‘Has something happened to Iris?’
‘No! Not at all. It’s just … well, we’re in town tonight, and I thought you’d like to meet up with us?’
The silence that greets my suggestion is a long one. So long that I suspect the line might be disconnected.
‘Hello?’ I say.
‘Yeah, I’m still here.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘Does Iris know you’re ringing?’
‘Well … that’s the thing you see. I thought … it could be a surprise.’
Vera laughs like a witch; high-pitched and cackly. I have to hold the phone away from my ear. She stops suddenly, as though she’s been cut off. Then she says, ‘What you say your name was?’
‘Terry. Terry Shepherd.’
‘Okay Terry, Terry Shepherd. Do you know what the road to hell is paved with?’
‘Em … is it … good intentions?’
‘Ten out of ten, my love. And I’m sure your intentions is good. But you mustn’t know my Iris very well if you think she’ll be pleased to see me.’
I think briefly about saying how it’s never too late for second chances, but then I don’t.
Instead, I say, ‘We’ll be at the Hippodrome tonight. From about 7.30 ’til, I’m not sure, say half ten anyway. It’s in Leicester Square.’
‘I know where the Hippodrome is, lovey.’
‘Of course you do. Sorry.’
‘Is you gonna tell Iris you phoned?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Cos the thing is …’
‘I’m just about to run out of change Mrs Armstrong. So, hopefully we’ll see you tonight? Looking forward to it.’ And I hang up without saying goodbye. Not even once.
I step out of the phone box and into the street where any remaining warmth from Jennifer’s undivided attention is quickly snatched away by a brisk gust of wind generated by a passing bus, as is my straw hat, which Jennifer insisted I wear out of the shop. I watch it sail through the air and land in the middle of the road, where it is immediately squashed flat by the might of an SUV with wheels that wouldn’t look out of place on a tractor.
I teeter at the edge of the pavement, jerking my head left, right, left again, waiting for a lull in the traffic, and when I eventually retrieve the hat, it is pancake-flat and black with tyre marks.
If this is a Sign, it is not a good one.
10
BE PARTICULARLY CAREFUL OF FEATURES THAT MAY HINDER YOUR VIEW OF THE ROAD AHEAD.
I can’t remember the last time I was at a concert. Even when I was young, I didn’t go to many. Too many people in too small a space and the condensation dripping down the walls and the queues for the toilets and then, when you got to the top of the queue, the toilets themselves. A veritable haven for germs and often no toilet paper or soap and only a dribble of cold water with which to defend yourself.
Suffice to say I am not looking forward to Jason Donovan’s concert this evening. Nothing against Jason himself, although I must confess that I am not familiar with his body of work.
‘There’s no need for you to come with me,’ Iris says, when I google the number of the Hippodrome. ‘Besides, there won’t be any tickets left.’
There are tickets left. I purchase two of them.
‘You can’t bring your dad to a gig,’ Iris says.
‘He loves music,’ I say.
‘He loves Frank Sinatra,’ Iris says.
‘Exactly.’
I research everything on Iris’s iPad before I leave. It will take me twenty-two minutes to drive to the car park in Chinatown. I’ve allowed fifteen minutes for parking, to be safe. Then, a two-minute walk to the Hippodrome, which I’ve put down as ten minutes taking Iris’s sticks and Dad’s slack gait into account. Physically, there’s nothing wrong with Dad’s feet or legs. I’ve got the consultants’ reports to prove it. But he winces with every step, as if he’s barefoot on a pebbly beach. There’s no explanation for it, it’s just something that has to be factored in.
That’s forty-seven minutes in total, so we leave the restaurant sixty minutes before the concert is due to begin, to allow for any eventualities I have failed to consider.
Iris is wearing a jade-green silk jumpsuit I haven’t seen before. Silver sandals, and a soft grey wrap that matches her hair, which she has left to dry naturally as is her habit. She is wearing what she calls her night-time make-up. Traces of mascara and lipstick and barely discernible blusher along the long, high bones of her cheeks.
