‘You and Angela as babies,’ Dad says, lowering his face as though he can see the photographs, and yes, here we are, sitting on blankets in the tiny garden of our first childhood home, in Clerkenwell, toothlessly grinning from highchairs, sleeping in carry cots … Angela looks cute; I wince at the sight of me and that thing on my face. I hope Dad doesn’t know these photos off by heart. I hope, somehow, he has forgotten the blighted baby, that he doesn’t see the birthmark when he thinks of me. But how could he not? How could he ever imagine a ‘me’ without it being there?
I keep on turning. Here’s Dad with his foot on a spade in the tiny garden, triumphantly holding a turnip aloft. All three of us laughing under a crocheted blanket with Nana Larry in her front room; Dad pushing me in a wheelbarrow down some random hill; Angela and I in Southend, standing in front of a scary moving waxwork where a cowering man looks like he’s permanently going to get his head chopped off – huge lemon Rossi ice creams covering half our faces.
‘Is that one with us in Southend still in here, the one with the giant ice creams?’ Dad asks.
‘Yes, it’s still here.’
‘Which one?’ asks Dad.
I take his forefinger and trace it over the photo. ‘I remember it,’ he says. ‘I remember the taste of that lemon ice cream.’
I carry on turning the pages. There’s Angela and I, in red and grey uniform, on Angela’s first day at school – she’s grinning and looking all cheeky; I am perfecting a grimace and look pissed off. Angela dressed as the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz for a Halloween disco. Me, coming down the road on my bike, chubby in knee-high socks and a Wombles T-shirt.
‘Which ones are you on now?’
‘Photos of Angela and me, a bit older. Do you remember her as the Tin Man?’
‘If she only had a heart,’ says Dad, and it’s a joke but kind of true all the same. I like this, I think, us talking about these photos. It’s surprising, but I like it.
I shift the position of the album a little and a Polaroid falls to the floor, which I pick up. It’s one I had slid between the long-unopened pages a few years ago, when it hurt too much to keep coming across it in my bedside drawer. It’s one that makes my heart give a hitch now. It’s a Polaroid picture of the man I once had to stop myself from loving. A friend of mine. Kemp. His nickname, a reference to brothers Martin and Gary from Spandau Ballet. His heart, something I could never hope to secure … as we were only ever friends. I went to school with him, many years ago. I’ve cried over him, to that particular Bonnie Raitt song. It’s a good photo, this one I took of him, despite him being an actual photographer, by profession, and me just being a general numpty. It’s out on the dark street outside our pub, the one we used to go to. He is laughing and handsome. He is wearing a green woolly scarf I gave him. I look at the photo for far too long then slip it back into the pages of the album.
Here’s the photo Angela wanted. Yes, she does have a crab on her nose but I’m pretty certain she put it there herself, for effect. I’m standing next to her and squinting into the camera. I peel back the plastic film and dislodge the photo from its sticky background.
‘This is the photo Angela asked for,’ I say. ‘Me and her when we were crabbing.’
‘I don’t really remember that one too well. Remind me?’
‘Angela has a crab on the end of her nose.’
‘A crab, yes.’ He looks like he is concentrating. ‘A crab on the end of her nose.’
I put it to one side, to take a shot of it for Angela. There are some teenage photos now – ones that Dad took, on our instruction. We are often off-centre, with parts of us chopped off, and a blind man taking photos certainly gave passers-by something to talk about. There’s Angela on roller-skates on the pavement outside The Palladian, dressed in neon, a laughing smile on her face; me, standing in the hall before a trip to a terrible nightclub, in a black minidress and trowelled-on make-up. Weren’t they always terrible? Standing in sticky-floored bars, nodding to music while sipping on a straw, catching men’s eyes and looking away again, though in my case they looked away first … And you’d think I would have escaped the old ‘You’re not going out like that!’, with Dad being blind, but he always felt for necklines and hemlines on the doorstep and made me get changed into less horrendous outfits, if deemed necessary.
I look at him, his hands moving over the album, feeling the edges of the photographs under their transparent film. We seek to hide things from our fathers, don’t we? We attempt to shield them from all those scrapes in the life of a daughter – the times we got so drunk we crawled up the road on our hands and knees; the time we called him from that phone box that was actually the bedsit of a man twenty years our senior; the dark things we are most ashamed of. It’s to mothers we tell those stories – sometimes – and her whisper of ‘We won’t tell your father about this’ is a hushed conspiracy between mother and daughter. Except my mother wasn’t there.
