‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked, my voice muffled by my mother’s leaf-patterned skirt, but she wouldn’t tell me.
‘He’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be all right again soon.’
‘What is it?’ I persisted, crying as well now because I was panicking.
‘You don’t need to know.’
I did. I did need to know. Not knowing, I felt helpless. Of course, my mother knew I would feel just as helpless if I did know, which was why she didn’t tell me.
Over the next few weeks my mind worried at this mystery like a dog working at an old knot of rags. What was wrong with my father? I watched him closely for clues but he was just the same as always with me. Whatever it was that was wrong with him grew like all secrets grow in the minds of children until it assumed terrible proportions. If it was something that couldn’t be spoken about then it had to be something to do with some part of him that was taboo even under normal circumstances.
We went out for a day to some woodland about an hour’s drive from home. My father drove in his usual calm but firm way. My mother sat wreathed in a cloud of the perfume he always gave her at Christmas. I sat in the back playing with his hat, reading the maker’s label — Dunn & Co — and stroking the feather in the chequered band. After walking in the woods for a mile or two — sometimes I ran on ahead kicking through the leaves and could hear them talking in low voices behind me — we stopped for lunch at a pine-panelled cafeteria. My father said I could have ten pence if I would eat a piece of Blue Stilton. I put it in my mouth and tried to swallow without chewing it. He gave me the ten pence but I couldn’t swallow the cheese and I had to spit it out. He and my mother laughed along with the people on the next table and he took back his ten pence.
All the time we were out I was worrying about him and guessing what might be wrong with him. I decided that for it to be such an unspeakable problem it had to have something to do with going to the toilet, so when my father announced after the cheese and biscuits that he was going to the toilet I got up and said I was going as well. I waited for a look to pass between him and my mother but there was none. I followed him nervously to the door marked GENTLEMEN. If this was going to be the moment of truth he might take the opportunity to talk to me about it. Suddenly I didn’t want to know and I almost turned back but he’d reached the door and was holding it open for me. I smelt the disinfectant and dirty hand-towels and had to go in.
My father and I stood at neighbouring stalls — the first time I could remember us doing that — and I looked, because I had to.
It was all there and I couldn’t see anything wrong. When we left the gents I was doubly relieved.
If not that though, I started thinking as we got back to the table, what was wrong with him?
I found out a couple of weeks later. I crept downstairs one Wednesday night and listened outside the lounge door as my mother and father talked. They still had the television on and the door was closed, so it was not easy to follow their conversation. But I did manage to hear the odd word and half-sentence. When I heard the word ‘Christie’s’ I experienced a sudden, awful sinking feeling in my stomach and a chill spread from there to grip my entire body. I tiptoed upstairs so the sound of crying wouldn’t alert them to my presence.
Christie’s was the cancer hospital where several of my mother’s relatives had died. My father’s aunt, also, had spent her last two weeks there. I’d never been, but the name of the place terrified me. It was synonymous with cancer, which in those days and in my experience meant suffering and death.
It had been at the back of my mind, buried deep beneath layers of denial and fear, ever since I’d known my father was ill. Even to utter the hospital’s name was to tempt fate and hasten the inevitable.
I spoke to my mother the following morning while my father was out of the house.
‘Dad’s got cancer, hasn’t he?’ I said. I was hurting too much to realise how insensitive I was being to my mother’s feelings. She looked at me for a moment, tears brimming at her eyes, but I felt angry. I wanted to be treated like an adult.
‘He has, hasn’t he?’ I persisted.
‘No, Carl, he hasn’t,’ my mother said, kneeling down and holding my arms.
‘He has leukaemia. It’s like cancer but it’s different.’ She was trying to make it seem better than it was by giving it a name which wasn’t cancer — a word which in our house was usually lip-read — but because of the Christie’s connection I knew exactly what kind of illness my father had.
‘Is he going to die?’ I asked, my voice on the edge of breaking.
‘I hope not, love. I hope he’ll be all right. If you hope so too, as hard as you can, it might help him.’
I started to cry. Standing there in front of my mother I just gave in and the tears tumbled from my eyes. She gathered me into a fierce hug. I couldn’t stop once I’d started. My eyes hurt, I was short of breath, my head ached and still the tears fell, soaking my mother’s shoulder. She stroked my hair and said, ‘What, love, what?’ when I tried to speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Ssh, ssh. Stop crying. Try and be strong for your father. It’ll help him.’
By the time he came back inside I was in my room pretending to be engrossed in making floats and my mother was polishing the brasses in the lounge.
I didn’t tell my father I knew but I gathered that my mother had told him. We never spoke about the disease or the hospital and I did my best to be strong. At night after I’d gone to bed I’d slide out and kneel on the floor and pray for him, whispering the words so they wouldn’t be heard downstairs but would be loud enough for God to hear if He was listening. I didn’t believe in God but if my father died and I’d left a stone unturned I knew I’d never forgive myself.
A few days later my mother told me my father had been receiving treatment for months. When I thought he’d been doing shift work he was actually walking to Navigation Road, getting a train to Stretford, then a 22 bus to Christie’s. He didn’t take the car because the treatment left him feeling too groggy to drive home afterwards. And he refused the ambulance they offered to take him home in so that I wouldn’t look out of my bedroom window and get the shock of my life.
When I woke up in the abandoned ice rink, slumped on a wooden bench, Stella had come off the ice and was wearing a big old blue sweater. She’d exchanged her skates for a pair of heavy boots, and a pair of thick woolly tights. She made me a cup of what passed for coffee in the City. It tasted like dust and was pitch-black — ‘There’s no milk’ — but it was hot and wet.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her when we’d been talking for a while.
‘Most people can’t remember how they got here,’ she said. ‘They’ve just blanked out on it. But I still can. The details have gone but I can still just about remember the big picture.’ She sipped her own coffee. ‘I was a skater. It was all I lived for. I was no good at anything else and I dreamed of skating for England. They wrote about me in the local paper. I was prodigiously talented, they said. But I went too far. I did a quintuple salchow one day at the local rink. It’s not supposed to be possible. It means you spin five times in the air. It’s just not possible. But I did it. I got enough height and I was light enough. Somehow I did it. I knew I’d done it. I felt sick when I landed.
‘Only one person had seen me. I saw this woman staring at me like she’d seen a ghost. Her mouth hanging open, her eyes all wide. She’s here now as well. I’ve seen her a couple of times but she doesn’t remember a thing. I tried to talk to her but she was suspicious so I’ve steered clear ever since.’