Blue-eyed Nurses
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2019 by TonySpencer

Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 1 - Roger returns to his wintery home town to say goodbye to his dying estranged father. A sad and difficult time for them both but made easier through the spirited help of a couple of beautiful blue-eyed nurses.

Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa   Consensual   Romantic   Heterosexual   Fiction   Mystery   Ghost   First   Oral Sex  

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.

Eventually I rose and got myself a pretty basic lunch in the hospital café. I sent a text to my mother via my mobile phone, knowing she was asleep and wouldn’t read it until tomorrow, or tonight, I couldn’t really think what time it was right now in Western Australia. At least she would know that I was with Dad and left it at that. I didn’t like to tell her the end was so near but I knew it was.

Then I sent off another text, this time to my son Bobby, without expecting an answer; our exchanges of emails were few and far between. We didn’t get on, never had, Bobby was too much like his mother and I didn’t have a clue what I ever saw in her in the first place. Well, OK, I did initially I guess, she was an attractive woman, a stone-cold fox, but somewhere along the line she turned into a stone-heart bitch. Whatever the initial attraction was, her personality was ugly, so any romance wore off pretty damn quick but, by that time, baby Bobby was in the pipeline and I was trapped like gas under an anticline. I was still in the Royal Navy at the time and the long separations did little to maintain my marriage to Jeanie.

Dad was still asleep by the time I got back to his bedside after my meal. I sat with him for a few hours until the middle of the afternoon, then got up again and went outside for a walk in the fresh air. It was more than just fresh, it was bitterly cold out, trying hard to snow once more. I wasn’t really dressed to be outside in England in late winter, but I couldn’t stay cooped up in that depressing hospital one minute longer. Still, the cold made me walk briskly and I did warm up, eventually.

Dad was awake and they were serving up his evening meal when I got back. It actually smelt good. It was a long time since I’d had a traditional British meat-and-two-veg dinner with treacle sponge pudding and custard for afters. I was used to one-pot meals on my current job, usually heavily over-spiced and with ingredients best described as anonymous.

He needed help with eating the meal, the last stroke had paralysed him down his left side and he needed his meat and veg cut up, just like he used to do for me when I was a toddler. Well, he may have done it once or twice, Mum did it most of the time while he was at work, as usual, but one day she was gone for good and I pretty well had to look after myself.

He actually smiled, rather lopsidedly due to his stroke, while I cut his food up. Maybe he was thinking the same thoughts as I was but we hardly exchanged a word during his meal. We had nothing we had ready prepared to say to one another, even to make a start to cross those bridges which had kept us apart for so long. To express in words what had been repressed for so many decades would have contained too much invective, inflicting too much agony. So we each lapsed into uneasy silence.

He didn’t eat much, just played with his food. I remembered but didn’t say anything about how he used to chide me for playing with my food when I was a kid. Funny, the odd things that these moments bring back to mind after so long.

After his dinner plate was removed Dad slept again. Shifts changed and the big black nurse, Marie, who could hardly speak a word of English, popped her huge head in and looked at the charts. I tried to engage her in conversation to find out what she thought and ask if Mary was on tonight but I couldn’t get through to her and she couldn’t reciprocate either, so we both gave up the effort.

Communicating with women clearly wasn’t my forte, I had discovered long ago, a spectacularly failed marriage does that to you.

I went off site with my suitcase during the evening and found a pretty basic hotel room within easy walking distance and booked it for a week. I left my light travelling case there and had a shower, changed into clean clothes and enjoyed a half decent meal in their restaurant before heading back to the hospital. It was really bitterly cold and I desperately needed to buy a winter coat, I would do that in the morning when the stores were open again. They knew me in the hospital Reception by now without me waving my temporary pass and welcomed me in with smiles.

Dad was comfortably sleeping. I dozed too in the stifling warmth as the heating hadn’t gone off yet. I had bought a hardback book to read from a help-yourself charity bookshelf in the lobby, but it failed to hold my interest for long.

I was awoken from my fitful dozing when I heard the rustle of skirts and there she was again, Mary the beautiful night nurse, quietly ministering to Dad, checking him over while he slept. I didn’t think she knew I was even there because when she had finished all her checks she stood by the bed looking down on him, a loving smile on her face in profile as she gently stroked his cheek with the tips of her delicate fingers.

I closed my eyes and twitched, then stretched with a groan and opened my eyes, pretending to see Mary for the first time this evening. She had turned her head and was looking at me with a stern look on her face. Bloody hell, I thought as I tossed the blanket to one side and got up, it must be gone midnight and the damn heating’s gone off again!

