Page 25 of Watching You

The Watcher

Karl put on his father’s favourite music then ran warm water into a bowl and fetched a clean, soft flannel.

The carer had been in that morning, and washing his father’s face and chest was on her list of duties, but he’d caught her more than once on her phone, tapping away at a text message or social media post, so how could he possibly trust her to do everything on the list?

He’d worked his way through too many carers to risk losing this one, though, so he bit his tongue and did all the tasks again when he got home, stewing privately over the carer’s tiniest faults: not fully raising the blind to allow maximum sunlight in, washing the lunch plate and cutlery but not drying them properly before putting them away, putting a new toilet roll on the holder the wrong way round.

She was infuriating. He’d really wanted a male carer, but they were few and far between, and the only one he’d engaged had spoken virtually no English.

His father, in his few moments of lucidity, would have been horrified, not to mention confused, so that was never going to work out.

As Lee Marvin sang ‘Wand’rin’ Star’, Karl ran the flannel over his father’s face with all the care of handling a newborn.

‘Here you go, Dad. Hope that’s not too warm for you.’ Dip in fresh water, squeeze the excess, wipe again. ‘I had a good morning. Was Sandra nice today? I hope she let you listen to your music. Sorry I was out for so long.’

His father responded by jerking his head towards the window, more likely a twitch than a meaningful movement, but Karl stood anyway and pulled the blind down.

‘Too bright? I get it. I nearly went straight through a red light earlier cos I couldn’t see it properly.

Hey, I’ve got you a treat.’ He dried his father’s face with a towel softer than a plush teddy, and smoothed the few hairs left on his scalp.

‘You warm enough, Dad? I’ll put the heating up a little. Don’t want you getting cold.’

He pulled the blanket up closer to his father’s chin and unwrinkled the fabric.

The thermostat was in the upstairs hallway at the end furthest from Karl’s bedroom.

He’d long since moved his father downstairs into what used to be their dining room.

When his father was still able to walk around a little, the idea of him falling down the stairs was just too stressful.

The move had made everything easier, and really, who still used a dining room anyway?

Karl ate his meals on his lap in the armchair next to his dad’s bed, and his father only ate baby food these days.

The change had made the upper floor of the house even more lonely and creepy, but his father’s safety was more important than his own insecurities.

He moved into the hallway, took a deep breath and gripped the lower banister hard enough to blanch his knuckles, at least in those patches where he hadn’t picked the skin off.

His mother used to slap his fingers every time she saw him sitting there, scraping at one hand with the other while he was watching TV or reading a comic.

‘Stop it, Karl,’ her voice said inside his head. ‘You’ll get blood on your school shirt if you carry on like that, and I’ll have the devil’s own job getting it out.’

‘Stop it, Karl,’ Karl said out loud, his falsetto impression of his mother eerily close to her actual pitch. ‘Get upstairs and sort out that thermostat.’

‘Okay Ma,’ he said, his head so low his chin was almost on his chest.

Up the stairs he went.

‘Up the stairs to Bedfordshire!’ Karl/Ma sang as he plodded, as she had always done. He’d assumed Bedfordshire was some wonderful, made-up place until he’d asked her about it, aged ten. It had never seemed as magical after he was given the answer.

At the top, he paused, gave his shoulders a shake, and stared along the hallway at the thermostat clinging to a once-cream-now-yellow wall, and reminded himself that his mother was gone gone gone.

He’d visited her body in the hospital when she’d passed, the whites of her eyes much the colour of the jaundiced wall.

Then he’d made arrangements at the funeral home.

Once her body had been moved there, he’d taken one long last look at her with his father as they said their until-we-meet-agains.

She’d lain in the coffin with a pale blue silk lining. It had been her favourite colour.

So she couldn’t possibly be in the room at the end of the hallway now, perched on the edge of her bed, brushing her hair.

She couldn’t be, because he’d watched her coffin as it was lowered into her grave.

And the grave hadn’t been disturbed because he visited it every single week on a Sunday afternoon, come rain or shine.

Which meant that the woman in the room at the end of the hallway was either his mother’s ghost or a figment of his imagination.

‘Just my imagination,’ he said, his voice all his own again, low and gravelly, as his father’s had been when he still spoke, before the stroke had dissolved the man he had been and left only a quivering dad-shaped shell.

Karl forced one foot in front of the other.

The thermostat was a million miles away at the end of gluey brown carpet that did its best to keep his feet stuck to it.

‘Would you hurry up, Karl!’ his mother called from her bedroom. ‘You always were a slowcoach.’

‘Coming, Ma,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll do better.’

He forced himself to pick up speed, wondering if he’d left the door to her bedroom open himself or if Sandra – stupid, lazy, nosy Sandra – had been poking around where she wasn’t wanted.

Karl made it to the thermostat and cleared his throat.

It would be better if he just got on with it and cleared out his mother’s stuff.

