There was a man, who might have been my grandfather, in a bath-tub, and I've gone to help him out and take him to his room (for dinner? for bed?) but he's crawled up in the foetal position and his head is under the water.
There's a boy, who might be one of two people or he might be both, who comes into the bathroom after me and together we haul the streaming wet old man over the side of the tub and onto the bath mat. And the boy breathes into his mouth, and I pump on his chest.
The man shakes his head the tiniest fraction, and one eyeball flickers under its lid and there's part of me that jumps to attention. But it's in my head, in my mind's eye, because of all those movies with miracles that you watch in your lifetime, and the man who might have been my grandfather doesn't splutter out two lungs worth of water and gasp for a breath like a dying fish. Because the man is dying, has died, is dead - past tense, and there's no waiting film crew and there's nothing anyone can do.
And what I feel is not sadness as such, just exhaustion and a hollow, guilty feeling. I'm sitting, crumpled on the ground, with this man who might be my grandfather lying in front of me and this massive gulf stretching between myself and the boy kneeling on the other side of the body. We can't look at each other, we just stare into the middle-distance, my mind is grey.
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