“Hello, Mary,” I said, “How is he?”

“As well as could be expected in the circumstances,” she said frostily, the temperature in the room had certainly gone down more than a touch and I was certain it wasn’t all down to the timing switch. She continued, “You haven’t spoken to Frank yet, have you, Roger?”

“No, not yet,” I admitted lamely, chastened by her justified criticism, “I was waiting for the right time.”

“There is no time to wait for your convenience, Roger, you must talk to him now or it’ll be too late for either of you to get the peace of mind that you both need. You owe this to each other. I don’t know, you’re both so stubborn!”

“I know, I know,” I protested. I have never reacted well to criticism, even more so when I knew I was completely in the wrong and she was so correct. Whenever I stayed with Mum and her husband Cliff, she used to tell me off the very same way. I could live with it when I was thousands of miles away from Dad and felt Mum could take her share of the blame for the state of the relationship between my father and I. Here and now, though, with Dad right there and on his last legs and this dedicated angel telling me what I already knew, I was being backed into a corner with nowhere else to go.

“Well, it’s time you turned that knowledge into action,” Mary said firmly.

“As soon as he wakes,” I promised. And I really meant it.

She actually smiled, beautifully. “I’ve just given him something to help him sleep, so you might as well go home and get some proper rest yourself. Come back in the morning, Roger, and speak to him, please speak and make a peace between you and your father.”

Well, long story short, I did and Dad did. It was after I got back to his ward in the morning after a restful night in the hotel. At least they had the options of air conditioning or heating at the hotel, which I kept on as high a temperature as possible all night. I slept surprisingly soundly.

We spoke all morning, Dad and me. I apologised to him for being such an argumentative teenager, for blaming him solely for Mum leaving me behind. And again I was sorry for not being interested in his business as well as my leaving things unsaid for so long because I was so stubborn.

Dad replied that he was sorry he had been so tied up in his work. He admitted that my face had reminded him, every time he looked at me, of my mother Glynis and felt he had unconsciously pushed me away from him during much of my childhood. I guess I had never taken that point of view into account. So, while I blamed him for my crappy childhood, he was blaming me for ruining his middle years.

Families! All we needed to say to each other was sorry, and we could have both benefited from being without those last fifty years of heartache.

Dad asked about my son Bobby. My ex-wife Jeanie, he told me, had come to see him about a month earlier and wanted to ask him for more money to help “poor Bobby”, whose restaurant needed a fresh injection of cash. I told Dad that his place out in that provincial prairie city needed more than just an injection, it needed life support. I had gone through there two or three years earlier, on a stop-over on my way to troubleshoot an Alaskan rig, and the place was empty of a lunchtime, surrounded as it was by packed burger and sandwich cafés. There was really no market in that city for a seafood restaurant that only stocked and served frozen fish.

The partner in the business, Jonathan, was the chef, while Bobby was the front of house manager. I would be surprised, I said, if the partner was still there. According to Jeanie, Dad said, he was. I didn’t know he still kept in touch with my ex-, but Dad shrugged it off with a mumble about “family is still family”, and I didn’t want to say anything that would set us back from where we had reached. Dad had been getting regular financial reports from Bobby and Dad sure knows how to read a balance sheet.

Bobby’s just like us, son, Dad told me, too stubborn to give in even when the odds are heavily stacked against him. I said no, we were not all alike, Bobby and I were both failures, Dad’s business, the garage, had been the only one that had succeeded. Me?, I was sliding down the oilmen merit table, I had become a sleeves-rolled-up, blue-shirted dinosaur in a world of sharp-suited lounge lizards.

He grinned that lop-sided smile that he had developed and told me that he had gone bankrupt twice before the garage finally took off, and that it was the least likely of the three businesses he started to actually make it. That’s why he had to work so hard, he almost lost everything, and certainly lost Glynis and me, for long periods, in the process. Well, I said, I’m back and giving up the oil game for good, although I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in the future.

“The garage is Bird & Son Motors Limited”, Dad said, “it is virtually all yours if you want it. It could be yours and Bobby’s too.”

I had to admit that I thought he’d got rid of the place years before, when he retired. No, he said he’d had a succession of managers in charge but the place had been ticking over for years. It was still a sound business on a prime site that could do with some fresh blood at the top. Perhaps Bobby will come around to it sometime Dad thought, in the meantime it would keep me as busy as I wanted to be for at least a decade or so. We laughed about that.

