MAKE DO AND MEND - A NOVEL

I could say that this is the story of how I died, although that wouldn’t necessarily be true. As with anything in life, and death is no different, there is so much more to this tale than just my death. Although, that is certainly the beginning.

Some might say that I had good innings – which is really just an old term for, “She lived long enough, better unplug her and save the electricity bill which is already on the precipice of ruining the hospital’s purse.”

Call me a cynic, but that’s true.

I never wanted to die, of course. I mean, who does? So, you can imagine the great shock when, standing there in the tiled kitchen of my small apartment, something in my head went.

Went. That was really the best way I could think of describing it. It was that feeling you get when you walk into a room, determined to get something, and the moment your feet press over the threshold you completely forgot what you’d even gone in there for in the first place; or, if you’d rather, it felt like someone had caved my skull open with an axe.

Now, of course no one had caved my skull open with an axe. I lived in a small apartment, one of many, within a community for the elderly. “Assisted living,” they called it – because the moniker “care home” or “retirement facility” sounded too clinical, harbored the cliché of being the last stop before The Last Stop.

So, my head – axe – crumpling to the floor, head smacking hard against the sticky tiles. I could smell the tang of pine bleach down there. It was in that moment that I realized it was probably my moment.

My eyes, the color of a sunless sky, watched the teaspoon I had been holding as it bounced and scuttled beneath the stove. My grandkids had always joked that I’d go out making tea; how right they were.

I had reached for the necklace they made us all wear here for such occurrences as this. Fall? Push the necklace. Can’t remember where you put the flour? Push the necklace. Death-blow headache?

Well, try as I might to push the neat little button shaped like a plastic jewel, my fingers fumbled uselessly. My arms felt at once still, and limp.

I was unsure of how long I stayed like that, looking back on it now. An untidy mess sprawled out like some helpless creature, all tangled limbs and cracked skull. It’s hard, watching this over, not to imagine my skull like an egg and all that red blossoming out like some visceral, horrific yolk.

When Nurse Khan knocked and called out my name, rushing around the corner at the silence, my final moment of bodily consciousness before the fog had taken me was of her beautiful face (the color of milky coffee) bending down to scoop me up. The ruby bindi glittered on her forehead.

“Delphine?”

Her voice, those West Midland intonations, warbled through one ear and out the other. I felt the weight of my eyes drawing the lids together, the dulled sensation of a hand cradling my head before pulling gently away. A gasp. Voices muted by the encroaching fog.

And then, all at once, so much color. An explosion of kaleidoscopic technicolor, and I felt myself lightly rushing away from this scene, from Nurse Khan and my broken body. I could see swirls of blue and purple galaxies and endless sparkling oceans of stars.

I could see the birth of the universe and its end, when all souls throughout the entirety of existence (not simply earth, not just that planet, but every single one). I could see the sun, our son, blooming like a fiery rose; the stars petering out into the void, giving way to the age of black holes; and they, too, fizz into non-existence.

All of history rummaged through my…. My what? My mind? My being?

I could see my son, my Eoin, moving through the kitchen of his house. He was shoveling frozen fries onto a scuffed baking tray. Yet all around me, still just stars. And yet, there he was – my son, my Eoin – kitchen, frozen fries, baking tray.

I could see my grandson, my Archie. Oh, my Archie. Times without number he would remind me that I was his best friend; and times without number I would reciprocate. The thought of dying, of devastating him so, pained me endlessly.

And look at him there, ever lost in thought and anxiety. I can see him folding t-shirts and trousers at work, welcoming customers into the store and pulling faces after they’ve passed. I can see him work, hear his thoughts.

Now, I know what you must be thinking: Delphine, you can see your grandson? Hear his inner monologue?

Well, yes. I’m dead. The dead can see, can hear, everything. Absolutely everything. You know that moment you unzip and tug your jeans down to your ankles, reaching a hand into your underwear and you stop and think for just a moment about those who’ve gone before you, whether or not they can see you? Well, we can. But don’t worry, we don’t judge. We’ve all been there.

The dead can see absolutely everything. This is an undeniable, unalterable fact; and if it makes you uncomfortable, then I am sorry, but you are shit out of luck, my sweeties.

So, Archie. My Archie. My grandson.

Look at him there, folding the t-shirts he secretly hates (he would never shop here), though he feigns adoration in the presence of his manager. He neatly aligns the stack in the concave wall, pretending to actually care that each shirt lines up with the next.

