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Nurses

  Tony Spencer

  Copyright © 2013 Tony Spencer

  I never got on with my old man, ever. I blamed him totally for my parents' break up. It was all his fault. Ma wasn't perfect, of course she wasn’t, couldn't put up with his obsessive workaholicism and they argued about his commitment constantly. Ma left him briefly a couple of times, she later told me, before she found someone else who lived halfway round the world and walked out of our lives for the very last time. I hated my father for that. The feeling was mutual though, I always disappointed him, whatever I did wasn't anywhere near good enough. Perhaps I went out of my way to piss him off. I wasn't interested in running the successful garage business that he had built up to pass on to me, I wanted to be my own man, do my own thing.

  So I joined the Royal Navy as soon as I was old enough, to see the world, or at least the North Atlantic, the Med, and the Indian Ocean. After 18 years of that, I worked on offshore oil rigs and platforms, mostly North Sea and Alaska early on, more recently warmer climes like Central and South America. Too old for cold nowadays, I guess. Fifty-five is definitely too old to be at the sharp end in the oil and gas game when you don't have the geology degrees; I managed the men, not the science. Most riggers have given it all up for the good life by this age, but then my ex-, that bitch Jeanie, was enjoying the good life that should have been mine.

  Anyway, there I was on a steamy hot day when I, Roger Bird, was contemplating packing it all in and doing something else, anything different, at the end of the current contract. Then I got the call from Ma that Da had suffered a third stroke, and had only a matter of days, hours possibly, left. Damn it, I didn't even know he'd had the first and second strokes. Nobody tells me anything, but then I've never been overly communicative either.

  Ma's lived in Oz for almost fifty years with her second husband Cliff and are rather frail themselves, both in their early- to mid-eighties. Even if she cared a jot for the old bugger, which she certainly doesn't, there's no-one left to visit and see Da through what might turn out to be the end. Damn! I hadn't seen him myself for about twenty years, that was when I stopped off in England and thanked him for looking after my kid a couple of months earlier. That's Mummy's boy Bobby, after he got himself in trouble with the law in a bar fight, over some teenage girl or other I shouldn't wonder. I was in Honduras for an exploratory bore at the time and couldn't get away immediately. I didn't exactly know where Jeanie was, we informally broke up our relationship years before, I guess that kinda runs in the family. I hated to ask Da for his help, but I had no other choice at the time.

  What is it about workaholic dads, freeloader kids and me in the middle? Can we ever coexist? Or is it just my family that can't?

  Well, I was on a similar crap job offshore near Chile when I got Ma's call about Da's stroke. I guess she still had a soft spot for Da that wasn't a swamp at the bottom of her half-million-hectare sheep station. I was in Chile because I ended up with all the dross jobs going lately, the up and coming young bloods were skimming all the cream. The third of my scheduled five bores was coming up as dry as the previous couple, so I put Pedro, or whoever he was, in charge, telling the company I needed a month off to look after my father. I didn't really have any intentions of going back but wanted breathing space to keep my options open. Then I flew home.

  Home! That was a joke. The only home I ever really had was made out of imitation crocodile leather, with a handle and wheels, the wheels being a recent concession to my aching back, the wear and tear of old age creeping up on me I guess.

  The last proper home I had was now that bitch Jeanie's, which she rents out, Bobby let slip in a recent email, and I got my lawyers looking into it. Apparently she's been co-habiting with an art dealer boyfriend in New York, so not only should I not still be paying her costly spousal support, but the family home could be sold up to release my share of the capital value. Bobby moved to Canada to open a fish restaurant, with some guy I regarded as a dodgy business partner, in a prairie city a dozen or so years ago and never stops bleating about his lot. They should never have left Brighton, where they had run a similar but smaller establishment.

  Da looked awful, lying there, wired up to almost as many sensors as a Samson Patented Initial Test Rig, or Spitter as we call 'em. The only nurse I could find in the geriatric section that time of night was big and black, named Marie according to her crooked badge, she led me to Da's room when I eventually got through to her.

  Look, I've been around, I'm fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Pidgin and Arabic, with a smattering of Inuit, Italian, French and Urdu, but this baby must've Gatling-gunned fifty words back to me and I barely understood a tenth of them.

  So I sat in Da's little side ward and looked him over critically. He looked sallow, thin, ill, naturally. He wore every one of his 87 birthdays like a mantel. I always remembered him as huge, wrestling me with those big forearms, straining muscles built from lifting truck tyres and swinging out engines for rebuilds. When I last saw him, in his mid-sixties, he appeared to be in his prime, hardly changed at all since I left home at 17. Now he was skeletal, having shrunk to nothing more than loose yellow skin over dry brittle bones.

  It was as hot as Hades in that hospital when I first got in, which I was actually very grateful for. England in April I always remembered as Spring but not this year. A freezing Easterly took my breath away outside the hospital, when I paid off the cabbie. He'd been telling me on the ride all the way from the railway station how much snow they'd had last week and joking how I'd never have been able to hail a cab then, wearing my white thin tropical suit – they’d never have seen me! The evening rush hour had gone on much longer than I remembered from my last rare visit, the cabbie mentioning something about an accident that was on the news, a Theology College coach crash in the middle of town with multiple injuries, including a fatality, which had closed off the main street to through traffic. The time spent in the cab seemed lengthened inordinately by the cabbie's insistent commentary on life in general, when all I really wanted was time alone with my thoughts to prepare for meeting my father once more, perhaps for the last time.

  The geriatric section day sister, Mrs Maureen Curran, who I spoke with from the airport while I awaited the release of my baggage, said I could visit Da any time day or night. Due to his terminal condition, normal visiting hours were waived. She had left me a credit card-type pass to that effect, which I was able to collect from the hospital Reception, which gave me access through the security doors to the ward where my father was.

  So, I sat in the chair in Da's private side ward, him restlessly asleep, before the jet lag eventually got to me and I dozed off. It was about an hour to midnight by then but my body convinced me it felt more like it was four or five in the morning and I'd been up all day and night.

  The alarm going off woke me. It was a gentle alarm as alarms go, just an insistent annoying beep, accompanied by a flashing red light, I had no idea what it meant but it couldn't have been good. I expected the big black nurse to come in short order to rescue the situation, but she didn't show, so after a minute or two wait I went looking for her. There was no-one at the nurses' station. Eventually, I found a different tall thin, rather pinch-featured young nurse, Petra, in the middle of dealing with an old lady who had both vomited and soiled herself. Apparently there was a big flap on in Accident & Emergency, Petra briefly explained, and she would be along as soon as she'd finished with this patient. At least she spoke better English than the other nurse, albeit with a heavy eastern European accent.

  Now I hate hospitals, I feel so helpless and, well, I guess I prefer to be in charge, the big honcho, the lean mean gringo, the one who was relied on to always get the job done. Here, though, I was a fish out of water and didn't have a clue what to do other than run and fetch someone w
ho did have a clue what they were doing. I made my way back through the maze of empty corridors to the side ward. When you are used to finding your way round a rig at night half your life you develop a sixth sense homing instinct.

  I knew I was close, and I started to worry, because I couldn't hear that bloody alarm any more, that wasn't good. They'd also turned the central heating off, by the time switch I guessed, because it was becoming freezing cold in there. I was imagining the worst of what that ominous silence meant. All this way, halfway around the world, I thought, and I hadn't even spoken to Da as he quietly faded away.

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