His Will was up to date, he said, just a few little surprises for me to deal with, that he didn’t feel he had time to elaborate on, but nothing major that he thought I would have any problem dealing with. Bobby would get a share of some investments Dad had made, while I would get a majority share of the business. I would also get his house, so there was “no point in me piddling about in a bloody hotel, for crying out loud”, he added. We laughed about that too. His papers were in his office at home, filed under “Will” in his cabinet. Dad was always well organised.

Dad ate quite a bit of his lunch and actually appeared to both enjoy the meal and my active participation in helping him. His burst of energy was short-lived however and he dozed through the afternoon. I sat there and mulled over what we had spoken about. We had both been pretty silly over the years and all we had needed to say to each other was sorry. Of course, that was the hardest thing for both of us, until now, when we were almost at the very end of his life.

I went out that afternoon while Dad was asleep and bought myself a heavier winter coat. It was overcast and very cold out but at least it wasn’t raining, sleeting or snowing, just a fierce cold wind. If they would only keep the heating on in the hospital tonight after midnight, I might have been completely happy.

I showered and changed in the hotel. Dad may have said I could stay in his house, but it wasn’t quite as easy as that. I had thrown away my front door key 38 years ago. When I last called on him eighteen years later I remembered having to ring his doorbell. I did doze on the hotel bed for a couple of hours but hardly woke up as refreshed as I had earlier that morning. I got back to the hospital in time to help Dad with his evening meal. He was barely conscious the whole time though and hardly touched his food. He had gone downhill rapidly in those last few hours and I regretted selfishly taking the time off to rest when I could have spent that precious time with him.

The remnants of the meal were taken away, largely uneaten, although I had cut it all up for him. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day either, I just didn’t have any kind of appetite at all. I did want a coffee, though, but the hospital restaurant was closed by then and the machine-dispensed instant coffee was not very good. I didn’t want to leave the hospital merely to satisfy my thirst though, as I had a sinking feeling that Dad wasn’t going to be with us for very much longer. I poured a glass of room temperature water from the jug left for him and made do with that.

The nursing shifts changed, Nurse Petra popped her head in and glanced at the chart but didn’t actually do anything. The big black nurse, Maria, I saw walk past the door a couple of times on her way to other tasks, leaving Dad basically in my sole charge. Dad just dozed fitfully through it all, the instruments beeping with a boring consistency, hardly even hinting that he was drifting away. I didn’t need the instruments, though, it was becoming obvious.

At some point in the evening I noticed that the saline drip looked to be running low. Petra had checked his chart earlier but hadn’t looked at Dad at all during her brief visit. It seemed to me like a new bag was required and I needed to press the red button to call the nurse. I had my new coat draped over me as a blanket and, as I got up, it fell to the floor, the air felt very cool without its protective layer. Before I could reach that red button, though, I heard a rustle behind me and there was Mary, as pristine as ever in her crisp uniform, only her long fair hair still seemed to have a life all of its own, trying to break free of the knotted bun behind her head. In her hand was a fresh bag of saline solution.

I smiled warmly at her and she responded with her own sweet smile.

“Have you spoken to Frank yet, Roger?” she asked, still maintaining her pretty smile. What made me think she already knew the answer to that question?

“I have,” I grinned, “But what makes me think you already know that?”

“A little birdie told me,” was her only reply.

I no longer felt guilty as I had been at our two previous meetings so I was able to fully enjoy her sweet smile this time. She was young enough, just about, to be my granddaughter. If she were I would have been very proud of her, she was nothing short of absolutely perfect. My Dad was fortunate indeed to have such an angel looking over him at this time.

Mary fitted up the new drip and sat down on the opposite side of the bed to me, holding Dad’s hand in both her tiny ones. She looked as though she was settling in for the duration.

“No other patients to look after at the moment?” I asked.

“No, not tonight.” Mary looked at me so intensely with her blue eyes, it was like she was looking through me. “Have you resolved all of your issues with your father?”

“I believe so. We have been both pretty set in our ways all our lives. It has made things difficult between us. But now we have, peace, I suppose.”

“Frank told me that he had followed you all your career, Roger. Did you know he invested in the companies you worked for so he could keep track of where you were working and somehow he managed to get copies of all your reports? I am not sure how legal some of the methods he used were, Frank tapped his nose when he said he had ways and means,” Mary smiled serenely. “I think you now need to talk to your own son. You’ve also been estranged for too long, haven’t you?”

“I can’t argue with that, Mary, it sounds as though you have had some long conversations with my father while I was waiting for connecting flights on my long journey home.”

She nodded, “Frank’s a lovely person, Roger, you should be proud of him. He was very proud of you.”

“I think I get that now.”

“Now you need to prepare yourself, Roger, I think that Frank is leaving us tonight, very soon in fact. Will you allow me to call a priest to administer the last rites?”

