Listening to his one-sided conversation hadn’t given me much insight, and I watched him with barely contained impatience as he hung up the phone. He took a deep breath, put his hands on his hips and stood there, looking out the window.
I waited. And waited.
“Dad!” I cried, patience exhausted.
He jumped and spun to face me, looking for all the world like he was surprised to see me.
“Oh, sorry love. Your mum is being discharged in a couple hours. They want to make sure she’s not feeling too poorly on her medications, and what-have-yous, and then she–” he cleared his throat, “and then she’ll be home. Right as rain.”
I nodded, processing the information.
Once I’d moved past the initial shock of what my Mum had had done, I found I could be more analytical about it. It helped to think about the process from here, rather than the reason for it.
My mum had had an operation.
She was going to be on medication.
She would need help around the house.
That was easy. I could safely think about those things. What I absolutely could not stop to think about was the illness, becausethat subject was a precarious house of cards in my mind, and once you removed one card, it would all come toppling down.
“Right then,” I said briskly, getting to my feet, “we better get a shop in. I’ve had a look in the fridge, and I don’t think we can survive on cheese and condiments.”
“Righto,” Dad nodded, clearly more comfortable now that he’d been given a task.
I smiled as I realised my accent had come back since I’d been home. It had softened somewhat, since I’d moved to London a few years ago, but it always became more pronounced with every visit.
Jihoon had always laughed when I slipped into it, especially when I abbreviated ‘the’ with a soft ‘t’. He’d found endless amusement trying to say, ‘down t’shops’.
Though the memory was a happy one, thinking of it in the middle of my parent’s kitchen felt raw. The twanging of an exposed nerve. It was too conflicting, this happy thought in the middle of such devastation.
“You alright, love?” Dad’s voice shook me out of my reverie, and I quickly papered a smile over the crack in my composure.
“Just making a shopping list in my head,” I lied, easily.
“Come on then,” he urged, moving his glasses from atop his head to the bridge of his nose, “get your shoes on.”
As if I were a little girl again, I did as instructed and we set off in the car, down t’shops.
Shopping trip completed, we laughed in the car all the way home.
Despite the bizarre experience of the one-way system round the shop, the stickers all over floor and the very serious looking employees, there had been one incident that had reminded us that no matter the circumstances, there was always absurdity to be found.
A man had been stopped at the till, because he’d been trying to buy two massive packs of toilet paper, despite the clear signage forbidding stockpiling. Predictably, this caused a loud argument that echoed around the otherwise quiet shop.
Dad and I hadn’t even tried to pretend that we weren’t listening. To be fair, it would have been nigh-impossible to not hear as the man had loudly protested his ‘right to buy loo roll’.
“Of all the hills to die on,” Dad said, wiping his eyes as his shoulders shook, “toilet paper would not be the one I’d choose.”
Laughing about that had made the strange shopping experience seem less… apocalyptic, because besides that little snippet of human folly, it was hard to deny that things really were not okay in Britain.
There were signs everywhere, telling you how to wash your hands, telling you to keep six feet apart and advice on stopping the spread.
It had been easy to ignore while I’d been in Seoul, but here and now, it was so overt that it was startling. Until now, the virus had been a sort of niggling backdrop to my days; news bulletins I’d get periodically on my phone, accompanied by the assumption it would all blow over soon. But it wasn’t, and now that I was back home, it was starting to feel… like we stood on the edge of a cliff.
We got the phone call from the hospital as we were packing away the shopping, telling us Mum was ready to be discharged.
“I’ll be back soon,” Dad said, dithering as if he was trying to remember what he’d forgotten, but I knew it was because he was anxious.
