Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  Back home the following week the atmosphere was jumpy. Each day my dad tidied the house and did the shopping, but there was no work of his own to return to and he didn’t say much. I kept myself to myself. My mum was out at work. (‘I felt like the opposite of other people. I seemed to relax when I left home,’ she said, reflecting on it years later. ‘I’d tense up on the walk back across the common from the station after work, not knowing if I’d find him home or not.’)

  The third night back she tried to tell him about the Richard Burton party she had attended while we were away in Lindos. He’d been skulking in the kitchen making some food for them. With the dishes stowed in the warming drawer he suddenly started up. I heard him from the sitting room. It began as a long monologue but it slowly turned into a tirade, sweeping up the multinationals, the CIA, the bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, the Pope, and then inevitably her mother, her father, his stepchildren, her ex-husband, Richard Burton, everything into one huge desolate bonfire. It wasn’t the first time I had heard him sound off, but not for a while. My mum was in there with him. I knew he was never physically violent towards her but I didn’t hear her voice, and I could picture her in there not moving, absorbing it silently. Towards the end I went outside, not wanting to listen, and sat on the front wall, and then walked to the end of the road, and when I got back the car was gone and my mum was red-eyed in the silent flat and I didn’t know how to speak to her, let alone console her.

  ‘He told me I was an embarrassment to his friends,’ she said. ‘He called me a snob, not fit for the pub. A joke figure. That can’t be right, can it?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt young and tongue-tied. I tried to be grown-up about it and my mum thanked me for listening (‘I don’t have anyone else to tell some days’) but I went up to my room and opened the window on to the garden, and listened to the wind in the tall copper beech and watched the string of planes in the cool night air with their beads of lights heading into Heathrow.

  He tried it out on me a few times when I was growing up. He’d put a plate of food down in front of me in the evening and then start talking from the sink. It would start with good-natured if somewhat stern lessons in socialism and the Trade Union movement. But then one night – it must have been 1973 – after a couple of drinks he wound himself up about the death of the Chilean socialist leader, Salvador Allende. He said Nixon – whom I took to be the US president – and the CIA – who he said were like MI5 ‘only much worse’ – were behind an internal armed coup that had led to Allende’s death. He went into detail about a ‘fake suicide cover-up’ and the installation of a military junta (whatever that was), and he said I should know about it and not ‘take any shit from any teachers’ who told it otherwise. I was sitting at the table eating shepherd’s pie. I quite liked my teachers. I couldn’t imagine a Chilean military junta coming up in class. I felt like the lone member of a harangued congregation. When it was time for me to speak I said yes, I understood, and then asked if I could be allowed to go and watch A Question of Sport with David Vine.

  In such moods, he struck me as a sullen cornered animal, and not like the dad who went to football with me or showed me chords or told funny stories. I’d hear him complain to my mum about my half-brothers and half-sister too. They were as good as grown-up, no longer malleable, one or two maybe even resentful. And in return I think he resented their youthfulness, their sloppy manners, their use of the flat as a hotel when it suited them.

  Not long after the tirade against my mum – in part an effort to heal simmering family disaffection – a Christmas was planned at Ken’s new cottage in the countryside, out past Burford. Everyone assembled on Christmas Eve – my mum and dad, and me, and Simon, Toby, Roly, Jennie, who were all now in their twenties. It was an achievement getting everyone together. Ken was going to join us on Christmas morning. But as the evening wore on and alcohol began loosening everyone’s tongues, and the guards came down, and we were all cramped into the low-ceilinged cottage sitting room, the recriminations started.

