FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #6

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son. That’s what my Dad said about my Great-Grandfather and my Grandfather, before the latter died. My Great-Grandfather outlived him by some time, and they were supposedly carbon copies of each other. The last time I saw him, I had driven up to the home sometime around the middle of November. It was in the evening.

    When I found him, he was sitting on the veranda, looking out toward the lake’s eastern shore with the setting sun behind him. He was in that wicker wheelchair again. We bought him a new one well over a year before, my father and I, because the wicker was killing his back. It was steel, lightweight, electric and had a massager built into the seat. As far as I know, he never sat in it. “I like the feel of this one more,” he kept saying. Never understood it myself.

    “Gordon m’boy! I wasn’t expecting you this evening.” He was always enthusiastic, but he could never hide that tired huskiness in his voice in the last ten years or so.
    “I called you this morning, Granddad.”
    “You did? Well, no matter. No matter. Take a seat, for God‘s sake boy.”

I pulled up one of the patio chairs from a nearby table, and sat next to him facing the lake. He had been sipping from a glass of watered-down brandy, which was resting on a coffee table beside a closed, leather-bound book. The air was still that evening, as it often was there. The lake was sheltered by the hills in such a way as to reflect the wind, leaving the surface of the water as flat as a mirror. You could follow the ripples made by the smallest falling leaf. We had sent him there when I was still a boy. Before that, he had lived with his son, my Grandfather, who died when I was seven. My father insisted that we didn’t have the space for him, and that it would be best if he were sent to a home, a nice one, one of those nice little secluded ones up in Cumbria out in the country-side; the best that money can buy. “Nurses are all a bit too horse-faced for my taste,” Granddad used to say.

    “Fancy a drink, son?” he said.
    “I shouldn’t. I’m driving, and I have to be at the hospital in the morning.”
    “Ah! How goes the family trade, then?”

He poured me a drink, with shaking hands. He was fiercely proud that we’d all gotten into medicine. It was like a consummation of his own abilities, before the arthritis settled in. Me, my father, his father, and his father before him. We were all cardiovascular surgeons and two of us had been at the top of our game; my father had only then recently retired as Head of Surgery of Southend Hospital. I hadn’t been short-listed for the job. It was all for his legend, his spectre: my Great-Granddad the War Hero. He served under both the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in both World Wars, a medic in the first and a surgeon in the second. He liked to remind you of it.

    “It’s going well,” I said.
    “Tell me boy,” he said, “How is heart surgery these days?” He loved doing this. He would drop this in almost every time I saw him so he could tell me how hard it was, how much more skilled you had to be.
    “Well Granddad,” I said, “what we do these days is we take the patient and, under heavy anaesthesia, we induce a state of hypothermia to reduce the brain’s oxygen intake. Then, we use a machine that entirely drains the patient’s blood whilst keeping the lungs pumping and the blood oxygenated. Then, with the heart emptied of blood, still beating, but at a much slower rate, we start operating. It’s a good system Granddad, you can see exactly what’s going on, you can operate for as long as is needed without risking the patient, and the mortality rate is down to almost nothing.”
    “Hah! You bastards do have it easy these days, don’t you?” he said, “none of that back in the forties. Fucking nightmare it was. If a man had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his chest, the best surgeons in the world only had a fifty-percent chance of getting it out with the poor sod still breathing. With the heart still going, and the blood still pumping you’ve just got to dive in! Seconds you’ve got! Mere seconds! And the blood Gordon! You’d be amazed what an open heart can do when it’s beating as fast as it can.”
    “Yes Granddad, I’m sure it was something.”

He took a short victory sip, grinning as he took it. Then he turned his attention to the book. He touched it, but with a quiet urgency, as if the book would crumble under his touch were he to put too much weight on it and that it would escape from him if there wasn‘t enough. He wanted to ensure its place, gently but firmly. He let it rest there for some time. I’d seen the book before. He always had it close at hand since we put him in the home.