‘What’s the matter?’ Iris asks me. ‘You look worried. Have I made a dog’s dinner of the blusher? I have, haven’t I?’
‘It’s my default expression,’ I say, doing my best to relax my facial features. ‘And you look great.’
‘I like your London look,’ says Iris, grinning.
I look down at my new clothes. I’m wearing the pink tulle high-waisted midi-skirt, the pale peach cropped mohair jumper with three-quarter-length sleeves, and the brown gladiator summer sandals. I had to shave my legs. I used Dad’s razor and have two nicks to show for it.
Beneath the skirt, my new knickers – picked from a limited selection in a Tesco Express – make their presence felt with their sliver of gusset that has no truck with comfort.
Even with my hair in its usual ponytail, I look completely unlike myself.
‘It’s not exactly me,’ I say.
Iris doesn’t comment on the breadth of this understatement. Instead she says, ‘You look beautiful,’ and gets into the car before I can think of a response.
Everything goes according to plan. In the car park, I manage to find a space and manoeuvre the car into it with no damage to my car or anyone else’s, in just under five minutes, leaving me with ten minutes to spare.
The two-minute walk to the Hippodrome takes us only eight. Mostly because Dad insists on stopping to admire the rows and rows of red Chinese lanterns strung across the street, which, I have to admit when I pause to look up, make for a cheerful display.
I scan the crowd as we enter the Hippodrome, but can detect nobody who might be Vera.
And how would I know her anyway? Iris doesn’t have any photographs of her. None that she displays in her house, at any rate.
I don’t even know what age she is. Somewhere north of seventy, I imagine. Iris has always been scant on detail where her mother is concerned, and now I’m wishing I’d never phoned her. Left well enough alone. I’m not an interferer as a rule.
Que sera sera, my mother used to say.
Let sleeping dogs lie, was another.
Least said, soonest mended.
The Hippodrome appears to be a casino, and we have a total of twenty-one minutes to spare, which, Iris declares, is enough time for a drink at the bar.
She is not supposed to drink. The doctor says it interferes with the medication. Same goes for Dad. And I’m the designated driver so …
Iris slaps the bar with the flat of her hand. ‘Hendersons all round if you please,’ she says to the young man with the dark hair and the careful smile behind the bar. His narrow face bears the strain of leftover teenage acne which he probably thinks will never leave. I want to lean across the counter and tell him about Kate, who thought the same thing until her twenty-third birthday.
‘Just a small one for me,’ I call out as the young man begins his ministrations but he doesn’t hear me – Brendan says I speak too quietly – and the drinks, when they arrive, are much larger than a drink a designated driver should be drinking.
‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ Dad says, lifting his glass from the counter and holding it towards me and Iris.
‘Here’s looking at you kid,’ we say back to him, because it always makes him smile, and when he smiles, the disease backs away from his face and he looks like himself, just for a moment.
I’ve never been to a casino before. Iris has, of course. Dad can’t remember if he has or not. I’d say not. He was always a pint of plain in a public bar kind of a man. It was Mam who was more into trying dif
ferent things. Going different places. At least, she talked of trying different things and going different places. In the end, she didn’t do much of either.
It still astonishes me that it was her heart that gave out.
It wasn’t Dad’s fault.
She looked after him for ten years and then her heart gave out.
‘She wouldn’t have felt a thing,’ the consultant said afterwards. How could that be true? My mother’s heart – her big, wide heart – stops beating after all the years. After all the things she managed to do. All the things she managed to endure. All the things she never complained about. All the things she accepted. After all that, her heart stops beating and she doesn’t feel a thing.
Iris lifts her glass to her mouth and tilts her head back until the glass is drained. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s play blackjack.’
‘I was a seam-up bowler,’ Dad says, which is the thing he says whenever a game or a sport is mentioned. Cricket is the main reason why most of Dad’s teeth are dentures.
‘I don’t know how to play blackjack,’ I say.
‘It’s easy,’ Iris says, grabbing her sticks. ‘Follow me.’
I lift the drinks off the counter. It’s not wise to leave them unattended. Someone might spike them. I’m always telling the girls to be careful when they go to a pub or a club. You can’t be too careful, I tell them.
