The Guardians Read Free

Rob might hear. He had not stood up for his father as he ought to have done. Rob was hating him, too, as he finally fell asleep.
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    The hospital was a fairly new building, more than forty floors high, its exterior in pale-green plastibrick with anodized aluminum trim on the windows. The windows gleamed brightly in spring sunshine—the sky was blue except for a few white clouds in the west. At the very top was the balcony ringing the roof garden and heliport, toward which an ambulance copter was at this moment dropping. The doctors also parked their copters up there, coming in from the County, but there would be few at present. Only a skeleton staff remained on duty on Sunday.
    The Kennealys and Rob joined the queue of people waiting for the lifts, which did not operate until the start of visiting hour. At least, this being a hospital, they were all working. They were whisked up quickly and into a second line of people waitingoutside the ward door. A bored medical clerk, his head tonsured in the latest fashion, checked off names on a list. When they reached him, he said, “Randall? Not down here. You must have come to the wrong ward.”
    â€œWe were told F.17.”
    â€œThey’re always getting things wrong,” the clerk said indifferently. “You’d better go and ask downstairs.”
    Mr. Kennealy said in a quiet but hard voice, “No, you call them up. We’re not wasting time going all the way down there again on your say-so.”
    â€œThe procedure . . .”
    Mr. Kennealy leaned over the desk. “Never mind the procedure,” he said. “You call them.”
    The clerk obeyed sullenly. He did not use the visiphone but his handphone. They heard but could not make out the tinny whisper of speech at the other end. The clerk asked for a check on Randall, J., admitted the previous afternoon. He said: “Yes, got that,” and replaced the phone.
    â€œWell,” Mr. Kennealy said, “where is he?”
    â€œIn the morgue,” the clerk said. “He was takeninto Intensive Care this morning and died of heart failure.”
    â€œThat’s impossible!” Mr. Kennealy said.
    His face was white, Rob saw, while the shock hit him too. The clerk shrugged. “Death’s never impossible. They’ll give you particulars at the office. Next, please.”
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    Mrs. Kennealy came with Rob to help sort things out. She clucked over the untidiness and set about putting the place to rights while Rob packed his clothes and belongings. The furniture, he supposed, would be sold. He wondered if it would be possible to keep the saddle-backed chair in which his mother used to sit in the evenings. He would have to ask Mrs. Kennealy if she could find room for it, but did not want to bother her at the moment.
    He left her cleaning and rearranging the living room and went into his father’s bedroom. The bed was made, but a towel had been left lying carelessly across the foot, and two bedroom slippers were at opposite ends of the rug. There was a half-empty pack of cigarettes on the bedside table, a glass witha little water in it, and the miniradio which his father had sometimes listened to at night. He remembered waking and hearing the sound of music through the dividing wall.
    He still could not properly grasp what had happened. The suddenness was as shocking as the fact. His mother had been continuously ill for a long time before she died—he could scarcely remember a time when she was not ill. Her death had been no less horrifying for that, but even then, when he was ten, he had known it to be inevitable. His father, on the other hand, had been a strong, active man, always in good health. It was impossible to imagine him dead. He could not be.
    Rob opened the wardrobe. The clothes would probably be sold, too—they would fit Mr. Kennealy. He felt his eyes sting, and pulled open one of the