‘She sounds like my father.’
‘Was he a good man?’
‘Was? He still is. So good that St. Paul better up his game when my father gets to the Pearly Gates.’
And into Havana, city of movement; an intricate, free-flowing dance making the steps up as it went along. European cities were staid, self-conscious in comparison. I understood why my mother walked everywhere, her gaze moving like mine from the young men eyeing me from little streetside booths to the chrome-sparkle of a passing ‘56 Plymouth and the looming mansions with their decrepit, leaning cailleachs, the dome of the Capitol on immaculate blue, the marble-white columns and undulating balustrades of the Grand Theatre.
The buzz of traffic I’d expected but not the pulsing reggaeton, the Buena Vista old men replaced by skinny teenagers busting moves to choppy electronic beats, sometimes on the wrong side of cool, friends with big smiles clapping them on. They still had ghettoblasters here, chunky boxes in silver and black. They still looked cool. We passed the Inglaterra and down narrow, crowded Obispo, past the 10 peso pizza stalls and the Bucanero bars, the queues outside electronics shops, the white-cotton tourists who walked slightly faster. I didn’t expect the bookstalls at the end of the street, the sudden quiet of Plaza de Armas.
‘Your mother would come here every lunchtime. We’d browse the books together. Not that we bought many. It was a quiet place to come. The students in language schools can get very noisy.’
‘You think this is the best place?’
‘I can’t think of anywhere else.’
The plaza was more of a garden, the trees muffling more of Obispo, the cafés now a low murmur. Carlos Manuel de Cespédes, a nineteenth-century hero of Fidel’s, peered down from his marbled plinth, the only witness as we crouched at the foot of a Royal Palm. I took the urn from the rucksack and we scattered my mother on the dry ground beneath the tree, an endless stream, it seemed, dusting the hot air as I spread her around, scuffed her into the earth.
‘She would appreciate this,’ said Adelina.
A light breeze ruffled the palm fronds into a flickering shimmer. I brushed my mother from my shoes and rubbed her between my fingers, trying to dredge up some emotion.
‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.
‘It’s a hot day to be out walking.’
‘So where did the old reprobate drink then?’
She looked grave. ‘Your mother drank in a lot of places Jim. She drank an awful lot.’
‘Did she now? Did she have a favourite place?’
The Castillo de Farnés was back up by Parque Central, a streetside bar crowded with ever-changing locals stopping in for empanadas, bocadillos, a quick beer. Adelina told me that my mother had lived in Havana for over fifteen years. Before that she’d taught in a provincial town in Peru whose name she couldn’t remember. Did people really like her? I asked. They did, Adelina answered. Both colleagues and students. I admired the skill with which she was easing me into my mother’s life. Just the right amount of detail. I was grateful.
‘What about you?’
‘Me?’
‘You know so much about me but I don’t know anything about you. I mean, are you from Havana?’
She frowned and looked away, into the street. But when she looked back she was smiling. All through her childhood in rural Cuba and her move to the big city in ’91 she kept on smiling.
‘So you’re a bumpkin like me then,’ I said.
‘A what?’
‘A country-bumpkin, a farmer, salt-of-the-earth.’
‘Oh I see, well, yes I suppose I am.’
‘Where I come from we’ve got our own language that hardly anyone speaks anymore. Gaelic, it’s like Irish. Anyway, there’s a name in Gaelic for people like us. Teuchter.’
‘Chook-ter.’
I raised my beer. ‘Here’s to us then. To the old women who are no more and the two chook-ters!’
Again that smile. She seemed happy, being with me, although I wondered if I was being indulged.
The boxing match on the TV-gantry babbled in Spanish and if I didn’t already smoke I’d want to. I liked it here, the chrome topped bar, the twitchy barman and the three shelves of spirits, J&B, Johnnie Walker, ron. Even Che Guevara was relaxed, smiling down from a portrait above the bar. A sign outside the toilet told me that Che, Fidel and two compañeros stopped in here for a meal back in ’59, just after taking Havana. The victory was won, it must be why Che looked so playful. An impossibly handsome man, ideals to match and never any smugness in the eyes. What must it be like for a whole society to grow up in his shadow? Was he still a presence for the ghettoblaster kids, an inspiration or impossible myth?