She wasn’t coming back, and no one else wanted any of it, so leaving all those patterned dresses hanging in the wardrobe and all her tights turning to dust in the drawers was simply an exercise in denial.

Karl put his hand to the dial and turned it up to twenty-one degrees.

‘Going to ignore me, are you?’ his mother called, her voice thick with extra disappointment. She’d always been disappointed in him. It was her default maternal disposition.

‘I’m busy,’ he muttered. ‘Got to go look after Dad.’

‘You’ll go when I say you can go, son. Come in and sit wi’ me. You never come in my room any more.’

‘Not now. Later. I’ve washing to do.’

‘Look at me, Karl,’ his mother insisted.

His head turned of its own accord, in spite of Karl willing it not to.

There she was, craning her neck to peer at him, her skin so dry and flaky there was a haze around her in the sunlight. A different woman might have appeared as an angel. Not his ma, though. She was all demands and instructions.

‘Ignore her. She can be a bully, but she doesn’t really mean it.

That’s just the way her own folks were with her,’ Karl’s father had once whispered to him when his mother had told him he’d amount to nothing if he didn’t step up and do more of the household chores. He was seven years old at the time.

Somehow his feet had carried him to the doorway of his mother’s bedroom. He stood, head down, fighting the urge to stare at her disintegrating face.

‘Have you done what I told you yet?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t, have you?’ He knew without looking that she was pointing at him with her gnarled right hand, the nails too long, the tips of her fingers the sepia shades of an old photo.

‘I’m trying, Ma. I watch her. I’m just waiting for the right time. And now she’s got some policeman living with her, so it’s hard.’ He gave a defeated shrug and shoved his shaking hands deep into his pockets. ‘And she hurt me before. I nearly died.’

‘Oh, it’s hard,’ his ma mocked, her voice reedy and whining. ‘It’s hard and I can’t do it. I nearly died. I’m too scared. I’m too weak.’ She screwed up her face and more of her skin fell in dusty rivulets to the carpet.

‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I can’t take risks. What’ll happen to Dad if I get caught?’

‘You won’t get caught if you’re clever and careful, but I suppose that’s too much to ask.

’ His mother rose from the bed as if pulled by invisible puppet strings.

He heard her knees pop as she straightened and did his best not to let her see the tears forming in his eyes. ‘Lazy boy. Stupid boy. Careless boy.’

‘Please don’t tell me off, Ma,’ he whimpered. ‘I’m doing my best.’

‘You’re doing your best for your father,’ she hissed. ‘Always loved him, didn’t you? Clung to him. Asked for him when you were hurt or scared, you pathetic little shit!’

‘I loved you both,’ he cried. The tears were impossible to hide now, and he knew it would only make her worse, but there was no way of stopping them.

He could hear her feet scraping across the carpet and knew there’d be a trail of ash for him to clear up later.

‘Are you scared now, cry baby? You should be. Do you know what I’ll do if you don’t put that bitch Beth Waterfall down like the dog she is? I’ll creep into your bed while you’re fast asleep and—’

He screamed and bolted before she could reach out and touch him, tripping over his feet, stumbling, hitting the floor with one knee but getting straight up and clambering like some giant spider missing a leg or two, not even caring if he fell down the stairs.

He just had to get away from her. From it.

He made it into the safety of the former dining room, threw himself down at his father’s side and pulled one of his dad’s arms over his neck, burying his face into the old man’s chest.

‘She’s coming,’ Karl sobbed. ‘She hates me. Nothing I do is ever good enough. I did everything to Molly that she asked, but even that wasn’t enough.’

His father said nothing.

Karl cried until his eyes were raw.

‘You won’t let her hurt me, will you? I’ll sleep down here with you from now on. The chair is all I need. It’ll be nice and cosy with the two of us. And I won’t have to worry about you as much. She can’t get down the stairs yet. We’re safe here.’

He pulled his father’s arm a little tighter over himself.

‘And when Beth Waterfall is gone, Ma will go away too. She promised she will.’

His father groaned then let out a long, rattling sigh.

‘You and me, Dad, like we always were. We were the best team.’ Karl forced himself to sit up. ‘I never knew how much she hated us being together all the time.’

Overhead there was nothing but silence from his mother’s bedroom. He hoped that meant she was done for the day. He’d have to run upstairs later and grab his toothbrush and a change of clothes for the morning, but she almost never called to him in the evening.

That had been her special time. His father would come home from work at 5 o’clock, his mother would put tea for them both on the table, then she’d disappear up to her room with a bottle of something cheap but strong and a pack of twenty cigarettes.

They’d hear her television go on, she’d pull the curtains closed, and the next time they’d see her would be the following morning.

It was an arrangement no one ever complained about.

Not until the night with the ambulance, the trip to the hospital, waiting on the cold, hard chairs while Karl’s mother was under the knife. Everything changed after that.