Here’s one of me and Cherry Lau, sitting on the step outside her parents’ Chinese takeaway. She had to work there after school. I’d go and help out, loll around behind the counter and be surly to customers. We used to have such a laugh.
‘Which one are you on now?’
‘Me and Cherry Lau, you know, who lived next door?’
‘Yes, I know,’ says Dad. ‘Sweet girl.’
She was a sweet girl. I feel so awful about how things ended with her. I mouth ‘sorry’ at the photo and turn to the next page, but it is empty. The last few blank pages of the album are stuck together in a clump, but there’s always a sliver of yellowing paper peeping out, just before the back cover, so I peel it free of the last page to expose the paper flap, secured with the string that winds round the little cardboard button, and the set of faded photographs inside.
‘The photos of you and Mum, before you had us,’ I whisper. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them, but they always give me a jolt. They always make me feel stuff I really don’t want to feel.
‘Describe them,’ says Dad, his face impassive.
‘Well, there’s the one of you at Covent Garden, by the flower market. You both look so young.’ Sixteen, I think. Both my parents became parents at sixteen … ‘You have flares on, and Mum’s wearing the big T-shirt with a rainbow on it.’ I clear my throat and try to sound jolly.
‘Just before she had you,’ says Dad. ‘Best market in the world, back then,’ he adds, with a quick smile. ‘And we all loved the street performers, didn’t we? Do they still have them?’
‘I’m sure they do,’ I say. I stare at Mum’s face in this photo: so smiley, so full of fun, so alien. Her body, so full of me. The mound of me – not knowing how it would all turn out – is straining at the rainbow T-shirt, ready to burst forth. There’s a general otherworldliness to these photos, I think. An unlikelihood. ‘OK, here you are by the jeans stall in Camden, with the sign for the lock in the background,’ I continue, my voice purposely light. ‘You’re both laughing and Mum has a feather in her hair.’
‘I remember that.’
‘And here you are on your wedding day.’
I remember this photo well. I remember how it makes my breath catch in my throat and my heart contract. Mum and Dad looking ridiculously young on the steps of St Peter’s, the Italian church in Clerkenwell. Nana and Grandpa Larry to one side of them – tall and solemn and stoic – and Nonna and Papa on the other – small and proud and strained. Grandpa Larry died only a couple of years later – from lung disease; Nana Larry in 1975. What do I say to Dad about this photo? What did I always say to him about the faces of the four parents and his boyish grin and Mum’s pretty smile? I say how happy they all look. How hopeful. As if hope matters.
Dad nods. He places his forefinger to his lips and momentarily closes his eyes. ‘Where’s the photo of me with Jack Templeton outside the Roundhouse?’ he asks, after a beat. ‘When we went to see Blondie in ’seventy-eight?’
I’m happy to move on and flick through the faded photos. Some are a composit
e: a square photo with three or four smaller squares down the side, all with white borders. ‘Here it is. You’re wearing that jacket with the enormous collar and Jack looks like a proper dandy!’
‘What a gig,’ says Dad. The Roundhouse is literally just up the street from us. We hear the concerts sometimes, even through the closed window. I’ve never been there. ‘Remember Parallel Lines, their album?’
‘You used to play it all the time,’ I say. Before we lost the guide dogs, I want to add, but I don’t. ‘You should put it on again.’
‘Maybe,’ says Dad. ‘What about a picture of me by the Albert Hall?’
‘Yes, that’s here.’
‘Describe it to me, Prue.’
‘Well, you look sunburnt—’ I say.
‘Summer of ’seventy-six,’ interrupts Dad. ‘What a time to be alive! Aren’t they saying this year’s heatwave could be the longest since then?’
‘I believe they are,’ I reply. ‘And you’re stretched out on the grass opposite, the sun in your eyes. It looks like late afternoon.’