“I don’t think that Dad’s very religious, Mary.”

“I don’t believe he is either, nor am I particularly, but I have a ... a friend who is a priest and he has asked me especially if he can do this one last thing for Frank, well, for the three of us. I don’t see what harm it can possibly do.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t either. Go ahead if you want to. I don’t know if you will have time to fetch him, though.”

Mary smiled as she got to her feet, giving Dad’s hand a squeeze before putting it down carefully on the bed.

“Thank you, Roger, he’s been waiting outside for a while now,” Mary said as she walked to the door. “Father Patrick”, she called softly into the darkness. Then she turned back to the bed and an elderly priest complete with dog collar and purple shirt worn under a dark suit, entered the side ward behind her. We nodded to each other without exchanging a word, nor did he make any move to involve me in the process.

The priest ran through his rituals solemnly, in a dignified manner and left after he had anointed my father and completed his ministrations. A peace was descending on me during the process that, as a lifelong unbeliever, I felt I hardly deserved, but I appreciated the calming atmosphere that affected Mary and I, while I was not sure that Dad was even aware of what happened.

Dad was failing fast now, with me holding his right hand on one side of the bed and Mary holding his left on the opposite side. Soon he slipped completely away, quietly and painlessly, and Mary automatically switched off the monitors and covered Dad’s face with the bed sheet after kissing him gently on the forehead. Mary wiped tears from her eyes and said goodbye to us both.

I pulled her to me and kissed her thick blond hair on the top of her head. Mary had spent a lot of her night shift with us and I told her I appreciated her efforts and hoped she wouldn’t be in trouble with the other nurses or her boss Sister Maureen. She smiled and left us then, I guessed she had gone well beyond the bounds of her duty and therefore would have a lot of work to catch up on during what remained of her shift.

I sat alone in the room with the body, I really didn’t think of it as being Dad any more. I felt he had gone and that he was indeed at peace. I am not a religious person, never have been, but I got the distinct feeling that he had departed to a better place.

Perhaps Mary had realised that the priest was there more for my spiritual wellbeing than for Dad. I did feel a certain ease of mind. I had regrets that we had carried our little differences on for far too long, but that we were finally father and son again, at least briefly at the end when it really counted for something. Maybe having the priest perform that ancient rite was part of it but mainly I realised the reason for my ease of mind was Mary. The perfect nurse, caring enough for my father that she was prepared to devote her time to make his transition painless and quite beautiful. Mary was really wonderful. I felt there was something more than simply nurse-patient relationship here between her and my father, but a kind of love that transcended the sixty years plus that separated them, an impossible relationship but wonderful to behold nonetheless.

I rang Mum, at that time of night it was daylight in Australia and she received the news of my father’s passing tearfully. In fact Cliff answered the phone in the first instance and spoke to me for a moment before calling Mum to the phone. He had never met my Dad, but he knew the love that my parents once had for each other. It was a tempestuous relationship, but love was ever-present. Cliff landed the love of my mother only because of perfect timing and placing, he told me.

When Mum came onto the line she had heard most of what Cliff had said and she added her explanation. It was while their marriage was in trouble that she met Cliff, who was in England studying for an agricultural degree. Although she divorced Dad and subsequently married Cliff, that didn’t mean she ever completely stopped loving Dad, just the same as she never stopped loving me after leaving me behind. Cliff was also in his 80s and currently rather unwell, so he couldn’t travel but Ma felt compelled to come over for the funeral. She said she would make sure that Bobby and his partner would come over from Canada for the funeral too.

I expressed surprise that Bobby had a partner, I thought he was a confirmed bachelor and commented so. She tut-tutted and said Bobby and I had to have a talk when he was here with me, and not before time. Bobby was 38 and had been living with his partner and lover, Jonathan, for over twenty years, ever since they were both beaten up together by homophobes who raided and attacked the occupants of a gay bar in the capital city. Dad knew all about the relationship, Mum informed me. Apparently the couple had stayed with Frank during their recovery and the subsequent court case and had helped financially to set them up in the restaurant business together.

Families, I am such a loosely-fitting member of mine that nobody ever tells me anything.

I didn’t want to leave Dad’s body all alone in the dark, so I sat back in the chair and pulled my coat up to my throat and dozed the remaining few hours until dawn and the usual noisy daily bustle and business began. One of the day shift nurses came through, sympathised with me for my loss and said she would sort out my father’s effects and have them ready at the nurses’ station in fifteen to twenty minutes. It only occurred to me then that I needed Dad’s house keys if I was going to check out of the hotel and move back into my old home.

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