If you listen closely, you can hear the anxiety tick-tick-ticking away in his mind, like a watch at night. He worries so much and I’ve never quite understood why. He worries over the state of the world and his parents. He worries over me, though I wish he wouldn’t.

I wish I could explain to him, explain to you all, that existence is really as magnificent as you suspect it might be. That the chaos and chaotic splendor of life is but the beginning.

They say that if you follow these beliefs or pray to that deity then you will not die, not really. You will live on angelically. You will live on as disembodied energy in some bizarre universe of which we know little. So we live on; so we survive.

Archie used to believe in such fairytales and myths as a child; not so much any longer. Life and all its experiences had left him jaded and stoic, closed-off.

If only he knew how wrong he was. If only every single person on this planet knew how wrong they were, and yet, how right. I cannot help but wonder the amount of bloodshed it might save. The heartache such knowledge would abate.

You may not be able to see me, but here I give you a great celestial wink. Oh, the follies of bodily existence.

“Archie.”

It was Ester, Archie’s co-worker. She approached him, her dark face maudlin.

Hear Archie’s heart thump as he turns at her voice, his face contorting worriedly. Archie knows that something is wrong; Ester, ever the peppy, has approached him with a maudlin expression uncharacteristic of her.

A call, she told him. He had a call in the back, his husband, Barrett, on the phone.

Archie went into the back, wondering why his husband was calling him at work. He nudged his way through the stockroom, brushing past piles of jackets and hanging shirts, into the cramped office.

He pulled his cellphone from his pocket as the office door snapped shut behind him, to see five missed calls from his father, one from his husband.

Odd, he thought to himself. Then he felt the panic lance up his spine like a scorpion’s sting in his nerves.

Archie picked up the receiver, trembling already.

How I ache for him, watching this over.

Barrett had explained carefully how I had suffered a stroke. Eoin, he had said, had tried to contact Archie. Finding no success, he had instead called his son-in-law. As Archie listened to the few known details, gripping the phone hard enough against his ear that it painfully crushed his earlobe to his head, his heart sank elegiacally.

His husband’s voice, those honey intonations which typically soothed him, now wrought his stomach in uncomfortable knots.

Archie had explained to Ester and left work immediately. He slung his messenger bag over his shoulder, felt it slap his thigh wildly as he ran.

Watch the panic on his face as he dials on his phone, clambering into the taxi before it has even come to a stop. How I wish so desperately to comfort him, but we cannot.

Those of us who have gone before you cannot give you the knowledge that we are here. Can you imagine the upset such intel would cause? Of course, such knowledge would solve many issues; though it would give rise to new ones to take their place.

The taxi had reeked of stale cigarette smoke and the tang of body odor. The cramped, shadowy confines did little to mitigate Archie’s nerves which had already been on the precipice of snapping. Holding back the sensation of an oncoming panic attack, Archie shot from the taxi as it pulled to the curb.

The hospital loomed grand and glassy overhead, twinkling in the barely visible sun. The storm clouds were already sailing insidiously across the sky.

Archie scattered the change everywhere as he tried to pay, shouting harried apologies back over his shoulder at the irate driver.

He dashed through the revolving glass doors of the hospital, barely stopping to ask for directions at the administrator’s desk. Ignoring the closing elevator doors, he instead opted for the stairs.

Archie slammed the clunky doors to the metal, industrial stairwell open. The door smacked the concrete wall like an exploding firework. He took the ascending stairs two at a time, his boots clopping against the cinderblock.

He broke out into the stark hallway, momentarily blinded by the harsh white light.

By the time Archie reached his grandmother’s room, he already felt the sickening sensation of dread overtaking him, settling in the pit of his stomach. He feared that she might already be gone; that he might find a sheet pulled across her face.

Oh, my dear. If only you knew that I am watching you now, watching as you reach a trembling hand out to the door, turning the brass handle.

Eoin was perched on the edge of a chair close to Delphine’s bed, one of her hands nestled within his own. His cheeks gleamed in the harsh fluorescent lights. Tears tracked down his face.

Jacqueline, Archie’s stepmother, looked up as he entered. She was stood behind her husband, hands resting on his shoulders. Barrett heard the door creak open and turned, giving his husband a weak smile as he rushed over and tangled his arms around Archie’s neck.