The blackjack table is manned by a boy. He can’t be much more than eighteen years old. He high-fives Dad, grins at me, and winks at Iris, who throws a fifty-pound note on the table. ‘You feeling lucky?’ the boy says, leaning towards her with his glittery almost-black eyes taking her in, in an overly familiar way.
‘Set ’em up,’ says Iris, hooking her sticks on the back of her chair. I settle Dad into the seat between us. The boy deals us two cards each.
‘What are we supposed to do?’ I ask, looking at my cards.
‘You don’t have to do anything, you’ve got an ace and a king. That’s a blackjack,’ says Iris.
‘Oh, it’s twenty-one?’ I used to play that with the girls, when they were learning addition and subtraction at school.
‘Hit me,’ Iris says to the boy, and he flips over the card at the top of the deck, slides it towards her.
‘I’m bust,’ she says. ‘Mr Keogh, what do you think?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Dad says.
‘I’d tell him to hit you if I were you,’ Iris says.
‘I hit a man once,’ Dad says. ‘I broke his nose.’
This is news to me. ‘What man?’ I say.
Dad’s face creases in concentration.
‘Do you want another card?’ the boy asks.
Dad puts his hands on his head, rubs at his temples as if trying to massage the memory out.
‘Don’t worry, Dad, it’ll come back to you,’ I tell him.
‘What will?’ he asks.
‘Deal him another card,’ Iris says to the boy. He does, and now Dad is bust. The dealer has a king of spades. He looks at me and I nod and he flips his second card over.
Bust.
I win the hand.
I never win anything. And God knows, I’ve bought enough raffle tickets over the years, with the various school and community fundraisers.
‘Let’s play again,’ I say.
The dealer deals and Iris and Dad and the dealer go bust and I win the hand.
I keep winning.
‘Beginner’s luck,’ I say to the boy when I catch him looking at me suspiciously, as if I’m counting cards.
What do they do to people who count cards? Call the police? Or just throw them out? And which one would I prefer? Being thrown out, I suppose. At least then, I wouldn’t have a criminal record.
Which I wouldn’t anyway, because I’m not counting cards.
But how does one go about proving that?
‘Terry?’ Iris puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you sticking or twisting?’
I examine the cards on the table in front of me. Four of them. The six of hearts. The eight of spades. The ace of clubs. The five of diamonds.
Iris and Dad are already bust.
The boy has an ace showing, his second card still face down.
‘Hit me,’ I say.
‘You’ve got twenty,’ Iris says. ‘You should stick.’
I shake my head. ‘Hit me,’ I repeat. I don’t know why I insist. The odds are certainly stacked against me. I need an ace, and there are only two left in the pack. Maybe only one if the dealer’s second card turns out to be an ace.
The boy’s fingers reach for the pack and I think, If it’s an ace, it’s a Sign. That everything is going to be all right. That I’ll be able to persuade Iris to turn back and we’ll all go home.
This is madness. I should stick. I’m going to lose.
But it’s too late to change my mind and I watch the boy reaching for the card at the top of the deck, flicking it expertly between his fingers and pushing it towards me.
It’s an ace.
It’s the ace of hearts.
The boy calls it a Five-card Charlie. He says it’s the first one he’s ever seen.
‘Fucken Nora,’ Iris says. ‘You beat the house.’
‘Who is Nora?’ Dad wants to know.
‘Shall I deal again?’ the boy asks.
‘Yes!’ I say. I see now how easy it would be to get addicted to gambling. I have this feeling blooming inside me and it’s a gorgeous feeling, warm and sweet like home-made toffee. It feels like I can’t lose.
Iris scoops up my winning chips. ‘We need to go,’ she says. ‘The show is starting in two minutes.’
‘Oh right,’ the boy says. ‘Justin Donovan.’
‘It’s Jason,’ Iris tells him.
‘That’s him,’ the boy says. ‘He used to be in Home and Away.’