‘Fabulous,’ muses Dad. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes as though he is back there, soaking up the sun outside the Albert Hall. He always was a sun worshipper. A man who would happily sit in a deckchair for hours on the beach at Southend, his top off and his trouser legs rolled up, in our early years – occasionally catapulting himself out of stripy canvas and crickety wood to fetch ice creams or help us make sandcastles with long foamy trenches dug back to the sea. Or he would enjoy enthusiastic, splashy paddles with Angela and me, standing in the shallows long after we had returned to our sandy kingdoms to stare at passing ships on the horizon, while moussey suds washed over his feet and the sun beat on his back.
Dad looks almost contented.
‘Do you want to go out on some day trips?’ I say softly but, to be quite honest, reluctantly. I have just the right inflection in my voice to let him know I don’t really want to. ‘Revisit some old haunts?’
‘No,’ says Dad, shaking his head, his eyes still closed. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘OK.’ I am relieved. Of course. Of course he doesn’t want to! There, Verity. I’ve done what you asked. I’ve suggested it and he said ‘no’.
‘What about this one?’ Dad has leant forward again and felt for another photo, curled at the edges. ‘Describe this one to me, Prue.’
‘It’s you and me and Angela outside Papa and Nonna’s gelato parlour in Clerkenwell,’ I say.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, you’ve got your arm around us both and you’re smiling and we’re smiling, and I look about eight or nine, and Angela looks about six or seven, and you’re wearing a white polo shirt and look all young, and the sun is in our faces. You can just about make out Nonna’s face, in the window, behind the counter. She’s got that headscarf on – the one with the big dots. And it’s so sunny that you can’t even really see the right-hand part of the photo and we just look … happy, I suppose.’
‘Is it sunny today?’ asks Dad, as I gaze at the three of us outside Nonna and Papa’s gelato shop, in Clerkenwell, and remember.
‘Yes, it’s sunny today. Ridiculously so.’
‘And do you think it will be sunny tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I think it’s going to be sunny again tomorrow.’
He turns his face towards mine. ‘Maybe we could,’ he says.
‘Could what?’ I answer.
‘Go out somewhere.’
‘Really?’
He sighs and smiles and he looks a little strained, but hopeful. ‘If it’s a warm sunny day I’d quite like to feel the sun on my back and on my face.’
‘Really?’ I repeat. I feel a little panicked.
‘Yes. We might not ever get another one – a heatwave. The summer of ’seventy-six and this one, and that might be it. Don’t you think?’
‘Yes. No.’ I’m trying to gather my thoughts. I’m terrified.
‘What do you say? Shall we have a day out?’
When Dad used to sit in deckchairs with rolled-up trouser legs, he could see. When we last went out properly, and not just to the very local doctor’s surgery, Dad was guided by a calm and clever guide dog, not a grumpy, disillusioned daughter. And he was not grumpy himself, like he has been for so very long. Can Dad and I really do this? Can we have a day out? Will it be warm sun on our backs, or dozens of tripped-up kerbs, lots of swearing and staring faces, three falls and a trip to A & E …
‘Well,’ I say, looking at my father and glad he can’t see the fear and anxiety that must be written all over my face. ‘Where would you like to go?’
Dad smiles. ‘I’d like to walk up to Camden.’
CHAPTER 7
It’s thirty-two degrees. Dad and I are on the pavement outside The Palladian with the sun beating down on us like an angry torch. He’s wearing navy shorts, a white Fred Perry shirt, trainers and a hat to cover his bald patch. I’m wearing a sundress unearthed from the back of my wardrobe and a scowl.
We’re doing it. We’re walking up to Camden this morning. I’m not relishing the thought of it. It’s so bloody hot. I have my hair tied back in a ponytail, but my fringe is bothering me and my birthmark is already spoiling for a fight. It didn’t play ball this morning, despite my down-pat, tried-and-tested routine of dabbing on green colour corrector with my finger, carefully working in a concealer with a brush, blending the edges with a sponge, and applying translucent powder. Then adding another layer of concealer and powder. Then a third layer. Sometimes a fourth. This morning I pushed all boats out by eschewing the fourth layer and doing my special contouring – dabbing a lighter concealer into the recessed parts of my birthmark and a darker concealer on to the raised parts, to create the optical illusion of flat skin. It can be a bit hit and miss, and this morning was very much ‘miss’. I don’t feel adequately disguised. My mask feels uncertain. It’s going to slip, in this heat; everything’s going to slip like a Hermès scarf off a French-polished coffee table.
