Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  My dad was being hoisted into the ambulance. A man in shorts holding two packed sandwiches was watching from the opposite pavement next to a couple in matching wraparound sunglasses. A vast pink stretch-limousine with blacked-out windows was trying to edge past the ambulance in the narrow road. Up on the steps to the front door of the block of flats I could see Jim the porter watching us, stroking his wiry hair as if it were a cat, his suit probably rustling.

  It was a beautiful afternoon. The sunlight ricocheted brilliantly off the white villas on the corner. The trees were leafing. I listened to the steady wind-rush of traffic noise as it ran up from the white tented circus tops of Lord’s Cricket Ground. Two black taxis idled in the rank opposite the tube station. I saw the flower-cart and little palm trees, the patchwork of magazines on the news-stand, the people coming and going; I found it alive and comforting. I’d hoped all of it could have brought my parents out of themselves, helped them rise to some last-chance good times in the murmuring city, but as I watched the orange seat disappear, and the door close behind them, and the ambulance slip into the afternoon traffic, they seemed threatened and consumed by it all.

  Back up in the flat I fetched a cloth and some water from the kitchen. I mopped up my dad’s blood, rinsing it into the basin. There was piss all round the loo and I left it. I walked into the sitting room. All the Venetian blinds were down, but slatted to let in light. It was a decent room to grow old in, I thought. I turned off the dusty TV. Within arm’s reach of each of their armchairs – nestled on the side tables, in among the soft peach-coloured paper tissues, the wedges of foil-wrapped Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, the magnifying glasses, the crumbs, the marker pens and jotters – were large tumblers of brandy, not poured as a shot or even a double, but like full glasses of water would be poured. I picked them up and walked into the kitchen. I went to throw them down the sink, then paused. Does this make me look bad? I thought. Too disapproving? The Temperance Society? Why shouldn’t they do as they like? I put the tumblers back on the work surface. A hunk of badly wrapped half-dried-out Cheddar sat on a chopping board, the end of it cracked and split like a dry log. Next to it was a loaf of processed white sliced bread flopping out of its packet and some Flora warming with the lid off.

  I opened the freezer door above the fridge. Seven frozen Marks & Spencer ready-meals had gathered a heavy frost: the ones I bought them in pairs every weekend to try to make sure they ate something. I closed it and opened the fridge door below. It was almost empty: some parched supermarket ham curling in an unsealed packet, tiny granules of salt crystallising on the darkened dried-out surface of the exposed meat; an opened can of Stella; a bottle of soda water; a gel eye-mask; a brown banana. I shut the door and took the brandy over to the sink and poured it slowly into the waste disposal. It smelled of wood polish and toffee apple. The action suddenly seemed melodramatic and wasteful, but I felt as if I were pouring away risk. Although I still wondered if I had a right to.

  I walked back out into the hall to find my dad’s wheelchair. I’d driven up the Watford Way to the roundabout near the A1 in Mill Hill to buy it at the ‘mobility and independent-living retailer’ as soon as they had moved to the flat. I’d circled the shop for ages before hand-picking it. I told myself it was the lightweight functionality that made me choose it, but if I am honest it was just the black metal frame; it made it seem a bit more stylish and less old people-y than the grey institutionalised design of most of the others in the shop. I was still trying to keep upbeat about the whole thing. The wheelchairs all had names like the Escape, the Breezy, the Getaway. It was like buying a weekend holiday train ticket. I’d weighed up other things in the shop too, and wondered how many I might be returning for at some stage – the wide-head, easy-turn keys for bathroom taps; the heavy-duty ferrules for walking sticks; the handy-reacher-litter-picker; the non-slip bedside rug. Two other women were in the shop. I kept looking at what they were buying. Was their situation better? Worse? At least no one was buying incontinence pants. One was asking about a telephone amplifier; that seemed unthreatening. I pictured an elderly relative in tweed and small brown leather shoes settling into a high-backed wing-chair with a nice cup of tea and a copy of The Field after a tiring thirty minutes round John Lewis listening to the answerphone messages from her grandchildren. The other woman was weighing up the contrasting benefits of ‘flange’ versus ‘chrome’ grab rails. All sensible stuff. I paid, dismantled the wheelchair, placed it neatly in the boot of my car with an ease that made me think life was going to be better now, and drove back down the narrow dual-carriageways of Hendon.

