by Patrick Gale
A few days later, Eustace suggested they go to his and Vernon’s shelter in the park, where they drank cider and pretended to get drunk, although it was only Strongbow. Then perhaps he was a little bit drunk because some madness made him suggest they all come back to his place for tea. Lest there be any misunderstanding, he added, ‘Some cake and a cup of tea,’ which made Jez laugh.
‘Go on. Say that again.’
‘Some cake and a cup of tea,’ Eustace told him and Jez laughed louder, giving him a playful backslap on the chest.
‘What are you like?’ he said, but kindly.
Suzanne, who was their unofficial leader because she had the biggest hair, most spectacular breasts and most dangerous father, stopped in the street to gaze up at the house.
‘What? You live here, Stash?’ she said.
‘Well, yes,’ Eustace admitted. ‘But only in the rooms at the top. Most of it’s my parents’ old people’s home.’
‘That is so . . . Gothic,’ said Tyler, who spoke so rarely and had such a deep voice that everyone listened when he did.
‘I love old people,’ Sasha said. ‘If they’re not smelly.’
Perhaps they were all a bit drunk after all. Anyway, Eustace confidently led them in at the front door. Mrs Fowler greeted them warmly, as it was well known that young things visiting brightened an elderly day. They were soon having a surreal tea party in the conservatory with Mrs Bagnold and huge Mrs Knapton and ancient Mr Fryer, who remained fast asleep even when Sasha squirted him with some of her Charlie. The unexpected appearance of two young women cheered up his father no end, to the point where Suzanne outraged the others the next day during physics by declaring that he’d been so sweet and funny that she quite fancied him.
There was no question of Jez or Tyler ever entertaining.
‘I mean,’ Suzanne said, ‘their houses are quite nice and everything but there’s never anything in the fridge but cold takeaway.’ And so it was that, a few days after that, on a Saturday afternoon when they all met up as if by accident as Suzanne and Sasha came off their Saturday jobs, that Vernon surprised Eustace by inviting everyone around to his place.
‘No mad old ladies here, then?’ Sasha said.
‘Only you,’ said Suzanne.
The house was utterly silent. Downstairs was peculiarly orderly, every book on its shelf, everything in a drawer or cupboard. Mrs Cobb must have loved cleaning there, as there was no clutter to be tidied away before she could start dusting, and every surface sparkled. Tyler looked with longing at a painting of a naked woman looking over her shoulder. Suzanne scanned the crammed bookshelves.
‘Have you read all these?’ she asked.
Vernon shook his head a little sadly. ‘But I’ve never bought a book in my life.’
‘So how many of you live here?’ Sasha demanded. ‘It’s so peaceful.’
‘Oh. Just the two of us. Dad can’t manage stairs any more, so he lives in the front room on the first floor.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Suzanne asked.
Eustace marvelled at how her effrontery didn’t seem rude, merely honest.
‘It’s a kind of Parkinson’s. It’s been getting steadily worse. He can still think and feel and everything but he can’t talk any more and his body doesn’t work very well. He’s a prisoner in his body, basically.’
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Will he die?’
‘Suzanne!’
‘Yes,’ Vernon said gently. ‘I hope so. He’s ready, I reckon.’
Eustace was appalled that he had not thought to ask after Vernon’s father amid his preoccupation with his mother’s accident and time in hospital.
‘You didn’t say,’ he muttered.
‘I know. Sorry. I preferred not to.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘Can we see him?’ Suzanne asked boldly.
‘Suzanne!’
‘Yes of course. He likes visitors, especially sexy girls. And the carers are all men now because of the heavy lifting.’
He led the way up the stairs the sunset was gaudily painting, past portraits of women, still-lifes of fruit, flowers and then more women, most of them calmly displaying breasts and hair and everything, and took them to a big, dazzlingly bright room where his father sat in a wheelchair facing the view through the park to the promenade and water.
‘Dad?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought some friends home.’
‘Hello handsome,’ Suzanne said and walked directly over and kissed Vernon’s father twice, once on each cheek, and then, after looking at him a moment, on the lips as well. Bending over his wheelchair displayed her breasts to full advantage. ‘Your paintings are beautiful. Oh look at your view . . . Amazing!’
One by one they stepped over to introduce themselves. Eustace said, ‘Hello again,’ and gave a kind of truncated wave as he remembered they couldn’t shake hands.
‘We should take him out in the wheelchair,’ Tyler said. ‘It’s nice on the prom.’
‘He doesn’t like it.’
‘Er. How do you know?’ Sasha asked.
‘Before his speech went finally, he told me. He made me promise. He said it made him feel like a big baby when he still felt like a man inside.’
‘Fair enough,’ Jez said.
‘There’s cider downstairs,’ said Vernon. ‘We get everything delivered. Bye, Dad.’
They all said goodbye then trooped back downstairs to where Vernon produced icy cold bottles of cider, not Strongbow but proper country stuff from some farm.
‘This is really strong,’ Sasha said. ‘I’ll be anyone’s. Not you, though, Jez.’