Archie snuffed in his husband’s scent, burying his face in Barrett’s shoulder.

“Thanks for already being here,” Archie muttered, his voice muffled through Barrett’s red gingham shirt.

“Of course,” Barrett said. “I came the moment your dad called me.”

Barrett was a good boy. I had known from the moment Archie had brought him home that they would be good for one another. Of course, no relationship is without its peaks and its lows; but I have confidence in them both their ability to weather any storm.

Archie buried his face further into his husband’s shirt. He could smell the familiar vinegary tang of olives on Barrett’s breath when he spoke. It was a fragrance which typically repelled him. Yet, in that moment, Archie found nothing but solace in it.

Archie gave Barrett a peck on the jut of his cheek and squeezed his hand. He moved over to his grandmother’s bedside, to where he could face his father across her rising and falling, rising and falling chest.

Eoin did not glance up, did not even acknowledge his son’s presence. He was too immersed in whispering something to his mother that sounded like aching reassurance. He told her things he would rather not: that everyone was doing okay; that she could let go and be with her husband, her George, if she was ready.

“You will make a beautiful angel, Mum,” Eoin affirmed, his voice a choked strain.

“I will,” Delphine muttered.

Archie took ahold of Delphine’s free hand. “I’m here,” he whispered.

Her hand felt icy and frail to the touch. Archie almost dropped it back onto the hospital bed. He was terrified of breaking her skin, her brittle bones, from his gentlest touch. It felt like holding something delicate; an eggshell that might crack and crumble at the slightest provocation.

“When did my hands get so old?” Delphine asked.

Her silvery lashes fluttered like wind-teased tinsel as her eyes eased open. The blue irises were darker than usual.

“I remember when I was Delphine, and I was young. I was so young.”

And I was. I was such a pretty little bit, too, if you do not mind me mentioning. My hair had been dark as a crow’s wings, and just as gleaming. I had never cut it, instead letting it grow down my back. I had been thin, god had I been thin. One thing you never take seriously in your youth is the warning from those older than you of your metabolism’s death.

“Eat those cakes while you can,” they would warn. “Because it’s all downhill from thirty.”

Of course, I did not listen; and neither did I mind. I quite enjoyed the body I inhabited. I allowed myself to age into the plump old woman I became, because I knew that I was so much more to so many.

“You still are Delphine, Mum,” Eoin whispered. The pain in his voice was almost palpable.

Delphine glanced down at her hand with its translucent skin like wet, crumpled paper. Her hand was clawed, her thin fingers like ancient twigs; a cinnamon broom.

She let out a rattling sigh. Archie’s own hands, she noticed, were smooth by comparison. Thick-fingered and backed with ampersands of hair. He had so many years spread out before him like a great road, and she envied him for it. Of course, she always worried over him, over his health; but she was only human. Regardless of her wanting him to be happy, to be healthy, envy remained.

“Life goes so fast,” Delphine told the room, her eyes on her grandson’s hands.

She blinked measuredly. Every subtle movement cost her precious reserves of energy and her mind felt as though something was not quite right. It was the sensation of walking into a room and forgetting what you went in there for.

“All over,” she said. “Just when you start to get traction on it.”

There were flowers on Delphine’s bedside tables, filling the room with their color and their perfume. Eoin had brought roses with hefty ruby bulbs splayed open on thick, thorny stems. Jacqueline had brought frilled pink peonies like upturned wedding gowns. In a vase of opaque green stood delphiniums, their little galaxy-indigo cups so perfectly formed you might expect them to tinkle or to chime the hour like little bells.

“I see you’ve plenty of flowers,” Archie said to his nan. “And delphiniums, I see. I know how much you love having those around.”

Delphine blinked carefully. She had been gazing up at the frosting of the ceiling. She turned to look at the flowers either side of her. Delphiniums? Surely not. Surely that was lavender? Or bluebells?

She grimaced. The rose of her cheeks had been siphoned by the stroke. The grey down on them which typically stood out was now faded into the pallid skin.

“Wrong,” she frowned. Her voice was a pitiful croak. “You’re wrong. I like having delphiniums around. These aren’t delphiniums, they’re bluebells.”

Outside the window the sun was beginning to lower, the dark clouds overtaking the sky. Past the strolling garden with its benches of carved marble, you could see the streets and the shopfronts beyond glowing orange.

