Last Dog Watch

Even though he had been back to the house every week for the past two months, it still looked shrunken and dented; he kept expecting a wave of warmth to push its way up through him, pressurised and volcanic, but his memories of growing up behind the grey roughcast walls and picking blackberries and wild mint from the garden had been bleached bare by time. Now, it was just another detached house in a commuter suburb, in which his father’s life was burning to the quick.

He let himself in quietly and saw Hazel getting ready to leave, packing an assortment of dressings and vials and rolls of tape into the large leather bag on the kitchen table. He tried to read her expression to see how the day as gone but she gave off the same energy that she always did: serene and slightly tired. She looked up at the sound of the key in the front door and met his eyes as he stood in the hallway.

‘Hi, John. Thanks for being on time.’

‘Hi, Hazel, of course. How is he?’

‘He’s had a quiet afternoon. In his own thoughts for most of the time, until I brought him his tea about an hour ago. I don’t suppose you know who Harry, Don and Leonard are?’

John sighed and looked off into the middle distance for a moment. A different sort of memory was surfacing. He held up one finger to signal to her to wait, before heading for the front room and retrieving a black and white photo of four men in naval uniform from the mantelpiece. His father’s bedroom had been moved downstairs just next to the front room, so he closed the kitchen door to allow them to speak in peace. The men in the photo were standing on the deck of a ship, roughhousing each other and grinning. ‘Dad’s second from the left. The one with the electric hair on the left is Don. Leonard’s the short guy built like a partition wall and Harry’s the one with the wild eyes.’

‘Shipmates?’

‘Yes, for a while, on board the Munificent. What did he say about them? How did he sound?’

‘Listen, John: I don’t want you to worry. These moments come and go with patients all the time. He was sleeping peacefully when I left him.’

‘Hazel, you know that giving me that sort of answer is just going to make me worry all the more. I can handle it, whatever it is.’

‘OK, fine: he got pretty agitated for a couple of minutes. I did the standard tricks to calm him down but I figured it would be useful if I actually knew who these people were for next time. Even if it’s just to know whether they’re even real.’

As she talked, he busied himself with the coffee machine. ‘Well, at this stage, you probably know as much or more than I do about them. He always kept that damned photo in pride of place but wouldn’t answer any of my questions about it. It was always “They were my mates in the Navy,” or “Just some work colleagues”. When I got to the age where he felt comfortable getting drunk in front of me, he’d go off on all these shapeless tangents about how you should never try to fight Nature, ferocious Nature, because it would always claim its due in the end. I remember I was fourteen and didn’t want to go to school the next day when I started serving him, and myself, from his bottle of whisky when he wasn’t looking, and I finally got the whole thing out of him. All four of them were on watch one evening in a driving storm; Dad popped below deck for five minutes to go to the head, and when he came back, the other three were gone. Smashed into the bridge and dragged overboard by a massive wave. They never found any of them.’

‘Oh, god. How awful.’ She took the coffee for the road with a brief smile and they stood there in silence. The sky outside was so dark and congested that it looked like some time in the small hours of the night. Hazel had switched on the light so that she could pack her things properly but they both felt as though they were sharing some form of midnight confession.

‘Will you be all right getting home? Have you got anyone after this?’ John looked at the nurse with her geyser of dark curls and her lambent constellation of freckles, thinking of all the things he wanted to say that would make her talk to her supervisor and be removed from this particular care contract and never have to see either of them again.

‘Oh yeah, it’s fine. I’ve got one more quick check-up on a surgery patient at six-thirty, but he’s on my way home anyway. Actually, I’d better get on.’ She set the half-empty cup down on the table, hefted the bag under her arm and headed out into the coalescing darkness. ‘Call the emergency number if you need to, OK?’ Mumbled over her shoulder.

The air in the house set immediately after she left. John rested his own cup down on the worktop and, finally and too suddenly for breath, felt the chain reaction of memories blaze up within him. He was standing, too big for the furniture, in the kitchen in which he had grown up and spend endless hours soaked in the steam of cabbage and ham, writing pages of homework at the table. The kitchen was warm and bright but somewhere beyond, in the dense and curdled silences of the house, the shadow of his father roamed, the buttons on his dress uniform gleaming. John pushed open the kitchen door and at that exact moment heard the first cannonade of thunder that would usher in the storm. He rolled his eyes at the tastelessness of the timing.

Hazel had left a gentle nightlight on in his father’s room. As he entered, he saw the man’s vast and upholstered bed, a great padded cocoon that was gradually swallowing the pyjama-wrapped skeleton in it. There was a quiet whistle to the man’s breathing. The man’s eyes clicked open and he took in the figure standing at the foot of his bed.

