The Quarry (6 page)

Hol nods. ‘Yeah, that. That too. Like I said; he never did get them all transferred to digital.’ She makes a sort of small grunting noise. ‘Never exactly your go-to person when you were looking for a sense of urgency, our Guy.’

It was always strange seeing Guy looking so young in the films. They were made between 1992 and 1995 when he was only five years older than I am now – the others were only a couple of years older than I am now – so the fashions of the time, and the hairstyles and so on, are not too ridiculous (or, at least, not yet), but that still feels like a long time ago. Perhaps this is because I hadn’t been born, hadn’t even been conceived when they were made.

Back then they all looked young and fresh. You can see how they’ve changed from the people they were then to the people they are now, though I don’t know that you’d have been able to guess exactly how they would age; it’s more than just people getting more wrinkled. It’s like their bones change and their whole face alters. Maybe it’s not a bone thing. Maybe it’s muscles, and facial expressions that change. I’ve watched Guy when he’s asleep and his face is quite different when he’s in that closed-down, unconscious state. I suppose everything just relaxes, but it looks like more than that. It looks like the person is somebody else, or suddenly very old, or at least that you are getting to see how they will look when they become very old. Sometimes it looks like they’re dead.

I’ve watched a few people when they’re asleep, and they’re all the same: old-looking, or dead. I probably ought to have felt depressed at this, though at the time I felt oddly comforted, and in a strangely satisfying position of power. Also, I was usually more worried that they were about to wake up and start screaming. (I’m not a murderer or a rapist or anything; I just wanted to look, but I can reveal that people most definitely don’t like waking up in the middle of the night to find somebody staring at them from a half-metre or so away. Or even a whole metre.)

Hol is right, though: Guy has aged the most since they made those films, because of his illness. Back then he was probably the best-looking of all of them; I mean that if there was some absolute, objective standard of human beauty or handsomeness that applied across both genders, then he would have scored higher than the others. He was a golden boy then, all flowing blond locks and sparkling blue eyes, lithe and graceful and with the best voice too. The others looked like kids in comparison.

‘You sure you’re going to be okay?’ Hol asks. ‘When Guy goes. Will you be able to look after yourself?’

‘Oh yes.’ I nod. ‘I’m sure I’ll miss him, but I’ll be fine.’ It’s odd, though, because when I say this sort of thing I always get an image of myself living here alone, in this house, just me, all by myself, and that’s not what’s going to happen, because the house is going to be demolished to make way for more quarry, and I know this, but still; that’s the image I have of my life after Guy dies.

Also, I think I still find it hard to believe he’s actually going to die. I’ve watched him get worse and worse over the last few years and I’ve usually been present when the medics have delivered their sombre assessments, but even though everything points to him being dead in the next few months, it seems some part of me can’t accept it’s actually going to happen. I think it must be quite an important, if deeply buried, part of me, because otherwise I’d feel more. I mean, about him dying soon. As we stand, I mostly feel numb, and I’ve yet to break down, yet to cry properly, yet to feel any terror or impending sense of doom. Maybe that’ll change once he’s bed-bound and immobile, or in a coma, or at the moment he dies. Or later. Maybe this strange numbness is just a survival mechanism, to let me cope.

It has all made me question what I really feel for my dad. I love him, I suppose, the way you have to love your mum or your dad, the way people expect you to, and I’m grateful to him for looking after me by himself all these years, but I don’t love him twice as much; I don’t love him with all the love he might expect to be his, plus all the love that a mum might have got as well. Maybe it never works like that anyway.

Sometimes I think I love him only because he’s there, because there was never anybody else around. I once watched a TV programme about a bunch of ducklings who’d become imprinted, immediately after hatching, on a pair of red wellington boots; they treated the red wellies as if they were their parents, following them everywhere, and always expected to be fed by the person wearing them. Maybe that’s the way I love Guy.

Dad’s hinted more than once that when it seems like he’s being horrible to me, it’s just to toughen me up and get me ready for living by myself, or at least without him, and even to make me look forward to him dying, rather than getting all tearful about it.

Though, frankly, Guy being who he is, that could just be an excuse.

‘I mean, you’ll get money, won’t you?’ Hol asks, wiping hair back from her brow again. ‘For the house. There’s money coming to you, isn’t there? There isn’t anybody else.’