  It was late. I’d been sent to bed. I heard the arguing begin downstairs. I could hear my dad’s voice and Toby’s voice rising. And then Roly came upstairs and told me to go to sleep and it would all be all right, and silently climbed into his bed beyond me and pulled the covers up over him. And then there was shouting, and I crept out of my bed and sat at the top of the stairs and peeked through the banisters in my pyjamas to see my dad saying something disparaging about Ken and belittling his achievements as a father, and Toby standing up to him and then pulling back his arm and throwing a wild punch and my dad stumbling backwards, tripping over presents, grasping at something to keep his balance, but only finding the tree and pulling it down on top of him in a heap on the floor, the baubles tinkling and breaking. And then I watched as, without a word, he pushed the tree aside – the branches dislodging cards on the mantelpiece causing them to fall into the fireplace – and staggered to his feet with everyone just staring, and, reaching for his jacket while brushing shreds of tinsel from his hair, he opened the front door and – closing it behind him – blundered out into the cold night.

  Toby’s face was smudged with tears. I heard the car engine start up, and watched Simon leap to his feet and fling the door open and rush out, slamming it shut. It was a treacherous night. The lanes were icy. My dad then drove all the way back to London with Simon beside him making sure he didn’t run the car off the road.

  Chapter 24

  With my mum in hospital again, my dad was back in the care home on the Finchley Road. I drove him there. He was very good about it. They gave him a room with a garden view. I think everyone thought – although no one likes to voice these things – that it might be for the last time. Living at the flat suddenly seemed impossible, and it was clear my mum would have to join him to convalesce after she was discharged. I couldn’t picture her going back home as though nothing had happened. She’d been through enough. Twice. Inside a year. Someone else needed to be in charge now. The next afternoon I started to think about how to sell the flat and what to do next. They’d barely been in it two years. And then the phone rang.

  ‘Mr Watt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s the care home here. It’s about your father, Thomas.’

  ‘Tommy, yes, what is it?’

  As I said it, something small boomed in my chest. I had an image of him at the bottom of a set of stairs, a big pool of blood under his head, or wheezing helplessly in the back of an ambulance, his hair dishevelled, a paramedic pulling up his upper lid and shining a light into his eye. Or just dead in his bed after an afternoon nap. An easy exit. Still warm. His arms across his chest, his little feet crossed. Not so bad in the end.

  ‘We think he’s . . .’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘ . . . escaped.’

  I glanced round the room repeating the words to myself as I thought I might have misheard them, and a voice in my head shouted, ‘AGAIN?’ but I didn’t recognise the person on the end of the phone, and I stayed calm. ‘Right, OK. What do you mean?’ My heart was pounding. It was as if a mains switch had been flicked and a current of strong voltage was running down my arms and legs; it made me think of the time our burglar alarm went off in the middle of the night, and I had to bolt out of bed, groping for the light switch, still half-asleep in the dreadful cacophony. And then I could only picture the front doors to the care home. I could see them opening. Only ten feet from the road. I could see a National Express coach thundering recklessly along the bus lane.

  ‘We can’t find him. Not anywhere. We think . . .’

  I cut her off. ‘Who with?’ I thought it must be the chef again. Hadn’t they fired him yet?

  ‘On his own, we think,’ she said.

  I saw the National Express coach bearing down. ‘On his . . . I’ll be right there.’

  In the car, all the scenarios replayed themselves over and over again, each more gruesome than the last. And then I told myself to relax. It would be fine. He’d be in the wrong r
oom, or chatting to the chef out the back, or even if he had got out he wouldn’t have got far; he couldn’t get more than twenty yards without gasping; he’d have found a bench or something; he would be taking some fresh air. Fresh air? On the Finchley Road? Are you mad? And I saw him engulfed in a cloud of diesel fumes, choking, dropping to his knees on the pavement, no one around, pitiless traffic careering by.

  As I approached the care home in the car I started scanning the road, up and down the pavements. I discounted all the women. A black kid in a T-shirt almost down to his knees – no. A large man with a small fishing hat perched on his head, a shoulder bag across his chest in a sash – no. Two builders in rigger boots, one in a neon-yellow high-visibility vest – no. And then I found myself looking along the gutters.

