by Jonathan Coe
Before walking over to the main entrance, I took out my video camera and filmed for about twenty seconds, panning all over the building, left and right, up and down. It was the first time I’d used the camera, but it seemed pretty easy to operate. I’m not quite sure why I did it, though: partly to calm my nerves, perhaps, and partly because I thought my father might like to see the footage the next time we met, whenever that would be. At any rate, it was hardly going to be of much use to Lindsay or Alan Guest for their promotional video. Afterwards I put the camera back in the glove compartment and locked the car.
It’s odd that when I think back to that morning, now, and remember myself walking across the expanse of asphalt in front of the tower block, it feels as though it was all happening in complete silence. And yet, obviously, there is no such thing as complete silence any more. Not in England. So there must have been the rumble of traffic from the Eastern Avenue, or the distant wail of police sirens, or the crying of a baby in a pushchair two streets away, but that’s not how I remember it. All was stillness. All was mystery.
I took the lift up to the fourth level and emerged into a dark, featureless corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and walls painted an intimidating shade of deep brown. The little windows at either end of the corridor admitted just a hint of the grey, late-morning light: two feeble glows in the distance to my left and my right, as I walked over to the doorway of my father’s flat, full of trepidation, my footsteps so light and measured that they barely made a sound. I took the keys that Mr Byrne had given me and tried to fit one of them into the lock – which in itself was quite hard to locate, in this gloom. The key didn’t seem to fit. Nor did the other two on Mr Byrne’s key ring. I tried each of them again, one after the other, but two of them didn’t fit at all, while the other one did – with a fair amount of forcing – but refused to turn.
I remembered Mrs Byrne’s comment, as we’d said goodbye yesterday evening, that she didn’t think I’d been given the right keys. I had taken no notice at the time, taking it simply to be the wittering of a confused old woman, but maybe she knew what she was talking about.
‘Shit!’ I said, out loud, and started trying the keys again. But it was no use. However hard I twisted the one key that seemed almost to fit, the lock refused to yield. After two or three minutes, there was no point in pursuing the attempt any further. I wrenched the key out of the recalcitrant lock, and threw it on the floor in frustration.
‘Shit!’ I said, again. Why was it that everything I tried to do, whenever it had anything to do with my father, always ended in disappointment and frustration? I thumped the locked door of his flat so hard that it hurt my fist and then stood in the darkness of the corridor for a few seconds, wondering where I could go from here. Surely it would be too anti-climactic just to give up, return to the car, and continue with my journey north?
Then I remembered the other thing that Mrs Byrne had mentioned: that there was another set of keys, belonging to a woman called Miss Erith who lived in the flat opposite. That had to be worth trying, surely.
I approached the door of the flat, and hesitated for a moment before ringing the bell. Supposing there was no one at home? Well, that would be the end of it, then. But no – I could hear voices, distantly, coming from inside. A man’s voice and a woman’s.
Quickly, before I had the time to tell myself that I was doing something foolish, I rang the bell. Almost immediately I regretted it, but there was nothing I could do about that now. After a couple of seconds I could already hear footsteps coming towards the door.
The door opened and I found myself looking at a small man of Pakistani origin, who seemed to be in his late sixties.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry – I think I must have called at the wrong flat.’
‘Who were you looking for?’
‘Miss Erith.’
‘No, this is right. Come on in.’
I followed him inside, down a short corridor and then into a bright but small sitting room, full of clutter. There were three free-standing mahogany bookcases, crammed with old hardback books and a few battered paperbacks, an ancient stereo system (dating from the 1970s, I would say, or maybe even the 1960s) with a whole lot of vinyl records and cassettes ranged around it (no CDs), at least a dozen pot plants, and a number of pictures on the walls, most of which even I recognized as reproductions of old masters. There were two armchairs placed opposite each other, and in one of them sat an elderly figure who I took to be Miss Erith. I guessed that she was at least ten years older than the man who had let me into the flat, although there was a liveliness in her eyes which belied her physical frailty. She was wearing brown slacks, and a navy-blue cardigan over her blouse, but the left sleeve was rolled up at the moment and, judging from the equipment on the table beside her, she was on the point of having her blood pressure taken.
When she saw me, her body gave a visible jolt and she almost jumped out of her chair in astonishment.
‘Good grief,’ she said. ‘It’s Harold!’
‘Don’t get up,’ I said, ‘I’m not Harold. My name’s Max.’
She stared at me more closely.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank God for that. I thought I was going mad for a minute. You do look like him, though.’
‘I’m his son,’ I told her.
‘His son?’ She looked me up and down, now, as if this information made it even more difficult to accept the reality of my sudden appearance – or indeed my existence. ‘Well …’ she continued, as if to herself, ‘Harold’s son. Who’d have thought it? Max, did you say your name was?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Your father isn’t with you?’
