By John Nolan
The white walls of his hospice room turned grey in the fading daylight. Outside the window, a February rain slicked the streets, but inside, time had thickened, moving with the agonising slowness of my grandfather’s shallow breathing.
I sat in a vinyl chair that squeaked every time I shifted my weight, watching the man I knew as ‘Gags’. A man defined by granite and oak, by calluses and a hearty laugh. Now, he was barely a ridge under the thin hospital blanket. His hands, which I’d once seen drive a six-inch nail in two strikes, rested atop the sheets, pale and wasted like driftwood.
We had been sitting in silence for the last two hours. The nurses said it wouldn’t be long. When someone says it won’t be long, the world has more urgency about it. Urgency, that’s what I could her. Shallow breaths and the quickening metronomic beep of medical devices.
I sat there, watching the machines do their work. Suddenly, his breathing changed. A sharp intake of air—a sound not dissimilar to tearing paper. His eyes, cloudy with morphine and time, fluttered open. They found the polystyrene ceiling tiles first, then drifted down to me.
“Ben,” he rasped. His voice like gravel trapped in a sieve.
“I’m here, Gags.” I leaned closer, taking one of those driftwood hands. It was shockingly cold.
“The work,” he whispered, his eyes drifting back toward the ceiling. “It’s never really done, is it? You patch a roof, five years later a gale takes one off. You point a wall, the frost gets in eventually. What was the point?”
“You did good work, Gags.”
He offered a weak twitch of his lips—a shadow of his old, confident grin.
“I was alright. Measured twice, cut once. That’s all a man can do.” He paused, gathering his strength.
“Well, I remember you putting new stairs in my one-bed in Colchester. Amazing craftmanship.”
“You remember that?” His raspy voice unable to disguise his surprise.
“Yeah. Hard to forget you and Dad hammering the steps into place to the soundtrack of Led Zepplin’s Stairway.”
He laughed. A clanging, thick sound that filled the room and ended in a harsh cough.
“Do you remember St. Lawrence’s Church? The big stone church by the crossroad?”
I nodded. “I do. You did the restoration on the spire back in the Eighties. We used to drive past it, and you’d point up and say, ‘That copper’s mine.’”
“Not just the spire, Ben. I was up in the nave roof, too. Forty-feet up in the gods, replacing oak beams that had rotted since Victoria was on the throne.”
His eyes clarified, the fog receding for a moment of intense recollection.
“It was winter then, too. Cold enough to freeze the sweat inside your hardhat. I was working late one day. I think it was a Friday. The Sabbath to some folks. I remember the scaffolding groaned every time the wind hit the stained glass. I was alone up there. The vicar had gone home, the doors were locked. Just me, the dust of three hundred years, and a floodlight clamped to a rafter.” He squeezed my hand, a sudden surge of strength.
“You know me, Ben. I’m a bricks-and-mortar man. If I can’t hit it with a hammer, I don’t have much time for it. I never had a faith. Didn’t care much for doctrine.”
“I know, Gags.”
“I was chiselling out a mortise joint. Hard, focused work. And the light flickered. Just once. Then the air got… heavy. Not cold, exactly. Just thick. Like the air before a thunderstorm breaks.”
He swallowed hard. The sound was loud in the quiet room.
“I stopped hammering. The silence in a big church like that isn’t empty. It’s full of echoes, sounds of the past or those waiting to happen. And in that silence, I heard someone exhale. Right behind my left shoulder. Clear as day.”
A chill that had nothing to do with the hospice room walked up my spine.
“I thought it was the vicar coming to check on me. I turned around, ready to tell him to mind his footing on the planks.” Gags’s eyes were wide now, staring not at me, but through me, back to that high, dusty rafter.
“There was a man standing there. But he wasn’t standing on the scaffold boards. He was… just sort of hovering above them. A few inches, I’d venture. He wore clothes like something out of a museum painting—a heavy wool tunic, thick leather apron. He was translucent, Ben. Like looking through dirty water.”
My grandfather, the man who feared nothing but poor craftsmanship, was trembling slightly.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
“I froze. Hammer raised. I just looked at him. And he looked at me. His face… it wasn’t angry. It was just tired. Very, very tired. He looked past me, at the new oak beam I was setting into the wall. He stared at the joint I’d just cut. He drifted closer, inspecting it.” Gags lowered his voice.
“He was a mason. Or a carpenter—from way back when they built the place. One of the original hands. I know it. He looked at my work, then he looked back at me. He nodded. Just a small, slow nod. One tradesman acknowledging another. Like he was saying, ‘That’ll hold.’”
“And then?”
“Then he just… thinned out. Incense smoking in a draft. Fleeting.”
Gags let out a long sigh, his head sinking deeper into the pillow. The clarity began to fade from his eyes, the grey fog rolling back in.
“I never told anyone that. They’d say I had sniffed too much wood glue. But I finished that joint perfectly that night. Smoothest chisel work I ever did.”
His breath was becoming hitchy again. The pauses between them stretched longer. Like listening to a Walkman as the batteries run out of charge.
“Why tell me now, Gags?”
He turned his gaze back to me, his eyes watery and dim. “Because I was scared tonight, Ben. Scared of where I’m going. It’s a big room, and I don’t have my tools or a light. This is my chance to step back and look at my work.” Gags gripped my hand again, weaker this time.
“But then I remembered him. That old builder up in the roof. He wasn’t haunting the place, Ben. He was just checking the work, better than any foreman. Making sure all was square.”
He closed his eyes. A small, peaceful smile touched his lips.
“We’re just tenants, Ben. We patch things up, try to leave the structure sounder than we found it. And when we check out… “
I squeezed his hand, feeling no hint of resistance. “I know Gags, Try to get some res—”
“…Maybe in the end, when our work is done, we all just become part of the foundations.”
Those were his last words. Ten minutes later, the hitching stopped. The silence in the room changed; it became absolute. A forever pause.
I sat there for a long time, holding his cooling hand. I wasn’t afraid. I looked at the sturdy, weathered lines of his face, and I thought about the high beams of St. Lawrence’s, holding up the roof against centuries of winter rain. And the centuries to come.
That’ll hold, Gags. I thought. That’ll hold.
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