He quickly came to appreciate that Kay had more than pulled her domestic weight—lightly, reflexively, without complaint. But the mundane tasks he’d imagined would grow insurmountable proved a salvation. Laundering his clothes, tidying the kitchen, and shopping for provisions filled and ordered his days. He grew to resent the intrusion of these monotonous chores only once his memoir got underway.
The project soon absorbed him to the point that he was even able to put out of mind his precarious (which was to say, disastrous) financial position. After taxes and his daily expenses, the whole of his monthly pension couldn’t service the enormous remortgage that had paid for the couple’s charitable contributions, generous parental support, and holidays. The state bereavement payment bought him some time, but once the pittance was extinguished he allowed the bank notices to pile up unopened. Living under the assumption that there was no future had become a habit.
Cyril was no Luddite, so he was hardly buffeted by stacks of spiral notebooks jagged with crimped, manic printing. Nonetheless, the size of the chapter files on his computer burgeoned. He was at least able to constrain the reminiscences about his wartime childhood and ascetic adolescence. (Rationing lasted until 1954. Now, that was “austerity,” a word much abused during the twenty-teens. He was no fan of the “bedroom tax,” but at least housing benefit claimants penalized for a spare room could still buy butter.) British television had long wallowed in the history of this era, and he was loath to further feed the nauseating nostalgia for plucky, resourceful, stiff-lipped England. But once he hit his professional years, his views on what did and didn’t work in the NHS consumed his hard drive like yeast eating sugar.
Under the working title Fit for Purpose, the manuscript might have remained marginally under control—although Cyril was already contemplating two volumes—when at around the 200,000-word mark he veered into Brexit and fell in a hole. He imagined that he could write himself out of it, filling the pit with his fecund opinions and scrambling up the other side. Thereafter, he planned to delve into the poor preparation, carelessly alarmist epidemiology, and disproportionate public hysteria that contributed to the coronavirus debacle. Finally, he would divulge to the reader the pact he’d entered into with his wife, then explore the many reasons why quitting life at eighty was so sensible (the case somewhat hampered by the fact that the author making it was eighty-two). In the closing pages, he would reveal the sorrowful outcome, thereby ending the memoir on a poignant and confessional note. But in order to reach this climactic bare-all, he had to claw through his exasperation with British intransigence in trade talks, the sentimental overvaluation of the fisheries, and the terrible yet ineffable spiritual loss of exile from the European Union.
Flailing through this digressive “chapter” that after reaching 120,000 words still showed no sign of having exhausted itself, Cyril began putting in longer hours, hunching over his computer with a cold bacon butty at elbow until two or three a.m. It was in the vicinity of this witching hour that he felt an odd palsy on the right side of his face, whilst his right forefinger had an unaccustomed difficulty reaching the Y on the keyboard. The print on the screen danced, and his extensive elucidation of the many challenges facing the European continent that could only be tackled through concerted supranational action—migration, terrorism, further outbreaks of contagion—no longer quite made sense. Arising for the eternally futile cure-all of a glass of water, he stumbled dizzily and landed on the floor. He had a splitting headache. Doctors seldom regard the copious advisories they dish out to their patients as having anything to do with them personally, so that if anything Cyril took longer than mere punters would have taken to conclude that, yes—it was an insult to a medical man who should have earned himself out of the squalid, quotidian ailments that afflicted the hoi polloi—he was having a stroke. But by that point he had lost command of his limbs, and he was nowhere near a phone.
* * *
“I figure we should pull the plug.”
“That may be a bit hasty.”
“Well, what’s the prognosis? Is he ever going to recover?”
“These things are idiosyncratic. Though at your father’s age, the chances of significant improvement are slim. The damage was substantial.”
“It sounds like you think we should give it some time. Wait until he’s completely stabilized.”
“Wait? Wait for what? You heard the bloke. Chances are there’s fuck-all to wait for. In which case, get it over with. Pull the plug.”
“This is totally what he was afraid of. Like, it’s almost poetic. In some ways, this is the perfect revenge. Way better than him dying. Just lying there forever with nothing to do but contemplate his sins.”
“I’m sorry for what must seem like my sister’s cold-heartedness, Dr Evans, but there’s something of a backstory. She has her reasons.”
“Well, there’s no need to make any big decisions right away. So I’ll leave you to spend a few minutes with your loved one.”
A door closed.
“He was being sarcastic, right? He was totally being sarcastic.”
Cyril’s eyes fluttered open. There was a spot of water damage on the ceiling the shape of Norway. On the one hand he was curious what else his children might say when they thought their father was insensate; on the other, maybe he was better off not knowing. Yet croaking, “You know, I can hear you!” was clearly impossible whilst he was intubated.
Instead, Cyril waved an arm frantically to indicate to his visitors that the patient was awake. Correction: wave was what he intended to do, but in truth the limb continued to lie motionless, and the kids kept talking. He attempted to turn his head so that at least he could see his family, but that didn’t happen either. It was consternating to marshal the neurological commands one was never, ordinarily, even aware of issuing, and then to have them blithely ignored. The loss
