‘Okay, so theoperation went very well. It took a bit longer than we would have liked,’the nurse said and Morton glanced at the clock. Jeremy had been told itwould take around three hours. His father had been operated on for fourand a half hours. ‘We’ve moved him to ICU, which is standard procedureafter major surgery like this. You can see him but he won’t come roundfrom the anaesthetic for some time.’
Morton followedthe nurse into ICU. He found his father, mouth agape and milky eyeshalf-opened so that he resembled the living dead. He was hooked up to aneven greater quantity of beeping and flashing machines than before.
He stoodwatching his father’s chest rise and fall mechanically beneath the off-whitecrust of bandages strapped to his torso. Wherever his father was rightnow in the universe, his body looked peaceful. There was still a largepart of Morton that believed his father would never recover, but he realisedfor the first time standing there that he wanted him to pull through; he wantedhis father to live.
‘You can go inand see him,’ the nurse said.
Morton sat downbeside his father and tentatively said hello. He spoke quietly because itfelt odd talking to someone who you knew wouldn’t respond. They alwayssaid on Casualty that the person could hear you and that familiar voicesmight help them to recover. That was all well and good on television, butthe reality of sitting within earshot of the nurse whilst he spoke to aninanimate object left him feeling rather stupid.
He gentlypicked up his father’s gelid, bloodless hand. A large black bruisesplayed out from the entry point of the IV drip in his left hand. Hisskin had turned into thin tea-stained paper, sagging into the hollows of hischeeks and eye sockets. Morton looked pitifully at the frail man who hadraised him. Despite everything, he still couldn’t quite tally the word fatherwith his emotions; it was like there was a link missing somewhere in thechain. Could that link be nothing more than a separate DNA structure? Or was there more to it than that? His father’s Victorian style ofchild-rearing couldn’t have helped matters, but then it had done nothing todamage the relationship between him and Jeremy. If anything was going todamage their father-son bond, then it would be Jeremy’s sexuality. Mortonjust couldn’t see his father, a man who frowned upon sex before marriage,sitting at the breakfast table eating his daily fry-up whilst a half-nakedAustralian man draped himself over Jeremy.
‘What did youhave to tell me?’ Morton asked softly. He glanced over at the nurse, whowas either oblivious to him, or she was acting as though she was. Shemust see this kind of thing all the time, Morton reasoned. Just talk,he told himself, but the words wouldn’t come. If he was going to talk toan inert object, then there was no point in asking questions and waiting for areply; he just had to speak.
He chose totalk to his lifeless father about when his mother died, which he thought, froma psychological point of view, was very revealing. Of all the subjects,in all the world that he could have chosen to talk about, he chose what heconsidered to be the defining moment of his life. The point where it allchanged. When everything he had known was turned upside down. Amoment in history that had never been discussed.
After hisfather had told him that he was adopted, Morton shrank inside a cocoonedversion of himself, perfunctorily carrying on with life as if nothing had everhappened. Over the years he had wondered at the timing of therevelation. Had his father deliberately dropped the hit-and-run statementinto the emotional turmoil of his mother’s death, knowing that it would providea convenient smokescreen? He thought he could remember his fathermuttering something about wanting to tell him before, but the hours thatfollowed boiled down to a handful of crystal-clear words; the rest ablur. There followed brief empty conversations with his father, where thetopic was skirted around like a decaying animal in the road. Thatslowly-rotting carcass was his relationship with his father and his mother’starnished memory. It took him two years to summon the courage to ask hisfather the question. It was on his return home from the first termat university and Morton had found that his father had, for the first timesince his wife’s death, lavished the house in Christmas decorations and wasbounding around it with renewed zeal. Morton had barely set down his bagswhen he decided to snatch the presented opportunity of festive cheer and posethe question as to who his real parents were. He should have anticipatedhis father’s reaction. A long agonising silence, in which Morton hopedthat his father’s clenching jaw was simply concentration, was followed by thesingle longest diatribe Morton had ever heard from his father’s lips. Morton’s scheduled two-week break came to a sharp end after a record hour and aquarter before he caught the train to Jon’s house and spent a peaceful happyChristmas with his family. When he had returned home the followingsummer, Morton found that his bedroom had been stripped of everythingand turned into a guest-room. ‘Well, after you absconded at Christmas, wedidn’t think you were coming home again,’ his father said. And so heresided in the guest-room for the duration of the summer, spending as littletime as possible there. His father ended the summer holidays by informinghim that, in his opinion, university had turned him into a sulky introvert andmaybe it hadn’t been a good idea to go there after all. Morton’sresponse, which he knew retrospectively to have been spiteful, was to ask whohis real father was. Jeremy then waded into the argument and informedMorton that he’d broken his father’s heart and the subject was never to beraised again. And it wasn’t.
But now hisfather had had his heart repaired.
Maybe it wastime to ask the question again.
Chapter Seventeen
Tuesday
For the first time since he had beenattacked, Morton wasn’t woken by the pain from the lump on his head. Thismorning he was