The delicate pink of Delphine’s scalp was exposed to Archie as she turned to face away from him, her eyes moving to the window and the view beyond.

Archie was dumbstruck by this confession. He went to speak, but his throat felt like sandpaper. He knew this was not right; his nan’s favorite flowers were delphiniums. He was sure of it.

And they are my favorite flowers. But, unfortunately, you could say that I was not in the best state of mind that evening.

Archie knew my favorite flowers because I had recounted them to him on multiple occasions. Over tea and over biscuits I had told him the reason, the story of how his grandfather, my George, had handed them to me on our first date.

Over tea and over biscuits I had told Archie the story.

“Our first date,” I had said, gazing wistfully into my cup, watching the crumbs from the biscuit melt away in the milky vortex. “You should have seen him standing there, Archie. Holding up those flowers, those delphiniums. He’d grown them for me himself. Your grandfather always did love the garden.

Delphiniums for Delphine, he’d told me. And he’d looked so beautiful standing there, with the sun breaking around his head like a halo. How his ginger hair had glowed.”

I had smiled to myself, and still I feel the sensation of a smile even now at the thought.

“Like a lantern,” I had told my grandson, dunking my biscuit again.

The shopfronts in the distance glowed like lanterns. Delphine’s eyes fixed on them. She thought of how she might never set foot inside them again. She was so very tired now; tired deep down to her bones. All Delphine wanted was to close her eyes, to sink into whatever came next, whatever that might be.

Delphine shook her head, releasing Eoin’s and Archie’s hands. She pulled the thin sheet up to her chin, muttering something about the fatuous error her grandson had made.

Archie glanced at his father. Eoin met his eyes, gave him a weak smile. He felt for his son and knew that, despite being an adult now, this was difficult for them to grasp. He so often forgot that his boy had grown up.

Archie felt that to lose Delphine would be a chasm kicked into his life. He feared it would be something from which he might never recover; his nerves were so fragile already.

Watching his grandmother, Archie found himself contemplating what might be going through her mind.

Oh, if only he knew. What does go through the minds of the dying?

Despite my disembodied state, I am sorry to tell you that I cannot speak for all of us, only for myself.

As I lay there, what little thoughts I could conjure revolved primarily around the relief to finally leave behind the struggle that my life had recently become. My body had failed me; my mind had failed me. It was hard not to feel a sense of betrayal. Those two things I had relied on all my life now no longer worked as they once had.

The nerve of them!

Not that I would ever have told my family this, but I was at once ready to go, and not.

“No,” Archie said. “Nan, you love delphiniums, remember?”

Archie wanted to urge her to remember. He inched forward and reached out for her hand again. Delphine saw his hand edge towards her own. She snatched it away, tucking it beneath her bedsheets.

Archie needed so desperately for her to remember.

“Grandad George grew them for you, remember?”

“No,” Delphine snapped. “You’re wrong.”

Archie swallowed down the swelling lump of an argument.

“Archie,” Eoin said, rising unsteadily to his feet.

Archie looked over his nan’s body at his father. Eoin was forcing a smile onto his face, tugging awkwardly at the smoky goatee that dripped from his chin.

“What?”

He instantly regretting the severity of his tone at the look in his father’s eyes. They had lost their crinkle at the edge from his smile.

Archie glanced at his nan. She looked so strange lying there. The tubes snaked out from her body and the bulky machine bleeped all around her like satellites around a sun. One side of her mouth was slack. A bruise blossomed on her temple, dark and purple like a port wine stain.

Archie nodded curtly at his father. He knew, of course; of course, he knew. Delphine had been having strokes for a while, now; and her dementia was the penalty. It was her body’s noxious gift to her.

Still, the fact that the memory of her first date with her husband had been tainted by the illness hurt Archie greatly. He felt anger swell inside him like a tightly closed, white-knuckled fist.

How life could be so callous and cruel as this, he had no idea. It was not fair.

Life seldom is, but onward we carry, regardless.

One of the beautiful facets of life, as paradoxical as it might seem, is death. It shines a bright spotlight on life; it gives it an urgency, and a beauty. Despite whatever might come next, it will never be the same as a life physically lived.

Some go their whole lives burying the notions of death, even when it comes knocking on their own door. It is in death itself, however, when our vision becomes truly cleared. Never have I had such clarity as I have now.

I would be in no rush to die if I had had the option to do it all over again, though.