‘I always preferred Camilo Cienfuegos.’
I looked back at her. ‘Who?’
‘You don’t know Camilo! You’ve been in Havana three days and you don’t know Camilo. Shame on you Jim!’ She wagged a playful finger.
‘I will go to the Museum of the Revolution tomorrow, I promise.’
‘Good! Camilo always seemed more down to earth, lots of fun. What woman could ever live with a God like Che?’
‘Or man.’
‘To Che, then.’
‘And Camilo.’
‘To Camilo and Che!’
We tipped back our bottles and Havana flowed, blue into black, the gummy old men, the hip-hop Ladas that made sense only here, the cheap tables and frayed cushions, the hopscotch asphalt leading here, leading there, the verandas of bars too many to count, the whirr of the fans and the drumming, the strumming, Adelina’s sweet fired eyes, the bottles and beats of Obispo, O’Reilly, the catcalls and slick walls of endless jazz night where the stones keep their heat, the smoke and the light, my ghost-flicker mother somewhere just out of sight.
Five
I’ll never know them, not now. We exist together, no more. I have little desire to interact. What’s the word, gregarious? If it was my mother just finishing this killing night shift she’d be moaning in the tea-hut about the fucker of a problem in number three spirit and ripping the piss out of Camp Gary’s fishing story. It was this big, he’s saying. Like that guy in the bog at the Station Hotel eh Gary, she replies, another big one you reeled in. Malky would love her, she had the proper bolshie bullshit. If she’d stuck around I might have turned out the same.
I cross to the warehouse and lean against the wall, looking into the turbid sky. Nothing, no great revelation streaks across the grey, no clouds to conjure dreams or nightmares.
Back I go towards the Stillhouse, taking care to keep to the footprints I’ve just made. The fresh snow’s already becoming hard as the cold slips below zero. There’s sadness in seeing snow scarred by track-marks. I want maximum emptiness, still trying to convince myself that my days are a blank canvas to fill how I choose. Or maybe disturbed snow just looks messy. Whatever. Back and fore I’ll go, perhaps forever. Sometimes I do a little jump and skip one of the footprints, sometimes I hop the whole way. Sometimes I hover on one wobbly leg.
O’Neill appears. Says he’s been watching me from the machine room door. I’d noticed it was slightly open but thought nothing of it. I mean, who’d suspect there’d be some cunt there, lurking in the dark? O’Neill likes to challenge the world but his passive aggression is such an obvious act I wonder why he wastes everyone’s time. And he’s a swine to shake. I wander towards the stack of old bourbon barrels behind the cooperage and he silently follows. Makes me nervous, I have to glance back to make sure he hasn’t drawn a knife.
Then Des appears from another side door. Too many doors in this place, you can be ambushed at any time. Now it’s two of them following me as I walk along the line of barrels, scraping the snow from the top of each. At the end of the row I turn and face them. In any other context this would be awkward. Not here though, as with so much it’s beyond embarrassment.
Des frowns, opens his mouth. He’s in re-entry phase, returning from whichever distant star system he’s been visiting. O’Neill and I watch him closely. Snow, he final
ly says. Certain comments stop time dead, making already mind-numbing situations exponentially worse. Like someone going on and on about a traffic jam when you’ve been stuck in it for two hours and counting. Or saying snow when it’s been pouring with snow for weeks. The more meditative among us might be shocked into a state of instant enlightenment by such stark obviousness. Not me, I fear an immediate nervous breakdown, violence I won’t be able to hold back.
‘Snow,’ agrees O’Neill.
‘Snow,’ says Des.
‘Always the snow.’
‘Always the snow.’
‘Least Amber’ll get a white-wedding.’
O’Neill’s grin is mocking, he’s looking for a bite. He tries again, adds a question.
