‘So, how’s your dad?’ Everyone asks the question with the same eyes. Anxious, yes. Sympathetic, yes. They’d rather not ask, but they know they must. They’ve seen me now. Time for a difficult conversation.
It’s been more than a year since my father’s trip to Rome to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. It was on Boxing Day that he fainted and fell, injured his neck and became paralysed from the head down. Countless hospitals, operations, doctors, flights and interviews later, he’s finally home in west London, albeit transformed.
Today, as we prepare to leave the house, we speak about the same things we always did. But now he’s telling me about the friendly bike thieves he watches from his window as his live-in carer carries out his bed bath. We discuss our favourite vape flavours as he’s plucked from his bed by a robotic arm, which cradles him in a blanket as it ferries him across the room to his wheelchair like a stork.
We gossip about our golden retriever’s weight management as I shovel a Pret crayfish sandwich into his mouth. Then I brush his teeth and put on his coat, his hat and mittens, just like he would for me when I was a baby. After I gather his essentials into a bag, we finally set off on the long journey across Shepherd’s Bush for a haircut, the first proper one he’s had in a year.
When my father’s girlfriend, Isabella, called on Boxing Day to tell me, my twin brother and my mother about the accident, she made such an effort to downplay it, to shield us from distress, I wasn’t sure if he had perhaps sprained his ankle.
Two days later I was on a plane to Rome with my youngest brother, Kier, to see him at the hospital. My father cannot recall this visit as he was so high on meds. I wish I could have been. What do you say to someone who’s just awoken to the realisation they can no longer move their body? Jesus would know, though I can’t say his enormous crucified image above my father’s bed was exactly reassuring.
In the weeks and months that followed, some things became clearer, other things more confused. He had become a tetraplegic, a condition that stripped him of voluntary control over his upper and lower body. He had some movement, the way one has some movement in a straitjacket – his arms hung listlessly, his legs flailed and couldn’t support his frame.
The inability to move his hands is a particularly diabolical affliction: he is forced to endure his punishment without distraction, unable to pick up a book or reply to his messages.
