The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Read Free Book Online

fishing off the end of the jetty. The air smelled of rotting fish and tar. Ted closed his eyes and took huge lungfuls of it. How could he be dying? He had never felt so alive in his life.
    If he was lucky, he might get to see Rory McIlroy give the U.S. Open another shot in June. Might. Possibly. But he almost certainly wouldn’t see Dublin qualify for the All-Ireland in August.
    He would have liked to see Leonard Cohen again, he thought, to watch the white stars of his little
Magnolia stellata
bloom one last time, to be there when—if—his bloody son ever found a girl he wanted to be with for more than a fortnight, to see his daughter holding a son or a daughter of her own.
    The nurse holds up a mirror. His cheeks are sunken and his forehead seems to extend to the crown of his head, where a few pathetic wisps of hair still cling. His collarbone protrudes through his mottled skin like a coat hanger. He starts to laugh, though he’s not supposed to. Laughing makes him breathless. Margaret was right. He looks awful. He looks like Gollum.
    *   *   *
    The morphine pump chirps and the pain liquefies. He remembers the sun on his neck on a beltingly hot Sunday morning. Walking hand in hand with Margaret down Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. The eggy smell of the river at low tide as they crossed the bridge. How old was shethen? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? She had wanted to go to Bray, to the sea, that morning, but so had half of Dublin.
    The train was still on the platform at Tara Street but the doors were closed. When Margaret went up to the office to ask about the next one, the stationmaster took one look at her and added an extra carriage to the train. That’s how beautiful she was. Is.
    She is thirty-eight and he is seventy-one. How is this supposed to work? A summer shower outside the window. Beyond the clang and rattle of the approaching lunch trolley outside his door, he can hear the drops whisper against the glass. He imagines breaking out of this overheated room, pulling out the wires and the tubes, striding along the corridor, taking the stairs in twos and walking out into the parking lot, turning his face up so a curtain of cool rain closes over his face.
    When he opens his eyes, Margaret is back floating at the corner of his vision near the window, looking at a framed photograph of Lara and Phil.
    â€œYou were snoring,” she says.
    A short, round woman in a blue overall that looks about to pop pokes her head around the door. “Knock! Knock!”
    Ted wants her to go, wants to be alone with Margaret, but he knows he has to play this stupid game. “Who’s there?”
    â€œBoo.”
    â€œBoo who?”
    â€œCheer up!” The woman grins. “It’s corned beef and cabbage today!”
    He shakes his head. The door closes. Margaret sits on the end of the bed giving him a quizzical look. Drops of rain sparkle in her hair. She is wearing the same red coat. “Aren’t you hungry?”
    His appetite dwindled away the last few weeks before he came into the hospital. The morphine killed the last of it. Now he remembers a salad he shared with her at a beachside restaurant in Italy. He can almost taste the feathery green spears of rocket, the juicy pink shreds of Parma ham, the two ripe figs halved, the salty Parmesan shavings. He can see the cracked blue Formica table, the cheap, battered cutlery,the sooty red wine in the chipped tumblers. He can hear the music of Italian being spoken all around them.
    Margaret leans over and picks up the photograph. The children, taken a few Christmases ago. Lara in an elegant green dress with her hair up in a bun, smiling her serene smile. Phil in his bike leathers with reindeer antlers planted on his rumpled black hair, his chin tilted back, caught in mid-laugh.
    â€œTell me about them,” Margaret says.
    â€œLara’s the sorted one. She’s been with Michael for ten years now, married for eight. She runs a