Shuttlecock by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

suit but his underwear as well. An attendant stood up, shouted at him, and immediately the patient broke into a loping run, not, it seemed, to escape pursuit, for his run had nothing urgent about it, but for some peculiar, cryptic purpose of his own. He ran, at about fifteen yards’ distance from us, right in front of our line of benches, with the aim, perhaps, of reaching the ornamental pond to our left; but before he could do so two chasing attendants closed on him.
    Now all this could have been, in one sense, highly comical. But the man’s bony, yellowish body, his wide-open mouth as he ran, his shrivelled genitalia bobbing up and down, made you think – I don’t know how to put it – of something really terrible, not amusing at all. And this fact seemed to be endorsed by the reactions of the nursing-attendants. As they walked the patient back to his clothes they did not attempt to laugh the matter off. The mood of the sunny afternoon had changed. A third attendantran up with a blanket to cover the man. They all looked apologetic, ashamed – here where there was so much mental nakedness – as if they had allowed us visitors to witness something unthinkable. And the odd thing was that when I turned back again to Dad, whom I’d almost forgotten in the commotion, he was twisted round on the bench, his arms propped on the back-rest, his head turned away towards the roses so he could not see what was happening.
    When Dad and I have sat for some minutes we get up and take a second stroll. This is part of the pantomime too. We walk round the pond and down the yew walk and back over the lawns to the ward. All this time, of course, Dad is utterly silent. As we walk across the trim grass in the hospital grounds I am reminded of how I used to trail behind Dad, lugging his bag of clubs, as a boy, on the golf course at Wimbledon. Every Sunday morning, after an early breakfast; the pigeons clattering out of the hawthorn bushes, the dew still glistening on the fairways. It was one of those gestures of kindness and good will I made only in the period when I had my hamster. I volunteered to be Dad’s caddy – no mean feat, when you consider the weight of a loaded golf bag, for a boy of ten. But I used to follow doggedly the little entourage that gathered round Dad at the club-house. They had names – I forget now, Arthur So-and-so, Harry Somebody – and they all had the confident, weathered looks of men who had had, as they used to say then, ‘good wars’ and become well set-up afterwards. Dad used to make a fuss of me in front of them and they’d tease me in return. Dad was proud of me; he could scarcely credit my new lease of good behaviour, and I don’t believe I ever knew him happier than during that time when I had Sammy. What changes that hamsterbrought about. But what I remember most about those mornings is the ‘Wwhack! Wwhack!’ of the drivers at the tee; the little jibing, tense remarks that followed, heads tilting to follow the ball; and Dad always getting the best score and no one seeming to mind a bit, as if it were a pleasure to lose to Dad. Dad lifting back his club for the next drive, his body poised, and sweeping it down as if he really meant to punish the little ball, to annihilate it, and the ‘Wwhack!’ as it struck; and you always knew it would never fail (‘Good shot!’ and Dad smiles, shielding his eyes); up, up, with a ‘whirr’ like some flushed game-bird, up, over the gorse and the silver birch and the yellow bunkers, and down again; eighteen times, hounding the ball mercilessly, masterfully, towards the distant flags.
    I don’t believe Dad will never speak again. It can’t be that this awful thing has happened to my father. Sometimes I get the impression that this silence of his is only a pretence, an elaborate, obstinate pretence; that all the time he looks through me and seems not to recognize me, he is really only pretending. The doctors have given him up, but I have a theory that if