Nick
Nick
He’s absolutely exhausted by the time they pull off the M25. Perhaps driving for four hours on no sleep wasn’t the most sensible of all ideas. But he wanted to do it. For her.
He doesn’t want to examine why he wanted to. Not right now, anyway.
Beth, unsurprisingly, fell asleep halfway down the M1. He let her sleep right round the M25, but now he guiltily nudges her awake because he needs directions.
‘There’s a road map somewhere back there,’ he says, and she undoes her seatbelt and twists round to retrieve it.
He’s done nearly 20,000 miles in Maud. God, he loves her. And what she represents: his independence. Six months of taking every shift going at his local supermarket, saving up every spare penny, until she was his.
They arrive at the hospital at 9.48 a.m. When they finally pull into the car park, Beth starts to cry.
‘I can’t believe we did it…’ she says, blinking away the tears. ‘Thank you so much Nick. I’ll never forget this.’
‘No problem. It was fun,’ he says, holding her gaze. He feels his own eyes begin to tear up, which surprises him, and he reaches out to squeeze her hand. ‘I hope your grandad is OK, Beth.’
They lock eyes for a few seconds longer than necessary.
She takes her mobile out from her handbag, and calls her mother. There’s a lift in her voice as she tells her that yes, really, she’s at the hospital, and asks to come inside.
‘Do you want to come in?’ she says, after she hangs up. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘No, go and be with your family. I’ll take a nap in the car.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ll be here when you’re ready.’
She smiles, gives him a short nod, and then she leaves him alone.
*
He’s utterly shattered and so he gets out briefly, doing a lap of the car park to stretch his legs, and then he takes his glasses off and lies down across the back seats – somewhat awkwardly because he’s 6ft – and he falls into a deep sleep.
He dreams of his own grandfather, who lived with his grandmother in a small terraced house on an unremarkable street in a village near Woking. His grandad always smelled of woodbines and mothballs, and always wore a woollen waistcoat, even in the summer. He would produce a twenty pence piece from behind Nick’s ear as soon as Nick arrived at their house, and then he’d cuff him on the chin and, while his mother and grandmother chatted, he’d challenge him to a game of poker dice. They played for raisins.
He liked going to his grandparents’. His granny was always baking – a ginger loaf, or in the summer, a Victoria sponge filled with strawberries from the garden. The house was small, and dark, but it was warm and it was clean, and, most importantly of all, it felt safe.
He never could understand how his mother ended up the way she did, when she had such loving parents. He asked her about it once, and she was dismissive, said that things were very different when she was a child.
‘Grandad was still traumatised from the army,’ she said. ‘He was short-tempered with Ian and me. Retirement has mellowed him. You don’t know what he was like, Nicky.’
He’s always felt sad for his mother. She has had a difficult life, and none of it is her fault.
When he wakes, his neck is twisted and throbbing and he feels as though he’s been crying in his sleep. He reaches a finger up to his eye. His eyelids are damp.
He blinks a few times.
He thinks of his grandfather, the dream – or was it a memory? – of sitting on the rug in their front room, and throwing the poker dice, looking at the little symbols printed on each side, trying to work out if he’d thrown a winning hand.
His granny moved out of that house two years ago and into an old people’s home that smells of boiled cabbage and disinfectant. His grandad had keeled over three months before, falling face-first into the tomato plants that were just starting to sprout from their growbags.
Nick had spent an entire day planting the tomato seeds with him just a few weeks before.
He had to help his mum clear the house, and it was as painful as he knew it would be. He stood for hours in the small kitchen, arguing with her about his grandparents’ vast, valueless mug collection.
At one point, when she refused to let even one of them go into the box for the charity shop, he felt like he might burst with frustration.
‘I’m going to take a break,’ he said. He worried he might scream at her if he didn’t get some air.
The small back door still had a cat flap in the bottom panel, even though Misty had died more than a decade before.
He walked down to the bottom of the garden, gulping fresh air, and that was when he noticed that his grandad’s tomatoes had gone over. Plenty of sunshine followed by unseasonal rain had provided the perfect conditions for them to flourish, and yet they had been abandoned. Understandably, everyone had been distracted. But now they were all split and rotten, and it made him so mad to think of the waste – his grandad’s last effort, all for nothing – that he kicked one of the growbags so hard it split, covering his shoe in damp soil.
That was when he sank to the ground and cried for the first time since his grandad died.
Nick sits up on the back seat of the car and pats down his denim jacket until his fingers rest on the worn leather pouch in his pocket.
He pulls it out. Turns it over in his hand and un-pops the popper, letting the contents tumble into his other palm.
His grandad’s poker dice.
Some of the images are worn but each side is still recognisable. He squeezes them tight in his fingers. He tries not to encumber himself with too many belongings. He believes in collecting people and experiences, not things, but there are a few special items he would save in a fire, and these are one of them.
He carefully puts the dice back into the pouch, picturing his grandad’s warm, smiling face, the rough edge to his skin, the reading glasses he always kept in his front shirt pocket.
‘Let me get my binoculars,’ he would say, whenever Nick wanted to show him something.
Nick climbs out of the car and stretches his arms above his head as far as possible. He looks at his wristwatch. It’s nearly noon. He thinks of Beth, somewhere inside the concrete hospital building.
He hopes her grandad will be OK.
And if not, he will tell her what he learnt once. Words that he found online when he felt the most alone he’d ever felt. Words that were a true comfort.
The dead are only truly dead when they are forgotten.