When he was home but not well enough to sit with my mother, he would be up in his bedroom, which was now a sickroom. I didn’t go near it, if I could help it. Once I heard him calling me and at first I tried to ignore it. I looked out of my window at my mother kneeling down in the soil and tearing away at the bindweed that was choking her garden. Whenever she thought she’d destroyed a section it always grew back stronger than before, and it spread so quickly she was unable to keep up with it. But, being my mother, she didn’t give up. It wasn’t in her nature.
My father was still calling me. I went and stood outside his bedroom door, thinking that if he didn’t call again I’d leave him.
‘Carl.’ I could hear the effort he was putting into trying to make his voice sound normal.
I turned the doorknob and went in. The curtains were drawn across the windows even though it was mid-morning. Drawn curtains with daylight filtering through them have always depressed me since then.
‘It hurts my eyes,’ he said, lying on his side facing the empty half of the bed, his head completely bald.
The room smelt stuffy and damp. The illness was causing him to sweat a lot; my mother changed the sheets every day. I stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from one leg to the other, wondering what he wanted to say.
‘You mustn’t worry, Carl,’ he said eventually. ‘Neither you nor your mother must worry about anything. I’ll be up and about soon.’
His words rang hollow but in fact he was right. By the end of the week he was dressed and feeling much better. He looked like his old self. My mother’s face was gaunt and tense, as if she were expecting him to relapse at any moment. I was more naive, hoping the illness was in remission.
He started taking me to new places. I was still on my summer holidays so we had plenty of time. Sometimes my mother came with us and tried to enjoy herself, but with her it was as if I could see through the costumes and make-up and around the back of the set. The big man she’d loved all her life was dying. She knew and I knew it, even if he smiled and tilted his hat, and it was too painful for her. One day when my father was out — getting treatment — I caught her looking through old photograph albums. The fading brownish snaps of the two of them honeymooning on the north-west coast. The family groups in which the baby was me, but I was still too young to be able to see myself like that. My mother and father’s life before I was born and while I was tiny had always been a series of still images as far as I was concerned, but now I realised they’d had a life together and they were looking at the end of it coming up to meet them before they were half done with it.
I went into the garden and tugged at a fresh patch of bindweed.
My father took me walking in the Peaks, bog-trotting across the crumbly peat of Black Hill, clambering up the dried-up Kinder Downfall and wandering around lost in the mist on top of Kinder Scout. One Wednesday night he said we were going somewhere special. I asked if Mum was coming with us and he said it wasn’t her type of thing. This was at the tea table and my mother was there, smiling and nodding.
‘I know you’ll enjoy it though,’ she said to me, passing me the plate of buttered malt loaf.
As I was putting my anorak on and my father was buttoning his trench coat I saw my mother mouth something at my father. He nodded and said, ‘I’ve got it.’ I looked at his coat and saw something bulky in the pocket. I had no idea what it was and I didn’t ask. My father put his trilby on, tilting it in the hall mirror, and we stepped outside into the still-warm evening.
‘Why do we need coats?’ I asked.
‘It might not stay warm where we’re going,’ my father said as he led the way to the bus stop. I thought about asking why we were going on the bus instead of in the car, but thought that, like with the bulky thing in my father’s coat pocket, it might be better not to ask. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by finding out too early.
It was already quite late in the summer holidays and the sun was setting as we rode towards town on the 263 bus through the suburb where I was born and later past the end of the road where my father was born. I glanced at him and he looked down and smiled at me from under the brim of his hat, then looked back out of the window. I wondered what was going through his mind. His face looked calm. He was probably excited by the thought of where we were going and how much it would mean to me. But he must also have been plagued by thoughts of the underlying reason for making this trip. I had already sensed on our walking excursions in the Peaks that he was trying to cram into a few short months the activities a father and son might normally spread over several years.
I didn’t twig where we were going until we got off near Moss Side and walked down narrow terraced streets that soon were resounding to the cobble-slap of Doc Martens and trainers as hundreds and soon thousands of men and boys in football scarves streamed in towards Maine Road. We stopped at a corner and my father reached into his pocket and pulled out a brand-new sky-blue, maroon and white striped scarf. As he tied it gently around my neck and I looked at his coat collar, unable to meet his eyes, I could hear him wheezing. He straightened up, ruffled my hair and we walked on.
I looked down back entries as we passed them. Fans strode out of each one to thread into the main flow. It was a great feeling, to be part of this huge mass of people all going to the same place, carried along on a tide of anticipation. I was glad of the scarf — it made me feel I belonged, just as my father had known it would.
Soon I could hear the roar of the crowd in the stadium and my heart beat fast. There was a lump in my throat that was only partly due to the occasion. We rounded the last corner and there was the ground, rearing up massive and monumental before me. I’d been a fan for years but going to games was never even a consideration because we couldn’t afford it. My father bought me a programme and as we reached the top of a flight of steps I suddenly saw this huge shocking expanse of green, vivid under the spotlights. I looked at my father and I saw the same innocent surprise in his eyes as well. I had a thought.
‘How many matches have you been to?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he began. I could see him weighing up alternatives. ‘I mean, when I was a boy…’ He rubbed his nose.
I looked back at the pitch and in a small voice he said, ‘I haven’t been before.’
I gripped his hand for a moment.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning and leading me away. ‘We’ll have to get to our seats. Don’t want to miss the kick-off.’
The match was almost unbearably exciting. I watched my heroes in action. I was close enough to hear them calling for the ball. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d lost but they won, 3–1. We moved up two positions in the league that night and I took a big step closer to my father.
It was painful but I learnt a lot from both my mother and father in those weeks, about love and how to treat those who are precious to you.
I ran out into the night and the raging storm, careless of dogs and police and vigilante patrols, intent only on putting as much distance as possible between me and that house. The body in the bed. The rooms full of blood. The telephone that may or may not have allowed me to hear Annie Risk’s voice on the other end. Even if it was her voice she certainly couldn’t hear me. In the confusion I gave in to fear and just ran.
Maybe I was lucky. Perhaps I had a guardian angel or I was blessed with a good sense of direction. Possibly the map was as much inside my head as printed on a scrap of paper. Whatever, however, I found my way back to Stella’s abandoned ice rink. I yanked the door open and tore at the corrugated iron.