Losing It by Ross Gilfillan Page B

milk bottles and acting as if nothing has happened. The only telltale oddness about his behaviour is that when he puts out the bottles, he lets in Garcia and gives his coat a bit of a ruffle before settling him in his basket by the door. ‘Well, Brian,’ he says. ‘Sunday tomorrow, big day in the garden, so I’ll say goodnight!’ And off he goes. I hear him checking the locks on the front door, unplugging the television and then mumbling something to someone, GD presumably, at the top of the stairs.
    When GD appears in the kitchen and says Nana is asking for me, it is all I can do to get my arse off the chair. But I do and Itread softly upstairs and open her door. Sometimes Nana seems well, at other times she’s not so good. After what I’ve just heard, I’m expecting her to look awful. But tonight, Nana’s sitting up in bed looking at a bookmarked collection of poems, her night light throwing out a soft pink glow. The hot chocolate is on the bedside table, next to a framed photograph of herself and GD, which is so old that the people in it both have long, dark and shiny hair. She looks okay and I can’t quite believe what I have just heard, that she really is dying.
    ‘Is that you, Brian?’ Nana finishes what she is reading before she turns to me and smiles. ‘Have they been quarrelling again?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I do wish they wouldn’t. But they’re each as pig-headed as the other. Neither of them wants to give an inch about anything. It’s such a shame.’
    I sit on the end of her bed and say, ‘I wish Dad could be more like GD.’
    There’s a lengthy pause and I’m thinking that Nana has dozed off. But then she says, ‘We all have to be true to ourselves, Brian.’ She puts down her book and folds her spectacles. ‘And if that’s what your father is doing, then we must respect that.’
    ‘Is that what he’s doing?’
    Nana sips her drink before she offers a reply.
    ‘I think your father’s shielding himself from what he sees as a threatening world. He’s had his ups and downs, has our Charlie. Life has disappointed him. Frightened him too.’
    ‘Frightened him?’
    She won’t let me help as she shakes up her pillow, settles back into it and turns to me.
    ‘We’ve frightened him, Arty and me. We didn’t mean to, of course, but ours was never the life for a strange little boy like Charlie was. We tried to bring him up the way we thought a boy should be brought up. We wanted him to question everything, to be happy and out-going, to live for the moment, not for some far-offday that never comes. But none of this was for Charlie and he began to retreat from us, to spend more time in his room doing his own things. It wasn’t our idea he joined the boy scouts. You remember the way we lived at the cottage?’
    Dawn strolls, music making, shrieks from bedrooms, anarchic disorder.
    ‘I can’t imagine Dad being there.’
    ‘He wasn’t, not in spirit. And the fault was ours, Brian. He didn’t like the lack of restraint, he was frightened of our freedoms. I don’t know what we could or should have done for your father. He didn’t fit in and there was an end of it. He couldn’t wait to leave home and he did, at the first opportunity.’
    ‘That’s terrible,’ I say. ‘I can’t imagine you and GD being bad parents.’
    ‘Irresponsible parents, that’s what we were. Too intent on having fun, always thinking that our way was right and so Charlie must turn out right in the end.’
    It’s hard for me to envisage anyone not liking living with GD and Nana. I’ve spent as much time with them as I can and I know they’ve been a bigger influence in my life than my own parents.
    ‘Is he happier now, do you think?’ I say.
    ‘With Violet and you, of course he is. And he’s happy to have his garden, where he has complete control and is lord and master of all he rotovates.’
    I have to laugh: it’s so true. Nana smiles.
    ‘Your father’s done a better job with you than we did with him. So