Swimming Lessons(79)

Flora picked her way across the books in the hall, like the unstable floor in a fairground fun house. In the kitchen she took the bottle of whiskey from under the sink. She could only find three tumblers. She knew there were more, but with Nan gone only a few hours already things seemed to be missing or in the wrong place. She rinsed out a couple of teacups.

Louise stood in the kitchen doorway, her high-heeled shoes dangling from her hand; she must have taken them off to clamber over the fallen books. “He wants your mother’s dress,” she said.

“Don’t come in.” Flora flapped her away.

“He said you’ll know what he means.”

“Broken glass,” Flora said, nodding towards the floor.

“Where exactly is Nan?” Louise looked around the kitchen. Streaks of white were sprayed out across the wall with long drips running from them, ending in a globule of sour cream where they had slowed and congealed. The salmon, its one upturned eye now dull, was still flopped in its dish. A half-eaten sandwich lay on the counter without a plate, and dirty knives and cups filled with grey tea littered the surfaces.

“Why does he want the dress?” Flora said.

“He said something about acknowledging his responsibility. I didn’t understand completely. Something else about how he should have said sorry properly, behaved better. Anyway, he made me promise to get it.”

Flora passed Louise the glasses, picked up the cups and the whiskey bottle, and went into her and Nan’s room. The dress was on the floor where she had let it fall after she’d last worn it.

In the sitting room, Jonathan had shifted the record player out from against the wall and was clearing a space so it could be carried into the bedroom. Gabriel was holding the album with the picture of the man sitting at the kitchen table—Townes Van Zandt.

Gil lay as Flora had left him in the bedroom—propped up on the pillows, his eyes shut. Louise crept forwards, Flora behind her. “Don’t worry, I’m still alive,” Gil said. “Have you got the dress? We can’t have a party without a dress.”

“I think he believes Ingrid is here,” Louise whispered to Flora, and louder, “Is the dress for Ingrid, Gil?”

“Of course it’s not for fucking Ingrid.” Gil’s eyes were open now. “It’s for me. It was the last thing she wore.” He fumbled with the top button of his pyjamas.

“Oh, I don’t know, Gil,” Louise said, looking at Flora, who thought that the old Nan, the pleasant, agreeable version, would have disagreed on principle with anything Louise thought.

“Of course,” Flora said, and went around to kneel on the bed. Gil’s hands dropped to the cover while Flora brought the loop of his arm sling over his head and undid his pyjama buttons.

“Couldn’t we put it over the top of them?” Louise said.

“Do you wear your dresses over your pyjamas?” Flora said. “No, I didn’t think so.”

The skin on her father’s chest followed the outline of his ribs, dipping in the cavities, stretching over bone. The beating pulse of his heart knocked against the thin membrane, and Flora had to look away. She pulled his pyjama collar over his right shoulder and helped him bend his elbow to get his arm out of the sleeve.

Jonathan and Gabriel carried the speakers and the record player into the bedroom and plugged it in. An acoustic guitar started, a man’s voice.

“Louder,” Gil whispered.

“Turn it up,” Flora said. Gabriel increased the volume and this time she remembered the music, not from when she’d put it on after she came home but from years ago: a boy of about Nan’s age sitting on the veranda teaching her the lyrics.

Gil’s skin was mottled, the inside of his arm bruised. She pulled the pyjama top out from behind his shoulders and inched his other arm out from the sleeve, being careful with his still-bandaged wrist. His eyes were screwed shut, his jaw working.

Louise held out the dress that Flora had draped over the chair. When Flora looked up, Gabriel and Jonathan were watching. “Why don’t you pour the whiskey?” she said.

“More,” Gil said.

“More whiskey?” Flora whispered, looking into his eyes, and he raised his to hers.

“More music,” he said, as she pulled the pink dress over her father’s head, smoothing it around him.

Gabriel turned the music up again so that it swamped them and the room, overwhelming the noise of the rain and Gil’s laboured breathing, which sounded like the last gasps of the mackerel on the road. Jonathan passed around the glasses and the two cups. And Gil, with a tumbler gripped in his fist, held up his shaking arm and, one by one, Louise, Jonathan, Gabriel, and lastly Flora chinked against it and drank.





Chapter 42


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 1ST JULY 1992, 5:00 AM


Gil,

Yesterday evening Jonathan and I were the last customers in the bar of the Alpine Hotel in London. At the bar Jonathan ordered a whiskey. The woman who served him was stuffed into what the management must have thought was traditional Swiss costume: an apron and dirndl, the tight-laced bodice forcing her breasts over the top like risen muffins. Her hair was plaited and coiled around her head, and I wondered if they only hired barmaids with long blonde hair and whether that was legal. I asked for a glass of white wine, but Jonathan bought a bottle. We sat opposite each other on uncomfortable wooden chairs, a punched-out heart in each backrest.