‘Neighbours,’ Iris says. I pick up our handbags. Dad is telling his Frank Sinatra story. ‘… and he offers me one of his cigarettes. American ones. He kept them in a beautiful silver case with his initials – FAS, Francis Albert – engraved along the …’
Dementia is laden with oddities and here is one of them. Dad’s language can be full of holes, like a moth-eaten jumper. But sometimes, like now, when he is telling one of his old, familiar stories, the words reappear. They grow back so that, where once there were tattered holes, now there is a tapestry rich with the kind of vocabulary my father used to use and it is just a question of choosing the right word from a glut of right words.
The theatre is at the back of the casino. I was expecting something like the Bord Gais Energy Theatre, or perhaps even bigger because it’s London and everything is bigger here. And I had worried about Jason’s ability to fill such a space, given that I was able to procure two tickets at short notice. But the venue at the back of the casino is small. Intimate is perhaps a better word. It is set up cabaret-style, with round tables scattered about the floor, and people – women in their forties, mostly – sitting at them sipping complicated gin and tonics. At the back of the room is a balcony with tiered seating, and every seat is occupied, and I feel relieved on Jason’s behalf.
Iris finds our table and I settle Dad in a chair between us. He looks worried. ‘Your mother should be here by now,’ he says, looking at the place on his wrist where his watch used to be before he lost it.
‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll go and find her.’ I cross my fingers. ‘I’m going to cash in my winnings,’ I tell Iris, ‘and buy you a swanky cocktail.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me that alcohol will interfere with my meds?’ Iris says, grinning.
‘Would it make any difference?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
I get Dad a glass of Coke, which I tell him is a pint of Guinness. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he came to, one day. Woke up from this stupor he’s been in. Like Sleeping Beauty after her hundred-year slumber. What would he say? I know what he’d do with the glass of Coke anyway. Would he believe it? That it was me, trying to dupe h
im?
I don’t know why I bother wondering things like that, I really don’t. He smacks his lips after his first sip and declares it a grand drop. I get margaritas for Iris and me. A proper one for her and a non-alcoholic version for me. A mocktail, they call it. Isn’t that clever?
Even after parting with the astronomical amount the bartender asks for, I have winnings left.
And now the lights dim and a reverent hush falls over the crowd and the velvet curtains part and Jason Donovan appears in the centre of the stage, at first just a silhouette, then lit by a sudden, single spotlight, and the crowd show their appreciation with applause, interspersed with high-pitched shrieks.
I applaud. Iris shrieks. Dad drinks his Coke and smacks his lips. Jason hasn’t changed a bit. He looks exactly the same. Maybe a little more forehead on view, but as foreheads go, it’s not a bad one. In fact, it’s a fine forehead, tanned and untroubled by wrinkles.
I know the first song. It’s that one he used to sing with Kylie Minogue. ‘Especially For You’. The Kylie part is sung by a young woman who is a dead ringer for Kylie when she was twenty. Her shoulder-length chestnut hair, glossy with curls, reminds me of Anna’s. How she complained about her hair when she was a child. And it was true, it was no mean feat, getting a brush through it some mornings. I eventually found an excellent recipe in a library book and made hair conditioner using marshmallow root. And that was back when marshmallow root was pretty tricky to come by.
All Anna remembers about that conditioner was the smell of it. I did my best to sweeten it with essential oils, but it is true to say that the underlying smell of the concoction was a persistent one.
The Kylie-lookalike’s hair appears untroubled by knots.
My phone beeps and I dive for it, mortified I have neglected to put it on silent. I glance around. Nobody appears to have noticed. I look at my phone. Two text messages.
One from Anna:
where r u? tried to phone u but it went straight 2 voicemail. dad’s being really weird. My yellow silk #notreallysilk dress isn’t in the pile of clothes you left for me. Do you know where it is? #emergency
One from Kate:
where r u? dad seemed a bit confused earlier on the phone. did he tell u about hotel? have you booked another? dress rehearsal today a disaster. wish i’d listened to dad and become an accountant instead ;) can you send me the recipe for your ‘fail-proof stress-busting’ tea you used to make me?
Rules of the Road Page 8