by Ben Watt
‘We’re in no hurry, Mum.’
‘Oh. I thought you’d gone,’ my dad said from the bed, as we pushed the door open. ‘Did you miss the train?’
‘We were just down in the garden for a few minutes, Dad.’
‘Were you now. How very civil.’ He was still lying looking up at the ceiling, the back of his hand against his forehead, as though we’d caught him in the middle of a deep reflection on something.
‘They’re just leaving, Tom,’ said my mum loudly.
I looked at my watch. We had been there for thirty-nine minutes.
‘Thirty-nine,’ said Roly later, as he gave Blake and me a lift to the station. ‘That’s good going. They kicked Jennie out after twenty last week.’
In 2005 they moved into rooms together. The care home had a ground-floor suite for couples that gave them a small bedroom each and a shared sitting room overlooking the garden. Another halting-place, I thought. And my dad’s chest got a little worse. And my mum’s eyesight got a little worse. Roly would take my dad to the local memory clinic for pep talks on ‘functioning better’. (As opposed to getting better, perhaps.) I learned new words like ‘personhood’ and phrases like ‘empowerment through advocacy’. I started to think about having to officially take over all the important stuff – the paperwork, the bank accounts. It starts with the furniture, and ends with the bank accounts, I thought. The courses of antibiotics for chest infections came and went like vitamin supplements.
And I wanted to applaud and respect the wholehearted efforts of the care home – the emphasis on human dignity, the wry humour mixed with compassion – but every time I arrived I struggled with everything I saw although I tried not to show it. I’d slip along the corridors, mouthing the first names and last names on the residents’ nameplates on the doors, and glance uneasily into any rooms with the doors held open. A figure stationary in a chair. A shape in a bed with the curtains half drawn. A room with nobody there. And I hovered at the door to my mum and dad’s room not wanting to knock and push it open for fear of seeing stripped beds and their belongings gone and someone replacing the carpet.
One morning I woke from a dream in which all the residents were slumped in the chairs in the lounge, wearing white T-shirts with the words I may have dementia, but I still have a life and my dad was playing the piano for them but his fingers were splintering on the keys while my mum was loudly reciting from the poems of John Betjeman: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!’ I lay in bed and wondered if I should be there with them, and got up and started looking up train times until I recognised it as the absentee’s guilt. In such moods I felt I could agree to anything that would ease their pain, as really I would be easing my own.
Yet somehow as I pushed the door to their room open each time it was like the volume in my head dropped, as if a car with bass bins pumping had finally moved off down the road, and a new quiet descended, everything muffled by the soft furnishings and the double-glazing, and in my head I heard the slow ticking of the pendulum of an imaginary clock, and there they were, my mother in the chair and my father on the bed, in a silent limbo. And I would open my mouth to speak, and our worlds would merge again.
‘Don’t rush,’ I’d say to myself. ‘Don’t rush. Go at their speed. Take your time.’
Chapter 32
In the half-light I knelt by the bed, the air vaporous with the smell of pine-needles, cinnamon and menthol in the high-ceilinged, cool, north-facing room. Nail scissors and an emptied Karvol capsule lay on the bedside table covered in stickers. Three sheets of folded tissue paper were stained with amber droplets next to a plastic beaker of water with a spout. Under the feet at the head of the bed two fat books lifted the frame off the floor a few inches: Non-League Club Directory 2004; Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. Perfect choices in their matching heights. Behind me the summer-evening glow still edged the outer seams of the long curtains. The sound of a jetliner passed high across the house and garden.
Rolled away from me and close to sleep was Blake – four years old – his duvet pulled up under his chin. I could sense him quietly running the silk strip of his bear along his top lip.
‘Story?’ I whispered quietly, my head now resting on the pillow behind him, my knees still on the floor.
‘Mmm. But not the flying bed,’ he murmured.
‘No. Not the flying bed.’ (Not the bed that lifted off the floor and sailed out between his curtains into the night sky. Not even if it did return safely. I pictured him lying there worrying about it after I’d left: Could my bed really fly? Would it? Uncontrollably? I might never come back.)
