by Ben Watt
Outside the back door there were three small gardens, interlinked by high hedges with fat shiny leaves. It was all unkempt and overgrown and gave me itchy legs. There was a knotted and crinkly fruit tree that hurt my knees if I tried to climb it, and tall grasses grew at the back. (‘Don’t go in there. There are tigers.’)
If you scraped away the undergrowth you could find big iron rings embedded in the ground. My dad told me they were ‘Sinbad’s buried treasure’ and that he had landed at Climping and dragged his haul of jewels to the garden and buried it, but no one had had the strength to prise it out, and I tried not to believe him, but I wanted to, and it was only when my mum told me the place used to be a blacksmith’s forge and the rings were for the horses that I stopped looking at them, and was annoyed at my dad for lying to me.
In the furthest garden was an outbuilding, a small barn. Downstairs had been made into two bedrooms and my half-brothers sometimes slept in there. My eldest half-brother, Simon, was eighteen by then and had one of the rooms to himself and burned sandalwood joss sticks and played Roy Harper and Beach Boys records. He had cut out the face and shoulders of Roy Orbison from the front of a vinyl record sleeve and pinned it to the window ledge, and made a small hole where his mouth was and would dangle a lit joss stick from Roy Orbison’s lips. I thought it was a dangerous thing to do but also strange and lovely – like the altar at the end of a church where the cross stands. Simon used to walk across the fields on his own to the church some days and play songs on the organ when no one was there.
Above the bedrooms was a huge dark loft full of long strips and sheets of polystyrene; I never knew why they were up there. A rusted iron ladder was propped up outside against the gabled end, half hidden in an unruly thorny pyracantha bush. It scratched my legs, but I could get to the top and swing the loft door open, and turn round and sit in the doorway, and look out over the wheat field where I walked with my mum.
‘Who owns this cottage?’ I would say to her. I often asked the same question several times if I felt the answer I got the first time didn’t make sense, or to test whether I would get the same answer twice, and therefore it was more likely to be true.
‘Uncle Ken rents it from a nice man in the village.’
‘And who is “Uncle Ken” again?’
‘He is your brothers’ and sister’s father. And I was married to him once.’
‘Why aren’t you married to him now?’
‘Because I am married to your father.’
‘Is he your brother?’
‘No.’
‘Then why is he called Uncle Ken?’
‘We just call him that, darling.’
‘Why does Simon light joss sticks?’
‘It’s his room and he can do what he likes. Now run along.’
I think being unsure of Ken’s identity made the cottage even more special and secret.
We walked on slowly. The pavement was uneven. Padlocked to a lamp-post was a bicycle frame with no wheels. A police siren wailed near by and I felt my mum flinch. I filled the moments with chatter about the kids.
At the traffic lights she said suddenly, ‘Do you think I could have him back?’
I watched a plane disappear behind a cloud. For a moment I couldn’t think what she was talking about and then realised she meant my dad. ‘What makes you say that?’ I said.
‘He makes such a fuss now when I leave. I can’t bear it.’
I thought of them without me there at the care home: just a couple; still the little shifts in dominance; moments of beseeching; the things we do and the roles we play when we are sure no one is watching. ‘And how will you cope?’
‘Like I always have done, dear.’
We stood at the crossroads. I watched a car slow down, climb up on to the raised speed-table, then ease itself down the other side. I wondered how it was having to ask your children for help, knowing that some things can no longer be done without them – lifting things, organising things. Was it a little degrading, having to wait on the authorisation of someone who once relied on you so completely? As the traffic lights changed I asked myself if all this was easier in other people’s lives – these people, the ones in front of me in their cars criss-crossing in a matrix of dropping off, picking up, going home, leaving town. Was it the same for everyone? Life as a slow journey of negotiations. Back and forth. I pictured my mum and dad back at the flat. It was not much more than a year since they’d first moved in. I saw myself unpacking their things, making it nice, mapping it out, feeling I could make a difference. And suddenly I was conscious that I might make no difference, that I could help them do something but not influence its outcome, as if I had simply been invited in to view it all at close quarters, made to witness something, and it was going to unfold inexorably, whether I liked it or not, whatever I said, and it was something I just had to get through.
