David is doing the butterfly stroke, his favourite absolute. The butterfly is the said to be most anti-social swimming stroke that anyone can perform in a crowded public pool and David knows this. But, nevertheless, his back still arches, arms rotating with powerful legs together – undulating - as he moves through the water furiously splashing, with his eyes closed - imagining himself in slow motion and flying, not through it, but above, in another place - in some desolate sea - alone - unlimited and unbleached.
Some are impressed by the fluidity of his stroke but most are frightened by the violent waves he is making, as he ploughs on regardless, justifying to him self that his need to exercise is greater than anyone else’s pathetic attempts at keeping fit.
‘Get out of my fucking way!’
The pool had been empty when he first dived in, slicing through the calm, finding peace there, but when the pool suddenly got crowded with other swimmers intent on fun, his good humour turned to a fuck off bad mood. He understands that he is being unreasonable and wildly slanderous and struggles to keep a lid on the contempt bubbling in him. Worrying that his visions actually manifest in shouting at them - actually lead to him beating their ludicrous heads against the cracked tiles – actually thrashing them until, eyes staring, they sink lifeless to the bottom of the pool.
David hurts you see. He is clearly in crisis. Earlier, this morning, he received a text. He received a text at four forty three this morning. It read ‘ Your da is dead. Come home. Mum’
The pool gets even busier. And, in his dark mood he sees the people around him as losers who, quite clearly, should not be given the right to any public facilities other than toilets - dragging them selves as they do through the water farting - dawdling in the fast lane; trawling their bloated bodies from one end of the fucking pool to the other.
‘Bastards!’ he screams making bubbles under the water. Bastards! Bouncing about in their fluorescence. Driving him absolutely insane.
He pauses and stops at the shallow end growling - pulling at his steamed up goggles, and adjusting them - avoiding eye contact with anyone, when, right in front of him, an old man, toothless and grinning in a floral swimming hat, dog paddles across the fast lane, huge pink nylon shorts billowing. chuckling to himself; his little arms and legs He winks at David as he inches by so close that David gets a whiff of sausage breath.
‘Bleedin’ hell’ … the old man wheezes. ‘Just call me Flash Gordon! …’.
David laughs, despite himself and the old man winks again - inching his way over to the side of the pool. David climbs out of the water, squints at the clock on the wall. Its ten days away from Christmas and vast amounts of tattered gold tinsel twinkles on the old Victorian walls around it. He performs the perfect dive, slipping under the water, not surfacing until the middle and decides to do another ten lengths in addition to the four he had planned. And, length after length churns up the pool, defying anyone to get in his way - length after length revelling in the endorphin rush. Abstract movements in slow motion through the water - dancing colours singing - reverberating echoes – the whiff of chlorine cutting through it all as his body rides the surface of the pool with a mind finally releasing; relinquishing all decision and control to a body now suddenly exulted; ecstatic – confused pain abating – albeit temporally and, what could pass for beauty enters his soul; swamping it with warm light, vibrant colour and heady optimism. This is what he has been waiting for. This is why he dragged his fraught grief into the pool. For these glorious fleeting moments when the clatter of thinking, the awful pain and hunger of attachment evaporates – giving over to the physical -heart pounding, lungs working, muscles and tendons flexing all towards this amazing adrenalin, endorphin rush, making what could pass for beauty and a desperate need is touched and satiated.
None can see though. None can see the swirling, glittering water sliding off his back in slow motion as beauty. No one recognises David as a man whose father has just died; as a difficult man struggling to find beauty. How could they? All they can see is a bully thrashing about in the water showing off and frightening people. None can see his muscles glistening, contracting and relaxing - swamped momentarily with a sudden burst of sunshine from the skylight above - as a frantic soul desperate for beauty. No one can see anything other than a nightmare ploughing through the water towards a tiny girl who, all squeaky with excitement and pink armbands, is floating merrily towards the out-stretched arms of her big-hipped mother. The delighted child looks up to see this goggle-eyed thing with a rubber head bearing down on her. Massive fists hit the water a centimetre from her face as David swims past. She becomes hysterical. Her appalled mother shouts, ‘Oy, you idiot! You bloody shit! Oy!’
