This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  I asked whether Dad had said goodbye to him.

  ‘Well, he didn’t say goodbye exactly, but he did say, Oh, I don’t think I’ll be coming back …’

  We circled the subject for another twenty minutes, but got no further. Eventually, I thanked Bernard for agreeing to see me, and for the tea, and rose from the table. Outside, the wind gusted and nagged, smelling of chips. As I walked to the kerb, a police car nosed past, and I remembered how, at one point, Bernard had referred to vandalism – though, characteristically, he had used the word ‘nuisance’. It seemed a bleak and unforgiving place for somebody so gentle to end up, and filled with affection for him I turned around to offer one last wave, but he had already retreated behind his frosted-glass front door.

  Later, I left my hotel on Marine Parade and stood on the damp pavement, looking west. A single string of yellow bulbs looped the entire length of the pier. Fixed to the roof of the main pavilion was the word FUNTASIA, its neon a smudgy, brooding red. I crossed the road. Beyond the railings, banks of shingle sloped steeply down into the dark. A brisk wind was blowing from the south; clouds of vapour that smelled of seaweed and rusting metal lifted past my face. I paused again by a kiosk, its wares described in brash blue capitals: ROCK FUDGE INFLATABLES. The words belonged to another age – naive, comical, but tender too, somehow. I thought of the Channel Bar on the end of the pier, where Robin and I had spent an evening in 1984, and how we had stared in fascination and disbelief as a man who called himself ‘Mr Music’ played versions of top-ten classics on a Hammond organ. Perhaps I would sit in the bar for an hour. Get a drink, something to eat.

  I stepped on to the pier. It had been raining, and the wooden slats were slippery. In the old days, there would be posters advertising shows at the Winter Garden or the Hippodrome. Wrestlers with exaggerated, melancholy names. Pop-stars who hadn’t had a hit in years. Comedians. I passed the glass-blowing studio with its shelves of prancing animals, then a domed pavilion crammed with jingle-playing slot-machines. Several notices warned me of the dangers of jumping off the pier. Prosecution, among others. Two teenage boys slouched in a doorway, hoods pulled level with their eyebrows, cigarettes glowing sullenly between their fingers. This was the town I had always longed to leave, for ever.

  Halfway along the pier, I looked to the west again. The tide was low. Waves were breaking far out to sea and rushing shorewards in ragged white lines. Their constant, breathy roar erased all other sounds. On the promenade the lit windows of hotel rooms blurred and wobbled in the spray. The phone call Bernard had described was gnawing at me. I don’t think I’ll be coming back. Had my father had some sort of premonition? Or had he simply decided to let go? He had stayed alive for us while we were children, all those years, but now we were gone. We didn’t need him any more. Whatever the truth was, I was still surprised that he had failed to summon us. We could so easily have been there, at his bedside.

  Turning back into the wind, I walked on towards the bar. Why had he denied us the opportunity to be with him? Had he become disillusioned with us? Were we a disappointment to him? Had he deliberately died alone? This possibility had never occurred to me before, and it brought me to a standstill again, a charred feeling in my throat. His second wife, Sonya, had abandoned him. Perhaps he saw his sons as having abandoned him as well. What had he said to me on my last visit? We didn’t have much time, did we? If we didn’t need him, he didn’t need us. He had a stubborn pride in him. There might also have been, as Robin had suggested once, a streak of sarcasm. He would not call. He would not disturb us. He would do it on his own, with no support, no charity. Was that what he had thought?

  I reached the end of the pier. The bar had a new name – the Atlantis – but its door was padlocked, and no lights were on. I remembered the words on that kiosk. ROCK FIDGE INFLATABLES. Like a series of blows, they now seemed to promise damage, injury. I faced back towards the land. The clammy swirl of the wind, the rushing of those waves.

  The season was over.

  Chubb

  I stand by the front door of the house where I grew up. My life in West Berlin already feels unreal, despite the fact that I was in the city only hours ago. I knock twice, loudly. With Dad gone, there’s no need to be quiet any more, not even late at night.

