Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  At one point in the Aids years (the phrase has some shorthand value, though they’re hardly over) I slipped into a bath behind a friend and held him tight. He was recovering from shingles, and found that pressure on his skin could relieve the agonizing twinges he was experiencing, which are a sign of improvement, of nerve cells regenerating, but feel like anything but. Hugh hadn’t yet had his diagnosis of Aids, and was willing to embrace his shingles as tightly as I was embracing him, as long as he wasn’t in the firing line for anything worse. The bath was a mass of foam produced by bubble bath, and at some stage I recognized the bubble bath as Badedas.

  The intimate distress and comfort of the experience was so intense that it stripped all the Dadly associations from the smell of Badedas, overwriting them with tenderness and sorrow. Now both Dad and Hugh are dead, with Hugh dead long before Dad, but it is Hugh who is summoned back in welcomed pain by the smell of those Swedish horse-chestnuts. All the naffness has melted away, and my heart and my nostrils open up.

  I didn’t like to delay Dad’s carers with chat when they had other places to go, but I learned a certain amount about Nimat. She lived on Royal College Street in Camden. She had been brought up as a Christian. She had worked in Africa as an air hostess (I think she used that phrase, rather than ‘cabin crew’), though I imagine her height was a disadvantage in those cramped spaces. Her great pleasure on stopovers was to put on her hottest hotpants and make her way to the bar of the hotel where she was staying. There she would order a cocktail and make it last, pacing herself and letting the ice-cubes melt at their leisure. Everyone would know she wasn’t a renegade Muslim displaying herself and drinking poison but simply a Christian enjoying legitimate privileges, relaxing in her own way, though her presence in the bar is unlikely to have been sedative.

  Another morning helper was Damon, a slight, softly spoken man in his early twenties. He would shuffle off his boots the moment he entered the flat, as if he had spent time in Japan. In the corridor to the bathroom he had no wafting powers to compare with Nimat’s, but he spoke gently to Dad and persuaded him to co-operate pretty well. Most days he seemed not to have another job to go to, and I would happily squeeze oranges for him and brew coffee of quality.

  One morning over the coffee and orange juice Damon asked me if I had noticed his speech impediment. It was a strange thing to ask, because yes, I had in fact noticed that he had a speech impediment, but only on the very day he had asked the question. Before then there had been no detectable lack of fluency.

  He explained that on previous days he had been choosing his words carefully to avoid problem consonants, vigilantly manning the points (in effect) so as to send his sentences along stretches of track where there was nothing blocking the line. From today, though, he was putting into practice the principles of a radical speech-therapy method.

  It seemed odd that the immediate effect of speech therapy was to impair the fluency of speech, but it didn’t seem helpful to point this out. I hoped it would work for him.

  Over the next week or two the radical approach to speech therapy acquired a name – this was The McGuire Programme. Part of the technique seemed to be a matter of mastering the art of ‘costal breathing’ and part of it was clearly psychological. The system sounded so American that I was surprised to learn that the David McGuire who devised it was a Briton, a semi-professional tennis player who had drawn on his knowledge of sport for both aspects of the programme, the physical and psychological.

  Damon was set targets for some exercises, such as ‘VS with walk-away’. VS is Voluntary Stuttering, and Voluntary Stuttering with walk-away meant that he should approach a stranger and initiate a conversation, but exaggerate his stuttering to the point where the other person, yes, walked away. He was supposed to achieve this, say, five times between one group meeting and the next. There was also the electronic equivalent, VS with hang-up I suppose, in which he would act out a similar level of blocked speech on the phone until the stranger on the other end of the line hung up. I remember Damon saying that to save money he would call free helplines. He didn’t need to have a question prepared for the relevant product or service because he wouldn’t be getting beyond the first syllable anyway.

  This was fascinating and alarming. It made psychological sense for stutterers to take control in this way. If there is a link between shame and stuttering, what could be more empowering than seeking out the humiliation you have always feared? I don’t mean that shame is the origin of the behaviour but that it becomes an inextricable part of it. Having provoked rejection under controlled conditions, you can come to realize that it’s not so unbearable, and take some of the pressure off a self-reinforcing pattern.

  On the other hand there were elements in the programme reminiscent of minority politics, of twelve-step groups, and, most obviously, of cults. To stop passing as fluent, to start insisting on your imperfect articulation, seemed to be some sort of speech-therapy equivalent of coming out of the closet. Yet the notion of the ‘recovering stutterer’, endorsed by McGuire, seemed to describe stuttering as an addiction. It was hard to see that a stutterer who ‘relapses’, when unable to consolidate the progress made with the group, was in the same existential boat as the alcoholic unable to stay sober without the safety net of the meetings and the emergency parachute of the sponsor. Did the stutterer have to accept the fact of helplessness as a precondition for recovery?

