At the highest point of the Peak
District, there is a waterfall that flows upwards.
'Nonsense,' my dad huffs when I tell
him about it. For a man who has always wanted to visit the Peak District, he's
in a dark mood. He has other things on his mind.
The thing is, he didn’t want me to
come on this trip.
He told me about his plan three months
ago, just after he got his diagnosis. 'It’s called a bucket list,' he’d said.
'It’s a list of things you want to do. And this is top of mine.'
Every day I went to see him, he had
another item on his itinerary. Take a boat trip down the River Wye. Visit the
alpaca farm. Go on a biking trail. Explore the caverns.
'That old lead mine below Winnats
Pass, that's the one,' he said, jabbing at a brochure. 'That’s where I’m going.
You know how old it is?' But then he interrupted himself with a cacophony of
coughs, thunderous staccatos that left him hunched over, grasping at his chest.
'I’ll get you some water,' I said,
but his barked reply made me freeze in place.
'Don’t!' He coughs once more, as if
punctuating himself for emphasis. 'Don’t. I can do it myself.'
He is coughing a lot today too.
Before we set out this morning he joked that the fresh mountain air would do
him good. Looking at his frail form bent over double a few paces behind me, it
seems as though it has done the opposite. When I walk back to him and place a
gentle hand on his shoulder, he shrugs me off.
'I’m fine. Leave it.'
In front of the cancer nurses and
the carers, my dad is another man. He is amiable, jolly even, tamely allowing
them to fuss over him. He smiles as a nurse mops the side of his mouth with a
napkin, patiently letting her dab away the thick yellow bile that seems to leak
from his lips more and more. He thanks the carer who drops off his shopping for
him, telling him what a help she is. With his doctor he tells jokes, pausing
only to discreetly cough into his handkerchief. I do not clean my dad’s face
for him, nor do I help him with his shopping. When I collect his fresh laundry
and begin to fold it, he hisses at me to sit down. When I slide his cup of tea
closer to him for easy access, he pushes it back—out of my reach, out of his
reach too. He will put his life in the hands of strangers, but not in mine, so
I sit next to him uselessly, doing nothing, saying nothing. I have shrunk back
past my thirties, twenties, sped back through puberty and back to my helpless
ten year old self.
When I was a little girl, my dad
taught me how to ride a bike. He held the bike steady as I peddled, making sure
it didn’t wobble. Then, once I had successfully completed three dad-assisted
laps of the garden, he took his hands off the bike. A few seconds later I
smacked face down in the grass, knee smarting as it scraped the ground and bike
wheels spinning at full tilt in front of my eyes. I can still see my dad
looking down at me apologetically. He had let go. He had let me fall. I was his
little girl and I had scraped my knee on his watch.
That is how things go, isn’t it?
Parents protect. Children are protected. When the tables turn, it’s something
unnatural, something perverse. It’s a sunbeam that casts no light, ice that’s
hot to the touch, time flowing backwards.
My father looks at me and sees a ten
year old clumsily puppeteering a middle aged woman’s body. Yet this frail man,
bent like a tree pushed by strong winds, is not the father my ten year old self
looked up to. He is the last version of my father I will ever have, and that
makes him the most precious.
After he told me about the trip, I
lay awake each night with worst-case scenarios playing in my head like a movie
I could not turn off. My dad tripping and falling, my dad getting lost in the
mountains, my dad carried along by the currents of the rivers. I knew he would
resent me inviting myself along, but I had to do it. I had to do it for his own
good.
I knew if he heard those last three
words he might never forgive me.
The craggy rocks around us are
steep, and I wonder if taking my dad to see the waterfall was a mistake. We
climb slowly, stopping every time my dad needs to catch his breath.
He needs to catch his breath often.
As I watch his chest rise and fall
with what seems to be a herculean effort, I contemplate heading back down the
mountain. We are almost at the top, but the air grows fiercer the higher we
climb, as if to push us back where we came from.
My dad cannot make this climb. I was
irresponsible to make him try, irresponsible not to consider whether he could
do it.
Would one of his nurses have failed
him this way? Would his carer—sunny-haired, sunny-faced Sheryl, who comes every
afternoon to make lunch for him—have made him walk a path he could not finish?
I have grabbed him into my unsteady, inexperienced hand and now I cannot lift
his weight.
My dad was right to push me back
when I tried to help him, right to tell me to sit and watch and let the
professionals do what I cannot. This is what happens when you try to make a
clock’s hand run in the wrong direction.
'I’m sorry,' I say.
A stuttered cough. A furrow of the
eyebrows. And then, 'For what?'
'All of it. Inviting myself on this
trip even though I knew you wanted to do it alone. Interfering and fussing over
you when you hate it. Making you climb this stupid great hill to see some silly
waterfall that probably doesn’t even really flow upwards—'
That’s when my dad points. I follow
the path of his finger, past the flint grey rocks all around us and the little
tufts of fresh grass to the distance, where I see it. The waterfall.
Cascading down the cliff is Kinder
Downfall, a stream of fizzy white water tumbling down to a bed of rocks below.
It’s beautiful and humbling and not what I wanted to see at all.
'There you go then,' I say, turning
back to my dad and sighing. 'There it is, going in the same direction as every
other waterfall on the planet. I’m sorry for that too.'
A strong gust of wind knocks against
us, making my dad wobble unsteadily, and I quickly catch him, grabbing hold of
his shoulders to keep him on his feet. He opens his mouth—to scold me, I
already know, can already hear whatever admonition he’s about to bark at me—but
nothing comes out. He’s not even looking at me, I realise, but over my shoulder
at Kinder Downfall.
I wheel around on my heel, and
Kinder Downfall sprays up water in an impossible jet. The high wind is carrying
the water up in triumphant sprays, a defiant disobedience of everything I
understand about the world. Behind me, I hear a wonderful rumble I haven’t
heard for years - my dad is laughing in joy, a genuine belly laugh.
As the wind howls around us, the
waterfall continues gushing upwards. When the water finally reaches its
mutinous peak it does not give in to nature and return down to the earth below,
but instead evaporates into smoky tendrils of steam.
When I look back, my dad is leaning
against a rock, smiling with a brightness I didn’t know could still cross his
features for me.
The wind brushes around and against
us, and then retreats. I hear the gurgle of Kinder Downfall behind me as it
returns to its typical path down the cliff once again, greeting the rocks at
the bottom with a gentle splish-splash. I join my dad, hoisting myself up to
sit on the rock he rests against. For a while, we say nothing. Finally, my dad
finds my hand and squeezes it tightly. He squeezes it like he is trying to
impress the shape of his palm upon mine, to leave a permanent imprint of his
life line against my own.
'Thank you,' he says, 'for showing
me the waterfall.'
He lets me steady his shoulder as we
walk back down the mountain.
About the author
Daisy Ravenel is a writer and part-time cat wrangler interested in the strange, the whimsical and the unexplained. She can be found on Twitter at @daisy_ravenel.
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