The first Big Surgery happened a few weeks after the meeting with the fearful consultant.
The dream I had while I was under the general anaesthetic was so orange I could taste it.
When I left the orange dream, I found my father.
I watched him sitting by my bedside and he looked haggard. His face was grey and his jaw was set into stone.
‘I can’t do this, Len,’ he said, and his voice cracked. ‘I can’t sit here and watch you die.’
‘Then don’t.’
He looked at me then, for a long time. Like he was trying to find something in my face that would tell him what he didn’t already know.
At first he still came, between the visiting hours of three and six, and he continued his slow transition into a gargoyle – all stony and grey. Agnieszka had had to return to Poland for work and I knew that he had stopped laughing.
The visits became shorter, and he would miss a day or two, or a week. He became quieter and greyer, and I would watch the clock until the end of visiting hours and be relieved if he didn’t appear in the doorway, all hunched and mourning.
‘I meant it,’ I told him one afternoon as, through my eyelashes, I watched him watch me pretend to sleep, with the same expression of despair with which he had watched my mother stand in the kitchen staring into the garden wearing only a T-shirt and knickers. He wanted to row out to me, to pull me back to shore. But, like my mother, I was underwater already, where it gets dark.
I knew it was time. ‘Papa,’ I said. I hadn’t called him that in years. I was pulling out all the stops. ‘I want you to do something for me.’
He looked at me.
‘I want you to promise me you won’t come back.’
There was a really long pause.
‘I can’t do that, Lenni,’ he said, ‘I can’t leave you here on your own.’
‘I’m not alone, I have all these nice nurses and doctors and all these tubes. Look at them all! I’m out of my mind with all the tubes!’ I pointed to the tubes burrowing into me, across the bed, attached to the various machines.
‘Lenni,’ he said softly.
And then I couldn’t be soft any more. ‘I don’t want you here.’
He didn’t speak.
‘I want you to go to Poland. Take a holiday and see Agnieszka, meet her family. Then come back and start your life together and let her make you laugh.’
‘No, Lenni.’
‘You can’t say no to a dying child.’
‘You’re not supposed to make jokes about this,’ he said, but he smiled a little.
‘I want you gone.’
A few tears fell from his eyes and he had to take off his glasses to wipe them away.
‘It will be a promise. Promise that you’ll go away and you won’t come back.’
‘But I—’
‘And if I get to the end, the nurses will tell you. They will call you and they will tell you to come. And then you can come and say goodbye. But that won’t be our real goodbye. This will. While I’m still Lenni. When I’m flush for tubes and looking forward to when they bring dinner because I like the strawberry yoghurts they have here.’
He shook his head and more tears fell, so he just took off his glasses and rested them in his lap. Then he took my tubed hand in his wet one.
‘If—’
‘If I change my mind, I will get them to call you and you will come,’ I said. ‘I know. But you have to promise.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m setting you free.’
He sat with me for hours and when they brought my dinner, he asked the nurse to swap my lemon yoghurt for a strawberry one.
I woke up the next morning and found Benni the beanbag pig sitting in the visitor’s chair where my father had been, and there was a picture resting in Benni’s lap – a folded photograph of my father and me on my first birthday. I am in his arms and holding one hand up to my own eye and smushing it with the palm of my hand, and he is laughing. I have cake icing all over my cheeks and on my dungarees. The photo was worn at the centre in a cross from having made a home in his wallet for fifteen years.
And on the back, in green highlighter pen borrowed from the nurses’ station, he’d written: I will love you forever, pickle.
——
Margot gave me a smile that looked like she understood. And that maybe, although I might be wrong, she was proud of me.
‘Can we go to London now?’ I asked.
‘Well we could,’ she said, ‘but today we’re going somewhere new.’