Chapter 15
On a busy stretch of the Finchley Road, a few doors down from the Secrets table- and pole-dancing club, and the Thai Siam health and beauty bar, stands a large boarded-up sports bar called the 3one7. It was once a three-storey Victorian pub called the Carney Arms and at weekends – before it folded in the wake of an under-age drinking scandal – it doubled as a pre-club evening nightspot with DJs playing funky ‘sexy’ house music for buff lads on the pull, and girls on their way ‘up West’. There were pool tables and big-screen broadcasts, although during the week most of the sixteen satellite TV screens scattered around the venue were blank, the upstairs and basement roped off, and the clientele corralled on the ground floor in the mid-afternoons would change to companionless off-shift waiters on their way to the bookie’s and a few unaccompanied professional drinkers. It was here, on a January lunchtime in 2003, that my dad, accompanied by a blind man and a chef – both from the same care home where he was staying – escaped for a celebratory drink to mark the new year.
The exit doors at the care home needed a manually entered key-code before they would open on to a narrow brick driveway set back about ten feet from the pavement. My dad didn’t know the code and I don’t suppose the blind man did, but I’m sure the chef could do it in his sleep. The section of the Finchley Road outside the door is a ‘red route’: double red lines; no stopping at any time. The noise can be quite startling when it’s busy: four car lanes and two bus lanes of delivery lorries, skip-hire trucks, double-deckers, cars, coaches and white transits all jostling like jockeys in the final furlong for that extra yard of space.
The 3one7 is about two hundred yards away from the care home. It sounds near, but my dad, with his bad lungs, had been finding a short walk up and down the corridor was about enough most mornings; not only that, but the bar is situated on the other side of the road, across a box junction and a couple of pot-holes, where the pelican crossings need smart decision-making once the pedestrian signal flashes green.
By the time the three of them arrived, my dad was gulping for air. He made it through the front door, took a few tottering steps and then collapsed on the carpet.
You might have thought that at this point the chef – an employee at a care home, after all – would have realised how reckless he had been and sprinted back for help, but no; instead, he and a member of the bar staff propped my dad up against a fruit machine, and gave him a glass of whisky to revive him. The effect on his brain, already dangerously short of oxygen, must have been nothing short of psychedelic, but – more by luck than judgement – his heart didn’t stop, and they got him upright and seated on a bar stool. My dad, to his credit, composed himself and got his breath back. Everyone cracked a couple of jokes, and then, quite remarkably, they all got to the front door and somehow managed to walk back.
I suppose you have to have some sympathy for my dad. As a persistent drinker he must have found the enforced sobriety at the care home – unless you count the evening sherry – hard to bear. The drop in blood-alcohol levels must, at the very least, have brought on mild withdrawal symptoms and cravings, and with no emergency sugar su
bstitutes readily to hand – the Coca-Cola, the bars of chocolate, the dried fruit – it must have all got too much, especially when a young companionable chef was rolling back the years before him.
Of course when I found out I confronted the care home and expressed my outrage in the strongest possible terms, and there were unstinting apologies, but apart from moving him somewhere else – which in itself would have been even more disruptive for him – I realised there was little else I could do; I had no legal charge over him; he was still a grown-up; the care home had adequate security measures in place on the front door, which were circumvented in extremely unusual circumstances; and I could no more control events than I could stop him going back to bed all day. Perhaps I should have insisted on the chef’s dismissal, but that seemed overly hysterical, and anyway I considered that was up to them.
When it all blew over I realised I actually secretly admired my dad for the sheer audacity of his escape; and it occurred to me that I had felt many things for him over the years – admiration, respect, anger, disdain – but overarching all of it was a long indecipherable allegiance.
