Chapter 1

I never got on with my old man, ever. I blamed him for my parents’ break up. It was all his fault. Ma wasn’t perfect, of course, and couldn’t put up with his obsessive workaholicism and they argued about it constantly. Ma left him briefly a couple of times, she later told me, before she found someone else who lived halfway round the world, and walked out of our lives for the very last time. I hated my father for that. The feeling was mutual though, I always disappointed him, whatever I did, it wasn’t anywhere good enough. Perhaps I went out of my way to piss him off. I wasn’t interested in running the successful garage business that he built up, I wanted to be my own man, do my own thing.

So I joined the Royal Navy as soon as I was old enough, to see the world, or at least the North Atlantic, the Med and the Indian Ocean. After 18 years of naval service, I worked on the offshore oil rigs and platforms, mostly in the North Sea and Alaska early on, but more recently in warmer climes like Central and South America. Too old for cold nowadays, I guess. Fifty-five is definitely too old to be at the sharp end in the oil and gas game when you don’t have the geology degrees; I managed the men, not the science. Most riggers have given it all up for the good life by this age, but then my ex-, that bitch Jeanie, was enjoying what should have been the fruits for my retirement.

Anyway, there it was on a steamy hot Wednesday and I, Roger Bird, was thinking about packing it all in and doing something else, anything different, at the end of the current drilling contract. That was when I got the call from Ma that Dad had suffered a third stroke, and had only a matter of days, hours possibly, left. Damn, I didn’t even know he’d had the first and second strokes. Nobody tells me anything, but then I’m not overly communicative either.

Ma’s lived in Oz now for over fifty years with her second husband Cliff and are rather frail themselves, both in their eighties. Even if she cared a jot for the old bugger, which I’m sure she doesn’t, there’s no-one left to visit and see Dad through what might turn out to be the end.

Damn! I hadn’t seen him myself for nearly twenty years. That was when I stopped off and thanked him for looking after my kid a couple of months earlier. That’s Mummy’s boy Bobby, my only child, after he got himself in trouble with the law in a bar fight, probably over some girl or other I shouldn’t wonder. I was in Honduras for an exploratory bore at the time and couldn’t get away immediately. I didn’t exactly know where Jeanie was, we informally broke up years before, I guess that runs in the family. I hated to ask Dad for his help, but I had no other choice at the time.

What is it about workaholic dads and freeloader kids? Can we ever coexist? Or is it just my family that can’t?

Well, I was on a similar crap job offshore near Chile when I got Ma’s call about Dad’s massive stroke. I guess she still had a soft spot for Dad that wasn’t a swamp at the bottom of her half-million-hectare sheep station. I was in Chile because I got all the dross jobs going lately, the up and coming young bloods were skimming all the cream that was going. The third of my scheduled five bores was coming up as dry as the previous couple, too, so I put Pedro, or whoever his name was, in charge, telling the company I needed a month off to look after my sick father. I didn’t really have any intentions of going back but decided to keep my options open. Then I flew home.

Home! That was a joke. The only home I ever really had was made out of imitation crocodile leather, with a handle and wheels, the wheels being a recent concession to my aching back, old age creeping up on me I guess.

The last proper home I had was now that bitch Jeanie’s, which she rents out. Bobby let that info slip in a recent email, and I immediately got my lawyers looking into it. Apparently she’s been cohabiting with an art dealer boyfriend in New York, so not only should I not still be paying her costly monthly spousal support, but the family home could be sold up to release my share of the capital value. Bobby moved to Canada to open a fish restaurant with some guy I regarded as a dodgy business partner; it was in a prairie city about a dozen years ago. He never stops bleating about his lot since they left Brighton where they had run a similar establishment for just under ten years.

