by Ben Watt
Chapter 5
Back then my dad kept his piano in their bedroom but I didn’t often hear him play it. Or sometimes he would start playing it and then I’d hear him stop. In the afternoons he’d go in there to work and I might hear the key turn in the lock on the inside, and then the creak of the double bed as he lay down, and he seemed to stay in there a long time in silence. In the holidays or at weekends I might be down in the garden playing on my own and I would look up at his bedroom window and notice that the curtains weren’t drawn, which led me to believe he couldn’t have been asleep, and I used to wonder what he must be doing in there. I came to the conclusion that he must be doing a lot of thinking.
And then one day I came home from school on a clear late-autumn afternoon and there was a different atmosphere in the flat. I could hear notes from the piano as I came up the stairs to the flat door. I went into the kitchen. My mum was bright and her face looked like someone had turned a light on inside it. She was arranging a cup and saucer on a tea-tray. ‘Tea for the thirsty worker!’ she chimed. ‘You can pop your head round the door, but don’t stay long. So much to do!’
I gently pushed open the bedroom door. Behind it a black gate-leg table had been set up at right angles to the small brown upright piano. A fresh ream of manuscript had been cracked open. Black-and-red-striped dark 2B pencils lay ready in a row next to an eraser. There was a steel sharpener, a tuning fork and a long wooden ruler that was four times the length of the pocket one I took to school. More manuscript was propped up along the music rack on the piano and several double sheets were spread open across the top. My dad had the fingers of his right hand spread wide and he was holding down several notes at once. He lifted his hand, then keeping the same shape, played the notes again and I saw his right foot hold down the right-hand pedal underneath. He lifted his hand from the keys, grabbed a pencil, and as the sound kept ringing in the room he lightly whistled a few notes and wrote them on the stave.
‘Five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones. Was there ever a better sound?’ he said, still looking at what he was writing, but clearly for my benefit. Then he span round on his stool and grinned at me – a big grin, the pencil between his teeth – and I sensed my mum come in behind me with the tray of tea and she was grinning too.
That evening, after I’d done my homework, he took me to the Ship Inn at Mortlake to celebrate, though what we were celebrating I wasn’t quite sure. The pub sat right on the river’s edge in the shadow of the vast, brick, eight-storey Victorian maltings of the Watney’s brewery. The maltings scared me. It loomed like a blank hulk above the towpath, featureless and threatening. I wondered how much grain must be piled high inside, soaking in the monstrous vats of water. When the tide was out, the foreshore was an oozing mud-pit of stones and washed-up plastic debris, and if a mist had dropped low on to the water’s surface, as it often did in the cold dusk of an approaching winter night, I half expected to see a lighterman – or another river character I’d picked up from Dickens read aloud at school – sculling gently towards me, the rudder lines of his darkened boat slack in the turbid shallows. And yet, in spite of this, I got a thrill from being there, and loved the moment of expectation as we made the final turn in the car down Ship Lane, not knowing if the tide would be out, or in, and lapping at the very end of the road where we had to park, like a filthy tongue.
Looking back now, I know what it all meant. It was 1970. Work had been drying up for my dad since the mid-sixties; the work for modern composer-arrangers was in TV and pop, not in the thing he lived for – live ensemble jazz – and yet, just when it looked like it would never return, he had been offered the chance to revive the sound with his own new nine-piece band in nightly residency at the Dorchester in London. Everything seemed glamorous and important again.
In the fifties there were perhaps a hundred jazz big bands touring up and down the country, each sporting up to sixteen members – eight brass, five saxophones and a rhythm section; it was a unique and rich composite sound. But by the late fifties ballroom owners had realised that booking four or five young amateurs with electric guitars and amplification was a lot cheaper, and what’s more it brought the new sound with it – the sound of rock ’n’ roll. The big band age was dying. After a meteoric rise in the late fifties, the last notable event of any size that my dad had been involved with was a European Broadcasting Union concert at the Playhouse on Northumberland Avenue in London in 1966, where he’d directed an All-Star European big band including Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone and the Spanish tenor player Pedro Iturralde. The poster for it hung in the hallway at home when I was young. The names seemed exotic, weighty and serious, but my dad had wrinkled his nose when I’d asked him about it. It was as though it signified something disappointing.