‘The fuck’s she getting married in February for?’
I just nod and he reverts to his default sneaky snigger.
‘Snow,’ Des repeats and I take my cue to leave.
I’ve worked with Des and O’Neill for years but we’ll never know each other. In our ignorance our conversations have corroded to coldness tinged with malice. The fault may very well be mine. I may be a fool but I’m not an idiot. I’m well-aware of all the psycho-babble about how abandonment makes relationships difficult. Why some people need to spend a hundred quid a pop to be told the obvious by some yoghurt weaver is beyond my pay-scale.
It’s not always been like this. I remember less alienated times, which suggests there might be an element of choice in my indifference. Maybe I’m just jaded. What did Al Pacino’s detective say in Sea of Love? I have done some desperate, foolish things at three o’clock in the morning.
Like one night when I was seventeen, hopelessly in love with my future wife and she was away visiting her granny. I was alone, gibbering pissed on Export and Thunderbird. Fuck it, says Young Jim, I have to see her. So I charged the battery in the old Leyland Princess that had been abandoned in my father’s back garden for almost two years. I was fifteen miles down the road before sanity returned and I turned the car around. I never lost control like that again.
I peer through the kitchen window and watch my wife bustle around. These emotions, events, did they really happen? They seem less like memories than memories of a memory. Like the affection in my wife’s eyes as I rush inside and pull her towards me, give her a long cuddle. She remembers we used to do this and that’s enough to halt the rushing routine that would normally brook no interruption. Where’s she been transported to, what moment long-forgotten has suddenly re-emerged blinking into the light? But I’ve long realised that unless you replace old memories with new the more questionable, corrupt, the originals start to appear. That’s why she’s pushing me away, looking at me with an appraising eye.
‘What? Can’t I give my wife a cuddle?’
She folds her arms across her chest. ‘You choose your moments. I haven’t got time for sex Jim.’
‘So if I give you a cuddle you think I want sex?’
‘Don’t you?’
It’s a trick question. If I say no the ramifications could be huge. Yes means that she’s right. Either way I lose. ‘I was just thinking about that time I was going to drive to your granny’s to see you. Remember that?’
The eyes soften again. ‘Course I do, you bloody idiot. You could’ve got the jail for that.’
I last knew my wife when we were in love. And if you want to keep knowing someone you better make sure and stay that way, otherwise the interest fades and before you know it there’s some stranger lying in your bed scratching and farting where you wife used to be.
‘I hope they make it,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘Amber and Peter. I hope they make it.’
My wife takes my hands. She strokes my cheek, like her touch might remember something long forgotten. I do too, she says. I think of my mother, lying alone in a Havana shack. When did she realize she didn’t love my snowbound father with his opaque memories? I’ll be seeing the old man today. The manager of the home had phoned. He’d received the letter I sent a few days ago and wanted to meet as a matter of urgency. So back I go to that vision of my future and the vanishing father I have never known, that ghost of a ghost.
‘Mr Drever.’ The manager holds my gaze and frowns as he grips my hand, piling on the concern. I suspect his mannerisms are overcooked in most scenarios: bereavement, celebration, sex.
‘Always a pleasure.’
I immediately regret the choice of words. It sounds sarcastic when I meant light-hearted. He’s too self-important to shrug it off and the slight narrowing of the eyes is unmistakable.
‘I’m sure.’
I need to lighten the tone and notice he’s one of those people with photos of his children on his desk. ‘Nice kids.’
‘Thank you.’
Why does he have these photos here? Is he worried he’ll forget what they look like? It’d be horrific to have the mocking eyes of the Boy follow me around the Stillhouse all day. ‘How old are they?’
‘Ten and six. Mr Drever, can we cut to the chase?’
‘Sure. Let us cut.’ Why do I say these things?
The care home is the only one in a fifteen-mile radius. It’s full of local oldies and used to be family-owned. Some corporate entity bought it a year ago and within six months decided to shut it down. We care because we all have to, their brochures say. They advised it in good time, true enough, sent information and had people contact me from three alternative homes. With power of attorney all I had to do was choose and sign.