  My mum had planned to be thrilled by it. She had already earmarked a couple of spots outside the block of flats – ‘viewing platforms’ she’d called them – where she had imagined she would wheel my dad for sunny afternoons and a bit of fresh air, reading to him from the paper or toying with a crossword clue, as London burbled by. ‘Tom’s freedom pass,’ she’d joked. But when it arrived and she realised how heavy he was in the chair, and how they had argued from the moment he sat in it, it had just stood in the hall.

  The wheelchair was beside the front door. A speckled layer of dust was on the armrests. I found the footplates; they were in the coat cupboard. I fitted them back on but had to search in my dad’s bedroom for the seat pad. His bed, a single, was unmade as though he could return to it at any minute. The bottom sheet was washed but imprinted where his body had lain and perspired until the cotton had become impregnated with a faint oily shadow. The turquoise pillowcase was freckled with dry skin. There was a screwed-up primrose-yellow tissue on the shiny pine bedside table but that was all – no lamp or clock or water. The blinds were drawn to shut out the day. ‘I don’t know how he does it,’ my mum had said. ‘All day in there sometimes. It would drive me mad. Not even a book. Poor sod.’

  On the long wooden cabinet against the wall sat his hi-fi system – the same one I’d bought him for his sixtieth in 1985, presented to him somewhat ostentatiously in the dressing room at Hammersmith Odeon after one of our shows. On reflection it had been a clumsy display of power on my part: first I perform the sell-out gig, then I bestow the surprise lavish gift in front of friends and family. Clunky. The golden boy strikes again.

  The amplifier had white stickers on some of the buttons, and on them in my mum’s handwriting were written in blue felt-tip: CD, Tape! Not this! The actual power button was missing, snapped off. A sticker above it said ON, and a small hole showed where it should have been. I couldn’t help wondering if it had been pushed inside, or wrenched away in a confused fury, or knocked off by an unintentional lurch.

  His CDs and tapes were neatly laid out – the CDs in flip-front racks, the tapes along the windowsill. They seemed in the same order I had left them. Some of the cassettes were in my faded handwriting on black Memorex tape from when we’d taken possession of a used Sanyo Music Centre from a neighbour in 1977 and I’d shown him how to copy his albums to play in the car. I opened the tray on the CD player wondering what I might find – an old favourite perhaps; Zoot Sims; Bill Evans. But it was empty. It felt as if he hadn’t played anything in that room.

  I walked back into the hall, dropped the seat pad on to the wheelchair, tidied a few things away in the kitchen, then pushed the wheelchair out of the flat, closing the door behind me.

  Chapter 7

  The hospital kept my dad in for two nights. I ran my mum home on the first evening after she realised sitting behind a curtain for several hours in A&E with him ‘Nil By Mouth’, and her the same, was hardly her idea of a night out. She’d tried to buy a snack from the vending machine but hadn’t been able to follow the instructions or work out how to retrieve the coins. I left her at the flat and told her to eat something, drink some water and get some sleep.

  It was grey and overcast the morning I collected him, the clouds massed together like lint gathered in the filter of a tumble-drier. ‘He’s had some painkillers for the bump and we’ve rehydrated him – should perk him up for a bit,’ said
the nurse as he was discharged.

  The wheelchair was certainly coming into its own, I thought, as we trundled out. He had his few belongings in a blue plastic Patient Property carrier bag on his lap. ‘They tried to put my teeth in there, stupid fools,’ he said, gesturing at the bag. ‘Can’t greet my public without them – they’ll think I’m finished.’

  It was a tough push up the steep incline of Pond Street, but we crossed on the zebra, and turned into Hampstead Hill Gardens where I’d parked. ‘Lucky you don’t weigh a ton,’ I said.

  ‘Unlike your mother.’

  Same old jokes – it was like nothing had happened. I stopped the wheelchair, and walked round to face him. ‘No regrets?’ I said, meeting his eye.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All this. The fall. The hospital. Just going to carry on as before?’