In their heyday the big bands created a finishing school for young emerging players and acted as a bedrock for working jazz musicians. Before getting his break as a composer and arranger, my dad had cut his teeth playing piano with a whole list of them after moving to London following the Second World War, starting with Ronnie Munro’s band in 1948 running through to Harry Roy’s at the Café de Paris in 1953. Apart from the high quality of musicianship, the bands also brought a huge camaraderie, and for a generation of young men still used to the rigours of wartime deployment, the ballsy convivial communal effort of jazz orchestras must have felt like second nature. Archer Street in Soho was a magnet for any jazz musician looking for work. Crowds of them gathered during the day exchanging stories, picking up bookings. If the police were diverted by one of the frequent break-ins at one of the jeweller’s in nearby Burlington Arcade, it would be accompanied by the sound of two hundred musicians whooping and whistling. ‘I never wanted to go to bed,’ my dad once said. ‘You’d play until the small hours, go back to someone’s flat, play cards until dawn, and then you wanted to be back at it by late morning. It was a drug.’
We stood just above the foreshore at the Ship Inn, the sun melting behind the silhouettes of the trees on Dukes Meadows on the far side of the river. My dad seemed in a good mood. I was allowed a second Coke. He picked up an empty plastic bleach bottle from the flotsam washed up along the tideline, shook out the water, and placed it on the corner of the brick embankment over to our left. Then he bent down and picked up a handful of pebbles and stones.
‘Hit it from ten paces and I’ll give you a quid,’ he said.
A quid, I thought. He never gave me a quid; he must be in a good mood. I pictured my favourite toyshop in East Sheen and imagined what I could buy with it: some Subbuteo accessories maybe; a new yo-yo.
He was throwing one of the pebbles up into the air and catching it repeatedly in the palm of his hand.
I marked out ten paces and took a pebble from him. ‘Best of three?’ I said.
He took out a cigarette, rapped the end of it three times on the box and perched it on his lower lip. ‘If you like,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth, half smiling. He took out his Ronson cigarette lighter. I liked his lighter a lot. It felt nice in the hand: the leather grip and the chrome burner. Sometimes he’d let me top it up from a small yellow gas cylinder, which hissed as you pushed down on the red spout, and spilled clear fluid that evaporated from your fingers. He lit his cigarette, still looking at me. I sensed he was weighing me up.
I took another two pebbles and lined up the first shot. A riverboat cruised through my eye-line, its lights reflecting in the black steel water. I heard the gentle wash as the river slooshed on to the shore. I pulled back my shoulder, closed one eye, focused on the bottle, opened my eye again and threw the pebble hard. It missed by some distance. I heard it land with a soft pock into the mud.
My dad smiled wryly. ‘One down . . .’ he said.
‘Yes, I know,’ I jumped in. ‘Two to go.’
I took the second pebble, was about to throw, then switched it for the other one in my hand, then switched back again. The second throw missed. I felt a hot flash in my chest. ‘Don’t say anything,’ I said
quickly.
My dad stood there quietly, a low smile on his lips, half affectionate, half entertained. His hair was immaculately parted, a small badger’s streak appearing in the swept-back low quiff. He had one hand in his pocket. The other held the cigarette. He took a drag, briefly letting go of it. The orange tip intensified in the fading light like embers caught in a draught. Then he took it again between his fingers and moved it down to his side, and blew the smoke out in a long feathery plume from the corner of his mouth.
The third pebble I just threw quickly. I didn’t want to line it up, and make it even worse than it was surely going to be by even trying to get it right. I just wanted to get rid of it.