Vernon showed them the rest of the house. His father’s studio at the back with its broad antique daybed and paint-spattered armchairs and the large purple-painted room at the front with all the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves containing what looked like every English or American novel worth reading. Now he had finally decided to talk, Vernon told them everything. The purple room had been his mother’s. She was an English lecturer at Bristol. She had died very young of breast cancer.
‘The worst,’ Suzanne said, cradling her pride and joy.
Everything was taken care of by a lawyer, who would become Vernon’s guardian if his father died before he was sixteen. There was Mrs Cobb to clean, and a gardener once a week and the two alternating carers who washed, dressed and fed his father. He was fed by tubes, now that he couldn’t swallow any more. Vernon cooked for himself. He was quite good. He even made pastry and cakes. And casseroles. Casseroles were good as they lasted a week and he could have them with baked potatoes, pasta or even on toast.
They returned, via the fridge and more cider, to the studio, which Sasha preferred as she said the books were judging her. There was a big, paint-dotted sound system in there, as his dad had liked to paint to music as it helped the models relax. First Vernon played one of his father’s old Doors albums. Eustace thought it a terrible caterwauling racket, though of course didn’t say so, and he watched as the girls drunkenly danced together, hands above their heads and in their hair, then drew Vernon and Tyler in to join them. Despite his lifelong insistence that music was just noise to him, Vernon was an unexpectedly good dancer, actually flexing his thighs and hips rather than just shifting from foot to clompily-booted foot like Tyler. Jez just sprawled on the daybed beside Eustace, intently picking the label off his bottle. The scent of sweat and Brut coming off him was making Eustace’s nose tickle. Then Vernon put on Dark Side of the Moon and he and Suzanne and Tyler and Sasha started kissing where they stood, lazily but persistently. Soon Eustace could clearly see both boys’ hard-ons pressing through their jeans. Suzanne slid an exploratory hand over Vernon’s, her weekend bangles clattering down around her wrist as she did so.
It was awful. Clearly Eustace couldn’t pair off with Jez, although symmetry and desire required it, and walking out would have looked prissy. But simply to sit and watch felt all wrong. But then Sasha broke off and glanced at him – Tyler remained eyes shut, comically open mouthed – a
nd she smiled at Eustace before continuing, so it seemed that having an audience was part of the couples’ pleasure.
After a while first one pair then the other stopped and yet more cider was fetched and there was more drunken chatting and lolling around.
It became a pattern, getting together like this after school or at weekends, up at the Fort if it was fine or in the shelter but most often at Vernon’s house because they could do as they liked there. But Eustace did not always join them. He used cello practice and his mother as excuses he knew would go unchallenged.
He felt he was losing Vernon, just as Vernon had so surprisingly revealed himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY
His mother returned to them from Grace Manor and everything changed. She had greatly improved in her speech and mobility but it was noticeable that her symptoms flared up again if she was crossed or checked in anything. She repeatedly cut short disagreements now by alarming and ugly choking fits, explaining afresh between whooping gulps of air that part of her throat was now permanently paralysed and thus dangerous if a crumb landed on it. The air was full of her harsh little yelps of pain and frustration as she strained for things she couldn’t reach rather than be a bother to anyone . She banished his father to sleep in Grandpa’s old room, claiming that her sleep patterns were haywire since her brain damage and that it better suited a man.
She always called it that now – my brain damage – as though it was peculiarly hers and extra special, an exclusive torment nobody else could understand. Her medication haunted every mealtime in a little Tupperware box, supplemented by various herbal nostrums her new friends had recommended.
This challenging new version of her was only for private. If any of her Christians visited, she displayed yet another persona, more like how she had been after she woke up at the hospital, softly spoken and much given to touching people and to staring with tears in her eyes. In this guise, she spoke frequently of how she had died but come back, been asked to come back.
And in returning she brought Jesus with her. Suddenly Jesus was everywhere in the house, in books, in inspirational cards she stuck in places like the fridge door and the car, in holy music she now played in preference to Spanish Flea , and in her conversation. She said things like, ‘He loves me. I can see and accept that now.’
And Jesus’s friends were there as well. Every day. Calling round to drive her to the doctor or physiotherapy or to Father Tony’s church, which quite clearly was no longer for Sundays only. In fact, ‘It’s more special on weekdays,’ she declared. ‘When there are no noisy children and fewer of us there.’
Far from celebrating that she had, in most senses, returned to him, his father withdrew yet further. Since her accident he had been spending a lot of time watching the loud television with the residents or sitting with them in the conservatory, silent, as though prematurely aged. Mrs Fowler said it was shock and would pass. Granny said it was That Woman . But now he spent hours every day in the bedroom to which he had been banished. At least, he was there when Eustace left for school and often there when he came back. And frequently now he just cried. He didn’t wail or sob, nothing making much noise; the tears simply welled in his eyes and ran down his face and he sighed or just closed his eyes, and let them run.
‘We all pray for your father,’ his mother told him. ‘He’s in a dark valley.’
‘Are you sure he doesn’t need medical help?’ Eustace asked.
‘We will pray and it will pass. He’s not as strong as you or I.’
