46. Golden Gates Retirement Home

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Saturday, 8am

Waingard walks up to the home along the streets named after various numbered monarchs passing along high redbrick walls of mounted front gardens and the brittle hanging branches of bare oaks and sycamores. She walks to air some of the smoky smell from her suit. It’s the only suit she brought with her, and it already is beginning to feel like an old itchy blanket. She doesn’t drink much as a rule, and what little she did have is now coming out of her in an ice-edged sweat. Her breath comes out in narrow clouds. This is what being out of shape must feel like. A permanent hangover.

The home, named the Golden Gates for no reason Waingard has ever been able to work out other than perhaps it’s a joke about the next poet of call for the residents (the Pearly Gates would have been too on-the-nose), is on a main road, and for its gravel drive and water features in the front grounds the background of traffic is a constant reminder that congestion is a way of life at the top of the hill. Since she’s last been there, Waingard has noticed the place could do with a lick of paint. She’s paying enough for her father to live here at least for the cosmetics to be smooth.

The director is at the door pretending this is a happy coincidence and she’s just micromanaging the dried flower arrangements at the entrance, and she shakes Waingard by the hand. It’s a cold, bony handshake, and she has a hard underused smile for her too. So happy to see her, so happy that she was able to make the visit, so happy that she’s able to show Waingard some of the new features in the grounds. But Waingard blows her off. New features are put in to pull the visitor away from the problems, and today Waingard isn’t all that bothered with either end of that spectrum. Is her dad alive, is he getting fed, is he sitting in his own shit? These are the questions Waingard has. Is he happy? She’s never been too sure if she cares about that to be honest. She doesn’t want him to be miserable. That passed long before she dumped him in this place. This isn’t punishment for her upbringing. What was even wrong with it, apart from the fact she was morbidly fucking miserable the whole time. Everything she remembers is miserable. Birthdays: miserable. Christmas: miserable. Holidays: miserable. School: the worst thing that ever happened to a living soul in the history of humankind. Did she blame her dad? Yes. But she knew that was wrong. So, she satisfied both her guilt and her hunger for blame. She put him in the Golden Gates, a relatively luxurious waiting room for the ultimate check out. Discarded. Dismissed.

His room is at the top of the main building, up several wide oak staircases, and Waingard, having cast off the cloying advances of the Director, passes a few residents on the way up. A few of them remember her and say hello to her by name, and Waingard is forced to remember them as people, with minds and thoughts to go in those failing old bodies. Her dad manipulated his way to the top room; an excellent politician, he wangled his way higher and higher as occupants died off, until he could get his wing back chair in the window looking over the whole town right down to the skeletal posturing of the Transporter Bridge over the river. And that’s where he is now.

“Hi dad,” Waingard says standing at his shoulder so he has to twist his neck to see her. “I’ve come to feed you breakfast.”

His eyes are glassy, but he looks good, clean shaven, well-fed, although the frames of his glasses are a little bent and he hasn’t had his hair combed. He smiles when he sees her and points out the window. “I like to catch the sun come up over the bridge,” he says.

“You’ve been here since sunrise?” Waingard says. “They just let you sit up like that?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Are you tired, dad? Your mind isn’t quite as sharp when you’re tired. Do you know who I am?”

He looks down at his hand. “Of course I know who you are,” he says softly.

“I’m not your wife. I’m not mum.”

“I must have bene out on the pull last night,” he smiles and lifts his hand. “I’ve taken my ring off.”

There’s a chair near the window and Waingard takes it, her back to the vista.

“You think that’s funny?”

He does.

“Where have you been?” he says.

“That depends if you can tell me who I am.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Yes, I know. Do you know?”

He gets lost for a moment in the fog that plumes through the chambers of his mind nowadays. She sees it come through the back of his eyes. But he finds his way out. “Jellybread,” he says.

Waingard is reminded of Moses, back at the house passed out on the sofa, and she regrets having told him that. What made her let her guard down like that? You can blame it on being back here, she says to herself, but blame only gets you so far. What if it comes to mean something?

Her dad is staring at her now, his eyes reddening around the edges, as if he’s realised how long it’s been and how long it will be again before he sees her.

“I’ve come to make sure you’re okay,” Waingard says. “Thought maybe we could have breakfast together.”

He smiles. “Sure,” he says, still staring at her. “Not too much talking, though. Can’t stand jibberjabber.”

So, they sit there, and dad has his muesli and Waingard has the banana she grabbed from the petrol station on the walk up the hill, and they both stare out over the town and out to the Transport Bridge, dull and grey and rusty, its caddy hanging beneath it like a broken swing.

Before she leaves, Waingard goes to her dad’s dresser and takes from under his rolled socks his old leather address book, pocket sized and worn cracked black, loose pages, a red elastic band holding it all together. Dad doesn’t really realise what she’s up to, way behind him as he continues to purvey the bridge. She goes straight to W. The entries are scribbled in ink and pencil, different weights and colours, different sizes and different calligraphic styles. Some written at the dining room table – she can see him sat there in the dim light by the orange curtains – and some on the hoof with his hands on the steering wheel at a red light. Names drift up from the turning pages like aromas of long abandoned rooms. But there it is. As expected. Dennis Wigley. Moses had given her a real person, and if his number was in her dad’s address book from back in the day, then we was no good.