She creates havoc in the place shouting and cursing, forgetting to comfort her child. Both hearts are pounding with the thought of what might have been. David unaware of the chaos behind him completes his final length by bobbing up and slapping the side of the pool in final triumph. And, feeling blown and magnificent, heaves his freckled covered body out of the water. He stands panting, looking over the pool, satisfied. He is short sighted and can’t see, very clearly the bawling child held by her angry mother whose waving an arm in the air and screaming at the young male pool attendant to do something about David who, still wearing his gold rubber hat and silver goggles has a head like a futuristic bullet. He pulls off the goggles and hat in one delighted movement; his long ginger hair falls wet onto his shoulders and he blank faced and confused by all the shouting. When, at last, he understands what he has done and sees the other swimmers pointing at him, he mouths an embarrassed, apology as the mother’s last words bounce off the walls.
‘You could’ve bloody killed her. People like you … people like … you make me sick!’
All sense of beauty evaporates for David. He watches the mother wrestle her desperate daughter out of the water, wrapping her in a towel. The young attendant sidles up to him and urges him to leave. David is appalled.
‘ Oh Jesus! Did I hurt her?’
‘No. No. Just gave her … well all of us really … a horrible fright!’
David squints towards the whimpering child now being carried into the changing room.
‘Sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t see her’
The nervous attendant picks at and big cold sore on his lip and says,
‘Bit stupid to do the Butterfly when the pool’s so busy.’
David nods as the chlorinated water dries on his shivering body. He hates the smell. And, feeling the cold stare of reproachful eyes on him tiptoes along the poolside and disappears sheepishly through the clear plastic flaps of the men’s changing room door. Rushing, as in three hours he is to flight leaves for Glasgow. He can hear his mobile phone ringing and runs, half-slipping on the wet tiles towards his locker, past the smelly toilets and the steaming showers where two men are soaping themselves and shouting a conversation about athlete’s foot. David pulls the elastic band holding his key off of his wrist and opens his locker door. He has an over powering need for carbohydrate and visualises a bacon roll. Picking up his flashing phone, he listens to a recorded message from his mother. Her voice is slurred and nasally,
‘Is that you son? Hello? …. Fuck! I don’t … I cannae . Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! …’
David stands trembling in his light blue Speedo trunks unable to make out what she is saying. He manages to pick up certain words but the sense of the whole is lost. Suddenly her voice is sharp and clear.
‘He’s dead…. He’s fuckin’ dead ….Are you there? Better come hame … Oh fuck it!’
He stands transfixed. For the next two minutes he listens, frozen as Sadie his mother struggles to replace the receiver cursing. ‘Stupid fuckin’ thing! Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it!’
He can hear the Richard and Judy show blare out from the TV in her living room - Richard’s voice bangs on about a divorced father’s rights to see their children then it’s music then its a Snickers bar advert. The phone is at last clattered down on her final ‘Fuck It!’
David drops his phone. It slides along the wet floor. He leans against the cold locker and listens to the old toothless man who now in the shower is whistling the theme from Dr Shivago.
*
From the penultimate landing of the vast tenement building that was his home, David peers down through the spiral stone stairs and polished wood banisters blinking. His head hurts. It is late and the journey from London was exhausting. After two complimentary red wines on the plane, a bumpy taxi ride with a relentless, chatty driver with an unhealthy obsession for the Celtic Football club is feeling surreal. The stairs below him appear to twist and turn. He can see a tall ginger-haired man way down on the bottom stair and recognizes himself on his last visit home, in the hot summer of the year before. Throughout the flight from London, David had been overpowered by memories of the past; incidents and words crashing into his skull – faces and voices coming at him through the years, unhampered by alcohol or the loud music playing through the headphones mp3 player. Nothing seemed to quieten them. Nothing. And now as he watches himself slowly climb the stairs in the building that he grew up in, a particular memory holds him, swaying on the spot, frozen in another time.