Eustace tried sitting with his father. He would take school books into his room to work there and keep him company in their joint retreat from Jesus, but that often only made his father leave the room and take his unreachable sorrow elsewhere, which made Eustace feel guilty.
Granny died finally. She left her life as she had lived it, with the utmost discretion and lack of fuss. The doctor said her heart had given out but Eustace thought it quite likely she herself had stopped her heart with a final surge of willpower. Remaining in her room, she was spared the proofs of her daughter-in-law’s new friendship with Jesus, but she knew all about it as Eustace had continued to bring her regular bulletins with her breakfast tray as he left for school.
He found he could not cry for her. Her dislike of displayed emotion was too strong and her death had been too clearly a release. The contrast with Grandpa’s death could not have been greater. For all her late fumbling with her bible, her last gesture was a quite shocking rejection of the Church. A brutally coherent letter, filed with her will at her solicitors when she was still of sound mind, made it plain she wanted to be cremated without ceremony, religion or family witnesses and her ashes were to be scattered at the Fort, since that was where my late husband proposed to me and wooed me, even though the views are criminally overgrown now, I gather . So the only ceremony was the ash-scattering, which Eustace did alone with his father and Mrs Fowler because his mother couldn’t manage the steps and thought the rejection of God’s grace at the end too sad. Mrs Fowler baked an extra special and enormous cherry cake to be shared between them all and the residents afterwards.
She handed in her notice the next day. She had been cooking and increasingly managing the home from when it was Granny’s private house and thought it time, she said, although Eustace suspected she was driven out by the increasing incursions of Jesus into her territory.
His mother began to host Bible Study and Julian Meetings in both day room and conservatory, co-opting baffled or compliant residents sitting nearby. She found a new cook through her church, a young, comfortless woman, rescued by Father Tony after a bad marriage turned violent. And she, in turn, introduced pairs of bright-eyed Christian ‘cadets’, who astonishingly volunteered their strength and skills around the home in return for being able to sit in confidential huddles with already confused residents assuring them that, yes, they might not remember meeting Jesus but he met them on the road to Emmaus and remembered them every day. They were local youths for the most part, with accents that made it sound as though Emmaus was one stop before Filton Abbey Wood. The new cook said she only baked cakes at weekends, and that white sugar was a poison and Eustace needed to lose weight. He did not warm to her.
It was assumed that Granny had nothing to leave beyond the contents of her jewellery case, which were scant and characteristically unspectacular and her room, which were battered and shabby apart from a very pretty watercolour of a pleasure steamer docking at the old pier. They knew she owned the house, of course, which she left to Eustace’s father. Had she left it to a cats’ charity, Eustace considered, the shock might have done everybody good. But then, the will read and probate completed, he and his father received identical letters (because Eustace was still a minor) from her solicitor informing them that she had left Eustace what seemed a huge sum of £5000 to further his musical studies .
This was a complete surprise since she had never seemed to take much interest in his cello-playing even when he was small. It was enough to pay for lessons for the rest of the year as well as for two more courses at Ancrum.
As she had suggested at the hospital, he rang Carla just after half-term. It was so good to hear her voice. Their voices, in fact, because Louis answered. He hadn’t realized until then just how much he’d missed them both, missed not just the lessons but the calm, unregulated Friday nights with them in Clifton. It was as though he had to pretend everywhere else – at home, at school, especially at school – increasingly even with Vernon, and hearing Louis kindly saying in that gravelly tone of his, ‘Hey, Man-Cub, how are the hormones? We’ve missed you,’ let him breathe out and be himself even if all he said was the usual awkward nothing much.
Carla sounded breathless, as though taking the call had diverted her from something in a rush and flustered her. But she, too, said it was good to hear his voice. She asked how his mother was and he said she was home and out of the woods but . . .
‘But what?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. It’s easier if I leave
it till I’m not here.’
He heard a telltale creak on the landing below and glanced round to see his mother was coming up the stairs. He was convinced that her breathing and movement were not at all laboured until she saw him looking at her. He turned back to the phone.
‘School days aren’t as long as they were at St Chad’s, but I was wondering if you still had a space on Saturday mornings.’
‘First thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you could still stay over on Fridays?’
‘Yes.’ He saw now that he wanted this more than anything.
‘I hope you’ve been keeping up your practice.’
‘Of course,’ he said, although he had become a little lax that term, first distracted by all the hospital visits then by not having cello lessons to keep him focused, then by the fun of hanging around after school with Vernon, the girls and the cousins.
‘Well let’s see.’ He heard her flick her diary’s pages, heard his mother arrive on the landing behind him, breathing heavily. ‘We could do that,’ Carla said. ‘I think it’s time you learnt the next Beethoven, get you working on nice clean runs and clear, fast string crossing.’
‘Great.’
‘And how about the Easter course? Are you able to go back?’
‘I just had a little legacy,’ he told her, loving how that sounded. ‘I’m paying for it myself.’
‘Brilliant. So. Be here for supper on Friday?’
‘Yes please.’
She laughed. ‘Eustace?’ she added.
‘Yes?’
‘This is all OK with your parents, I take it?’
‘Oh yes. My dad said to call you.’