Free Lisdalia by Brian Caswell Page A

the smell of the hospital, not the look on my mother’s face, when she turned around and saw me there. Not the way my father looked when at last they let us in to see him.
    He was attached to a bank of monitoring devices and machines that hissed and beeped like something out of a science fiction film. The doctors said he was breathing on his own, but they kept the machine on to help him for a while. He was in a kind of shock, they said, and he might come out of it at any time.
    Or he might not.
    You could catch the words behind the words. The one thing they didn’t want to say.
    I moved over and stood beside the bed.
    Even with all the tubes and wires, he looked so peaceful. No anger, no orders. No need to put on that show of strength and toughness he thought was so important for a father.
    I touched his hand, and whispered his name, but the sound of it was lost in the hiss and thump of the machine.

20
    WHISPERS
    It was a simple operation. What happened was just one of those things that no one can foresee, like being hit by lightning out of a clear sky. You could do the procedure a thousand times, with no problems, and then …
    Somehow, it was no comfort to know that what had happened to my father was rare and unexpected.
    I sat by his bed and spoke his name, and talked to him about anything that came into my head. While he just lay there. They had switched off the machine that helped him breathe, but they kept all the monitors working, and my words were accompanied by an electronic beeping, like some kind of bizarre answering machine. I didn’t like to speak too loudly in that room, so I whispered; words, encouragements, anything that came into my head.
    â€œI have to go to the University on Friday. They’re announcing the winner of the writing competition. You know, the one Mum told you about. They’ve asked me if I’d mind reading my poem on the night. I don’t know if that means I might have won or not, but it can’t be too bad …”
    I was just talking. Making sounds, trying to fill up the emptiness of that room. I hadn’t really thought about the poem and what it meant to me for … ever.
    Even when I wrote it, I’m not sure I really had a strong idea of what it meant to me.
    She calls his name in whispers …
    It was the sound of the words that I’d liked. The way it might feel to … lose touch with someone. To feel them slipping away, and sit there helpless.
    Like now.
    I looked at my father, lying there. What dreams were passing through his mind? What creatures lived deep down in his imagination? Could he hear what I said? The doctors seemed to think he might, but all they really knew was that they didn’t know enough.
    The scary thing was that when I tried to remember all the fights we’d had, all the things he’d done to set me off and get me so mad, I couldn’t. They didn’t matter.
    The thing that stood out was something I hadn’t thought about in years.
    I was four, maybe five, and the silent dark had me trapped. It was closing in from the shadowy corners of my room, and I was wide awake and watching it coming to get me. I couldn’t move; I could feel it coming closer …
    And then it was gone, and he was holding me in his arms, whispering comforting words in Italian, and carrying me back to his room, to where my mother, sleepy-headed, was sitting up in bed.
    Just a nightmare. A silly, babyish fear. But my father had driven it back.
    He wasn’t just a selfish, out-of-touch Calabrian, making my life hell because I was a girl and he had the power to do it. He wasn’t just anything.
    He was my father.
    And he still saw himself driving back the shadows, even if I no longer saw them. Even if the things that still scared him no longer worried me.
    And if his demands hurt me, what had mine done to him?
    I reached across and touched his forehead. It was warm.
    He didn’t move.

21
    INTO THE LIGHT
    I watched my