‘Are you fully cognisant of the challenges of caring for your father at home?’
‘It’s only temporary.’
‘There is still a place open at – ’
‘Can you recommend a nurse?’
‘I can, but that really isn’t a long-term solution.’
‘It’s temporary.’
So. The old man’s coming home. My decision, even though I don’t want another stranger sleeping in my house, even though he was difficult enough when healthy. Contradictory, sure, but it’s the classic recipe: complacency, laziness and guilt. Ignore the quantities, just pour and mix. And what can I possibly prove to myself or my father by bringing him home only to ship him out a few weeks later? The hate for my mother is sudden, swelling. She should be the one dealing with these fuckin issues. It should be her looking after him, not me.
Nurse Ratched takes me to the day-room. The old man’s sitting in his usual seat in the conservatory. The windows are steamed up and the temperature tropical. He’s compos mentis. This makes me feel even more guilty. It’s so much easier when he’s away with the fairies, less disquieting than to be reminded of the person he once was. When do I tell him he’s got to leave this place? The matron told me that today’s been a good day, so why not now?
‘You’re looking pale, son. Been on nights again?’
He’s wearing a tatty green tank-top with white shirt and tie. His brogues are polished to a shining mahogany. A bible sits on the arm of his chair and if I half-closed my eyes he could be back in his neat little seaside cottage. In front of him on a small table is a Scrabble game set for three players. But no other seats. ‘You doing ok dad? You winning?’ I point to the board.
He gives that now-familiar unnerving smile and taps the side of his nose. ‘Easy when you know how, eh?’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Easy when you know how.’
I expect the mist to quickly descend but it doesn’t. I’m struck again by how he endures. He asks about my wife, Amber and yes, he would very much like to come to the wedding.
An essentially good man. I’ve never measured up. He never imposed his values but his quiet moral decency and generosity were pressure enough. I’ve always felt like a twelve-year old in his company. Then the dementia began to set in, Lewy body they called it. When he had to move into the home it was his suggestion that I take on his power of attorney. It would make things easier to manage, he said, as he got more and more sick. But it seemed like a test, a last opportun
ity for the son to redeem himself. Bastard. I’ve watched his disappointment at my inevitable and ongoing failure swell and ebb on the inconsistent tide of his illness, my guilt magnified by an inability to do or say the right thing, now when the challenge is greatest and my need to succeed, in both our eyes, is the most urgent. The appalled relief I felt when he was diagnosed has long evaporated. Despite his dementia, I remain the child, he the man. Is that why I decide to ask about John Tannehill, this shaded presence in my mother’s journal. Am I looking for cruel revenge, a haunted memory, perhaps, that will play on endless loop in his malfunctioning mind?
‘Who was John Tannehill, Dad?’
He stares at me, says nothing for a long, long moment. ‘I haven’t heard that name in years.’
‘Mum knew him?’ Time presses harder when my father’s rational, insisting that I get my words in quickly.
He places his hands on his lap, the quiet pose I remember from a million Sundays sitting beside him in church. ‘John Tannehill was a troubled man. Your mother was a troubled woman. The world is full of people like them. I don’t suppose you need to look very far in your own life to find other examples of two troubled souls finding solace in each other.’
‘Solace?’
He reaches across and takes my hand. ‘Yes son. Solace. We all need solace.’
‘I want to know about him.’
‘Jim.’ His voice is warm, almost a whisper. ‘What does it matter? The sun rose today, didn’t it?’
He’s a master of defusing tension and I almost smile, reaching out for his feather-light hand, the almost translucent skin. I’ve noticed on several visits the clump of cotton wool held in place by white surgical tape on his left wrist. But I’ve never asked about it, another reason for Nurse Ratched’s lacerating disdain. I see her out of the corner of my eye, bustling around some of the other residents. She’s still watching though, she’s always watching.
The Stillman Page 10