Dad looked awful, lying there, wired up to almost as many sensors as a Samson Patented Initial Test Rig, or Spitter as we call them. The only nurse I could find in the geriatric section was big and black, named Marie according to her crooked badge lodge precariously on her overdeveloped breast. She led me to Dad’s room when I eventually got through to her who I was and who I wanted to visit. Look, I’ve been around a lot, I’m fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Pidgin and Arabic, with a smattering of Inuit, Italian, French and Urdu, but this baby whale must’ve Gatling-gunned fifty words back to me and I barely understood a tenth of them.

So I sat in Dad’s private little side ward and looked him over critically. He looked sallow, thin and ill, naturally, almost exactly as I expected. He looked like he had fully lived every one of his 87 birthdays. I always remembered him as huge, wrestling me with those big forearms, his straining muscles built from lifting truck tyres and swinging out engines for rebuilds. When I last saw him, in his mid-sixties, he appeared to be in his prime, hardly changed at all since I left home at 17. Now he was skeletal, having shrunk to nothing more than loose yellow skin over brittle bones.

It was as hot as hell in that hospital when I first got in, which I was actually very grateful for. England in April I always remembered as Spring but not this year. A freezing Easterly took my breath away outside the hospital, when I stood in the sleet and paid off the cabbie. He’d been telling me all the way from the railway station how much snow they’d had last week and joking how I’d never have been able to hail a cab then wearing my thin tropical white suit.

The evening rush hour had gone on much longer than I remembered from my last rare visit, the cabbie mentioning something about a Theology College coach crash in the middle of town with multiple injuries, including at least one fatality, which had closed off the main street to through traffic, while the wreckage was investigated before removal. The time spent in the cab seemed lengthened inordinately by the cabbie’s insistent commentary on life in general, when all I really wanted was time alone with my thoughts to prepare for meeting my father once more, perhaps for the last time.

The geriatric section day sister, Maureen Curran, who I spoke with from the airport while I awaited my bag, said I could visit Dad any time day or night. He didn’t have any other visitors. Due to his terminal condition, and location in a private side ward, normal visiting hours were waived. Nurse Curran said she would leave me a credit card-type pass to that effect, which I collected from the hospital Reception. So, I sat in the chair in Dad’s room, him restlessly asleep, before the jet lag eventually got to me and I dozed off, my chin drooling onto my chest. It was about an hour to midnight by then but my body convinced me it felt more like it was four or five in the morning and I’d been up all day and night.

The alarm going off woke me. It was a gentle alarm as alarms go. On the rigs they were loud enough to wake the dead. This was just an insistent annoying beep, accompanied by a flashing red light. I had no idea what it meant but it couldn’t have been good. I expected the big black nurse to come in short order to rescue the situation, but she didn’t. After a minute or two wait I went looking for her. There was no-one at the nurses’ station.

Eventually, I found a different tall thin, rather pinch-featured nurse, Petra, in the middle of dealing with an old lady who had been both sick and soiled herself. Apparently there was a big flap on in Accident & Emergency, Petra briefly explained, and she would be along as soon as she’d finished. At least she spoke better English than the other nurse, albeit with a heavy eastern European accent.

Now I hate hospitals, I feel so helpless and, well, I guess I prefer to be in charge. I’m the big honcho on the rigs, the lean mean gringo, the one who was relied on to always have the answers to get the job done. Here, though, I was a fish out of water and didn’t have a clue what to do other than fetch someone who had more expertise than me. I made my way back through the maze of empty corridors to the side ward. When you are used to finding your way round a drilling rig at night half your life, you develop a sixth sense homing instinct.

I knew I was close, and I started to worry, because I couldn’t hear that bloody alarm any more. That wasn’t good. They’d also turned the damned central heating off, by the time switch I guessed, because it was freezing cold again. I was imagining the worst of what that ominous silence meant. All this way I’d come, halfway around the world, I thought, and I hadn’t even spoken to Dad as he quietly faded away.

