“Ready for inspection?”
I’d salute and stand to attention in my camouflage Tee and black trackies. It was just you and me, no Ma to fuss and dress me like a lady. My pyjamas always spread out in dead man’s pose; empty arms crossed at the chest.
Breakfast was always 7:30a.m.
“Routine. That’s what will keep us going, Leigh.”
Six years old. Ma just buried. I didn’t know the meaning of ‘rue -teen,’ but I’d watch your hand shaking when you poured the milk.
In my adult home the yoghurt pots line up – a dairy army policing the fridge. Battalions of books, author alphabetised, sit shoulder to shoulder with my CD collection. I wonder how your orderly mind would cope with streaming? Nothing tangible to box and label.
I stand before the locked window, fifteen floors above Manchester’s grey urban sprawl, awash with both adrenalin and alcohol. I had rushed from a works do, celebrating profits and margins, called away by a phone call. The phone call.
Your sheets are pulled up so you’re cocooned like an elderly larvae. I am fluttering around you, tidying up your sparse belongings; on a loop fuelled by anxiety.
The tea trolley arrives “I’ll be mother,” I mutter.
The automatic familial phrase of ours. I hold the white cup to your lips, careful not to spill one brown drop on NHS bedding. Conversation stutters as your eyelids close.
A nurse comes in. “Lovely man, your Dad. So polite. A real gentleman.”
She knows, but she means well. Words to bandage the gaping wound. I stare out of the window, at the toy town cars and Lowry people. You were once my world Dad and I your future. I take your hand, to keep hold of my past.