    “We were stationed in Japan back then,” he said.
    “When was that Granddad?”
    “What?” he said, “Oh, it was toward the end of the War, must have been forty-four, maybe forty-five,” he paused, “Did I ever tell you about John Barker?”
    “No.” I was surprised. He hadn’t.
    “Victoria Cross winner. Bloody good pilot he was.” He poured another drink, without water this time. “I never saw it happen,” he said, “but he got into a dogfight that day, managed to down four Jap planes. The man was a fucking maniac, a damned maniac. They outnumber him, one of them gets a good shot on him right at the beginning, tears his leg clean off at the knee cap. The man passes out and goes into a nose dive, but the rush of air wakes him up and, one leg short, he takes down the first two planes. Then, they come at him again and get a few more shots in. This time he’s taken two in the remaining good thigh, and one in his right shoulder. The shock knocks him cold again, but the rush of air from the next nose dive wakes him up again. He pulls up, damn close to the ground this time, so he’s got an edge on the last two boys and manages to take them down as well, but he’s taken one in his gas tank and he’s flying with one working limb so he crashes. Somehow, he makes it back to our lines.”

    “And then they brought him to me,” he said, “a severed limb, three gun-shot wounds, and deep lacerations to the face and torso, he was lucky to have both his eyes; one of his eyelids was ripped and it was barely hanging on.” He stopped, and looked directly at me.  “He was laughing. He was laughing and he wouldn’t stop. He was thrashing all over the table, like a child. The first nurse to go at him with a needle snapped the thing, and the gas didn‘t kick in for an age. All the while he was laughing, and those eyes.” He said.

    He was silent for a while after that. He just looked at the lake, his hand settled on the book still. I can remember the colour of the trees that day. Those were last days of Autumn, and almost all of the crimsons and the orange and the yellows had left the leaves. Most of them were a dull brown colour, shrivelled to nothing and barely clinging on to their branches.
    “And then the War ended,” he said, “I stayed out East after that. Thailand for the most part. And India. That’s where I met Lily - my second wife.” He reached for the book on the coffee table. “I took pictures when I was out there, care for a peak?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    I was surprised to see there were very few soldiers or pilots in the photographs. For the most part, he had taken pictures of local boys standing on or around cars and playing football in the streets. There was one photograph of what looked like an Indian official, standing to attention and making an “L” with his arms. “Couldn’t speak a word of English, bloody nice of him to pose for me like that,” he remarked. There were a lot of Buddhas in that book.

    The last two pictures were one of 20 Squadron’s crest bearing the words “Facto Non Verba” (Deeds Not Words) and the other a man in a loose-fitting, white linen shirt leaning over the front of a sand-covered jeep, a crutch in each hand, with a look that was either terse or unreadable. “That’s John Barker there,” my Grandfather said.
    “He survived?” I said.
    “Yes. Just about. He came out to India to see me a couple years after the war ended. Read the back.”
    I turned the photograph over where there was a simple inscription in black ink. It read, “Good luck Gordon, great to have the pleasure of knowing you. John.”
    My Grandfather leaned over my shoulder to look it over himself. “I think he was disappointed when he met me,” he said, “ honestly, I couldn’t think of much to say to the man. And he thought it dreadfully odd that I hadn’t gone back to England with the rest of the boys. Kept calling me ’Siam Joe’.” He swished his drink a little. “I’m tired Gordon, could you wheel me in?” He took the book into his lap.
    “Of course I can Granddad,” I said.
    “Gordon,” he said, “will you take the album?”
    “If you want me to.”
    “Jolly good. Jolly good. You won‘t sell it, will you?”

I wheeled him off the veranda and into his room, where there was a nurse waiting for him. She chastised me for letting him drink so much and helped him into his chair. He stretched out his hand to offer a handshake, as was his habit. As firm as his hands would allow.

“Gordon,” he said, “do you remember that one I told you about the Victoria Cross winner who had his tongue shot off?”
    “Yeah. He never talked about it.”
    “Good, isn’t it?”

back to Contest #6