Darrin felt some electricity run from the small of his back to his shoulders, he turned back to face him.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah - well, maybe.’

Young continued.

‘That scrote you and Moz chatted to - Baz, Bazzer Dougan.’

‘Yeah,’ nodding at him to get to it - his breathing now slightly quickened and shallow.

‘Disappeared…his missus called up the station this morning.’

‘Really, fuck! That is news.’

‘We’ll see, like I said, maybe it could prove to be nothing.’

Darrin turned back towards the door ignoring Young’s blandishments, feeling slightly giddy with the implications of it.

It turned out there was no maybe about it and Bazzer Dougan didn’t stay missing for very long. The call came in before he’d even made it down to the Quays. Dougan had been found by a dog walker in some bushes in Rosetta Park - his pants pulled down, his cock hanging out of his boxers and a stab wound to the heart. Crystal meth, a fair bit of it too, was found in his pant’s pocket.

The park was a well-known beat and that was the picture that quickly became the party line around the station. Bazzer quickly pigeon holed as a closet shirt lifter, which tied in nicely with the possible procurement of kids and Dalton’s party scene. It was convincing but not, Darrin thought, that convincing, all a bit too convenient and too pat, like there
was a big fucking neon sign pointing the way for them. He thought of talking to Mozzer about it but dismissed that option without giving any real consideration as to why all that shit with Moz had left things not feeling right. It was uncomfortable between them now and it was well beyond the occasional bout of irritation that they had had with each other. He’d have to wait, Darrin thought, take his time.

When Tommy turned his mobile back on a series of alerts told him that he had a lot more messages than he would have anticipated after just a weekend away; Jimbo, Johnny Buck, Nev and Linda, Mick’s next door neighbour, had all contacted him to say variations of the same thing. His dad was decamped in the local hospital. Cobbled together, the messages had given him a composite sketch of what happened with his old man while he was away in Brighton. Mick hadn’t been seen by anybody on the Thursday and Friday and his lounge room curtains had remained drawn throughout both of those days, which was an unusual event in itself. Linda, a little concerned, had knocked on his door Saturday morning but left it late as she knew that Mick enjoyed a lie in. She thought that she could hear the murmur of his radio but there was no answer and the curtains remained closed again throughout that day too. Saturday evening, now worried, she’d called Johnny Buck and Johnny came over, JB knocking hard and long at both the back and the front doors. The two of them had speculated that Mick might have gone away for a few days but he usually told Linda if that was to be the case. Sunday lunch time Johnny Buck had grabbed Nev from the boozer and they had gone back up to Mick’s house. Johnny had made an executive decision when they had, again, received
no answer - quickly smashing in the front door to find Mick slumped in his recliner - immobile, dehydrated, soiled, out of it and barely conscious.

Tommy was down at the hospital within fifteen minutes of listening to the calls, he quickly ascertained Mick’s ward and the nurses on the ward desk let him straight in to see him, although it was still out of the visiting hours. The old man was asleep; gaunt, parchment pale and parchment frail. But, all up, he didn’t look too worse for wear and the old fucker was still kicking. Tommy felt a wave of relief, it looked like it had been a close call.

He came back in the evening and Jimbo and Johnny Buck were already there at the bedside, chatting with the old man who was propped up in bed, listening to JB talk with that amused, indulgent look in his eyes, which he often reserved for Buck.

‘Ten percent truth, ninety percent bullshit and hundred percent entertaining,’ was Mick’s assessment of Buck’s meandering tails of mischief and derring do. Jimbo stood back to let him in and he bowed down to give the old man a quick, gentle embrace.

The old man gave him a soft ‘hi,’ and a little ‘what can you do,’ raising of the eyebrows.

‘How you feeling then Dad?’

Another shrug, ‘Alright I guess - not as good as you I reckon,’ Mick gave him a wintery smile/grimace - an unusually fatalistic one at that.

Johnny Buck filled in some clinical details, ‘they’ve got fluids in him Tom - he’s looking a lot bloody better than he was.’