Feeling sick, he turns and looks up towards his father’s flat on the top landing, he bites his lip before looking back at his other self, now on the landing below, pausing at the stained glass window, looking out though the reds, blues and greens onto the cityscape outside. He remembers feeling the hot August sun project colours through the glass onto his face and hands. He remembers the faint smell of piss in the air and recalls watching through the mucky window, the tiny multi-coloured figures of children -, aggressively playing football while shouting insults - on the recreation ground at the back of the red sandstone tenement, in the district of Maryhill. He can see his other self bathed in sun drenched colours moving their rays, up the remaining stairs towards and past him, leaning up against the wall outside his father’s flat. And now, giving over to the memory, both breathe heavy and become one, as in his memory, he studies the open outer double doors of the flat which had clearly not been painted since he last did so when he at twelve. He remembers scanning the flaking blue paint and scuff marks that his bicycle had made on the freshly painted wood. He remembers smiling at the tartan nameplate screwed into the wood. The tartan nameplate with his Lithuanian family name Dumblachkis, etched into the plastic; into the vibrant tartan of the clan MacDonald. And so as he stands on the landing bellow, he sees himself from the year before standing before the red-tinselled edged front door of his father’s flat.
He held his trembling finger over the doorbell, looking through the bubble glass of the inner door; at the abstract shapes of the hallway inside – moving forward to look down through the glass to see if the mad colours of the swirling carpet where still there. And they were. It had been his first visit in over five years. He had intended never to come back, but after hearing the news from his older brother Michael that Billy, his father was dying of lung cancer had change his mind. And so, there he was, heart racing about to ring the bell. He whispered to himself and sifted through his feelings, calming himself before, with too much effort that he pushed the bell so hard that it stuck. The bell stuck! The bell rang continuously. He pulled at it and bashed it, but no matter what he did the bloody thing kept on ringing and ringing and ringing. He stood sweating, his calmness dissolving; becoming fear. He stood staring at the glass. He stood and stood bells ringing until, through the bubbled glass he could see the horrific shape of his dying father in stripped blue pyjamas crawling from his bedroom, at a snails pace, moaning – cussing, crawling across the floor towards the door. The ringing bell grew gigantic in proportion reverberating around the building like an alarum - and helpless, all David could do was to witness through the distorting glass, Billy’s pyjama bottoms falling down around his bare arse, around his ankles as he pulled himself up the other side of the door with coughing and growling and fury, falling against the glass panting with exhaustion. He glowered at David from behind the glass; wordlessly demanding who the fuck was ringing the bell. No words just harsh muffled rasping.
‘Its me da’ David shouted over the din. ‘Are you all right?’
He was still shouting when the bell suddenly stopped.
‘Its me. Davie. Where’s ma ma…?’ He bellowed.
The building seemed to shake and David remembered the strong urge to spin round and apologise to the air. Billy managed to open the door before sinking to his knees coughing and, like an injured animal, gestured David to come in. It became a long, sweaty and surreal dance as David dropped his bag onto the floor before he lifted his father gently and slowly up into his arms. Billy was a rag doll and his semi-conscious head lolled onto his son’s shoulder. For a moment they swayed back and forth in a grotesque dance as, down below, Billy’s pyjama bottoms got tangled around both of their feet. David remembers that they fidgeted and twisted for ages trying to keep their balance until, at last, one leg got free. They could at last make an attempt at getting into the bedroom. David trip-dragged his semi-naked father back to the bedroom and as gently as he could lower him, lay his torso down onto the bed before disentangling the other pyjama leg. He lifted Billy’s emaciated legs onto the bed quickly covering them and his shrivelled genitals with a soiled sheet. Sweating like a horse, David slumped into an old orange armchair by the bed and watched with sweat-blurred eyes, Billy pass out from the exhaustion. In the corner, a large TV was on. David turned to see Postman Pat and his Black and white cat get into a toy train and disappear into a tunnel. ‘Choo choo.’
