Sheltering

Sheltering by Thomas Ollerhead

He stubbed out his cigarette on the bright red window frame, carefully
placing it back into his tin, his convulsive cough, unexpectedly loud
in the confined silence of the shop doorway. He never threw away
cigarette ends, sitting before his hearth, a spread newspaper across
his knees, he would carefully slice open each stub with his damaged
thumb nail. Then he would combine the reclaimed tobacco with new, mixed
and kneaded, new strands with old, a careful pinch evenly spread along
the cupped cigarette paper, a deft tongue, and there on the edge of the
hearth, a pristine row of neat new cigarettes, growing insidiously more
deadly with each cycle of renewal.

There was no meat in the window now, a bright steel rail, sharp hooks
above the cold marble. Neat rows of fading garnish, parsley, thyme,
laid to embellish, to beguile, reality held cleverly at bay; heavy
rain, jaundice yellow in the nearby gas lamp, indiscriminately
meandered down the black window. When the rain stopped we moved out
from the doorway, uneven cobbles, their pinpoints of reflected light
beckoning, and he, his throat succumbing to the infinitely slow cancer
that would eventually kill him, coughing up phlegm onto the slick
pavement, his breathing laboured as he manoeuvred the bicycle out onto
the wet road.

I sat on his crossbar, my child's hands, small between his, big damaged
hands, docker's hands, a blue vein tattooed crucifix; and there he was,
a forty-a-day roll-your-own man coughing and wheezing onto the back of
my head, the long dock road running away to infinity. I wasn't to know
it but that journey was to be our last, an evening memory frozen in
time, surfacing down the years in the most unlikely of moments. The
hard cobbles forcing the lens of his glasses into the side of his
temple, dark blood pulsing onto his rain-washed face, onto the cobbles.
A man out walking a small dog, stopping to help, the dog, unsure,
hesitant, nosing the warm blood.

In late winter they transferred him from the hospital to a place in the
old part of town, an austere building, more befitting a Victorian
workhouse than a hospice.
As was the way in those days, children were not admitted, when my
mother went in to fetch him, to bring him home to die, I stood outside
looking up at the blind-black windows and waited, held onto the cold
railings, in case they flew away. The small side street silent and
empty, grey slate roofs reflecting the heavy sky, only me, and the cold
iron railings. When she brought him out, his head protected by a
woollen scarf, she made me run and hold onto the bus, in case it
escaped, dragged him in a fit of coughing; the railings could look
after themselves now, but not him. In those days I hadn't learned to
love him, that only came later, little by little, growing stronger with
the passing years and the surfacing memories.