My face was inches from the back of his head. ‘When he was four . . .’ I said softly, beginning an imaginary story of the same imaginary boy, who lived an imaginary life in an imaginary house, as I had done almost every night that summer, half kneeling, half lying behind him in the soft shadowy light; I’d made up stories of tall trees and fields, boys and caterpillars, catapults, bikes, duping grown-ups, cheekiness and misrule, crossing busy roads and getting lost in crowded shops; a moment of danger, but a safe resolution; and an ending steeped in affection and protective tenderness. Always that.
When it was over, I lay there a little longer and heard his breathing lengthen and deepen, and smelled his freshly washed hair, and closed my own eyes, and wanted to follow him down the tunnel of sleep, away from my nagging melancholy and irritability. It was as if I could be him, not me. Wondrous. Charmed.
Did I have a memory of my dad putting me to bed? Not that I could remember. Only a memory of him standing silhouetted in the doorway ready to go out in a well-cut suit. It made me wonder whether I was lying there listening to my son sleep because my own dad hadn’t; not that it was probably expected of him back then; perhaps he did that thing that men do in movies when they look in on their sleeping kids in a moment of crisis, and it is supposed to signify immense love and trapped emotions. Yet still I asked myself why I needed these moments with Blake so badly, why I felt so entirely enveloped in them, as though I could swim through him and have everything about him – his clear skin, his small smooth feet, his unclouded blue eyes, his sense of fear and wonder – all around me, like the waters of a pool. Sometimes it felt as though I needed them more than he needed me – which of course I looked on as a flaw, a parental flaw in me – for as soon as the thought crystallised I sensed I was hovering above the bed, observing my own mawkish scene of great self-involvement below, and a voice was saying in my ear, ‘There is no place for self-regard in this. You signed the parents’ contract. No conditions.’ What did my dad feel when he stood silhouetted in the doorway? Perhaps he saw in me – tucked up warm and safe in flannelette sheets under a flat felt roof, a gentle night-light burning – an idealised image of himself as a little boy, watched from the landing by his own father. Or maybe it was more complicated than that.
I breathed in the comforting menthol air and felt the warmth of Blake’s body on my face until I was hit by that deep jolt of imminent sleep. My neck muscles loosened and I sensed my head go heavy on the pillow.
Twenty minutes must have passed. I woke to feel Tracey’s hand on my shoulder in the darkness. I stood up, heavy-lidded, slothful, and followed her out on to the landing into the bright light.
‘You all right?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
Looking back, I did know. I was running on fumes – the motor turning, the needle on zero. An accident waiting to happen. Each day I just felt wretched and withdrawn. Absent. A dark daydreamer. Often joyless and intolerant, I was forgetting appointments and errands, putting things off until the last moment, loitering distractedly in front of the family, there but not there. Falling asleep on the bed next to Blake seemed to be a kind of fragile narcotic escape.
Why so sad? Because back then I had been unable or unwilling to accept, and then act on, obvious patterns of depression in my own life, even though I’d
been happy to point them out in others. Tracey could see them; she’d lived through most of them. For years she’d watched them bubble up like clouds over clear skies. I could bore you with all the perceived injustices and insecurities that have left me tearful and guilty, or paralysed and bleak, for days or months on end, but I have gradually learned it is better to see them as part of an injury I carry. Like a bad back. Debilitating but now generally treatable. How I have longed at times for more wry wisdom, an elegant stoicism, an indomitable black humour – such attributes fly in the face of dark days – but let’s just accept that we are all credulous and soft, encircled by the casual affectlessness and unkindnesses of real life, and it just gets to some of us more than others.
Having said that, it is hard to avoid the violent sadness that has gathered over the heads of various members of my family. There is a black-and-white photograph from the twenties of Sandy – one of the brothers of my grandma Jean, my dad’s mother; if I’d known him I suppose he’d be my great-uncle. He is sitting outside on a flight of steps. Everything is covered in thick snow; it covers most of his boots. He wears a dark-wool winter Mackinaw jacket with the collar turned up, and gloves and a flat cap. On his head is balanced a large snowball, and flecks are tumbling on to the peak of his cap. His is smiling shiny-cheeked into the lens of the camera. It is a picture of winter fun. On the back it says: Jean’s brother, Sandy: drowned himself in river (love affair?).