  I pulled into the drive of the care home and leapt from the car. Dashing round the front, I barged through the doors when they buzzed open. As I stopped in the lobby – my eyes trying to settle on someone with some information – I heard a female voice behind me say, ‘Mr Watt, it’s OK, he’s back.’ My first thought: So he did escape; he really did; he wasn’t just in someone else’s room, or chatting to the kitchen staff; he was out there; on the street; in danger; you fucking idiots.

  I span round. The receptionist was looking at me uncomfortably. ‘What? When?’ I blurted.

  ‘Just now. We heard the bottles,’ she said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘We heard the carrier bag. It was clinking as he came in. He’s safely up in his room now. With the . . .’

  ‘It was clinking as he came in,’ I said slowly, looking her in the eye. By repeating the sentence and accentuating the key words I thought I could wring some sense out of it.

  ‘He was in a taxi,’ she said nervously.

  ‘A what?’ I was hearing words I wasn’t expecting to hear. I was expecting to hear ‘ambulance’ and ‘fall’ and ‘A&E’, and instead I was hearing ‘bottles’ and ‘clinking’ and ‘taxi’.

  ‘It seems he hailed the first taxi and took it along to Waitrose,’ she went on. (The first taxi?) ‘And it seems he bought some alcohol and then got a return taxi from the rank outside the shop back here.’

  I let the information sink in. I had to hand it to him. That was style. Right there. Right fucking there. ‘Where are the bottles?’ It was all I could think of saying. I was picturing him pouring one down his throat right at that moment, up in his room, unattended.

  ‘Here,’ she said, reaching down behind the desk. There was the sound of glass on glass. ‘We had to confiscate them. Obviously.’ She dangled the bag in front of her.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Like I said. Safely up in his room. You can go up if you like,’ she said, putting the bag down again.

  Safely? ‘How did he get out?’ I said. I could feel my brow scrunching up.

  ‘He was in the lobby for half an hour at lunchtime today. He was very sociable. Up by the door. Quite chatty. We think he watched a couple of people coming and going and memorised the code.’

  Memorised the code? He couldn’t even remember where we were last week. ‘How did he memorise it?’

  ‘Perhaps “copied” is a better word, or he might have been hovering and slipped out while the door was briefly open.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone stop him?’

  ‘He must have picked his moment when a back was turned. Some of our residents are allowed out,’ she said, raising her eyebrows, as if to say it’s not a prison. ‘We encourage residents to exercise choice and maintain independence, and they are free to journey out alone if they feel able to do so. Of course, in this instance, it was . . .’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said, butting in. ‘I get it. I will speak to someone properly about all this. I’m going up to see him now.’

  I took the stairs instead of the lift. Someone was coming down with a hoist and a couple of bed-rails. I flattened myself against the wall to let them pass and flicked them a quick smile. Up on the landing I passed a bucket and some carpet shampoo. I knocked on my dad’s door.

  He answered almost immediately. ‘Come in.’

  I pushed the door open. He’d been standing at the window and was turning towards me. The words were coming out of my mouth almost as soon as I had stepped into the room. ‘What have you been up to? Have you any idea of the fuss you’ve caused?’

  A look of boyish innocence and mild incomprehension was on his face. His jacket was on the back of the chair beside the small built-in desk. He was wearing a loose oatmeal sleeveless cardigan over an ironed blue shirt. His moustache had gone. Who had shaved it off for him? The beard at the bottom remained. He looked like an Amish Mennonite sympathiser.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’ He edged towards the chair to sit down, coughing.

  I sat on the bed. ‘How on earth did you get the taxi?’

  ‘What? The . . . ? Oh that.’ He eased himself on to the chair. ‘Nice driver. Waived the fare. Jazz fan.’

  I could hear his chest wheezing quietly. ‘How did you stop it?’

  ‘He was right there outside,’ he said. ‘Did you order it for me? Very kind of you. I left the bottles with the concierge. Said they’d stow them. Very accommodating they are here, you know.’

  ‘You can’t do it again, Dad. You realise that, don’t you? You could have fallen, or got hit by a bus, or anything. They called me. I drove straight here. Everyone’s been in a panic.’

