Season Three, Again

"You've seen this one," Ruth said. "I've seen all of them." "So we can skip it." Her dad picked up the remote from the arm of the chair and put it down on the far side, out of her reach, which for a man who'd needed help getting out of that same chair an hour earlier was a fairly clear statement. "You don't skip in a rewatch. The whole point of a rewatch is you don't skip." The show was a police thing from the nineties. Grey Manchester, men in bad coats, a theme tune that sounded like a fax machine having a breakdown. Six series. Her dad had watched it when it aired and then on video and then on the box set she'd bought him for his sixtieth, and now, three weeks before the operation, he'd announced he was doing it again, from the start, and Ruth, who'd moved back into her old room "for a bit", had found herself watching too. She'd meant to be helpful. Meals, lifts, the pharmacy. Instead she was on the sofa at half past two on a Wednesday afternoon watching a detective called Frank interview a man about a lorry. "This one's important," her dad said. "It's about a lorry." "It's about Frank's marriage. Watch his face when the wife rings." She watched. The wife rang. Frank's face did something small and terrible and Ruth, despite herself, went quiet. They did two episodes a day, sometimes three. Her dad narrated. Not constantly, but at the bits that mattered to him: "this is where they knew they had something", "she leaves after this series, they never explain it", "that's the actor's real dog". He'd been a lorry driver himself for thirty years and he'd watched the show, Ruth slowly realised, the way other people watch documentaries about their hometown. Checking. Nodding. Occasionally saying "they'd never get away with that." By the second week she'd stopped bringing her laptop in. By the third she'd started saying "one more?" The night before the surgery they were on series three, episode nine, which her dad said was the best episode of anything ever made. Frank stands in the rain outside a house for four minutes. That's it. That's the episode, more or less.

"Why is this the best?" Ruth said, halfway through the four minutes. "Because he doesn't go in." "Why doesn't he go in?" Her dad didn't answer for a bit. On the screen Frank stood in the rain in his bad coat. "Because sometimes you've done all you can," he said, "and the rest isn't up to you." Ruth looked at him. He was looking at the telly. "Dad." "Watch the episode, love." She watched. Frank didn't go in. The credits came up, the fax machine started, and her dad reached across for the remote and turned it off. "Right," he said. "Series four when I'm back." "You've got twenty-four episodes left." "I know. Best not skip any." She drove him in at six the next morning. She brought the box set in her bag, the whole thing, all six series, and it sat on her lap in the waiting room while she looked at the door he'd gone through, and she found she was thinking about Frank in the rain, and about what he'd meant, and about how she'd never once asked her dad why he liked the show, not in twenty-five years, and had only found out by watching it.