‘Not that I know of,’ I tell her.

‘I mean, there’s the money I’ve got for you, obviously, but there’ll be more from the house. A lot more. Should be fairly serious money, I’m imagining.’

‘There will be some,’ I confirm. ‘If he leaves it to me.’

‘Good.’ She nods slowly a few times, staring at me. I feel that perhaps she didn’t really hear the second sentence. ‘Good,’ she says again, and sighs. ‘You look tired,’ she tells me. ‘You should go to bed.’

‘I can’t, until Guy’s gone. He needs me to help him get undressed and into bed and that sort of stuff.’

‘Oh.’ She seems to think about this. ‘None of us could help him, no?’

‘Hmm.’ I try to make it look as though I’m thinking about this, even though I know the answer perfectly well already. ‘Probably best not. Unless it’s me or Mrs Gunn he kind of gets upset.’

‘Huh. That’s tough.’

I shrug. ‘Thank you for the offer. This tape.’

‘Hmm?’ she says.

‘It’s not a sex tape, is it?’ I’m really hoping it isn’t.

Hol laughs. She shakes her head once, or at least moves it. ‘No,’ she says. Though it could be ‘Oh’ that she says rather than ‘No’; it’s hard to tell. She’s still slurring her words. ‘It’s … embarrassing for other reasons … Nothing to do with sex.’ She smiles at me.

‘Fucking parliament of crows, vultures,’ Guy says as I tuck him into bed. ‘Fucking circling vultures, so-called friends.’

Guy is quite drunk. His eyes, looking large in his thinned head, appear glazed and don’t seem to be focusing well, pointing in subtly different directions as if he’s become part chameleon, though without the interesting ability to blend into the background through changing skin colour.

‘You did invite them, Dad.’ I check his meds. They’re held on the upturned lid of an old biscuit tin sitting on the bedside table. Only just held; they almost overflow. He has to take quite a lot.

‘Yeah, well, nice to have some normal people in the house for a change,’ he tells me. ‘Some decent company, adults I can talk to. The bastards are only here to gloat, though, watch me suffer.’

‘Why would they do that? They must have better things to do.’ I can see the opiate capsules have gone early; they usually do.

‘Because people are vicious bastards, that’s why. They don’t all run flow charts in their heads before they decide what to say next. They’re not all fucking Dr Spocks like you.’

I think about this. ‘I think you mean Mr Spock. After the character from the original
Star Trek
.’

‘Fuck off. You know what I mean.’

It has taken us even longer than usual to get up the stairs this evening. Usually it takes less than two minutes, with me helping Guy and him resting on each step, but tonight it took nearly three minutes. The others offered to help – especially Pris, because she used to be a nurse and still deals with a lot of old and mobility-impaired people – but it’s not really about numbers. We have applied for a stairlift device but there’s no word of it yet. Guy reckons if it ever does get installed it’ll turn up just in time to bring his coffin down the stairs, assuming he has the good grace to die peacefully in his own bed.

‘Anyway, they’re here because they’re your friends. They’re all busy people. They didn’t have to come.’

‘All right! I heard you! Take their side, yeah, why not; just you do that. Why support me, eh? I’m just your dad.’ He looks up at me from the bed. He lies half propped up against a slope of pillows and cushions because that’s the most comfortable position for him to sleep in. He stares at me. ‘You’re all just waiting for me to die,’ he says. ‘You are, aren’t you?’

‘Now, Dad,’ I begin, checking his water bottle on the bedside table is full.

‘I’m not an idiot. I’m not losing my mind. Fucking shitty horrible fucking cancer hasn’t got there yet!’ His voice has grown louder and a little higher in pitch. ‘I know you’re just waiting. I know you hate me. I know you can’t wait for me to go. I’m not fucking stupid.’ He makes a noise like a sob. ‘Don’t think I’m not fucking stupid.’

He means ‘Don’t think I’m fucking stupid’, not what he actually said, with the almost certainly unmeant ‘not’ in the phrase, which entirely turns the meaning on its head.

