Shuttlecock by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

lives in a ward with about twelve other patients, all in their fifties and sixties. For the most part, gentle, amiable-looking men in dull dressing-gowns with piping round the cuffs and tasselled cords. Now that the weather is warm, and as the ward is on the ground floor, they are usually sitting outside when I arrive, grouped in wicker chairs on the little terrace outside the tall ward windows, smoking, talking, reading the papers or playing board games. Dad sits amongst them, but not taking part in any of their activities. When I appear I say hello to them all, and a broken chorus answers me. Then I say hello to Dad in particular. His eyes flicker. He recognizes me. But I don’t know if he recognizes me as his son or only as the person who comes to see him on Wednesdays and Sundays. He gets up – sometimes he does this automatically and sometimes I have to put a hand on his arm – and we go for a slow stroll round the hospital grounds. We sit for a while on one of the wooden benches placed here and there on the lawns and ‘chat’. Then we stroll back to the group outside the ward windows and I have conversations with some of the others in which I somehow pretend Dad is taking part. In the winter, of course, we cannot take our stroll outside. Then we walk up and down the corridors (the hospital is run on liberal lines and is quite tolerant about this), and we visit the canteen where the more capable patients can come and go as they please. But I don’t like these indoor meetings so much. In the corridor we haveto pass other patients, some of whom jibber, jerk their heads and even yell out loud (though I have learnt after two years’ visits that such things are nothing to be alarmed at). But passing by these patients makes me think that my Dad is only another indiscriminate member of the ranks of the mad.
    Of course, there is something terribly perfunctory, terribly pointless and mechanical about these twice-weekly visits. Sometimes I think it is not a man who walks or sits beside me, but some effigy I push and trundle about on a wheeled trolley, and it is I who am the deranged one for imagining this dummy is really alive, is my own father. When we sit on our bench (we have our favourite one, beneath a cedar tree) there is this feeling of hopeless pantomime. But then, on the other hand, there is so much to be
said
, so much to be explained, understood and resolved between us. It is odd, but until Dad ceased to speak I never had this need to talk to him. And because Dad does not answer back, because he neither hinders nor encourages whatever I say, I use him as a sort of confessional. I go to Father to say things I would never say anywhere else. (Perhaps I
am
the deranged one, after all.)
    Tonight, for example, I said: ‘The boys have been bad again this week. Trouble-making, insolent. What’s wrong with them, Dad? I’ve been down on them again, and I’ve been bullying Marian and I’ve threatened to take back our television. And I don’t mean any of it, not really, though I’m going to go through with it.…’ Dad looks in front of him, as if he is looking at some phenomenon in the middle distance which only he has noticed. His eyebrows are thick; pale brown hairs mixed with grey. The little furrows above his straight nose, the firm set of his lips suggest some inscrutable resolution.His hands rest on his knees, and now and then they move automatically, rubbing the cloth of his trousers. Between the knuckles on the first finger of his right hand is the little bluish scar where I bit him when I was a boy. ‘What do you say?’ I ask. ‘Nothing, eh?’ For, even after two years, I still treat Dad’s silence as if it is some quirky thing of the moment and not a permanent fact. And even after two years, because I can’t help feeling that Dad’s silence is some punishment, some judgement against me, I sometimes say to him, in all ingenuousness: ‘Please Dad, please. Speak to me. Explain.’
    It’s peaceful in