“How long is that doc going to make us wait before deciding Dad’s completely vegged out?” Roy said. “Probate can take a while, and it would make a big difference to my circumstances to get the estate settled and the house sold off. Must be worth a couple mil by now.”
“Hate to break it to you, little brother,” Simon said. “But I swung by Lambeth the other day, just to check on the mail and that. Turns out they refinanced, and Dad hasn’t kept up with the payments, either. He hadn’t opened the envelopes, but he’s in the process of being evicted.”
“How can you be evicted from your own house?” Hayley asked in horror.
“It isn’t his house. It’s the bank’s house. And there’s more. I poked around his statements, and all his accounts are either down to spare change or in overdraft. In sum, Roy, there is no estate.”
“Motherfucker!” Roy exploded.
A wad of bunched-up bedding was poking uncomfortably into Cyril’s upper back, but he was powerless to rearrange it. His right hand seemed to regard the request to scratch a raging itch on his bum as positively hilarious. Experimentally, he made a concentrated effort to wiggle his toes, but when the sheet didn’t brush against them he could tell that they weren’t moving.
“The other thing I found,” Simon said, “was this huge, incontinent manuscript on his computer.”
“Incontinent” my foot! Cyril raged silently.
“The story of his life or something,” Simon continued. “You know, it was long enough to make a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel seem like a travel brochure. Though the section onscreen when he collapsed was like, believe it or not, hundreds of pages about the European Union.”
Hayley groaned. “Gawd. As if anyone wants to talk about the EU any more.”
“Still, I was wondering if we should rescue the files,” Simon said. “This magnum opus is the last thing he left behind. It might be of historical interest . . .”
“Well, it’s certainly of no interest to me,” Hayley said. “You can’t honestly imagine that any of us would ever read it.”
“Go ahead and print it out,” Roy said. “I’ve finally used up my lockdown stockpile, and I’m running low on loo roll.”
“What a typical vanity project,” Hayley said. “It’s so like him to go on and on like that—doubtless in the expectation that this turgid, self-aggrandizing tome will be published, and glowingly reviewed, and go on to become not only a bestseller, but required reading in medical schools. Maybe he was right in the first place, planning to bite the big one at eighty. He makes a crap old man. Being elderly is all about stepping aside and accepting you’ve had your day. In his whole life, Dad hasn’t experienced actual humility for five minutes.”
“Listen, do you think he left a living will?” Simon asked.
Of course there’s a living will! Cyril screamed. Middle drawer of the filing cabinet in the study, in the red flexi-folder at the front!
“Ordinarily, you’d think so,” Hayley said. “But he and Mum were expecting to do that whole theatrical double suicide thing, before it morphed into murder. He probably didn’t bother.”
“Bloody hell!” Roy exclaimed. “He’s blinking.”
The three ingrates gathered round their father’s bed and peered down. However under-affectionate his middle-aged progeny, it was a relief to see something besides Norway. Cyril blinked frenetically.
“Do you think that’s involuntary?” Hayley said.
“Hard to say,” Simon said. “It could be a twitch.”
Cyril blinked hard; stopped; blinked frenetically again; then stopped and stared. He was new at this, and unsure of the protocol for “appearing to blink on purpose.”
“Figure there’s someone still in there?” Roy said.
“Wow,” Hayley said. “That is sick.”
“Dad?” Simon said. “Is that you?”
Blink-blink-blink-blink-blink.
“Dad?” Simon said again. “If you can hear and understand me, blink once for yes, and twice—or cancel that. Blink twice for yes. Obviously if the answer is no, you’re not going to answer at all.”
Blink-blink.
“I know it sounds cruel,” Hayley said. “But there’s something, like, delicious about this. If he’s really with it, that is, and not in a comatose fog. I mean, you can really contemplate your sins now, can’t you, Dad?”
* * *
Cyril had never known that it was possible for time to pass so slowly. A mere half hour presented a vast temporal desert; he pictured himself dragging over dunes weighed down with equipment and wearing boots full of sand. Aside from occasional visits from nurses, and far more occasional visits from Simon, the most dutiful of the three, he lived without markers—that is, the firm junctures of an ordinary day that gave one purchase on its passage. Fed intravenously, he ate no meals. Hydrated by tubes, he sipped no bracing breakfast coffee or four p.m. tea. They’d installed a catheter and colonic irrigation bag, and he’d never appreciated before the welcome punctuation and purposeful urgency of visits to the WC. He could only sleep with drugs, and then only for three or four hours. Morning, afternoon, and evening were abstractions. Weather was irrelevant. A nurse sometimes turned on the television, but because he couldn’t control the channels or even turn it off, the drivel rapidly decayed into one more torture.
Back in the day, he had savoured opportunities for reflection—sitting in contemplation on the Tube and deliberately choosing not to read, or enjoying an unexpected break in his workday when one more patient was a no-show and he could be alone with his thoughts. But now being alone with his thoughts had become his full-time job. Keeping something circulating through his head was a burden. Having once fancied himself something of an intellectual, he grew deeply disappointed by the limits of his mental athleticism, for his cerebral workouts resembled less Olympic gymnastics than clumsy clambering on a climbing frame. It was official: he