I can see it all. I can see the birth of everything, and its end; and it is, in a word, gorgeous. And when I say everything, I mean everything.

I can see myself hitting the floor and the silver teaspoon skittering stickily beneath the stove, where it will become forgotten. Weeks, months, years from that moment, when my body is gone and is little more than bones in the ground or ash within the rotten remains of a coffin, of an urn, the teaspoon will still sit there. Ants will nibble at the sugar crystals glued to it.

I suppose this just goes to show how much those at Audley Hall, the assisted living facility for the elderly, in which I lived, cared. Honestly, Nurse Khan was perhaps the only one there who gave a damn about us at all.

Archie followed his father from the room and into the scrubbed hospital hallway. Jacqueline took the vacant seat her husband had occupied, taking Delphine’s hand.

There was a strange aroma circling, something ferrous mingling with the stark, sharp scent of bleach.

A doctor marched past, winding her stethoscope around her neck as she went. A harried young man in scrubs followed in her wake, consulting his clipboard held between trembling hands for every question fired at him.

“She doesn’t mean to come off so hostile, Arch,” Eoin said.

The door to Delphine’s room closed behind them with a little snap and a click.

“No, I know,” Archie said.

Archie leaned back against the wall, his head resting on the blue arrow pointing to radiology.

He could hear muted conversation from behind the door. It was the sound of his husband chatting with his grandmother. His heart sank. There it was, then; Barrett could coax from his nan that which he, Archie, could not. It was simply something else at which he failed in life.

“It’s getting hard again,” Archie admitted.

Opening up this particular can of worms, as he had tried with his father in the past, was always difficult. He knew the response he was going to get, yet still he tried.

It wasn’t that Eoin didn’t understand. It was simply that his philosophies were a world apart from Archie’s when it came to mental health.

“Your job?” Eoin asked.

“Everything, I mean. It, mainly.”

“I keep telling you to try meditating, son.”

“I know, Dad,” Archie sighed.

There it was: Eoin’s philosophies, that your troubles, your health, could be rectified with simple positive thinking. That problems could easily be solved, if only you were willing to ask the universe to intervene.

Archie refrained from rolling his eyes. He thought of telling his father that the absence of serotonin in his brain required more than just the act of fondling a few stones and hoping for the best.

“I’ve never felt comfortable with those pills the doctors have you on,” Eoin said. “They zombify you.”

“Do I seem zombified?”

“Well, no.”

“The medication helps,” Archie said. “Even small steps still take us somewhere.”

Archie sighed, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“I just worry about you. That’s all,” Eoin said. “It’s my job.”

Eoin was that not-quite-rare breed of parent: the Constant Worrier. He wore the title with covert pride. If there was an outcome of any melancholy variable you could rest assured that Eoin had wasted no time in imagining it, and convincing himself that it was the only possible outcome.

Times without number Eoin had to remind himself that his little boy had grown up; that the man who now stood before him, head leaning back against the hospital wall, was the same tiny, wrinkled form he had once held in the palm of his large hand. It amazed him to no end, this remembering that he had created a life, and had watched this life grow, scrape knees and wail, demand an extra chocolate, an extra hour, before bed; had trusted him with his secret (Archie’s father being the first he had told).

Now here Archie stood before him, less a boy and more a man, married; committed, traveling through his own life, with his own anxieties and fears and concerns. Yet, did Eoin worry less for his son, despite his twenty-five years on this earth and counting?

Eoin allowed himself a smile; he worried as much now as he had the day his son had been born.

“I know,” Archie said. “Look, I’m probably just gonna take a stroll, maybe grab a cuppa or something. I think I saw a café on the way in.”

“All right, mate. You want me to get Barrett?”

“No, I kind of just want to be alone with my thoughts for a bit. Stroll and think, that kind of thing. Tell Barrett I’ll be back in about twenty minutes.”

Archie left his grandmother’s room behind, making his way swiftly down the stairs up which he had run.

Weaving his way among the crowded tables and chairs of the hospital café, Archie approached the exhausted woman manning the counter with the warmest smile he could currently muster.

Archie exchanged coins and platitudes for a cup of tea, and made his way back to the uppermost floor, this time opting for the elevator.

Look at my grandson, panicking yet again. It is all he seems to do these days. He steadied his breath, eyes fixed on the dotted digital numbers as they counted up.