The pebble sailed through the air and to my astonishment grazed the side of the bottle. For a moment I thought it would fall. I took in a sharp breath. The bottle rocked on the stone wall for what seemed like for ever but then righted itself and didn’t fall.
‘I hit it. I hit it!’
‘So you did. The quid’s yours.’ He hadn’t moved, still the same smile on his lips. ‘Tell you what, if I can hit it, I’ll double it.’
I gasped. Two quid. Two quid. I thought of the pencils in a row on the gate-leg table and my mum with the tray of tea; it must be good news, whatever it is, I thought. I opened my eyes wide and gazed at him.
He bent over and scooped up a stone. He was two or three paces behind me; that made it at least twelve or thirteen from the bottle. I stepped back. He stubbed out the final third of his cigarette, smearing it into the path with the sole of his shoe. I heard the gravel grind. Then he pulled back his arm. For a moment he didn’t look athletic at all. In fact, he looked somehow constricted, and I remembered how he never looked comfortable throwing a tennis ball; often he just threw it underarm. And I thought of how he always pulled out of a tackle if we played football, and couldn’t play badminton in the garden without making a jokey shot.
He let fly with the pebble.
As it left his hand I lost it against the background of the huge brick wall of the maltings. It was as though it was a magic trick and he had made it disappear. He used to fool me and pretend he had found a sixpence behind my ear, or had guillotined his thumb at the knuckle, and for a moment I wondered if the pebble had vanished. The maltings seemed massive in the thickening dusk, like a huge hole with the pewter sky above it.
The pebble missed by a mile. I didn’t know whether I was pleased or disappointed. Part of me had wanted him to smite the bottle into the river like a real dad. Part of me was pleased I had grazed it and he had missed.
He straightened up, and winked. ‘The two quid’s yours anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s our lucky day.’ Then he put his arm round me and we walked back to the car. ‘Your father’s got a jazz orchestra again,’ he said. ‘We’re back in business.’
Chapter 6
The door was ajar. Milky April light dropped through the stippled glass of the frosted window at the end of the corridor. It was chilly. The air smelled yeasty. I pushed the door to the flat open into a quilt of dry heat. A whiff of old butter and stale clothes lingered in the hallway. All the lights were on. It was just gone four in the afternoon.
My mum was walking towards me from the sitting room. The TV was on behind her. I could hear the racing commentary. It was Aintree Grand National Day 2002. They had been at the flat for four months. She padded towards me, her purple towelling trousers sagging at the knee, a paper napkin wrapped around two fingers.
‘Where is he?’ I said.
‘In the bathroom, of course.’ Her voice was slurred. ‘Silly old fool.’
Along the short corridor the bathroom door was open. My dad was lying on the floor. It was a small room; his body seemed to take up all the floor space. He was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown. The dressing gown was unbelted and his pyjama trousers were half unbuttoned. He was lying on his back. Under his head a halo of deep red blood spread out in a thick circle on the grey marble tiles. Some of it had trickled into the grouting like rays of crimson light.
I knelt down. In the calmest, most non-committal voice I could muster I said, ‘Dad . . .’
‘Mmmm.’ He responded to his name but his eyes remained closed.
‘You all right?’
‘Fine.’
His casual tone surprised me, as though I’d just said lunch would be ready in five minutes. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ I said.
‘Lovely.’ He opened his eyes and blinked at the ceiling. The same brackish sweet smell was on his breath. I felt unnerved. Oddly aggrieved.
My mum was standing behind me in the doorway. She had called me a little more than fifteen minutes before saying he had had a fall. ‘Badly?’ I’d asked. ‘Well, there’s blood,’ had come the reply. ‘Have you called for an ambulance?’ There’d been a belch down the phone. ‘Can you do it, darling?’ she’d said rather flatly. ‘Would be so much easier. You know the number and everything.’ I’d hung up wondering if she really couldn’t remember how to dial 999 before running to find my keys.