OK, you need to know right here and now that I really couldn’t stand the old coot, never had, all the way back to when I lived with him as a kid. But when it boils down to it, he was still my Dad, after all. I hadn’t seen him in years, two decades, and had never really wanted to, but he had always been there, always, whether I wanted him or not, whether he gave a damn about me or otherwise. I knew there would be regrets on my side that we parted on such bad terms. I was also sure I’d miss him when he’d finally gone. I braced myself for the worst.

She was an angel, there was no doubt about it. A vision of loveliness in her crisp green nurse’s uniform. Petite, with golden hair, rather untidily tied into a bun under her little hat, with one long strand hanging down. I imagined that she had dressed hurriedly after leaving her boyfriend’s bed, delaying the wrench of departure until the very last millisecond. Well, I certainly wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed if I was her boyfriend.

I watched her from the doorway as she glided gracefully round Dad’s bed, tucking him in and smoothing the bed down. This was a proper nurse, the embodiment of perfection: calm, efficient, caring, as well as effortlessly beautiful. As I said, an angel, blissfully occupied in the care of her patient, totally unaware of my presence. I cleared my throat.

She turned and looked at me, her eyebrows arched, her stare enquiring as if to ask what was I doing here at this late hour, stopping her from getting on with her essential life-saving work?

She looked utterly beautiful. And that nurse looked so familiar, yet different somehow, perhaps an echo of a memory of some Hollywood hospital drama I had seen once? If it was less than two decades old, then no doubt it would have seen it dubbed into Spanish.

“Thank you for attending to my father,” I said, putting on my most disarmingly charming voice. I hide it most of the time behind gruff four-lettered barks and snarls and only dusted it off from time to time when it was useful to be at least temporarily engaging. I added my number one smile too, and hoped my teeth were at least a degree cleaner than they felt, “I didn’t know what to do when the alarm went off and I tried to find someone.”

The nurse smiled back. Her fresh-complexioned face was elfin, a few brown freckles speckled the bridge of her button nose and upper cheeks, her even white teeth brilliant above a slightly pointed chin. Her eyes were as blue as the ocean, deep, unfathomably deep. Cute? Oh yes, cute as a button, reminding me of a Cork barmaid, who took me in hand, must have been almost forty years ago.

That beautiful Cork barmaid, who came to mind more and more often as I aged, would now be in her early seventies, of course, and her even cuter daughter in her mid-forties, late-forties maybe by now. That fair-haired, blue-eyed barmaid had been a lot older than me and had a little girl, I remembered, that she carried half asleep from the one double bed in her single-room apartment and put down on the adjacent armchair.

I was only a fresh-faced teenager then, accompanied by shipmates who were on a 48-hour pass on a ferry trip to Cork from Plymouth after completing our Navy basic training. I was the only virgin in the crew, reluctantly admitted by me through a tongue loosened by an unaccustomed consumption of alcohol. To the joy of my drunken shipmates I had been ceremoniously delivered to the barmaid, of that last pub we occupied, down by the docks, who willingly agreed to pop my cherry in exchange for a handful of crumpled fivers and a bunch of condoms collected from a whip round of my crew mates. They had paid her to take care of my tender virgin arse for the whole night.

She popped my cherry well and truly, that Cork barmaid. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, told me she was a “Pro” for “Professional”.

She had patted the bed beside her, “Come sit here, why doncha?” in her lilting Irish accent.

“Look,” I remembered saying nervously, “We don’t have to do this, the guys’ll never know.”

“Oh, I can’t do that darlin’,” she smiled, no doubt amused at my terror of the night ahead, “I’m a ‘pro’, as in ‘professional’, I’ve been paid ta provide a service for the night, and that’s exactly what I’m goin’ ta deliver.”

“But ... you are too, well, too beautiful to do this.”

She was indeed stunning, with thick strawberry-blond hair, blue eyes set in a beautiful face, and a curvaceous female body to die for.

“Oh, you sweet boy,” she laughed, “You’ll be breakin’ hearts one o’ t’ese days.”

“But not yours?”