  I even thought there was something rather ominous about the phrase ‘the road to freedom’ – it seemed to say there was only one. Still, I enjoyed having conversations on a subject so far outside my experience. Damon maintained direct eye contact while he spoke, which was particularly disconcerting when he was telling me about the unbroken eye contact which was a requirement of McGuire Programme meetings. It was only when I was tactless enough to ask if the sessions were expensive that he moved his gaze away.

  One day he took a further step in his shy boldness, asking me if I could recommend a gay bar for him to visit, since he was ‘bi-curious’. Inevitably I had preened a bit about the way I could balance divergent impulses, filial, sexual, paternal, as if I was Blondin coolly cooking an omelette on a rope above the Niagara Falls, when my little balancing trick was only over the Serpentine. I pointed out that I wasn’t much of a bar-goer, and that he should consult a listings magazine, but he was very keen on a personal recommendation. What he wanted was a bar that was 100 per cent gay, so that everyone in the whole place except him had a fixed sexual identity. Only then could he satisfy his bi-curiosity in safety, conceivably even setting his feet on another road to freedom.

  Almost from his first visit I had encouraged Damon not to be defined by the duties which brought him to the flat. I wanted to reward his excellence as a carer, but the result was that his excellence was eaten away by the rewards I devised for it.

  There was the day when after Dad’s shower was finished Damon popped his head into the kitchen and asked, ‘Any chance of some fresh squeezed orange juice?’ There was every chance, as long as I got busy and squeezed some oranges. I might not have been made uneasy by the request for juice, but I certainly was by his stipulation of the process.

  And there was the day when he popped into the kitchen to ask a personal question before finishing his tasks. After about a minute I became aware of the creaking noise as Dad shifted his weight on the Zimmer frame, and realized that Damon had left him in the corridor leading to the bathroom. Having no momentum of his own, Dad was waiting patiently for the resumption of cues. By this point the personal attention I had given to Damon had more or less destroyed his professional performance.

  Luckily the agency that empl
oyed Damon lost its contract with Camden Council shortly afterwards, so I didn’t need to deal with the problem I had created.

  One helper from the Care Alternatives roster who stayed on to look after Dad in the evenings even after the agency lost the council’s contract was Bamie. Bamie, from Sierra Leone, wasn’t tall but was certainly strongly built. Not only did he think the British had done Sierra Leone a power of good, he claimed that this was the general opinion of the inhabitants. Imperial guilt is such a reliable reflex, even in those born after the days of Empire, that I would have suspected a joke if Bamie hadn’t been so solemn and insistent. In some impossible way we were the good guys, and anything that had gone wrong since we left was a matter of local culpability casting no shadow on our collective honour. Whether he meant to do it or not, Bamie was chipping away at a fundamental part of modern British identity.

  One thing about Bamie which took a little getting used to was that he called Dad ‘Dad’. At first it seemed possible that he had misunderstood and thought that this was his client’s name in the world, until he explained that in Sierra Leone it is the polite way of referring to an older male person.

  Though in his North Wales childhood an awareness of racial diversity went no further than the admission that South Waleans might be human, Dad soon became used to Bamie. But the first time this muscular black man, not only black but somehow monumentally black, his skin tone very dark, his eyes flashing, used the form of address ‘Dad’ while tucking him into bed, Dad’s own eyes went very wide and he sent them wonderingly over towards me, seeming to signal Something I’ve forgotten? I was able to reassure him that his bloodline hadn’t taken a strange turn by saying, ‘Dad, you remember Bamie, he comes to look after you …’ Holly, though, never really got used to being referred to in his darkly growling voice as ‘Aunty Olly’, aunty being the respectful form of address in Sierra Leone for female persons of whatever age.

  Bamie was proud of his wife and toddler son, but it was only in his dealings with Dad that I could see his tenderness. He was a Christian, much involved in the activities of his church, yet to my eyes his strongest underlying characteristic was anger. In conversation he was very big on Matthew 10:34 (‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’), less mindful of Matthew 5:39 (turning the other cheek). It might be from a different gospel or a different religion.

  When his church went on pilgrimage to Walsingham, it was Bamie who drove the bus. But on the way back into London after they had paid their homage to the Virgin, Bamie came very close to an incident of road rage when another driver tried to cut in ahead of him. What stayed with him from the day was not serenity.

  I enjoyed discussing religion with Bamie in the sitting-room of the Gray’s Inn flat, while Dad turned his face from one of us to the other in low-level surprise, though I had a definite feeling of playing with fire. Riding in the bus with Bamie might well be exhilarating, trying to nose out into traffic ahead of him would certainly not be.

  I invited him to consider that he liked the bits of Christ which were like himself, but had no time for the bits of Christ which were unlike Bamie. Debate wasn’t his natural element, but he maintained his position forcefully, with quotation, repetition and the occasional rhetorical question.

  Did I mention to Bamie during our chats that my private life was not as standard as was implied by the occasional presence on the premises of that miniature aunty, my daughter? I did not. This was feeble, though I could tell myself that I had no business preaching a gospel of sexual non-conformity if the result might be to upset the crucial aspect of the arrangement, namely the smooth bond between Dad and his carer. This was a truth but not a sufficient one. If Bamie was minded to take Matthew 23:27 (‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees’) as the text for a homily, I would need all my debating skills. I could hardly deny I was a scribe when it was how I made my living. If he decided I was a Pharisee into the bargain, hypocrite and whited sepulchre, things would not go well for the household.