  He took one hand off the plastic bag and wiped his fingers back and forth across his brow. ‘You’re right, Ben. Please accept my apologies. Unacceptable behaviour,’ he said. He seemed contrite, but there was something glib in the delivery, an undertow of saying the right thing to please me.

  ‘Have you any idea what the hospital said to me?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Only the extremely obvious: that they thought about admitting you to the “falls clinic” but the reasons were fairly clear to them – chronic breathing difficulties, low oxygen intake, plus alcohol; it’s not a great combination for steadiness on the feet, wouldn’t you agree?’ I waited for a response. He blinked. ‘No wonder you fell, and will keep on falling, and I am the one who is going to have to keep picking you up if this carries on.’

  He said nothing. He looked down the road, then at the back of his hands. Then he looked up at me. ‘Understood, Ben.’ He had on his penitent face.

  I remembered the day in Oxford a few years earlier when he’d completely surprised me by ending a heated exchange with, ‘In this, as in all things going forward from now on, I defer to you. And I’ve told your mother.’ I thought he was joking but then I realised he was deadly serious. And with it, a fire had seemed to go out, and over the ensuing months he became more pliant and obliging. But now, I couldn’t tell if it was still smouldering, like a dormant volcano.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said, moving on. ‘Let’s get you back. Mum’ll be wondering where we are.’

  A couple of days later my mum asked me to come over. We sat in the sitting room. They were doing their best impression of being alert. My mum was sitting forward, perched on the front of her chair. ‘You’ll be glad to hear your father’s off the booze,’ she said, by way of an introduction. ‘Aren’t you, darling?’

  My dad nodded solemnly from his armchair. He had made the effort to get dressed. An unironed gingham shirt was tucked into a pair of dark blue track pants. His narrow white bare feet looked like fragile seashells resting in his burgundy leather slippers.

  ‘It was all a shock: the ambulance and everything; and we accept we haven’t adapted well to the move. I think we have felt, well . . . a little isolated and disorientated, haven’t we, darling?’ she said, looking at my dad again.

  He nodded solemnly again.

  ‘And I didn’t tell you, but that was not the first fall,’ she said, trying not to look too sheepish.

  ‘I am not totally surprised,’ I said. ‘How many?’

  ‘A few . . . maybe six. Or seven.’

  ‘Seven!?’ I tried to hide too much surprise.

  ‘Yes, the porters have been very helpful.’

  ‘What do you mean the porters? They’ve been up here? Into the flat?’

  ‘Yes. They say it is no bother. But let’s not dwell, dear. We are chastened, aren’t we, darling?’ she said, turning to my dad again.

  ‘Chastened is the word, Romany,’ he said, nodding once as if to cement it into the conversation.

  ‘And remorseful,’ she added.

  ‘Another good choice of word, Romany,’ he said.

  They seemed like a double-act. It was hard to tell whether they had selected the words before I arrived, chosen for the effect they hoped they would have on me. I looked at both their faces. They were looking at me expectantly like pets awaiting a treat. I had been here before; the history of my adult relationship with them was benchmarked with promises of abstinence. ‘ON WAGON’, she wrote to me memorably as I started my second year at university in 1982. ‘Dad fell over the saucepans when he came in last night, but apart from this one lapse we have been SCARSDALING without booze in the house since last Monday.’

  I looked at both their hopeful faces. Pre-planned or not, I tried to get into the spirit of thinking that a small Rubicon might have been crossed, however temporarily. I smiled. ‘Good for you,’ I said, trying to muster as much neutral sincerity as possible, but after I’d said it I thought about the oily shadow on my dad’s bed, and the hours he was spending there under the landslide of thoughts inside his head, and I knew it was only a matter of time before we were back where we started.

  In the kitchen a few minutes later I said to my mum on her own, ‘Would he try Prozac, or something similar, do you think?’