Tommy turned to JB and motioned with a flick of the
head that they go outside to chat.

JB’s good cheer disappeared as soon as he knew that they were out of the old man’s eye line.

‘He were a fucking mess Tommy, musta been there a few days the doctors reckon. They think he may have had a fall somewhere in the house, made it to his chair then just sat there, couldn’t move his legs at all the poor bastard.’

Tommy pictured, not for the first time in the last hour or so the phone on the coffee table that would have been within easy reach of his dad’s right elbow. Again, he was thinking squarely about the fact, and the implications of the fact that the old man had made no attempt to alert anyone to his predicament. He was sure that Mick had made a conscious decision to let it all go and he, hundreds of miles away in bloody Brighton had clearly heard that decision, ‘this is what it feels like to die,’ sent to him through the fucking ether - no degree of separation.

Tommy patted JB on his wide bony shoulder, ‘thanks John, he’ll be right, you know what he’s like, a tough old sod he is.’

‘Aye, yer right son, yer right enough. He had us worried though, a fucking mess he were.’

‘They X-rayed him yet?’

‘Don’t think so, I asked him but he said he didn’t know - probably a bit out of it with the drugs and that.’

They turned and went back in to the ward and for the next hour they chatted like four old mates propping up the bar. Mick warming up to it a little bit, not talking that much and, at times, a little halting and mixed up in his speech. Tommy had never heard that before from Mick.

His dad had slivers of brown lodged under the fingernails
on both of his hands - Tommy popped back to the nurses’ desk and commented on that, asking them what the story was.

The young nurse on duty told him that he’d been soiled when they brought him in. He pointed out that, to a degree, he still was and they told him that due to Health and Safety issues/regs/fucking concerns, she no longer provided that kind of care for the patients.

Tommy had a ‘have I slipped into a parallel universe’ moment but left it alone - he needed his energy for other things. He’d bring some clippers and a nailbrush in the next day and get the old man sorted out. The nurses told him that they would be onto the X-rays tomorrow and they would give him a blood transfusion too, after that they’d know more about what was going on with him.

When he got back to the bed Mick had nodded off and they quietly left him to it.

For the next few days Tommy did a run over to see him at lunch, Pauline had no issue with the need for the extra time off. He stayed at the Centre till six then he was straight back to the hospital for the evening visiting hours. The old man had noticeably perked up with the series of blood transfusions and was looking fresh and in the pink. Mick had people with him every time he visited - a rotating roster of Nev, Jimbo, JB, old Lenny from the railway, the boys from the blues band, Drink Gorman and an assortment of other regulars from his various watering holes. Linda, her daughter and even Di, Mick’s many years past old flame had shown up, she was still fetchingly tasty too - much closer to his age than Mick’s.

During the visits Mick was listening a lot more than he
was talking, there were no displays of recalcitrance from him and he was ever the gent with the nurses. Mick always did put women on a pedestal. The old man was rallying the troops the best that he could, lots of winks and thumbs ups - trying to minimise the fuss around him in as much of an energy saving way as possible.

Tommy saw the specialist on Thursday. He was a slightly diffident Asian guy, maybe his age, maybe a bit younger. They parked off in a non-descript room, which was located just around the corridor from ward’s reception area. The small windowless room housed a half dozen or so reasonably comfortable newish looking battleship grey chairs. The walls were filled with the usual NHS paraphernalia promoting health awareness, handy hints and vigilance. Without any fanfare or pre-amble the doctor told him that the X-rays had shown that Mick had brain cancer - secondaries, he said. They hadn’t found the primary and there was a suspicion that there was some internal bleeding too, probably as a result of a fall. They were reluctant to perform any invasive surgery on a frail seventy six year old. The guy gave him a grave, unreadable look though there was not much need for a postscript after that.

Deep down he’d already known it, known it ever since Mick had opened the door to him some eighteen months ago, and Tommy absorbed the impact of the news relatively lightly as if somebody had just flicked him across the chops.

‘How long,’ he asked, ‘are we talking – months? A year?’

