Proof of Life

Dad had stopped looking at the camera sometime in the spring, and I'd put that down to the dementia.

The calls came through at ten on Sunday mornings, three in the afternoon at Ashdown House. I'd prop the phone against the fruit bowl and get on with something. That week it was eggs, in a pan I'd paid ninety dollars for and was still trying to justify.

'There she is,' Dad said. 'There's my kiddo.'

He was in the armchair by the window, angled so the camera caught him three-quarters on, and he was smiling at a point just to the left of me, about where my shoulder would be if I'd been sitting opposite him. His consultant had a phrase for it at the last review, something about attention. I'd said 'right, of course', looked it up afterwards and still didn't get it.

Marta held the tablet. She'd taken over from Jo in the spring, and in all the Sundays since I'd seen her hand and nothing else: broad, with a plaster across the thumb knuckle, and the cuff of a lilac tunic when she changed her grip. She always started too low, so I got Dad's chin first, and then the picture would lurch up to his face.

'Good week, hasn't it, Frank?' she said from somewhere above him. 'Tell your daughter.'

'Good week,' said Dad.

'What have you been up to?' I cracked an egg against the pan and lost a bit of shell in it.

'Oh. This and that.'

It was this and that most Sundays. I asked about the food (fine) and the man next door who sang hymns at night (hadn't heard him). I told him about work, and about my manager who replied to everything with a thumbs-up, and he laughed roughly where he should. I wasn't listening to his answers, and I doubt he was listening to my questions. We'd both got used to that, and I'd decided it was a kind of peace.

His room hadn't changed since he moved in. It had magnolia walls, a print of a lighthouse that came with the room, and a lamp with a pleated cream shade on the chest of drawers. On the windowsill was a mug of tea with milk in it, gone cold, with a skin on top. I remember thinking they'd got it wrong again, because he'd drunk his tea black for as long as I'd been alive. I meant to mention it to Marta, and then the eggs caught.

'What's it like there?' Dad said.

'Toronto? Cold.'

'No. Your flat. What can you see?'

I stopped scraping. When I moved, he'd treated Canada like a gap year I'd grow out of, and he'd never once asked what my place was like.

'Not much.' I picked the phone up and gave him the tour. 'Window. You can see the CN Tower if you lean out, which the landlord says I'm not allowed to do. That blue's me. I painted it the first weekend and got half of it on the skirting. Sofa. Books.' I held it on the green glass lamp I'd carried home on the streetcar, wrapped in a duvet cover. 'And that's the lot.'

When I turned the camera back, he was nodding at my shoulder.

'That's lovely, kiddo,' he said. 'That's lovely.'

I put the phone down and did something unnecessary with the spatula until I could trust my face.

When I picked it up again, he was muttering, and I had to turn him up to catch it. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties. When I couldn't sleep as a child, he used to do the shipping forecast at my bedside in his flat Radio 4 voice, and I'd usually be gone by Dogger.

'Cromarty,' I said. 'Forth. Tyne.'

'Dogger. Fisher. German Bight.'

We went the whole way round the coast, him in the chair and me at the hob. When we reached Southeast Iceland he shut his eyes, and for a second he looked exactly like himself.

'He gets tired,' Marta said. 'We'll let you go.'

'Same time next week, Dad.'

'Same time next week,' he said. 'I'll be here.'

The picture held on his face, mouth a little open, eyes on the space beside me. Then it went black.

Call ended. Duration 14:32.

The next Sunday he got to my questions before I'd finished them.

'Did the parcel –'

'Came Thursday. Lovely.'

I'd sent shortbread from the Scottish shop on Yonge Street and paid for tracking, so someone could have told him it was coming. 'And are they treating you –'

'Treating me well.'

I put it down to the connection. On the open day the manager had made a joke about Ashdown's wifi, and we'd all laughed the way you do when you're about to hand over a parent.

The light through his window was the same as the week before, a pale wedge across the arm of the chair that stopped at the same seam in the upholstery. The mug was still on the sill with its skin of milk. I decided someone there was very bad at washing up. The walls looked cooler too, more blue than cream, and I blamed the tablet's camera.

I told him Derya from accounts had brought her spaniel into the office on Friday and I'd spent the afternoon full of antihistamines.

'You and your nose,' Dad said. 'We could never have a dog.'

A bit later he asked where I sat when I talked to him.

'The kitchen, mostly.'

'I can't see you properly in the kitchen.'

So I took him to the sofa. I sat with my back against the arm and my knees up, holding the phone over me, and he said that was better. That was where I sat from then on.

He was tired after six minutes.

Call ended. Duration 6:12.

On the Wednesday I rang Ashdown in my lunch break to thank Marta. A young man with a cold answered and asked me to spell her name.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Who?'

He checked. There was no Marta on the rota, and there hadn't been one that he knew of, but they used a lot of agency staff at weekends. I said that must be it. Then I went back to my desk, because the other explanation wasn't one you say out loud in an open-plan office.

On Sunday the hand came up into the bottom of the frame as usual, with the plaster across the thumb knuckle. It was the same plaster, one corner lifting the same way it had in the spring.

'Have you hurt your hand, Marta?'

The pause was long enough that I thought the call had frozen.

'It's nothing, love.'

The lighthouse was gone. The wall where it had hung was bare, without even a paler patch where the frame had been.

'Have they redecorated, Dad?'

'Have they?' he said, without looking round.