  It made a great difference to me to know that Dad was in Bamie’s care, in his strong, scrupulous hands. Bamie worked a long shift, from three in the afternoon to ten at night, which was when I would return after spending time en famille. One evening he told me, ‘A lady came to see Dad and shouted at me.’ I didn’t need to be told that this was Edith Wellwood, though in fact Edith ended up (to everyone’s surprise including perhaps her own) approving of Bamie. Her initial mistrust wasn’t based on race but on long experience of other people’s unremitting incompetence. Confronted with such conscientious skill she surrendered. Her only concession to contrariness was to insist on calling him Bamber, as if his Sierra Leonean parents, great fans of University Challenge, had decided to name him after the long-ago quizmaster.

  When the school summer holidays came around I was able to take a break, borrowing a converted barn in Normandy from a friend so as to spend two weeks there with Holly and her mother. Set free of Dad-related routines I immediately devised replacements. I would get up early for a shower, then cycle many kilometres to the bakery that made the best brioches, wearing a clinging vibrant orange singlet which I was fairly convinced I could get away with, though I knew better than to look at my reflection in shop windows en route in case the verdict went the other way. My timing was sufficiently predictable that the plunger in the cafetière would just be beginning its descent when I returned with the baked goods.

  We made a day trip to Mont Saint-Michel during which I carried Holly on my shoulders across the causeway for what seemed several hours, knowing that there was absolutely nothing in Mont Saint-Michel to engage a six-year-old’s attention when we got there. The expedition was a failure even before the setbacks of crowded pricy restaurants and smelly dustbins, the generally oppressive atmosphere of a historic spot gone rancid from sheer picturesqueness. Tourists and supplies were being imported in order for one to consume the other before the tourists traipsed off to fill the buses again and the dustbins were emptied at last.

  On the way home Holly fell asleep in the back of the car and the drive back to the barn outside Gourbesville, through fog over unknown roads, was oddly magical. In her brain memories of the day were being coded to record the stoical enjoyment that makes family expeditions special, when people have fun on principle, whether they want to or not. We adults listened to Mark Lamarr on some esoteric radio station, playing even more esoteric rockabilly. I hadn’t even known I didn’t hate rockabilly. With that rapturous winding-down of mood in a silence alive with twangs, the trip had to be classified all over again, as a success. The fogbound afterglow backlit the whole day.

  Between them my brothers had been looking after Dad for that fortnight, and then I was back in harness. He seemed balanced in his static decline, though of course decline is never static.

  He began to have difficulty swallowing, coughing and spluttering almost with every mouthful of tea or coffee. This was diagnosed as ‘dysphagia’, which my ghostly Greek A-level allowed me to identify as meaning no more than ‘difficulty swallowing’. Not exactly a revelation. The solution was to add a thickening agent to the liquid in the cup. In theory this was what Dad had always wanted, with every drink promoted to the status of soup, but the coughing and choking didn’t really go away.

  I was mortified when I found that Dad had a sore on his heel. This wasn’t a surprising development, considering how little encouragement his blood was getting to circulate with any vigour. Dad was proud of the manly shape of his legs but had never done anything either to earn or to maintain it. Even as a young man he didn’t enjoy walking as an activity. In his prime he would get into his cherished Jaguar on a Saturday morning, the
n drive two hundred yards to John Brumfit, the tobacconist’s in Holborn Bars, to buy cigarettes.

  When he had taken up ‘jogging’ in the 1980s, buying matching New Balance running shoes for himself and Sheila, he moved so slowly that I had to discipline myself not to overtake him at a comfortable walking pace. In retirement he had offered masterly passive resistance to any attempt at keeping him mobile.

  Nevertheless I took the sore on his heel, this site of necrosis, personally. I was mortified at the failure of care. This time ancient Greek provided a more vivid etymology. Nekros means a corpse, and necrosis is a patch of local death.

  One day as I was changing the dressing on his sore, Dad patted me on the back and murmured, ‘Dear Adam.’ This was so unlike his usual style that I bridled at it, saying something thoroughly ungracious like ‘What brought this on?’

  His preferred manner was formal, a matter of raising a glass to Sheila when she entered the room and saying, ‘You elegant fowl’, the endearment safely sourced from a nonsense poem. After her car accident he went through a phase of calling her ‘the salt of the earth’, which I thought thoroughly patronizing. When he started abbreviating the phrase to ‘s.o.e.’ I would bare my teeth silently, as if I had taken a mouthful of salt myself.

  He didn’t have a late-life nickname for me, which was no loss if Nogood Boyo was the template. While I was looking after him he would sometimes say that I was a ‘good guy’, or ‘one of the good guys’, in a tone of mild surprise, as if my reputation had suggested otherwise.