  ‘The happy pills? He is resistant, darling. His doctor got him on something like that for a while in Oxford, as you know, but as soon as his mood lifted he stopped. Didn’t trust it. Said he felt odd. We are the wrong generation, dear.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, you know me, I’ll try anything for a quiet life. Maybe now is a good time. I think they work for me. Hard to tell. Have I tried them? I can’t remember. I might be already taking them. Pills for this. Pills for that.’ She tidied some lists and reminders to herself by the telephone.

  I swept some crumbs off the worktop into a dustpan.

  ‘Anyway, it’s probably Alzheimer’s,’ she added with a dramatic flourish. ‘Doubt you can do much about that. Funny farm only, probably.’

  ‘The hospital made no mention of it, Mum,’ I said, refusing to rise. ‘They just thought he was drinking too much for a man in his condition.’

  ‘Well, you won’t change him now.’

  ‘What’s the point in stopping the booze then?’

  ‘Oh, leave it now, please, darling. I can’t keep up with you. We’re doing our best.’

  I put the brush and dustpan back in the cupboard and moved a magnet around on the door of the fridge.

  ‘Sorry for all the fuss,’ she said. ‘It’s all very strange, you know.’

  By that summer my Sunday visits to their flat were interleaved with occasional weekday lunches at our house. I found I could wheel my dad from the car along the alley that led to the garden and almost directly into our kitchen. Things seemed to be going quite straightforwardly, although I sensed an underlying note of worry from my mum.

  ‘He was up at three o’clock last night,’ she said to me on the phone one morning. ‘I heard a noise. He was getting dressed. He said he had an appointment. I told him he must have been dreaming. Get back into bed, you silly old fool, I told him. And he keeps thinking we’re on holiday. He keeps asking about when we’ll be back in Oxford. But he seems all right this morning.’

  I said I’d pop round.

  I drove to the flat. I took the ticket for the NCP car park under the block, and as the barrier went up, I moved from brilliant August light into darkness. I turned the car tightly past the attendant’s booth with its cluster of ghostly TV screens, and past the empty bays of the upper level, each reserved with a single traffic cone. My tyres squealed on the corners as I spiralled down. It was only on the lowest level – four storeys below, and as silent as a mausoleum – that I’d ever found a space, where the ramp stopped up against a dead-end and a chained gate to a darkened generator room, where the only other cars were long since driven, parked in the shadows, shrouded under sheets like long low tombs, thickly caked in dust, spectral and strange.

  I parked and got out. The sound of the car door closing bounced off the concrete walls. I thought of my mum moving around in the flat, floors and floo
rs above. It felt miles away. Unnerved, I found the green exit door and climbed the stairs back up to the light. The steps emerged near the front door to the flats. I could see Jim the porter reading his paper. Palms and conifers framed the path as I breathed in the warm fresh air. A chaffinch was singing in the maple above my head.

  Upstairs I rang the bell to the flat. Nothing. I rang again. Finally I heard the chain.

  ‘Who is it?’ It was my mum’s voice behind the door.

  ‘It’s me, Mum. Ben.’

  She opened the door. In her hand was a frozen Macaroni Cheese – one of the ones I’d bought her from Marks & Spencer.

  ‘Sorry, dear, I was on the sofa with my leg up. I’ve rather bashed my knee. Nothing serious. Bruise probably.’ She held up the ready-meal. ‘No peas, so I was using this.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, how?’

  ‘I was trying to plug the TV in and lost my balance.’

  ‘But the TV is always plugged in.’

  ‘Is it? I couldn’t get it to work.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘But you said he was OK.’

  ‘He was. But now he isn’t, I suppose.’

  ‘Is he taking his paroxetine?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘But you said you were pleased he was trying some new tablets.’

  ‘Did I? I can’t police everything.’

  I made a cup of tea and sat with her for a while.

  ‘He’s just switched off,’ she said, after a long silence. ‘As long as I am here, he is OK, but I daren’t go out, not even to the shops, and of course he is not interested in my interests.’

  ‘Was he ever?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be cruel, darling.’ She looked across the room, lost in thought. ‘We have our moments.’ She ran her finger across her knee. ‘But it’s getting worse.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Him. His absence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s like sometimes a piece of him has . . . He’s just a little old man. Don’t expect too much, dear.’