  ‘Really?’ A look of genuine surprise was on his face.

  ‘Where did you get the money?’

  ‘Not sure. You mother gave me forty quid, I think. Is she all right?’ He looked at me expectantly.

  ‘Yes, she’ll be OK.’ I didn’t want to tell him everything yet. ‘Not the easiest of operations. But she’ll be fine.’

  ‘Oh, good. Tough, she is, that Romany. Like her mother. Though not as miserable. Tell her I asked after her, won’t you?’ He coughed a little.

  I could feel the moment losing its heat, my reprimands losing their urgency. On the one hand, I was agitated, too involved, wearied by the random demands of keeping them safe, keeping them out of trouble, but on the other I realised I was silently cheering him on, willing him not to give up, actually helping him into the taxi, paying the fare.

  ‘Is it hot in here?’ he said. I could hear him wheezing harder now.

  I looked at him. He suddenly seemed paler. He eyes were blinking hard. His hand was gripping the edge of the chair. His nails perfectly clean.

  ‘Help me on to the bed . . . there’s a good . . . chap.’

  I jumped up and slipped a hand under his armpit and lifted him to his feet. I turned him round and got him over to the bed and sat him down. He swivelled and lay back with a grunt. I cupped my hand under his bony ankles and helped them up on to the covers. The backs of his legs felt tight like piano wire. His head was on the pillow now, his eyes closed. He was taking shallow breaths in and out through his nose and mouth. He coughed with his mouth shut. There was no rattle, just a compacted, compressed noise, like air trapped in a creaky harmonium, his whole ribcage lifting and subsiding. It was a dense fibrous sound.

  There was a knock at the door. It opened simultaneously, and a carer was into the room all in one movement. She saw me and rolled her eyes. In a second, she seemed to have control. ‘Been overdoing it again this afternoon, I hear, Tommy,’ she said loudly and directly. ‘I’ve got your inhalers here. You left them downstairs again. Shall I give you a puff now? And a blast of oxygen, yes?’

  My dad nodded but was waving me away insistently at the same time.

  I got up and stepped away from the bed as the nurse bent down to help him up, and then I backed away, loitered for a moment, then retreated from the room, and shut the door. I stood in the quiet corridor and stared at the bucket and the carpet shampoo bottle still at the top of the stairs. Through the fire door came another woman. She had a plastic basket of laundry under one arm.

  As she got to me she said, ‘You with Mr Wat
t?’

  ‘I am. I’ll be back in with him in a minute. The carer is with him.’

  ‘Give him these for me, there’s a love.’

  She handed me three pairs of underpants, neatly folded.

  I took them and nodded, and she turned to go.

  As the fire door closed behind her, I looked down at the underpants in my hand. Each one had a new name tag with ‘Tommy Watt’ written on it. I remembered that evening hour in hospitals – ‘handover’ – when one shift of nurses goes home and passes a patient’s relevant notes on to the incoming night shift. I thought of the uncomfortable adjustment I felt as the patient, the new faces to get used to, the worry something would get lost or misunderstood, but having to trust the process, to let the moment go. His underpants weighed barely anything in my hand, and in a moment I would give them to a stranger.

  My dad’s door opened. It was the carer. She came out into the corridor and closed the door behind her. ‘He’s all right,’ she said, under her breath. ‘He said he wants a kip now. Long afternoon, what with one thing and another. He asked me to tell you that he’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I nodded. ‘Understandable. Can I give you these?’ I held out the underpants.

  ‘Of course.’ She took them from me, and turned to go.

  ‘Superman will always need his underpants,’ I said.

  She stopped, looked back at me over her shoulder and smiled, and then I watched her disappear through the swing doors.

  Chapter 25

  When I was sixteen I made my own escape. On a moped. A red Puch Maxi. It was a special birthday present from my mum and dad topped up by weeks of savings from me. During the week I used it to ride to school and back. It had a top speed of twenty-eight miles per hour. I would scoff at the headwind that whipped down off the river.