Free Letting You Go by Anouska Knight Page B

intercom. The doors onto the AAU opened. Alex followed quietly as Jem gave the nurses stationed at the central desk a salutatory smile and headed for the second side room on the left. Their roles were already set – Jem, the daughter who knew her way around, what to do, where to go – and Alex, the bumbling visitor.
    Alex rubbed at the back of her neck. It was impossible not to feel anxious at what lay on the other side of the door in front of them. This awful ominous build up smacked of one of the games she’d watched last night on Takeshi’s Castle, the maze game with its skittish contestants where the only difference between salvation and some unknown horror was a couple of inches of plywood.
And what’s behind door number two?
A scary Japanese monster? An emotionally estranged father? An unrecognisable mother.
    Alex eyed the door as Jem reached to push on it and felt an unpleasant lightness in her stomach. She could have taken a running jump, like the nervy lunatics on Takeshi, but Jemwas already a confident step ahead, silently slipping through the door.
    The smell was subtle as it hit. Alex shuffled quietly across the threshold, the scent as familiar as a favourite winter coat. She readied herself. She always readied herself.
    ‘Hello, Dad.’
    Ted was standing, grey and monolithic, beside the only chair in the room. Alex lunged clumsily at him for their obligatory kiss. Ted turned from where he’d been watching her mum sleeping to receive Alex’s kiss. They bumped jaws awkwardly. His skin felt rough, bristly with the greying beard that wasn’t hanging onto the last of its blond quite as well as the rest of his hair. Alex gave him his personal space back and tried to remember the last time they’d made physical contact for anything other than this awkward hello–goodbye ritual of theirs. The last time she’d hung onto his arm or pecked him on the cheek for no particular reason.
    ‘I spotted her in the car park. She still snores like you, Dad, mouth wide open and everything,’ Jem chirped, filling the void with warmth before anything cooler could creep in there. Ted rewarded her with a lazy smile. Alex wished she could think of something to say of equal worth. Nothing came. She shuffled back to the bottom of her mum’s bed, away from that distinctly subtle cocktail of her father’s – coffee, morning tobacco, the last engine oil her mother’s flowery detergent could never quite purge from his overalls.
    ‘You shouldn’t have driven through the night, Alexandra.Folks fall asleep at the wheel all the time,’ he said softly. He gave Alex a few more seconds’ eye contact before his attention returned to her mum. Alex watched his huge gnarly hands move gently over her mum’s hair. It looked redder against the stark white of the pillow. Jem was right. She didn’t look like their mum. Not sick, at least, but older. Different. Fallible.
    ‘Is she …?’ Alex tried past the lump forming in her throat.
    ‘Your mother’s just sleeping. She’ll be right as rain once she’s had a good sleep, slowed down for five damned minutes.’ He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he did this when something was niggling at him and he couldn’t light a cigarette.
    Alex looked at the stranger in the bed. She’d never seen her sleeping like that, straight as an ironing board, sheets neatly tucked beneath her arms. It was all over if anything happened to her. Blythe was the thread holding their patchwork family together. It would all unravel without her.
    ‘Did she like the sunflowers?’ Alex heard her own voice.
    Alex saw her dad’s forefinger begin back and forth against his thumb again only with more intent though now, as if trying to eradicate a sharp little irritant that kept finding its way back under his skin. Alex wished she hadn’t asked.
    ‘I, er … I know purple is mum’s favourite colour but the yellow …’
But the yellow was for you, Dad. Please don’t clench your jaw.
He did it again.