‘Have you come to take my temperature? I can assure you that I am quite fine.’

‘No…I mean, not literally. But I have come to see how you are.’

‘Are you an RNMS lad? That’s a splendid white shirt you have on. All these…these new recruits…don’t even know how to iron a bloody shirt.’ The rain began to fall outside at a hammering intensity that made John fear for the integrity of the great French doors. The doors spanned the whole wall of the dining room that had been converted into a field bedroom, and the thick raindrops smashing against them almost drowned out the two men’s conversation.

‘How are you adjusting to the new routine?’ John became abruptly aware of the fact that he was shouting.

‘Oh…you know…you’re given your orders and then you just get on with it. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I won’t mind getting back to Civvy Street once this whole thing is over. Got a good woman waiting for me. Get married, have a family, you know…I’ve always wanted to be a family man.’

John sat and listened to the febrile voice of a young naval officer at the peak of fitness who had thrown every piece of furniture out of his father’s brain and taken up residence, fizzing with hope for the postwar world. That same hope rang peculiarly sour with John’s own memories of a wriggling, seared and empty man home from the war who had swatted away any attempt at closeness as if it were a leech bite. As he watched his father rave and be eaten by the eddy of the past, he noticed that the man’s face had turned to face his bedside clock. The time was 18:01. As if suddenly plugged in, his father hurled off his bedclothes and jumped to his feet with a violence that John had not seen in years. The man’s great, bony frame crossed the room in a couple of strides and flung open the French doors to step out into the storm. John got up and ran after him, still reticent in spite of himself to walk into the suffocating heavy shred of the rain. Through the curtains of water, he could see his father clinging to the railing between the patio and the garden. The man’s body thrashed and seized in turn and John realised as he got closer that his father was yelling into the wind. Blurred, frenzied screaming. John grew close enough to grab his father’s arm.

‘Len? Harry? Don? Where are you?’ He jumped back in shock when his son latched onto his forearm and became even more delirious. ‘Man overboard! Man overboard! Sound the alarm! S-turn!’

John pulled his father closer to him and shouted as fiercely as he could through the storm: ‘They’re below deck, Lieutenant! They’ve been found! Leonard’s in the infirmary with a broken arm but they’re going to be fine! Weather decks are secured. Hollywood shower — Captain’s orders!’ The gangling man with his grey, terror-soaked face allowed himself to be led back inside and gladly made his way to the bathroom, from where John could hear him singing songs that he had always judged too coarse even for the ears of his teenage son. John pulled the French doors closed and flopped into one of the armchairs opposite the bed. There was nothing to do now but to wait and field whatever came out of the shower.

Five minutes later, his father emerged clad in his best white bathrobe, his thin black hair slicked to the back of his head. He broke out into an uncertain smile at the sight of the smartly dressed man in his bedroom. ‘John? My god. What are you doing here? You should have called.’ He held out his arms and John rose to accept the brief embrace.

‘Hi, Dad. Just thought I’d drop in and see how you were doing.’ Wringing out the words in any kind of normal tone was excruciating.

His father made his way back to his bed and sat on the covers. ‘Nothing like a proper shower, is there? And look at that, speaking of showers — some dozy twat’s left the French doors open for too long and the floor’s all wet.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’ll get a towel. Is there anything you need?’

A mischievous grin overtook the man’s expression. ‘Get us a drink, would you, son? Have one for yourself as well.’

There could not possibly be anything dangerous about serving a man a drink when he had days left to live. John went to the kitchen and fished the bottle of single malt out from under the sink, where Hazel had hidden it behind the cleaning products so that it would slip his father’s mind. He poured two stiff slugs and returned to the dining room to find his father leaning back against the headboard with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow and raspy. He had been briefed so many times on the protocol to follow: he was supposed to call Hazel, no matter how late it was, or to call Dr Weston and have an ambulance sent round. He shrank into himself in disgust at the idea of a team of faceless uniforms showing up and jolting his father back into the terrified and rudderless existence his life had become. He crept up to his father’s bed and set his whisky down on the bedside table, before returning to his armchair and taking in the scene in the warm half-light. His father was still sitting upright with his back against the headboard, his head leaning back against the wall, and what looked like the dimmest suggestion of a smile on his face.

‘Cheers, Dad,’ John whispered as he raised his glass and drained it in one go. A fresh squall was boiling up outside, bringing with it a fresh burst of thunder, and as the whisky thawed the tension from his joints he realised he could no longer hear his father’s breathing over the storm.