Up until as little as a few months ago I’d have pointed this out, because, well, it’s just wrong. However, I am learning not to do this all the time. He’s very ill, and constantly either in a lot of pain or so loaded with opiates he struggles to think straight, so he deserves to be indulged. I recognise this. Also, picking him up on this kind of minor mistake only leads to further argument and vexation, and it’s pointless. I’m not dealing with a child still learning the ways of the world and how language works; he’s a dying man. There’s nothing to be gained trying to teach him new things or reinforce stuff he ought to know because he’ll need this information for his life ahead; he hasn’t got one.

And, of course, he’s right, in a way. I am waiting for him to die. I don’t necessarily
want
him to die (my deepest wish is that things could go on the way they were, just the two of us living here, minding our own business, like we did before the cancer got so bad and spread so far and he became so dependent on me), but knowing that his death is as close to inevitable as these things get, and not far off, makes me wish it was all over with sometimes. Apart from anything else, my knowing he doesn’t have very much longer to live helps make it easier to ignore the insults and curses and the general unpleasantness that him being in this state leads to.

If I faced a lifetime of this, or let’s say ten more years – or maybe just five, or even two – I think I’d kill him, or myself, or run away.

I point at the biscuit-tin lid of drugs. ‘Have you taken the purple ones?’

‘What?’ He glances, then winces with the pain that must have come with the movement. ‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You should wait until I’m here before—’

‘Oh, shut up. I don’t know. What are they?’

I pick up the pack. ‘Larpeptiphyl,’ I read off the label.

‘Stupid fucking name. Stupid as the names in that idiot game you play all the fucking time. I think you make half of these up. Is that really what it says? Let me see it.’

‘Here.’

‘Well, where are my
glasses
? What am I supposed to do with … What have you done with my glasses?’ For the last couple of years Guy has needed glasses to see things close up. He is vain about this; he would have had laser surgery on his eyes to correct them instead if he’d been well enough.

‘I haven’t done anything with them,’ I tell him. ‘Last time I saw them they were round your neck.’ I wish they were on his head; that’s where they would be in a sit-com. ‘They’ll be in a drawer probably …’ I go to open one of the bedside cabinet drawers but he flaps a hand at me.

‘Never mind. You’ve worn me out with all this bollocks. Just let me sleep.’

I look at the pack of Larpeptiphyl, counting the empty, punctured blisters. ‘You need to take two of these.’

‘Trying to make me overdose now, are you?’

‘No. You haven’t taken the ones for tonight. See?’

‘How do you know?’

‘I counted.’

‘You counted,’ he says, as though spitting the words. I pop the purple pills from their little clear plastic bubbles. ‘Yeah, that’s all you can do, isn’t it? Count. That’s what you’re good at. That’s all you can do: just count. You don’t even have the people skills to be a fucking accountant, do you? I wasted my fucking life on you. I don’t know why I bothered.’

‘Here.’ I offer him the pills one at a time and hold the water glass to his lips as he leans forward and up and gulps everything down.

He seems to choke, and splutters. ‘All right! Don’t fucking drown me!’ He collapses back amongst the pillows. His lips look livid against the pale skin of his face. They’re a sort of strange purple-brown, like the lips of giant clams on the Great Barrier Reef. I wipe the glass, top it up from the bottle.

‘I think that’s everything. Are you all right now?’

‘Of course I’m not fucking all right! Do I look fucking all right? Look at me!’

‘I meant—’

‘You meant can you fuck off with a half-clear conscience and play your stupid fucking game and leave me to die, that’s what you meant.’

‘I think it’s time we both went to sleep.’

‘Put to sleep,’ he mutters, though his eyelids are fluttering with tiredness. ‘Put to fucking … yeah, you go. Just leave me,’ he says, voice fading. ‘Fuck off.’ His eyes are closed now. ‘Oh, fuck … I’m sorry, son,’ he says, sighing, eyes still closed, lids fluttering. ‘Shouldn’t talk to you like that. Know you’re just trying to help. You shouldn’t listen … You’ll be better off without me.’ He sighs again, as if it’s his last breath easing out of him. ‘You go. Have a nice wank. Wish to fuck I could.’ But he can’t even manage the hard ‘-ck’ sound; the word comes out more like ‘fuh’, and while I’m still tidying up the lid of drugs he relaxes at last and with a long sigh his breathing slows and his face goes that slack way, mouth opening a little, giving him that look that people get, so that he seems even older, or already dead.

I stand over him for a short while, looking down at him as he sleeps. Then I put the light out, turn the night light on, and leave.