‘In my estimation six months would be the maximum Mr Cochrane. It’s hard to say though and we don’t like to speculate about such matters. It might only be weeks even but it’s impossible to say.’ He shrugged a kind of sorry at him but
there was no way to gild it.

Weeks!

He thanked the doctor who stood, came over to his chair to shake his hand with a light cool grip whilst placing his left hand for a few moments on his right shoulder - the guy told him that he was sorry, very sorry.

After a few moments alone he made the short walk back to the ward. Linda was at Mick’s bedside fussing over him in her low-key good-natured way.

Tommy took the chair between Mick’s bed and the long ward window that looked out to the north-eastern fringes of the town and on up to the moors. He leaned over the bed rails and rested his hand on his father’s forearm. Mick looked at him a little quizzically but he was OK with it.

He told Linda the bottom line when they left the ward and she immediately burst into tears, he held her and they lightly rocked together for a while, impervious towards and uncaring about the flow of activity that swept on around them.

He went home but he didn’t eat. He put on some music that he didn’t hear then went to his bed to lay down and, finally, in the dark and in the silence he wept hard and long for his old man. Mick was on his final journey.

Tommy was the first one in to see him on the Saturday. The ward was busy today with lots of family milling around the beds. He’d had an update from the nurses - yesterday they had tried some light physio’ on him and the old man couldn’t use his pins at all and the prognosis for mobility was not good. Mick was a realist - he would know what that meant - no going home.

They sat quietly together for a while; after all they had
had half a lifetime of shared silences. Tommy was sat again with his back to the wall-length window taking in the movements and postures of those attending to their ailing loved ones.

His old man was awake and he’d managed a bit of food this morning - some pale scrambled eggs washed down with a red jelly for afters.

Tommy leaned in over the bed rail feeling the weight of all those soon to be shed tears pressing against his eyes and tapped his old man on the shoulder. Mick turned his head and looked at him and Tommy delivered the words that he had incessantly replayed in his mind for the last twenty-four hours.

‘You know Dad, you can let go if that is what you want to do. You don’t have to stick around mate - it’s OK, you don’t have to, not for me or for anybody else you don’t.’

Mick looked levelly at him and, for a moment, Tommy wasn’t sure that it had registered with him. Then Mick gave him a brief nod and turned his head back to look briefly over at the guy in the opposite bed to his, and then he looked up at the ceiling and kept his gaze there. A few moments lapsed and then Mick reached over with his right hand to pat the back of Tommy’s and then Mick kept the hand there.

Drink and Nev showed up some ten minutes or so later. Nev with a couple of books for Mick, one of which was a biography of George Best, Mick rolled his eyes at that but thanked Nev for it anyway. They shot the shit for a while and Tommy left a few minutes before visiting time was over. He turned in the doorway to the ward to look at the tableaux of the three friends - then he went straight home, empty, spent - yet somehow unburdened too. He’d said what had
needed to be said.

Tommy saw the change in him the next day. It was amazing really, powerful testimony to how the body followed the mind. Death was now clearly showing on the old man’s face. Mick had started to incrementally step away, drawing back from this mortal coil. Over the next few days there was little talk from him, just the odd nod and a cheery thumbs up. The conversation of his visitors flowed over, across and around the old man as he serenely lay there in his bed, the ailing King as still and calm as a rock in an eddying stream.

Every night, as soon Tommy lay down in his bed he asked for his old man to let go - in fact he willed it. He couldn’t bear the thought of a protracted struggle both for Mick’s sake and, perhaps selfishly for his own sake too. He embraced the overwhelming helplessness. No matter what he wanted he could not do a fucking thing to prevent it. It was all beyond his wishes and well beyond the force of his will. After another week in the ward they transferred Mick over to the hospice, which was located a couple of miles away from the hospital, Mick was obviously beyond their care now. On the day of the transfer Tommy had taken the afternoon off work and made the fifteen minute drive over there from his flat. The hospice was located on a large block of landscaped grounds, a single storey building flooded with lots of light and suffused with a feeling of space and tranquillity, everything that took place in there felt calm and unhurried.