‘So you tunnelled out then?’ I said to him a few days later. We were sitting in the lobby of the care home just inside the doors to the outside world.
‘What?’
‘You and the chef. The bid for freedom.’ I nodded towards the doors.
‘Do you know the chef as well?’ he said, looking at me as though we’d found a mutual acquaintance. ‘Nice fella.’
I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately avoiding the subject or had clean forgotten. ‘No, not personally,’ I said.
‘Good sense of humour.’
That was the stamp of approval. I remembered coming home from school one day and riding my bike down to the shed at the end of the alley and seeing a huge extendable ladder propped up against the back of the house. At the top of the ladder – which was flexing under the weight – and about six feet below the guttering, almost on the top rung, was a man. He must have been about thirty or forty feet off the ground. But what made me gasp was the fact that another man was standing on his shoulders and reaching up over the guttering. They seemed unfeasibly high – as if performing a reckless circus trick. My dad was at the bottom looking up. I’m not sure if he was meant to be helping to stabilise the ladder, but he was leaning on it nonchalantly with one hand, smoking. He saw me and gestured to the spectacle above. ‘That’ll be our Chris Kerrigan up there,’ he said. ‘Fine roofer. Good sense of humour.’
I smiled at him sitting there, his hands mottled and creased, planted on his knees, the rumble of traffic kept at bay by the glass doors. ‘Glad to hear it. You’re getting on all right then?’
‘You’ve got to get me out of here, Ben, you know,’ he said, turning to me.
‘Why?’
‘I’m not cut out for it.’
I tried to think of an answer. I knew if I answered firmly and logically he would accept it, as the deferral of power was in place, and I was now in charge, but before I could find the words he carried on.
‘They’ve asked me to play the piano, you know.’
It seemed unlikely. He hadn’t played for years. I looked at his stiff white fingers. Was he imagining it? Had he been telling jazz stories to impress them? ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said, for want of anything better to say.
‘You must be joking. They’re all potty.’
One of the staff passed us, carrying a bag of linen. ‘Feeling better this afternoon, Tommy?’ she called out.
My dad flashed a compliant smile.
‘All at sixes and sevens this morning, weren’t we?’ she said loudly. ‘But we’re all here for you, that’s all that matters.’
I smiled at her too. She winked at me. I didn’t ask what had happened. She carried on towards the lift.
We sat in silence for a moment. I wished I knew the best course of action. I wished there was a sign. One minute everything was normal – by which I meant the same as a recognisable and non-frightening past – the next, everything was strange and alarming. Then words came out of my mouth, as if from nowhere: ‘Mum’s doing much better. Feeling stronger. She’s been thinking of getting you back to the flat with her.’
He immediately took my hand. His palm felt cold. I was aware of his bony fingers as they squeezed mine, and the power I seemed to be wielding.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
Chapter 16
In May 1971 my dad’s father – my grandpa – died in hospital following a car crash. He was seventy-one. He held the steering wheel with the same white matchwood hands. I was in the car when we crashed, together with my grandma. My recollection of it is as vivid now as when I described it in Patient. We were on our way to the swimming pool in Dumbarton in my grandpa’s bottle-green Mini. My grandpa was driving. My grandma was in the back. I was in the front passenger seat, my feet up on the dashboard, my trunks rolled up in a towel held across my chest. We approached the traffic lights at the big crossroads. The lights were red but my grandpa just seemed to accelerate rather than brake. Behind me I heard my grandma shout, ‘Will!’ When I came round, there was a crowd around the car. A tiny trickle of blood was on my ear. I touched it with my fingers. Hundreds of small crystals of glass like transparent cane sugar were all over my lap. The car wasn’t in the middle of the junction – as it would have been if we had continued in a straight line – but pushed over as though we’d turned left but sideways. There was a double-decker bus stopped too. My grandpa wasn’t speaking. He was still in his seat but he looked floppy and awkward, like a discarded puppet. The bus had hit his side of the car on the junction, side on, and pushed us some distance. The steering wheel was very near me, touching my leg; it seemed odd to have the steering wheel that close to me, as though it had been positioned in the middle of the dashboard for use by either the driver or the passenger. My grandma was lying on her side on the back seat. She was saying something to me. Her shoulder seemed tucked behind her back. An egg yolk was dripping off the seat and there were peas on the floor. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. It felt like a minute but it must have been a while for the ambulance to have already got there. A woman I’d never seen before helped me out with an ambulance man. I was barely marked. My grandma had dislocated her shoulder. We had to wait while they cut my grandpa out. The sparks cascaded into the grey afternoon light. In the ambulance, he opened his eyes for a second and said everything would be all right, but then he closed them again. He was very pale. The liver spots on his balding head stood out. His fine wispy white hair was messed up like he had been sleeping on it. He didn’t have his glasses on any more which made him look less like him. I didn’t see him again after that.
