‘Son, Son’, he calls.
So I went.
‘I’m on the toilet.’
‘I see’, I say.
He never really got that this was our Christmas. The first weekend in December — it’s a public holiday in Spain. The Feast of St Nicholas, too. So they come over, my brother and his wife. It’s good for us, as well; cheaper and if we all come we can stay in the Premier Inn. But he always asks, ‘Will you be coming back for Christmas?’
The door is open.
‘I’m going to be a while’, he says.
I say nothing and wait, eyes down.
‘It must have been that soup.’
We try to make a thing of it: we give him presents, he hands out cash — euros for the Spanish — and cards especially chosen: ‘To My Son And His Partner’ for me. He’s precise. One year, after his fall, I had to get them for him, from Card Factory in the High Street; when he came to sign mine he flew into a rage: how was I to know that under the flowery ‘To My Son And His Partner’ was a silhouetted drawing of two men holding hands?
‘I see’, I say.
‘There’s more to come, I can feel it.’
‘I see’, I said, and moved away.
‘Son, Son!’
* * *
From the ruin of the old church, up on the bare hill, the church dedicated to St Nicholas, you’re hidden from the hospital where he died. At twilight you could be floating, the land and the sea hardly drawn apart; to the west, the sea falling towards the horizon; the sodden land to the south barely out of the water. Northward, beyond the town’s humming lights you can see the wooded hill over which we used to walk to the village where he was born.
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