He wanted my address so he could send me a card. He'd never sent a card in his life; Mum had done the cards. I read it out anyway, postcode and all. When he asked whether there was a porter, I said no, just a buzzer, and told him how I'd locked myself out in August and had to get the spare key from the meter cupboard on the landing, where I keep it taped behind the gas pipe. He laughed properly at that, the old laugh that ended in a cough.

'Still on your own over there?'

'Still on my own.'

'Good,' he said. Then: 'I mean, you'll meet someone.'

Call ended. Duration 11:48.

On Saturday night I sat at the kitchen counter with a pad of Post-its and tried to think of something only he and I knew.

I couldn't. Everything I remembered about my father I'd already handed to someone: a boyfriend, a therapist, the eulogy I drafted in my head on bad nights. Or I'd handed it to him, on one of these calls, while I was cooking. The shipping forecast was in a blog post I'd written at uni. So I did it the other way round. I'd give him something that had never happened, and if he told me it hadn't happened, I'd know it was him.

Whitby. Guesthouse. Rained all week.

We'd never been to Whitby. We went to Hastings every summer until Mum got ill.

'Dad,' I said on Sunday, after the food and the man next door. 'Do you remember Whitby?'

His face opened. 'Course I do. The Harbour View. Mrs Kettlewell and her kippers at seven in the morning.'

'It rained.'

'Every bloody day. And Biscuit wouldn't come out of the sea. Your mum went in after him in her good shoes.' He was laughing. 'You cried all the way home in the car.'

The Post-it was still stuck to the back of my hand. I'd given him four words and he'd built a week out of them.

'We never had a dog, Dad. You said so. My nose.'

'Did I?' He smiled at my shoulder, kindly, as if I were the muddled one. 'What else do you remember, kiddo? About Whitby?'

I didn't hang up. The best I can say is that he was asking, and nobody had asked me about my childhood in years, and part of me wanted to see how much more it could make. He asked what colour the car was, and where I'd sat in it. He asked about Mum. When I stopped answering, he did the shipping forecast, every area in order, word-perfect, and I didn't join in. Behind him the lamp on the chest of drawers was off, a dark green shape over his shoulder.

Eventually Marta said, 'He gets tired.'

Call ended. Duration 41:07.

On Tuesday I rang Ashdown again and asked for the manager. Pauline had a voice like a primary school head. I asked her to go and look at my father while I held, and she must have heard something in how I said it, because she didn't argue.

The hold music was Greensleeves. It went round four times.

'He's asleep, love,' she said when she came back. 'He had a bit of soup at lunch. He's fine.'

'Did he seem all right after Sunday? He was on the call a long time.'

'What call?'

He hadn't done video calls since March, she said. He couldn't manage the tablet any more. He got upset when he saw himself on the screen, because he thought there was a man in the room with him. They'd written to let me know.

'To Deptford,' she said. 'Is that not you?'

I'd left Deptford two years ago.

After she'd gone I opened my contacts. Dad (Ashdown). The number was a UK mobile. Ashdown's was a landline beginning 01892, printed on every invoice I'd paid. I scrolled back through my texts and found it, from the second week of March: Hi Nell, new number for Frank's Sunday calls. Ashdown House. I'd saved it on the bus without reading it twice.

I sat in the kitchen until it got dark and went through it all. I'd told it my address, and that I lived alone, and which end of the sofa I sat on. I'd told it where the spare key was. I'd shown it every room.

The cheapest flight home was the Monday after next, and I booked it. On Wednesday I paid a locksmith a hundred and forty dollars to change the lock, and when he'd gone I went out to the meter cupboard. The spare key was still taped behind the gas pipe. I don't know why that was worse, but it was.

At ten on Sunday the phone lit up on the arm of the sofa, and I let it ring. When it stopped, it started again. I spent the rest of the day with every light in the flat on.

Missed calls (14).

My flight was at 6.40 the next morning. The case was by the door, the new key was on a hair bobble round my wrist, and I'd decided I wasn't going to answer.

At ten the phone lit up. Dad (Ashdown). It rang out, stopped and started again.

I've thought a lot about why I answered. It wasn't courage. By tomorrow night I'd be in a room in Kent holding my actual father's hand, and I'd never have to know what I'd been talking to for most of this year. I found I couldn't stand that. I wanted to see it once, now that I knew it wasn't him.

'There she is,' Dad said. 'There's my kiddo.'

There was no hand this time, no plaster and no lilac cuff. The picture was perfectly still, the way it is when a phone's propped against something. And for the first time since the spring, he was looking straight down the lens at me.

Behind him the walls were the blue I'd painted the weekend I moved in, with a smear of it on the skirting. There was a bookshelf. Beside his chair, on a side table, was my green glass lamp, switched on.

I looked at the lamp beside me. It was on, and I hadn't switched it on.

'Where are you sitting, kiddo?' he said.

I knew the angle. It was my flat seen from the kitchen counter, from about where the fruit bowl sits, looking down the room to the sofa. He was in the foreground, in an armchair I don't own. Behind him, small and a little out of focus, a woman sat on the sofa with her knees drawn up and a phone in her hand.

I lifted my hand, and she lifted hers.

Then I looked up, past the phone, across the flat to the kitchen. There was the counter, and the fruit bowl with three soft bananas in it. Between me and it there was nothing but floorboards and the rug I keep meaning to get cleaned.

On the screen, he leaned forward in the chair, towards the camera and away from me.

'Same time next week,' he said. 'I'll be here.'

I haven't hung up. It's ten past two in the morning and the counter says 16:10:51. I'm still on the sofa with the lamp on, and I'm going to miss my flight. I know that. But as long as the call is running, I can see where he is.