‘What happened, Dad?’
‘No idea.’
‘You had a fall?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Clearly.’ He was still looking up at the ceiling.
‘He went for a pee after the race,’ my mum said, over-articulating each syllable. ‘I heard a crash. I think it was the edge of the bath. He nearly did the same last week.’
I heard footsteps in the hall. I’d left the front door open. It was Jim, the porter from downstairs. He was followed by two paramedics in green jumpsuits.
‘You all right, Romany?’ Jim said nervously, smoothing his hand across his mat of wiry white hair, his suit rustling. His weak eye seemed to be wobbling a lot.
‘Oh, ye-e-e-s,’ said Mum, extending the ‘e’ in the word, brushing the moment away with a stiff broom, as though she’d been asked the same question for years and no one ever expected her to say anything other than ‘yes’ and remain phlegmatically contained in alarming circumstances involving my dad.
‘Where is he?’ said the first paramedic, pushing past.
I stood up to let him in.
‘Oh, deary me. Made a nice mess of your tiles there, Thomas,’ he said, crouching down.
‘Tommy,’ I said.
My dad made to raise his head.
‘Just lie still for a moment there, Tommy, and we’ll get you sorted out.’
My dad lay still while they tended to him. In his pyjamas, with his little white goatee joined up to his moustache, and that familiar faraway look in his small green eyes, and his red button nose and crimson tributaries on his cheeks, he looked like a little homeless Disney character. The eighth dwarf. Dopey, Grumpy and Tommy, I thought to myself.
Within a few minutes they had him upright and sitting on the edge of the bath.
‘Couple of nasty gashes. Not too bad. Seen worse today. Always bleeds a lot, the head. Don’t worry,’ the paramedic said, as much to me as to my dad.
My mum was back out in the hall.
‘Best get you checked over though. You don’t want a bang to the head if you can help it. We’ll run you down to St Mary’s, Tommy. OK?’
He nodded and blinked.
‘Any chance you could make it the Royal Free?’ I said. ‘It is nearer me and I’m going to be the one dealing with this.’
‘Not really supposed to,’ said the paramedic. ‘We were called out from St Mary’s. This is Westminster, isn’t it?’
‘Borderline,’ I said with a beseeching look.
He looked at his colleague, who shrugged. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ he said. ‘But don’t mention it if they ask.’
I smiled.
He winked.
A stretcher – more like an orange seaside deckchair mounted on fat pneumatic rubber wheels – was brought in. They dressed his head wound and sat him in the chair, strapping him in. He looked like he was being prepared for an airline safety demonstration.
‘Shall I stay here, dear?’ my mum said to me. ‘Will you be all right w
ithout me?’
‘Don’t you think you ought to go with him in the ambulance, Mum?’ I said.
‘Really? Do I need to?’
‘It might be nice,’ I said, opening my eyes wide at her, trying to stir her sympathy. ‘For the company, no?’ I looked at her: her tipsy expression; her lifeless shoulders. It was as if all her body weight had been transferred to her feet, as though her prevailing exasperation at all of it had snuffed out concern. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him deep down, I thought. It was that it was getting increasingly hard to dig it out. I sensed the deferral of power blaze in my stomach; everything about them now seemed my responsibility, even attempting to manage their feelings for each other, but as I readied myself, she suddenly spoke up.
‘Oh, all right,’ she sighed testily. ‘Where’s my bag?’ She shuffled off down the hall muttering.
The paramedics were wheeling my dad out of the flat. I said I would bring my mum down, then follow in the car and meet them all at the hospital.
My mum dithered in front of the hall cupboard, peeling off her towelling cardigan, replacing it with a lightweight rain-jacket, choosing then rejecting a hat, then choosing another. She searched her handbag for something.
‘Will I need to pay?’ she asked.
‘No, Mum. There’s been a National Health Service since 1948.’
That seemed to bring the search to an end. She gathered her things and I got her downstairs.