“No, darlin’, me heart don’t break no more. It was broke just the once an’s beyond mendin’.”

“But what about her, your daughter?” I jerked my thumb towards the little girl, who was sitting in the chair staring at us with her deep blue eyes.

“Don’t worry about her, sweet t’hing, she’s tired an’ll drop off directly,” she said, her eyes ablaze and a smile on her luscious lips, “She’s not intimidating you, is she, me little girl?”

“Yeah, she does a little, while you scare the pants off me!”

“Ooh, that sounds promising’, you know, your pants comin’ off!”

She put a hand either side of my face and pulled me into a long breathtaking kiss, one that made my knees go AWOL and I collapsed on the bed. She rolled me on my back and smothered me in kisses as she was unbuttoning my shirt and trousers, then she pulled them off me. Despite all the black beer I had consumed through the night, I was sobering up quickly, every nerve ending in my body afire with fear and passion. My erection was so bloody hard that it hurt.

“My,” she giggled as she grasped my steel girder, “What do we have here?”

To my embarrassment, I literally exploded all over her hand. Pop! Just like that.

“I’m s-sorry,” I stammered in my utter shame and disappointment.

“Don’t worry, my darlin’, it’s good to get that one out of the way,” she said soothingly, “Now we can both relax and enjoy this.”

She pushed me onto my back and pulled off my trousers, which were gathered around my ankles by this point. To my amazement, she squeezed my balls and started to lick them with her pink tongue. Soon she was licking my limp cock, which gradually rose upright, like a cobra responding to a fakir’s flute. I just hope it wouldn’t spit at her again. She tore off the wrapper from the condom and put it on me, rather expertly I thought. Then she mounted me slowly, working my stiffening snake into her heavenly basket. She had those blue eyes closed as she eased down until she touched bottom. She smiled, opened her eyes and leaned down, kissing and biting my lips.

“Use yer hands ta squeeze me tits, darlin’. Gentle now, that’s it. Now yer t’hum an’ forefinger on me nipples and twiddle. Yes, jus’ like that.”

She worked up and down me, varying the pace and rhythm, fucking me slowly and steadily, until she lost control and fucked me hard until collapsing on me.

Every time I looked over to the chair I saw the little girl’s big blue eyes looking straight at me. Even though there was no light on in the room, there was enough glow coming in from a nearby streetlamp to give us all the illumination we needed.

The whore, I never knew her name, pulled off the condom and tied it up. As she worked my cock with her mouth she positioned her fanny over my face and told me to lick her. She directed me this way and that, how long and how deep, until I was rock hard again. Then she lay on her back while I climbed on and entered her again. She was still in charge though, and directed everything. Soon we were pounding at each other again, my sweat dripping down on her.

Again, at the end, after she removed and dealt with the condom, we cuddled for a while. hen she got me hard again while I received instruction in licking her to her satisfaction. After fucking her doggy style, we both collapsed and slept for a while.

I would never forget that night or the little girl with the big round blue eyes. She watched me like a hawk when I left that single room in the morning, my face scarlet to my hair roots. It wasn’t simply that I felt guilty, it was more complicated than that. I couldn’t believe how beautiful the woman was, why she was what she was when she could surely have had any man of her choosing. It couldn’t all have been beer goggles on my part, I thought.

And the tiny little girl who sat there looking at me with her pretty little blond head cocked to one side as if to wordlessly ask if that was as much fun as I thought it was going to be? I know my shipmates had paid her well for the night but I left a couple more banknotes on the table as if to salve my guilty conscience, as the mother slept on in the half-light of the dawn.

Memories, some of them good, some bad, that is all we are left with at the end of the day. That particular memory will stay with me always.

“Frank’s resting now,” that angelic nurse interrupted my reminiscences in her soft voice with the very slightest hint of an Irish accent. Perhaps I was right about the Cork barmaid? No, forget it, that was not far short of 40 years ago, this nurse was no more than half that age.