‘No.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Yes, he is. He’s very well, actually.’ With one thing and another, I seemed to have reduced her to speechlessness. To fill the silence, I said: ‘I was just passing through the area, so I thought …well, I thought it was about time someone checked up on the flat.’ Still no response. ‘I’m on my way to Scotland. To the Shetland Isles.’
Miss Erith’s companion stepped forward, at this point, and held out his hand.
‘Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Doctor Hameed.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Doctor,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘Maxwell Sim.’
‘Maxwell. The pleasure is all mine. Call me Mumtaz, please. Margaret, why don’t I make a pot of tea for your guest?’
‘Yes, of course. Of course.’ She slowly emerged from the daze into which my presence had thrown her. ‘Yes, where are my manners? Sit down, please, and have some tea. Would you like some tea?’
‘That would be lovely. But shouldn’t you finish … ?’ I gestured at the blood pressure monitor on the table.
‘Oh, we can do that afterwards. Come on, this is a special occasion.’
‘Very good,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I’ll make a pot for all of us.’
When he had disappeared on this errand, Miss Erith explained: ‘Mumtaz used to be my GP, until he retired. But he still comes and sees me, every couple of weeks, completely off his own bat. He gives me a quick MOT, and then we drive out somewhere for lunch. Nice of him, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’
‘You see, if there were more people around like him, we wouldn’t be in the state we are now.’
It wasn’t clear to me exactly what she meant by this remark, so I let it pass.
‘I haven’t seen your father,’ Miss Erith continued, ‘for more than twenty years. 1987, it was, when he left. He’d only been here a year or so. I was just getting excited about the idea of having him for a neighbour when he buggered off to Australia, without so much as a by-your-leave.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was a bit of a surprise for me, as well.’
‘Well, I’m not sure I was surprised, exactly. Not in retrospect, anyway. It never struck me as being a very sensible thing to do, coming back here, to his home town, after his wife had died and everything. What he re
ally needed was a fresh start. Still, I was very disappointed. He was good company, and we’re not exactly spoiled for that around here, I can tell you. He never wrote, or anything. Never got back in touch. Miserable sod. How old would he be now, seventy-something? He’s still in good shape, did you say?’
‘Yes. I saw him in Sydney last month. That was when he asked me to call in here. He wants me to find some … some items from the flat. Trouble is, I can’t seem to get in. I think I was given the wrong key.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got one somewhere. I still go in there every so often, to check the post. You know, it’s very irresponsible of him to leave that flat empty for so long. It could have been squatted by now. In fact, it should have been, really. If it had been anybody else I would have reported him to the housing association.’
Mumtaz returned, at this point, with a tray loaded with teacups, saucers and a plate full of biscuits. I fetched another chair from the corner of the room and offered him the armchair he must have been using before. Soon we were all settled again.
‘You never knew Mr Sim, did you?’ Miss Erith asked him. ‘From the flat across the corridor.’
‘No, I never had the pleasure,’ said the doctor. ‘A little before my time.’
‘Max has come to collect some of his things,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Though I don’t know what, exactly, because there isn’t much in there.’
‘I was told something about some postcards,’ I said.
‘Ah! Of course! Well I’ve got those, unless there’ve been any others in the last three weeks.’
Miss Erith began to rise effortfully to her feet, but Mumtaz tried to stop her.
‘Please, Margaret, don’t exert yourself –’
‘Give over,’ she said, brushing him away. ‘I’m not a cripple yet, you know. Now hang on, they’re in the spare room somewhere …’
While she was away, Mumtaz poured me some tea and handed me the cup, smiling in a confiding sort of way.
‘She has plenty of spirit, Margaret – still plenty of spirit. Mind you, her body’s not in such bad shape either. Would you have guessed that she’s seventy-nine? You should get her to tell you the story of her life. Fascinating. She was born on the canals, you know. Her father used to keep a famous shop for canal people, a few miles north from here at Weston. All that trade and traffic is gone now, of course. But just imagine! Imagine the changes she must have seen in her lifetime. Someone should fetch a tape recorder and keep her story for posterity. In fact, that’s what I should be doing. I’ve mentioned it to her, of course, but she’s too modest. “Oh, nobody wants to hear about a boring old lady like me,” she’ll say. But stories like hers need to be remembered, don’t you think? Otherwise, England has forgotten its own past, and once that happens, we’re in trouble, aren’t we? Even more trouble than we’re in at the moment.’
Another enigmatic remark; but before I had time to think about it, Miss Erith re-entered the room, saying, ‘I’m sorry they’re not in a box or anything,’ and dragging a large black bin liner behind her.
‘What the – … ?’ I said, opening the bag and peering inside.
‘You see, I never sorted them, or anything like that,’ said Miss Erith, ‘because I had no idea whether your father was ever coming back or not. And he specifically told me not to forward anything.’