Archie felt weightless within the metallic confines of the elevator. He never had liked them; not as a child, and apparently, he still loathed them as an adult. The only reason, so he told himself, for taking it on this occasion was to not waste a single, precious moment with his nan.

Images swirled through his mind that if this plated floor at his feet were to fall away, he would plummet at speed through a grim, darkened shaft to his splattered and pulpy death.

The plastic cup of tea steamed in his hand. The elevator stopped with a jolt, the doors sliding open with a whimsical ping.

Thoughts such as these often plagued his mind; he had become accustomed to them.

A nurse in blue scrubs, the same from earlier to whom the doctor had been firing ceaseless questions, gently pushed a rickety wheelchair past. An emaciated old man sagged into the seat, yelling raucously about playing with himself.

“You really can’t do that,” the nurse said.

“I’ll fiddle with myself all I like!”

“Not in front of the nurses, Mr. Connor,” the nurse groaned, apparently not even trying to conceal his exasperation.

The nurse gave Archie an awkward nod as he passed, the soles of his shoes making squeaky contact with the floor.

Handsome, Archie thought to himself, watching the golden cap of his head vanish around the corner, giving a wan smile in return.

Archie made his way down the hallway, passing an empty bed in a vacant room. Barrett was stood outside Delphine’s room, massaging his hands as though trying to work something obstinately sticky from them.

Really, Archie knew in that moment what had happened. His husband only performed this little tic under moments of great stress.

Barrett glanced up and saw his husband stealing towards him, tea in hand. He gasped, fleeing to him, almost knocking the steaming drink over them both. Archie felt his husband’s shape tremble in his arms, their hearts drumming together, chest-to-chest. That pungent stench of olives had dissipated now, and all Archie could smell was Barrett’s amber cologne.

“What is it, BarBear?”

(Oh, those pet names. I cannot tell you the amount of times I had heard Archie, on the phone to his husband or sat across from him in my living room, calling him by that pet name. My eyebrow would shoot up, I would laugh, jovially mocking, embarrassing him; after all, what are grandmothers for?)

Archie tried to pull back, but Barrett clamped on tight. He wished so ardently that he could somehow change it, or that it could turn out to be some cosmic lie he was about to tell his husband.

And how to even tell him?

“Archibald,” Barrett tried.

(Archie’s pet name)

Archie knew. He didn’t need the words or the explanations. He heard it in his husband’s voice.

Before he knew it, he felt his own body quake. He felt the sturdiness of himself, of his frame, suddenly give way. It was as though all the stitches that hemmed him together were unraveling and splitting.

If only our dearest Archie had stayed, had decided against his stroll, his drink. Though I do not hold it against him. I cannot help but wonder, in a similar situation, if I might not have done exactly the same.

After all, after my darling George had passed away, I had receded into myself for months. People, they say, deal with grief in their own, bespoke way.

The door to Delphine’s room opened with a gentle click. Eoin emerged with a hand to his mouth. Awful sounds the likes of which Archie had never heard his father produce before, was not even aware his father could make, reached his ears.

Jacqueline came next, her hands on her husband’s shoulders. Her round, bespectacled face was laddered with black train tracks of mascara.

Archie locked eyes with his father. He could see the depressing revelation reflected from those shining, bloodshot eyes. His greatest fear, that which he had spent the last few years dreading, had arrived.

Archie felt the hallway constrict and the floor drop away beneath him. To place one foot before the other, time and again, became difficult; he was not sure how exactly he was even managing to move forward at all.

“No,” Archie muttered plaintively. “No.”

There Archie was, telling his father and his stepmother as he passed them.

“No.”

Archie told his husband who trailed after him as he forced himself into his nan’s room. Something felt different about it now, despite the shape on the bed; something felt missing.

“No,” Archie told the air of the room and the world around him, told the flowers.

The doctor was there already, gently tugging the sheet up and over Delphine’s face. Archie saw her, saw how relaxed she looked. Her eyes were closed, and he thought how they would remain forever closed; how they would never again open to take in the world.

Archie almost expected the doctor to whip the sheet away much as a magician performs a trick. To whip away the covering and reveal that his nan was not gone; to reveal that this hospital visit and the handful of strokes that had punctuated the last few years had all been a trick.

And here the trick would finally be revealed. The cover would be whipped away; a grand revelation. Delphine would spring out of bed, spry as she ever had been. She would demand a kettle and a cup of tea.

“No,” Archie moaned.