It’s my father…

It’s my father who tells me that last piece of story.

I didn’t know it before now.

He tells me it haltingly, in pieces, and like he’s been waiting to.

I’m on my phone, holding it up, visiting him in hospital virtually from his own kitchen. A doctor in a mask and a face-shield speaks to me first.

She says he’s not out of the woods yet but that things look much brighter. I thank her. Then Viola in her mask and face-shield props the hospital iPad up in front of him. I thank her. I thank them for everything because any of this and all of this is miraculous.

Now he’s speaking to the iPad, to me, through a mask, about a history this close to me that I didn’t even know I had.

But were they rebels, then? I ask him after he tells me.

Were –? he says.

He closes his eyes, screws them up. He’s not good yet with questions.

I flinch at my own stupidity. I take my phone and show him the dog in her basket again instead.

Desperate for a walk, I say. I’ll take her as soon as I can.

Still at mine, then, he says. Good. Make yourself home.

This is how we started our conversation some minutes ago, me showing him the dog in her bed, the dog hearing him, rousing herself then looking blank at the phone, him saying, you’re still at mine, that’s nice, me telling him about the unexpected visitors I have at my own house and him saying,

hospital me. Hospitable you. Stay at mine. Make yourself home. Tins in the garage. Tuna, beans, corn. Help yourself. Bacon. Soup and mince.

The freezer. Do the dishes. Do them properly. Check they’re clean. Wipe down. Sideboard. Do it as you go.

I promised him I would wipe all the surfaces clean and told him I’d be in to see him as soon as I was sure I was negative, and he said, negative. Isolated. Yes. My fault. I’m to blame. Not your mother. I was the wrong man. The wrong time. Hopeless. My fault.

Don’t talk rubbish, I said.

We’d no choice, he said. Your mother especially. She’d no choice.

That’s when he told me in bits of broken sentence the story of my mother and the doctor.

Now he squints at where he can see me on the screen, which means he’s looking down and off to the side of me rather than at me, and he shakes his head and says,

away with the fairies.

You’re back now, I say.

Dreamed you were here, he says. You told me words.

That was real. I did. That wasn’t a dream, I say.

Then I was on a bird, he says. Or was it a word. Hung on it for dear life. Holding its neck. Dear life! High above trees we went. Oh, marvellous.

I could see the roofs of, of. You know. Houses I’d made. Saw them from above.

Viola appears on the screen of my phone too.

Two more minutes, Mr Gray, she says. Two more minutes, Sand.

Tell me, my father says.

What would you like me to tell you? I say.

His eyes look bewildered again. My chest hurts to see it. So I tell him about the good weather and how everybody is acting like lockdown never existed, and that when I was driving around on one of the sunniest days yet I drove past the park and it was as full of people as it would be if no virus had ever happened, and that as I’d passed the Co-op I’d seen on the pavement a young woman come shooting out of the doors of the shop running so fast and in such a flimsy skimpy top that one of her breasts broke loose from her clothes and bounced up and down as she ran, she was running like an Amazon maiden, she was full of glee, she had a bottle of wine in each hand and behind her, too far behind her to catch her, a security man and he was running like crazy too.

My father barks so big and sudden a laugh that Viola comes running over to check he’s okay.

I’ll come and see you as soon as I know I’m clear to, I tell him.

He nods in his mask then Viola waves. The screen freezes on her waving hand and his eyes next to it looking down, as if not at me at all, though to him what he’s doing is looking as at me as he can.