  The door opens. Before I can speak, Robin leans close to me and whispers, ‘Ralph and Vivian are here.’

  I stare at him. Ralph, my brother, and Vivian, his wife.

  ‘They arrived this morning,’ Robin says in the same dramatic whisper. ‘They’re moving in.’

  ‘I thought Ralph worked in London.’

  ‘He does. He’s going to try and change his job.’

  I glance sideways, into the dark. All day, I have been imagining that Robin and I would have the house to ourselves. Once the funeral was over, we would stay up until dawn, drinking and talking, listening to music. At weekends, there would be parties, with people driving down from London. It would be a last wild farewell to the place where everything began. If Ralph and Vivian are living with us, though, there will be constraints.

  Not that Robin seems too bothered. ‘You’d better come in.’ As I step over the threshold, he grins at me across one shoulder. ‘We’ve been opening Dad’s wine.’

  I follow him into the kitchen. Ralph is sitting where Dad used to sit, in the blue wooden chair at the head of the table. Vivian is at right angles to him, her back to the door. She only half-turns when I walk in. Her dark hair falls well past her shoulders, the same length as it was three years ago. I seem to recognize her sweater too, the knitted wool flecked with grey, white and pale blue. The air in the room is tense, smoky.

  Bending, I kiss Vivian, then turn to Ralph. He rises to his feet, and his face crumples into a smile that manages to be wry, affectionate and bashful, all at the same time. Something about the shape of his top lip reminds me that he used to play the trumpet. I wonder if he still does. We hug each other quickly. It occurs to me that, since I’m the last to arrive, Ralph and Vivian will have been waiting for me, and not, I imagine, without some apprehension. We have become riddles to one another. Unknown quantities.

  I take off my black oilskin and drape it across the chair behind the door, then I pour myself a glass of wine from the open bottle and sit down at the far end of the table. I lean back, light a cigarette. Ralph glances at Robin, and I know what he’s thinking. He still smokes. I tell them that what has happened hasn’t really sunk in yet. It all just seems so unbelievable. There are nods. Ralph and Vivian reach for their own cigarettes. The atmosphere loosens a notch.

  And suddenly all four of us are smoking, even though no one has ever lit up in the kitchen before – nor, for that matter, in the house. Dad attributed his lung problems to cigarettes, and when we were boys he would often lecture us on how dangerous they were. To be smoking now feels disrespectful, even risky, and my eyes keep flicking towards the door, afraid he might appear at any moment. From time to time Vivian goes upstairs to check on Greta, who is six months old. Ralph and Vivian have a baby. That, too, seems unbelievable.

  I talk about the self-important feeling I had while on the plane. Almost as if I were a celebrity. I shrug. But my brothers are nodding again. They felt something similar. Our lives seem to have been heightened or even somehow invigorated by our father’s death. Is this normal? Every now and then, a silence falls. Difficult tasks lie ahead of us. We will have to choose a funeral director. We will need to contact Dad’s relatives and friends. And there will be a visit to the hospital – a chance to see Dad for the last time.

  Robin leaves the room to fetch more wine. ‘At least we won’t have to buy anything to drink for a while,’ he says when he returns. ‘There must be twenty bottles in the study.’

  ‘He always saved his wine for special occasions.’ My voice is momentarily unsteady.

  ‘This is a special occasion,’ Ralph says.

  Vivian has hardly opened her mouth all evening. She keeps her eyes on Ralph, and if she does speak, she speaks to Ra
lph, even though she might be responding to me or Robin. When you try and point something out to a cat, it tends to stare at the end of your finger. That’s what talking to Vivian is like.

  I ask where everyone is sleeping. Ralph says he has taken ‘Paradise’, so called because it has a dressing-room whose window looks towards Paradise Wood; the word has been on the door for as long as I can remember, the light-blue letters painted at head-height on the dark brown varnish. Robin tells me he is using Dad’s room. Unwilling to start searching for clean sheets, I decide to share Dad’s double bed with Robin.