‘Lock the door, then,’ says Dad.
He’s grumpy; he’s been grumpy all morning – is he already regretting this as much as I am? The street outside The Palladian is busy and the people streaming past are already staring at the blind man and his coral-clad companion, and I worry if we step out we’ll be swallowed up by them, carried along, out of control, but ‘OK,’ I say, and I lock the door and put the keys in my cross-body bag.
My sundress is a bright coral maxi dress I bought from Loved Before three or four years ago. It’s been hanging in the wardrobe in Angela’s old bedroom ever since. I’ve taken it out often, just to look at it. It’s beautiful and it isn’t really me (it should ideally be worn by a twenty-something Instagram influencer with Pinterest hair), but I feel I want to make an effort somehow, for this. This thing I don’t really want to do. I’m not equipped to guide my father. I can’t even guide myself through my own life to any satisfaction. I don’t know what we’re even doing here, with the sun beating down on us and a long road ahead. But this morning I really felt a need to take this beautiful maxi dress off its pretty padded hanger and put it on.
‘Ready for the off, then?’ says Dad gruffly.
It would be so easy to turn Dad around, step back into the cool, dusty lobby and head back up the stairs to The Palladian for a glass of cold lemon squash and a KitKat.
‘Yes, ready,’ I say.
Dad, who is standing to my left, places his hand on my left arm, just above the elbow and I straighten my arm. This is how we do it when I take him anywhere – the default positioning we slip into automatically. We start to walk slowly along the flank of the tube station, the closed windows of The Palladian above us and the dark red tiles of Chalk Farm tube station gleaming under bright sunlight.
‘Do you want to pop into the Stop n’ Shop for anything?’ I ask him. I’m stalling, I know. My dress feels too swishy and rather ridiculous.
‘No,’ Dad says. ‘But let me feel the tiles.’
We step closer and Dad
places a flat palm on one of the oxblood tiles. I put my hand on another and it is hot to the touch. Dad looks like he is drawing energy from his tile. He loves this tube station – everything about it. The tiles, the arches, the ticket hall, the cornicing and the Arts and Crafts dado rail friezes, featuring the acanthus leaf. All the details people don’t notice and he can’t any more.
‘Chalk Farm has the longest frontage,’ he says, ‘of all the underground stations in London – and the most tiles.’
When we lived in Clerkenwell, he’d bring Angela and me on the hour-long walk here, sometimes, and he’d point up at the iconic flat above the station and say, ‘One day, I’d like to live there’, like all the promise of the world was in The Palladian, which of course it wasn’t. After the accident, he received a large amount of compensation, and when he heard from Jack Templeton that the flat was up for sale, back in 1982, he bought it, just like that, over the telephone. How sad it was that when he finally got to step inside, he couldn’t see a bloody thing.
‘Come on, then,’ I say, with fake enthusiasm. Dad takes the back of my arm again and we walk away from the station and take the few steps to the edge of the pavement on Haverstock Hill. We have to cross in three sections; there are two islands in the road. I wait for the traffic to pass then I say, ‘Kerb down, Dad,’ and we cross.
‘All right?’ I ask him, as we cross to the first island.
‘Well, I can’t bloody well see anything, but yeah, I suppose so.’
It’s going to be like this, then, is it? I think. Grumpy Bollocks on Tour? We cross to the second island. We must look quite conspicuous – Dad in his baseball cap and me in my coral dream and inadequate face paint. We reach the other side of the road – ‘Kerb up!’ – then begin to carefully walk up Chalk Farm Road, heading for Camden.
Dad taps left right, left right, with his cane. We are ignored or stared at – briefly – or swerved around. Mostly ignored. It was so different when Dad had a guide dog. We always caused a bit of a stir, back then, especially on the school run – Dad rocking up with Sunny, all the school kids fussing round, the mums saying ‘aww’ … Angela revelled in it and I didn’t. She would stand there in her pigtails and her little skirt, looking all proud; I was in the final year and would hate all the attention. Mums would look from dog to Dad to Angela to me; their eyes remaining on my face just a fraction too long before they smiled unsure half-smiles coated in sympathy and just a smidgeon of mild disgust.
Summer in the City Page 5