Excerpt
Ive put Father upstairs. I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart. He sat there like a calf thats just a couple of minutes old, before its been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things. I ripped off the blankets, sheets and undersheet, leaned the mattress and bed boards against the wall, and unscrewed the sides of the bed. I tried to breathe through my mouth as much as possible. Id already cleared out the upstairs room - my room.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Youre moving," I said.
"I want to stay here."
"No."
I let him keep the bed. One half of it has been cold for more than ten years now, but the unslept side is still crowned with a pillow. I screwed the bed back together in the upstairs room, facing the window. I put the legs up on blocks and remade it with clean sheets and two clean pillow-cases.