The Last

Artwork by Charlie Robertson

There are so many last times, and you never know, at the time, that they are last times. The last time I dyed my hair red. The last word you say to a teacher as you leave their classroom. The last book I read to Eva. The last time Leo reached for my hand. The last time I carried Leo, his warm head on my shoulder, thinking only of getting him to bed. You stop and don’t start again. You don’t notice the stopping until much later. 

But when I said goodbye to my father, I knew. That was it. 

*** 

You would call Ian ‘difficult’. I always hated that word. It’s a way of smoothing over something sharp and jagged, something that should never be smoothed. He was frightening. I grew up flinching, listening for the shift in tone that meant things were about to tip. You couldn’t relax around him. You had to pay close attention – like noticing when the air in a room goes still. 

Ian’s anger filled the house – it was imminent and moved like a shadow, pushing into you, colouring the light. He was cruel, mostly with words and sometimes with shouting. There were times when it wasn’t just words. My mother was afraid of him. My siblings were too. We all were. 

I stayed afraid of him. 

*** 

It was a winter day when I walked into the palliative wing of the small country hospital in north-east Victoria. He’d been there just over a month. The foyer was dim and hushed, with that unmistakable hospital smell – clean, chemical, threaded with something sour. 

Dad’s room was dark. He was propped upright in bed, his face slack with sleep. 

‘Hi Dad. It’s me, Michelle.’  

He stirred. ‘Yep, yep. Hello.’ His voice was rough, distant. His skin had taken on that dead-man pallor – grey and shrunken, his hands mottled with purple and blue, bruises blooming beneath the surface. 

‘Do you want some water?’ 

‘No, no,’ he murmured, giving a faint shake of his hand. 

We sat in silence. The blinds were drawn, and the room was shadowed in brown late-afternoon light. I held his hand. I think I spoke about Eva and Leo and Andrew – how busy they were with school and work, how Mum would be over later. He nodded here and there with grunts of acknowledgement. The conversation thinned. An odd mumble, barely sounds, no full sentences, just fragments. Were these the last bits of information to keep the line between us open? Or did they make only too clear how far apart we were? 

We were left alone with our memories. His eyes were resting, and his face seemed emptied out. What was he thinking? 

What made him so hard and such a prick of a man? Being the ‘mistake’ child, trailing years behind his siblings? Boarding school at six? Being raised by my pop, Roy (always referred to as ‘the old man’), and my nanna, Margaret (who was obese and an alcoholic)? 

He was a farmer. Four children by the time he was thirty. Too many responsibilities – financial struggles, unpredictable weather, drought after drought, mounting interest rates. Around this, the drinking. Always the drinking. Only a few weeks ago, before he entered the hospital, he would have his whiskey poured and a ciggie in his hand at ten in the morning. The bottle would be empty by the end of the day. 

How much can one ever really know another person? Is the version I’ve carried of him in my head anything close to the truth? 

‘So, Dad,’ I said. ‘I won’t see you again.’ 

He nodded, eyes fixed on the far wall. We weren’t looking at each other – we rarely did. 

‘I love you, okay?’ I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question – maybe I needed him to believe it. You never say what you really mean. ‘This’ll be the last time we see each other.’ 

‘I love you, Michelle,’ he said. Another small nod. Still no eye contact. Just the shared quiet of two people standing on the edge of something final. I don’t know my father at all. And he doesn’t know me. 

I bent down, touched his hand gently one last time and kissed his forehead. 

‘Bye, Dad. Bye.’ 

*** 

It was a strangely weightless thing to walk away knowing I would never see him again. My body moved with a kind of ritual slowness. Time thickened around me. At the desk, I paused to thank the nurse – a quiet gesture, almost ceremonial. 

‘Thank you for looking after him,’ I said. There was nothing more to say. 

Through the glass doors, the winter sky startled me – an improbable, lucid blue. The brilliance of it struck me, almost violently, after the hush and shadow of that room. I raised my hand to shield my eyes, undone for a moment by its sheer audacity. 

*** 

When Mum called, I knew. 

‘Oh Michelle,’ she said, her voice fractured at the edges. ‘He died this morning.’ 

‘I’d just been with him,’ she said, as if it might change the order of things. ‘If only I’d waited a little longer.’  

He died alone. 

There was a pause – long enough for the day to shift slightly around us. 

‘And I’m so sorry that it happened on your birthday,’ she said. 

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I hesitated. ‘It’s just a day.’ 

We stayed like that – tethered across the line, holding the silence together. 

Just a day. 

The last.