She continued, breaking into my continuing thoughts, “He’s been waiting for you to come, Roger. Frank doesn’t have very long left, you know.”

Roger, she called me Roger. Damn it, she had been speaking to Dad and knew exactly who I was. She probably knew our history as well as I did but only from his perspective, his slant on why we couldn’t stand being in the same room together. That’s why she was being so short with me.

“I’m here now, Nurse... ?” I said, looking for a nameplate. She knew my name but I was at a disadvantage, I didn’t know hers and she didn’t appear to be wearing any identification badge.

I held out my hand, she hesitated momentarily before she shook it, her hand was cold. Not surprising really now that the heating had been switched off. It was trying to snow outside as sleet rattled against the window. It was freezing in that unheated hospital and nurses wear such skimpy sleeveless uniforms nowadays.

“Mary,” she smiled, “I prefer - just call me Mary. I must go now, I’ll be back later if I am needed.”

“Thank you, Mary.”

She left with a quiet swirl of her green uniform.

I settled down in the chair, Dad was sleeping peacefully and looked like he was set like that for the rest of the night, so I snuggled down in the chair under a spare blanket left at the bottom of Dad’s bed. As a result I soon felt snug and warm again and dozed until dawn. If Mary had looked in during the rest of the night, I wasn’t aware of it, but the bag of saline drip looked much fuller than it had been, so she must’ve quietly changed it without disturbing me.

Hospitals are noisy places at the best of times but they are particularly so first thing in the morning. Shifts change, new nurses appear as if by magic, checking charts and seeing who was still about and any new admissions that may have appeared during the night. Then the rounds of washing, changing, feeding and drug administration before the doctors did their rounds. Then it all starts again. I found it exhausting simply sitting watching.

Dad stirred when the bustle started and I arose, stretched out the kinks in my back and we shook hands formally, sword arm to sword arm like old adversaries, which we were. We had barely exchanged a few terse words before I was bustled out of the door while the nursing staff did whatever private functions they were charged to perform.

I asked to speak to Sister Curran at the nurses’ station, but apparently she had come in during the night to help with the emergency in A&E and wouldn’t be back in until much later as a consequence. The nurses who were around were therefore short-handed and pre-occupied. I had hoped to thank the Sister for sorting out my pass, but it could wait.

I visited a bathroom to freshen up and grabbed some breakfast in the hospital coffee bar situated next to the reception area. I didn’t really have much of an appetite, I was really washed out and tired. I was weary of the life I was leading and wanting a change but not sure what I wanted to do or even what I could do starting out on a new career at my age. I had been drilling for oil and gas too long and wasn’t fit for much else. I was alone and lonely, too. I didn’t really have what you could call a life, I existed at best. Coffee, I definitely needed that coffee.

I popped into the nurses’ station again on my way back. Both nurses smiled at me, but they were sad smiles. Just then a porter wheeled past me with a bed containing an occupant covered by a sheet. For just a moment I thought the worst, then realised the bed came from the opposite end of the corridor from Dad’s side ward. As the bed passed, the younger of the two young nurses suddenly burst into tears and ran off towards presumably the nurses’ toilets. I still wanted to thank the day sister for arranging my pass so efficiently, but neither of them were called Maureen, which I remembered from our conversation yesterday. Was it only yesterday? It seemed longer ago than that. I asked the remaining nurse and she gravely told me that Maureen Curran wouldn’t be in today or possibly even the rest of the week. It must’ve been quite a busy night last night. Oh well.

When I returned to his ward, Dad was sitting up and looking comfortable and alert after his refreshing bed bath. We danced around one another, neither of us remotely touching the subject of our stunted relationship. He soon wearied of the game and lapsed into a fitful doze. I relegated myself to the chair again and sat there listening to him breathing with difficulty and the relentless noises and flashing of the instruments. Sleep wouldn’t come for me, my body clock was all over the place.