Lift
- May 24, 2024
- 3 min read
by Daniel Addercouth
I’m standing in my parents’ living room by the hospital bed the council lent us, waiting for my father to finish his lunch. Except lunch is too big a word for what he’s having: half a bowl of tomato soup that I warmed in the microwave. He used to polish off a whole can plus a handful of oatcakes, even after he retired from the farm and was no longer so active. My father sits propped up in bed with multiple pillows. The front of his pyjama top hangs open, revealing his wrinkled chest. He takes a small spoonful from the bowl, which slides precariously on the tarnished metal tray as he adjusts his bed-sored legs. It’s the same tray I used to go sledding on behind our farmhouse when I was growing up, gleefully skidding over the bumps. He raises the spoon to his mouth with a trembling arm and slurps off the red liquid. I already know he won’t finish the bowl.
My father abandons the spoon with a sigh and returns his attention to the TV perched on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. It’s yet another repeat of Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys, which I assume my father enjoys, although he no longer expresses opinions about television, or says anything much at all. In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain. His name was George Bradshaw, and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks. I can’t stand to watch this old Tory in his salmon-coloured suit jacket and pastel green sweater extol the beauties of the Cotswolds, so I move to the end of the bed where I can no longer see the screen, and look out at the gunmetal-grey North Sea. I’d like to open the window to dispel the stench of my father’s pipe, which he insists on smoking even though it helped to cause the COPD which is slowly killing him, but I know he’ll complain about the cold, despite the heating being turned up so far it gives me a headache.
It was the view that sold them the house, my mother used to tell everyone, but I’m not sure my parents made it down to the water more than a couple of times during the quarter century they shared this bungalow. Every time I’m here, I make a point of visiting the beach, a broad expanse of sand that curves around the bay for miles, but my father will never see it again. He’ll probably never set foot outdoors again, unless — or until — he needs to go to hospital. He can barely manage to get into the borrowed wheelchair so I can transport him to the bathroom for what he still refers to as a “number two,” although the time for euphemisms is over.
Our neighbours’ trees sway in the March wind. The view isn’t as good as when my parents moved in, after the family across the road built their barn of a house and next door let his cypress bush explode, but it’s still a pleasure to gaze at the washed-out mountains on the other side of the Moray Firth. A shape moving across the water catches my eye. Too fast and erratic to be a boat, too big for a bird. I fetch my grandfather’s binoculars from their spot behind the sofa. Slowly the shape comes into focus and I realise it’s a rectangular kite, bent into a bow. I spot a figure beneath it: a kite surfer in a black wetsuit, skimming over the waves on a board. It’s the perfect day for it.
My father asks what I’m looking at, the first question he’s posed in days, but I don’t reply. Instead, I watch mesmerised through the binoculars, imagining how it must feel to be suspended above the water for a weightless moment, before splashing down again.
Daniel Addercouth grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Flash Fiction Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and Vestal Review, among other places. You can find him on X at @RuralUnease.