My mum’s brother, Glyn, killed himself too. In 1977. My aunt Jean found him. They’d been married since the fifties when they first met working in different departments at the Coal Board. Glyn had striven against unhappiness for years. They moved to the countryside near Cambridge shortly before his death in an attempt, Jean said, to alleviate the perceived stresses of London life. She told me how she came home from work one evening. The first thing that struck her was the silence around the house. She went in and found their dogs locked in a room in which they wouldn’t normally be kept; if Glyn was napping, she’d thought, he would have taken the dogs with him, and they’d have been curled up on the bed beside him. She went upstairs and found him in their bedroom. He’d used a shotgun.
I was brought up to believe it might have been an accident, that he might have been cleaning the gun, but as Jean said, ‘Who locks the dogs in a strange room before they clean a gun in the bedroom? And anyway, it was always coming. If it hadn’t been the gun it would have been something else.’
Perhaps closest to home is the story of my half-sister Jennie who lived with neurosis and depression for pretty much all of her adult life. She was twenty-two when our mum let her come back home to live briefly in the flat downstairs after Nunu’s death. I was thirteen. I’d pop down in the evenings after I’d done my homework to see her and her new cat. She didn’t seem to have very many possessions. Although she was my half-sister she seemed unlike anyone I knew – quiet and far away yet gentle. I never understood why my mum was reluctant to have her stay. I didn’t really know any of the drug and psychiatric stories then. I knew she had had a breakdown at nineteen – not that I knew what a breakdown meant, except that it had left her sad and without a job or A levels. It was only later I learned that, by the time she moved in downstairs, while my half-brothers were getting university degrees and finding their first jobs, she’d already lived with an ex-junkie, been arrested for possession, had an abortion, survived an overdose and an attempted strangulation, and experienced two long spells at Long Grove Psychiatric Hospital living among schizophrenics and addicts, where she’d undergone electro-convulsive therapy and something called desensitising where they confront you with your phobias in an attempt to cure you of them.
She stayed in the flat only a few weeks. It was the long hot summer of 1976. She played me Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite Of Love’ and J. J. Cale’s ‘Magnolia’ with the windows open, and when we talked she made me feel grown-up.
Aged thirty – long after she’d moved out and tried holding down her first half-decent office jobs – she was still capable of being fearful of her own family and could still hear voices talking to her through the radio, voices that could drive her from a house in the middle of the night, and make her run down an unlit country lane with bare legs to be found curled up in a cold remote barn by Ken, her distraught father. She lived on and off with a handful of unreliable, sometimes violent men, or had dead-end affairs with ones who were married and bored, but when she finally got herself sorted out and got married herself to a lovely bloke in a windswept country church on the Somerset Levels at the grand age of fifty, she asked me to be the ‘father of the bride’. Her own father was no longer around – Ken died just after Christmas 1984 – and Tom was by then housebound in the care home near Bristol. I was forty-one. My daughters were bridesmaids. I was very proud.
Of course these stories make my own seem tame by comparison, but when things were then to take a turn for the worse for me with my own depression, Jennie was one of the few people I felt able to talk to.
I travelled heavily that summer of 2005. I flew out to Palm Springs and DJ’d at the Coachella Festival. The manicured grass of the polo fields and the vast picket-fenced business class of the VIP section made me nostalgic for the mud and unruly hedonism of festivals back home. I went on up to New York and Boston, joining the club circuit, and then headed south-west again taking in Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Part of me was travelling to escape myself. I was down and I couldn’t shake it off. We will always take our hang-ups with us wherever we go, but at least we can keep them moving. The itinerary helped stupefy and nurse me: comfy beds; room service; taxis; airline check-in staff; travel accessory shops; massage chairs; moving walkways and vast windows of light; airports as cathedrals to the pining journeying heart. And at the other end – for those of us lucky enough to make a living out of our self-expression – a kindly stranger who wants to promote our work is there to drive us into town, pay for our hotel room, buy us dinner, set us up in front of a supportive crowd, give us drinks, offer us drugs. What’s not to like? Not much of course. A life seemingly gilded. Except that I hadn’t addressed why I’d left in the first place, what it was I was running from, rather than towards.