The bag was full to the brim with picture postcards. I reached inside and pulled out a handful at random. They were nearly all from places in the Far East – Tokyo, Palau, Singapore … They all had my father’s address written neatly in block capitals on the right-hand side, while the other half was filled to the very edges with cramped, intense handwriting. And they all bore the same signature: ‘Roger’.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘This is beginning to ring a bell.’
And yes, it was true: I remembered, now, that similar postcards used to arrive at the family home in Birmingham every so often. They would be scooped up from the doormat along with the rest of the post, either by me or my mother, and placed without comment on my father’s desk in the dining room, to be read by him when he returned home from work in the evening. Like everything else that took place in our uncommunicative household, this practice was hardly ever discussed or even remarked upon. Although I did recall saying to my mother, at least once, ‘Who is Roger, anyway?’, to which she had simply replied, ‘I think he was some old friend of your father’s.’ And that had been an end of it.
‘I’ve seen this handwriting before,’ I went on. ‘And always on postcards like this. All through the seventies, my dad used to get these.’
‘They come about once a month, generally,’ said Miss Erith. ‘He doesn’t get anything else. A bit of junk mail sometimes.’
‘I’ll take them away with me,’ I said. ‘Is that all right?’
‘Of course it is. Oh, and the key’s over there, while I remember. In the fruit bowl, on top of the bookcase.’
I got up to retrieve the key and, while I was on my feet, said: ‘I’ll just pop across and look for the other stuff, I think. Shouldn’t take a minute or two.’
To tell the truth, I was dreading going into the flat, and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. So I left Miss Erith and Dr Hameed drinking their tea, and stepped back into the gloom of the corridor. And this time my father’s door unlocked easily.
Have you ever been inside a place that has not been lived in for more than twenty years? If not, you will find it difficult to understand what it feels like. Just then I tapped out a couple of sentences but I decided to delete them again because they didn’t seem to do justice to the atmosphere in there: I used words like cold, sparsely furnished and eerie, but somehow that’s not enough. There’s another word I could have used, of course. Perhaps rather an over-dramatic word. Dead. Does that seem over the top to you? Well, never mind – it may be a little blunt, but still, this is exactly what my father’s flat felt like: like a place that belonged to someone who had died a long time ago.
After I’d been in there for about two minutes, I couldn’t wait to get out.
There were two bedrooms. One contained a single bed (with mattress but no linen), while the other – much smaller – was dominated by a desk and a large self-assembly bookcase made of artificial wood. Thick dust everywhere – that goes without saying. There were about a dozen books on the shelves – all the ones my father hadn’t wanted to take to Australia with him – and a few papers and items of stationery in the desk drawers. The precious ring binder was sitting on the third shelf of the bookcase and was easy to find. It was pale blue and on the spine my father had stuck on a label which said Two Duets: A Verse Cycle and a Memoir. You could tell that he had stuck the label down with double-sided sellotape, because the paper had faded and now you could clearly see the two strips of sellotape coming through underneath.
I plucked down the ring binder and carried it through with me into the kitchen. Here there was a French window leading out on to a little balcony and, with a bit of effort, I managed to turn the latchkey and push it open. It was good to get out into the fresh air. From up on this balcony I could see traffic circling endlessly, purposelessly on the orbital road and, beyond that, rural Staffordshire stretched out towards the horizon in grey waves of gentle, unremarkable countryside. A light but persistent drizzle had started to fall. I could see the A5192 ribboning away into the distance, and suddenly felt a strong desire to be driving on that road, back towards the motorway, just me and Emma again, heading north, on my way to Kendal, where this evening (God, this was such a wonderful prospect, until now I had barely allowed myself to contemplate it) I would actually be seeing Caroline and Lucy again, for the first time in months. Perhaps the most important evening of my life, in some ways. Certainly a chance to prove – once and for all – that I was not going to repeat my father’s mistakes; that I was capable of having a relationship with my daughter based on something more than mutual toleration and the prolonged accident of sharing the same living space. I was not (I intoned the wo
rds to myself, in silence but fervently) going to end up like this. My memorial was not going to be an empty, unloved, unlived-in apartment on the forgotten outskirts of a Midlands city.
Full of resolve, now, I went back into the kitchen, locked the French window, took one more pitying look around the sitting room as I passed through it, and then left the flat for good, locking the door behind me. I felt a strange, irrational flood of relief, as if I’d just had a narrow escape from the jaws of some fate so imprisoning and nightmarish that it couldn’t even be defined.
‘Mumtaz and I were just trying to decide where we should go to lunch,’ Miss Erith said, as I rejoined them and took a welcome sip of my still-warm tea. ‘We can’t just go to any old place, you see. I don’t know what he thinks about it, but it’s a date, as far as I’m concerned, and a girl expects to be taken somewhere special.’ She glanced at the blue ring binder on my lap. ‘So – did you find what you were looking for?’