  I climb the stairs. On reaching the landing, I take a breath, then open Dad’s door. Nothing has changed. In front of me is the fireplace that he boarded up with one of his own paintings to stop the draughts, and on the chimney breast above is his only valuable possession – a framed lithograph by Georges Braque. To my right are the curtains he bought with Sonya in the early seventies, columns of white shapes that resemble snowflakes overlapping dizzily on a background of cobalt and turquoise. In the far corner, above the sink, is his green glass bottle of eucalyptus oil. On nights when I agreed to massage his back, he would stand the bottle in warm water so it heated up to body temperature.

  I slip between the sheets. The bed still smells of him – lavender soap and talcum powder – but I can smell cigarette smoke too. Old rules are being broken, thirty years collapsing in an instant. I wonder if I should say something, now that I am head of the family. What would Dad expect of me? The impossible, I suppose – as always. I have so obviously failed to live up to his ideals. I should have claimed that Scottish title. I should have married a girl from a good family. He wanted me to be a professional golfer as well. So many should haves. But I’m too tired to think, or care. My head sinks on to the pillow, and I’m gone.

  I wake to the sound of hammering. Forcing my eyes open, I imagine for a few moments that I’m in Kreuzberg, but there is no shadow on the ceiling, no black paint lurking underneath the white. These dark blue sheets, this dark blue pillow: I’m lying in my father’s bed. I turn my head. Robin is fast asleep beside me. Two parallel lines run diagonally towards his left eyebrow, as though a small but heavy vehicle drove across his forehead in the night. Beyond him, on a chair, is a jug of water. If he drinks the contents of the jug before he goes to sleep, he doesn’t get a hangover. So he claims. The hammering becomes a little more insistent.

  I sit up. ‘Rob?’

  ‘What?’ he murmurs, eyes still closed.

  ‘That noise.’

  ‘Fuck. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The banging stops, then starts again, even louder than before.

  ‘Sounds like it’s coming from inside the house,’ I say.

  I ease out of bed and pull on trousers and a shirt. Robin groans and hauls himself upright. Opening Dad’s door, I step out on to the landing. With Robin at my shoulder, I peer round the corner. Outside Paradise is a dusty-looking man in paint-stained overalls. He appears to be attacking a point about halfway up the door, close to the handle.

  I say hello.

  The man glances round in a casual, almost insolent manner. He doesn’t seem to realize that he has woken us up – or, if he does, he isn’t overly concerned. Set into the door behind him is a lock the size of a fist, its bright brass standing out against the ancient varnish.

  ‘This is a good lock, this is,’ he says, his bottom lip jutting briefly. ‘This is a Chubb. Best lock there is.’ He nods, lending weight to his judgement, then turns back to the door. The hammering continues.

  Robin and I retreat to Dad’s room. I lean against the windowsill, arms folded. Robin sits on the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes.

  ‘That’s a good lock, that is,’ he says after a while.

  ‘It’s a Chubb,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t get better than a Chubb.’

  We chuckle quietly.

  ‘It seems a bit extreme,’ I say, ‘don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe they’re frightened.’

  ‘What of?’

  Robin shrugs. ‘Us, I suppose.’

  I remember a weekend in 1978. I had arrived in Eastbourne with a lump of hash zipped into my leather jacket, and on the Saturday night Robin and I got stoned in his bedroom, which was downstairs, at the front of the house. Instead of rolling joints, we used a technique that involved a jam jar, a needle and half a cork. That way, if Dad walked in, there would be nothing for him to smell. We opened the window as well, though, just to be on the safe side. As we sat in Robin’s room, rain tapping softly on the leaves of the holly bush outside, we wondered what would become of Dad now that Sonya had left him. He was disabled. He had little or no money. He was almost sixty.

  ‘Maybe we should do away with him,’ I said.

  I tilted the jar for Robin, who put his mouth to the gap and sucked out all the smoke. Fixed on the end of the needle, the hash continued to burn – a tiny, glowing coal.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘put him out of his misery.’

  When Robin finally exhaled, I looked at him and we both began to shake with laughter. Soon we were laughing so hard we could scarcely breathe.