It went on back home. At the Homelands Festival I arrived after nightfall. I drove through swirling mist and silent woods west of Winchester, my headlamps shooting ahead into the darkness, the tents and rides appearing suddenly like an extra-terrestrial circus had landed in a hollow in the land. In Paris I was led into a club in the hull of a huge moored ship on the Seine. Then Edinburgh, Malmo, Ibiza. The Electric Picnic in Ireland. Berlin and Brighton. And then back for more: a return to New York in December with San Francisco, Seattle and Hollywood thrown in for good measure. And of course, in the midst of it, were the gigs themselves. Two or three hours of indulgence and escape; glass-rattling bass and air-punching exuberance, burnished with moments of pathos and blurred melancholy; and all the time the drum, the drum; a ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it; a fire that gets stoked then self-sustains; societal and infectious. Clubland is a world largely without language, in which fragments of song replace narrative, text messages and gesture replace conversation, feelings replace ideas. For someone who all his life had written songs that had often been performed in hushed auditoriums to crowds clinging to every syllable, it represented something that suddenly seemed to express the way I was actually feeling inside at the time: inarticulate; messed up; introspective; my mood rising and falling in waves; grateful for a room of people who seemed to need the same thing.
I stepped off a plane from Los Angeles at Heathrow after a week of dawn finishes and a final night-flight of broken sleep and intermittent sinusitis on the first day of November 2005. It was as if I was testing myself. How much sleep did I not need? How many decibels could I stand? How far could I run? It was the day after my dad’s eightieth birthday and I knew I needed to see him. At thirty-seven thousand feet just before I’d tried to close my eyes, I had leafed through a catalogue
from The Sharper Image and dwelt on all the useless executive man-toys I could have bought him for a birthday present – an indoor golf-swing improver, fog-free travel mirrors, a bagel splitter, a shiatsu belt massager. What do you buy old people? Slippers? Chocolates? A rug? They seem so comforting and sensible, yet also somehow insulting.
The kids were thrilled to see me back, rushing at me, pawing at my suitcase for presents, jumping up at me with paddling hands like terrapins at the side of a tank. Wasn’t I meant to return home refreshed and invigorated, ready for the resumption of normal life with equanimity and renewed zest? In reality I felt the same as before I left, if not a little worse. Shrink-wrapped in my own world. Jangly. Apprehensive. Not helped in the least by being down on sleep.
Forty-eight hours later, jet-lagged and guilty, I got into the car to drive out to see my dad and my mum in the new care home near Bristol. By the time I reached the M4, my eyes felt sand-papered and my hands were trembling on the steering wheel. The tissue inside the back of my head seemed to be flexing involuntarily, pushing into the hard bone. The traffic slowed then stopped near the junction to the motorway from the Hayes bypass. I was staring at the concentric rings on a flyposter wired to a lamp-post by the crash barrier: Back To 88 Old Skool House Rave All Dayer You Know It’s Gonna Be Fireworks. A van honked behind me. A gap of three cars had opened up in front of me; I hadn’t noticed. I signalled an apology into my rear-view mirror.
I drove round the roundabout under the motorway and missed the exit. I drove round again, hugging the inside rail, and missed it again. This time deliberately. And then I did it again. This time indecisively. And then I just wanted to lie down and sleep. A metal signpost in the tall grass of the roundabout flashed by amid the trees and the underpass: Welcome to the Field of Hope. And then I was shouting at myself inside the car,‘Why, why, why?’ and had started to drive back the way I came. Another lamp-post: Cash Paid 4 Cars. And then another – dead flowers wilting in cellophane. The barriers were strewn with litter – split sandbags, styrofoam cups, Lucozade bottles, empty plastic bags wafting like little ghosts. I kept driving, retracing my steps. When I got home, having managed only fifteen of the one hundred and twenty-two miles to Bristol, I went upstairs and climbed on to my bed fully clothed and pulled my knees up and lay there for a long time. So this is what a wall feels like, I thought.