All of this memory rushes into him with extraordinary detail as he stands on the outside, on the landing below. He is so cold but can’t yet move. He can’t yet take the final flight of stairs to the flat where his father died.
When David awoke an hour later, Billy was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette looking right at him. Saying nothing just staring him out. David yawned and came to. He returned Billy’s stare and studied his face. All had changed but the eyes. Brilliant cold, cruel, often beautiful, always luminous china blue eyes. All had changed but the eyes. The rest was gone or going. His yellowing skin now too loose for his skull scarred with blotches and lesions. Mask like, lipless scary-faced man. He was still his father – almost. And all the while, the son, the spitting image of the father was terrified that the future of his own face was opposite him.
Billy dragged the smoke deep into his fibrous lungs and watched David with piercing eyes, his malevolent lipless mouth puckering around the cigarette.
‘Yer ma’s at work. Wit the fuck are you doin’ here?’ He said, pausing to spit bloodied gob into a yellow plastic bucket by the side of the bed.
‘Thought you werni comin’ back here again? He said, taking another drag of his fag.
David swallowed, gripped the chair and opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came. In the terrible silence that followed, he felt a trickle of sweat ripple down the back of his neck. There was a gas fire on full blast in the smelly room with the widows that did not open. He does not remember the windows ever being opened in any of the rooms of the flat not even in summer. Outside it was the hottest summer Glasgow had known for years, the gas fire was on full and he was gagging for a drink, his throat like Velcro, but he could not move. Held in the gaze of the man that had always terrified him.
‘There’s nae money. If that’s whit yer after?’ Billy scoffed as he took another drag -was about to continue when suddenly and violently he erupted into a painful circular, relentless cough. On and on it went his face rapidly going beetroot - fighting for breath - clawing the air. The noise he was making sinister and amplified like something out of the ‘Exorcist’. David finally got up and frantically hovered around him managing to take a slug from a glass of orange barley water on the bedside cabinet. Billy shooed him away, the glass fell to the floor, and while sparks from the lit cigarette briefly danced in the air, managed to thump David hard on the arm - sending him reeling towards the wall. Satisfied, Billy threw the cigarette at David, fell back against the pillows and coughed and coughed and coughed. David, moving, dream-like, sat back down and watched helplessly, feeling his own life, his sanity, and his sympathy sinking–draining away into the brown nylon carpet of his father’s room. He became six again. Tiny in the orange chair - numb. All he could do was to look at the clock on the bedside table. The second hand clicked around the dial as another nauseous smell reeked into the bedroom. Billy had shit himself.
David sits on the bottom step of the landing below with his head in his hands remembering the clawing atmosphere of the room, contemplates making a run for it. His feet, hands and ears are freezing. He watches his breath make steam, closes his eyes and momentarily lost in the Butterfly, relaxes and is moving through the water unhindered and free.
An old woman comes out of the flat opposite his father’s and double locks the door. She turns to see a young man with his head in his hands rocking back and forth on the bottom step.
‘You awrite son?’