  ‘How,’ Robin gasped, ‘are we going to do it?’

  As we ran through the various methods, we rolled on the floor in absolute hysterics.

  ‘Stop.’ Robin was clutching his ribs. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. I couldn’t work out what was so funny, but that only made it worse.

  Later, when there was no more smoke in the jar, we drifted, each in his own reverie. I saw my father lying in the doorway in his dressing-gown, his face turned towards me, his eyes wide open. Offshore, a foghorn sounded. The rain had stopped, and the air seemed polished, crystalline. The hush of a seaside resort in winter.

  Towards midnight, we climbed out of the window and on to the drive. The clouds had broken up; sky showed in the gaps like black glass. We stood on the street corner, shoulders hoisted, sharing a cigarette. Drips fell from the trees.

  ‘Do you think we woke him up?’ Robin said.

  ‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘I mean, imagine if he’d heard …’

  The hammering is still going on.

  Standing at Dad’s bedroom window, I wonder if Ralph knows about that night in 1978. I don’t think I ever told him, but Robin might have done.

  Ralph and Vivian met in 1979, during their first term at London University. Vivian had grown up in an industrial city in the West Midlands. With her black eyeliner and her long dark hair, I used to think she looked like Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of the Pretenders. Vivian and my brother quickly became inseparable. They went to each other’s lectures. They ate together. They rarely, if ever, spent a night apart.

  When I first knew them as a couple, they were renting a bedsit in Princes Square, not far from Hyde Park. That year I was living with my girlfriend Tina in a council flat south of the river. Both Ralph and I had motorbikes, and Tina and Vivian rode pillion. The four of us would go to pubs or live music venues – the Nashville Rooms, the Moonlight Club. But then, almost overnight, Ralph and Vivian stopped calling, and the next time they moved they didn’t give us their address.

  In the autumn of 1980, while returning from a job interview, I found myself in Bayswater. I rode to the house where they had lived and parked outside. As I loitered on the pavement, the front door opened and a West Indian appeared, eyes narrowed against the morning light, cigarette smoke coiling like a blue vine up his arm. Could this be the famous Pedro, who had once chased Vivian round the basement kitchen with a knife? As he started down the steps, I eased past him, catching the door before it clicked shut. I climbed the stairs to the first floor and paused outside the room that Ralph and Vivian used to rent. It was so quiet on the landing that I could hear a fly rebounding off the windowpane behind me. I thought about my last visit, and how I had sat on the floor and watched as Vivian dyed Ralph’s hair. The room had been stuffy and cramped, with yellow walls, and they had told me
about the people in the building – a Glaswegian on parole, a Jesus look-alike, a pimp. I reached out and knocked on the door. I wasn’t sure what I would say if somebody answered. Hello. I’m looking for my brother. Upstairs, a kettle came to the boil. Its whistling built to a crescendo, then cut out. I felt close to Ralph, even though I knew he was no longer there. I was standing where he would have stood if he was fitting his key into the lock. I was breathing the same air.

  Back at our flat in the Oval, Tina and I kept trying to work out what lay behind Ralph’s abrupt disappearance. Tina had met Ralph while at art college in Eastbourne – being a friend of Robin’s, she had often run into Ralph at parties or in pubs – and she would constantly circle back to the idea that she was to blame. She felt she might have been indiscreet about Ralph’s past, and that Vivian might have taken offence, but I could never grasp the nature of the indiscretion. So far as I knew, Vivian had been Ralph’s first real girlfriend, his first – and only – true love.

  A few months later, on the phone, Dad told me that Ralph and Vivian were always moving from one flat to another, and that he couldn’t keep up with the changes of address.

  ‘Why is that, do you think?’ I asked.

  He couldn’t say.

  In that same phone call, he told me he would hear them walking around the house in the middle of the night. He had no idea how they got in. He thought they were taking things.

  ‘How could you be sure it was them?’

  ‘I heard the motorbike.’

  He wanted to ask them what they were doing, but was afraid to leave his room. By morning, he said, they would usually be gone.