I remember the phone call several days later when I was back home in London and the hospital said my grandpa had died. They said the cause of death was pneumonia and a broken ribcage. I wasn’t sure what a ribcage looked like; I wondered if it was like a bird-cage. Every Sunday morning my dad used to shut himself in my mum’s study just before 11.30 a.m. and a couple of minutes later my grandma called on the dot of the half-hour for the week’s news. Their chats usually only lasted about five or ten minutes and started with my grandma saying – as my dad often impersonated, purring his ‘r’s in a comic Glaswegian accent – ‘Anything fresh to report from south of the border, Tom?’ but I remember after my grandpa died there were a couple of weekends when my dad was in there talking for a long time.
I think my dad felt guilty. I’d been only eight, alone on holiday with my grandparents when the accident happened, four hundred miles away, while he was in London still licking his wounds in the weeks after the Dorchester. Even while my grandpa was in Intensive Care I heard my dad criticising his driving one night and referring to him as a ‘stupid old man’. I worried about why he didn’t like him.
We had been up to stay with them in their retirement bungalow in Milngavie on the outskirts of Glasgow the previous year. They had only recently moved in. It was on
a long curving residential drive high up overlooking the small town, silent except for the wind that got in behind the brick and whistled long hollow sighs. It felt very remote even though there were houses all around. Concrete steps led up to a yellow front door that swelled in the rain and was only ever used for visitors. The sitting room had a bay window that looked north. On a clear day, with my grandpa’s binoculars, I could stand on a chair and see across the town and beyond Craigmaddie Reservoir as far as the ruined Mugdock Castle. It was the first thing I wanted to see when I arrived.
‘Who lives there, Grandpa?’
‘No one, it’s a ruin. Just ghosts.’
When he said the words ‘ruin’ and ‘ghosts’ he sounded like Private Fraser in Dad’s Army and it made me shiver and I always asked him to say it again.
The furniture seemed plain and strange. A dark oak sideboard with carved mouldings stood behind the door laid out with a spider plant in a jade-green fruit bowl, a small set of leather-bound books and a Chinese teapot. Next to it stood a folding cake stand; I had to ask what it was. I couldn’t imagine my grandma serving cake on a cake stand, but my dad told me they used to run a little guest house after my grandpa had retired. I wanted to ask what a guest house was, and maybe even what ‘retired’ meant, but I thought that was one too many questions.
On the wall above was a small oval glass mirror and two prints of Buenos Aires brought back by my grandma’s brother-in-law, Harry, who was a merchant seaman. There was an oak dining table in the window that never seemed to be used. (I got the feeling my grandma wanted to lay it with nice crockery when we stayed, but my dad insisted we made less of a fuss, so instead we all had to cluster round the tiny drop-leaf Formica table in the kitchen, while my grandma made a simple tea of potato scones.) A velour three-piece suite with tan vinyl armrests was grouped around a gas fire and a black-and-white TV. Behind one of the chairs was a glass display cabinet with eight sets of china. I used to try and count the teacups without opening the doors. ‘Do you drink a lot of tea then, Grandma?’ I once asked.