The cough took a long time in dying. David sucked on his Marlboro light. The second hand on the clock transfixed him. He noted that it took three minutes for the worst of the violent hacking to stop. Then came the flurries of tickly coughs causing the dying man to spew phlegm and yellow bloodied gob wherever it fell - lasting for at six minutes thirty two seconds. Then came the fight for breath, which lasted one minute twenty before he sank back into his pillows sighing with the relief of a passing attack. David watched as Billy grabbed a phial of morphine, snapped off the top and drank. The relief was quick. Billy closed his eyes. Wonderful silence enveloped them. David relaxed and watched his father sleep. Around his bed was the paraphernalia of the dying. Oxygen – phials of morphine – a commode – a bin with overflowing with soiled tissues - books and magazines never read or to be read – dying flowers and rotting fruit. He watched his old man sleep and could almost detect a gentleness creep into Billy’s eyes and in the lines around his mouth he wondered if their was beginnings of a gentle smile. Nothing made any sense and right then David would not have been able to move from the safety of the orange chair. Not even if a fire should rip through the flat and threaten his life. He became absolutely transfixed with the man that he so resembles. Even though ravaged with disease, it was easily still possible to trace his own face within his father’s desperately thin ghost like-mask.
‘Awe .. Yer jist like yer Da’
Everyone used to say it. David was ready to move closer to his da – to peer even closer at the man who was responsible for him existing. Billy’s eyes opened. David pulled back as Billy strained foreword and reached for a Embassy Regal. David sparked his lighter and held it out for his father who, ignoring him used his own lighter. He took a drag and sucked it deep down into his already poisoned lungs and held it there. David looked on in agony and lit another Marlboro. Billy smiled, blew the smoke out defiantly at his son and then collapsed into another even -more painful cough.
‘Davie?’
David opens his eyes to see Mrs Riley standing opposite him. He had not heard her moving down the stairs past him and looked up at her bewildered.
‘Awe son … its you! Awe son. God bless you in this sad time’
Mrs Reilly makes the sign of the cross on herself then puts her hand gently on his head. Feeling the warmth from her gloved hand and aware of the scent of roses, he looks up, smiling into her bi-focals, which make her eyes appear huge like glasses from a joke shop. The old woman from Dublin had been the family’s neighbour since he could remember. Her kindness had always been constant and to see her now warms him.
‘Mrs Rielly?’
Embarrassed, he stands up and towers above the tiny round woman who plied him with cakes and tea throughout his childhood and awkwardly tries to embrace her. She pats his back and smiles up at him.
‘What the god’s name are ye doing out in the cold? Is she no in yer mammy? Has she gone oot?’ She asks him whilst pushing him up towards her flat.
‘Come on now son. Lets get ye warmed up.’
Glancing nervously towards his mother’s front door, he gratefully lets Mrs Reilly usher him into her own flat, out of the cold and into her kitchen. Jesus and Mary look down from the walls and a rush of comfort envelopes him. Mrs Reilly takes her coat off and removes her plastic rain hat - with tiny yellow umbrellas printed on it, untying it from under her chin and pushes David down onto an overstuffed armchair - the one he remembers always being there - and then busies her self making tea. Her soft voice is full of questions, which he tries to answer, but sensing his mindset, lights the gas fire, stops with the questions and gently talks at him instead. She talks of the tragedy of losing a father and the comfort of knowing that he is no longer in pain.
‘Ach … don’t fret son. He’ll be with the angels now.’ She coos, not believing it for a minute.
David sits dreamily on the chair, feeling the heat against his shins and bends forward holding out his hands for the blessed heat and winces.
Billy’s eyes started to flicker in and out of consciousness. After another cigarette and another phial of morphine, he had allowed David to plump up his pillows and help him to lie, high up onto them. Billy had been murmuring under his breath for the last half hour caught in a dream. He would smile then grimace making it impossible to tell if it were a pleasant dream or bad nightmare. And, having had the courage at last to turn off the blazing gas fire and drink a fresh glass of water, David sat down on the orange chair opposite, and for some time wondered how he was going to get through what was going to be a weeklong visit. The clock began to irritate. It’s ticking getting under his skin. He got up and moved over to the bedside table, picked up the clock and was trying to get at the battery when Billy gripped his arm with an improbable but nonetheless horrible tangible strength. Billy’s eyes opened but this time there was no anger. No cruelty. They were frightened. Terrified.