The Gran Tour

by Ben Aitken

  ‘Oh it’s not that I wouldn’t be fine.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I’m just worried they’ll all think you’re clearing off before I get back to my husband.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I will be doing.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean.’

  After dinner I sit in the lounge for a bit, in one of the two armchairs in the bay window. Deborah – daughter of Val – is in the other.

  ‘So what are you, 40?’ she says.

  ‘That’s the end of the conversation, Deborah.’

  ‘What, 30?’

  ‘I’m 28 plus VAT.’

  ‘So you’re in your prime.’

  ‘Good of you to notice.’

  ‘On paper at least. I was shit at 30.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘I was a kid with adult issues, with one of those issues being kids.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I didn’t feel at ease. I didn’t feel settled. Do you feel settled?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘If I’m honest, I feel a bit all over the place.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Not majorly but yeah.’

  ‘What grounds you?’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘What’s your anchor?’

  ‘I don’t know. My mum?’

  ‘I hope you’re joking, Ben.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my mum?’

  ‘Your mum’s fine until you’re eleven. Mortgage?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Career?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well that explains something.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you’re on a coach holiday with your nan. You need more weight, Ben.’

  ‘You think so? If anything, I thought I could do with—’

  ‘I mean weight as in ballast.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Weight as in responsibility.’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘It sounds to me like you could do with some grief.’

  ‘What have you got in mind?’

  ‘I could push your nan down the stairs?’

  ‘We take the lift.’

  ‘No, but seriously. I got better at being happy after some truly, truly rubbish things happened.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Dad dying, divorce, cancer. Janet’s great by the way.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  Patrick’s door is less ajar and more open. One explanation is that he’d given up on me and was planning to shout at the next person he heard passing – or just bellow ‘Janet!’ until she got the message. Fifty years at GCHQ ought to have taught him how to communicate. When I enter, he’s counting his liver spots. ‘Either I’m losing my marbles or I’ve less than the last time I checked,’ he says. I can barely hear because Handel’s blaring out the radio.

  ‘I hear you went down for the bingo last night?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, can I turn this down a bit?’

  ‘Oh. Sure.’

  ‘I hear you were carried down for the bingo last night?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I bet that was fun.’

  ‘It was. I felt rather like a Roman emperor. That or a sofa.’

  As well as Classic FM he’s got the History Channel on. It’s a war documentary. He points to it now and asks if I know what a doodlebug is. Turns out I don’t, so Patrick explains that it’s like a very explosive drone. When you heard one you were meant to stop what you were doing and put your hands on your head. Patrick remembers one occasion when he was swimming in the sea and heard a doodlebug and stopped what he was doing and put his hands on his head. He hopes his memory’s playing tricks on him, however, for he likes to think he can’t have been as daft as that.

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘About fourteen or so.’

  ‘So you avoided service, did you? During the war?’

  ‘Not quite. I was sent to Bletchley Park towards the end of the war – which was cracking, of course.’

  ‘You’ve used that line before.’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘And did you run into Alan Turing?’

  ‘You know, everyone asks that. You’ve got to remember he hadn’t been in any films back then. There were probably a dozen Alans just in my department.’

  I do the drops quickly.

  ‘Good job!’

  ‘I’m getting better.’

  ‘The first night was a baptism.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that.’

  ‘I shall have to promote you at this rate.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure I could find you some odd jobs.’

  Nan pops in.

  ‘Yoo-hoo,’ she says.

  ‘Hello, Janet!’

  ‘How are you, Patrick?’

  ‘Extremely tired.’

  ‘Well, it’s been a busy week.’

  ‘No, it isn’t that.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It was waiting for young Ben to turn up.’

  ‘Oh dear. Was he late?’

  ‘Late? He was almost early for tomorrow.’

  At the bar downstairs, I bump into the daughter of the man who had balloons tied to his chair.

  ‘That your dad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Birthday?’

  ‘Yeah. Ninety-five.’

  ‘He seems a lively sort.’

  ‘Aye, he’s a card.’

  ‘He doesn’t sit still for a second. He’s like a 95 year old with ADHD.’

  ‘He’s got spirit all right.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  And before she can say that again, Jim has got a recital of ‘Happy Birthday’ going and 95-year-old Arthur is on his feet with his arms aloft. He’s wearing a bow tie and has got more hair than I have. He reminds me of my mate’s son William, who’s five.

  ‘What would you say you’ve learnt from him?’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t know. You don’t think about it.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘He’s a good advert for later life, that’s for sure.’

  ‘A poster boy for the 90s.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The highlight of the evening is ‘Jim’s Irish Raffle’, which is basically a backwards raffle, and for that reason, about as politically correct as saying all gay people are interesting. ‘Anyway,’ says Jim, ‘it works like this. Everyone gets a ticket and if your number is called you have to say “Oh no, Jim!” and you’re out. So the winner is the person whose number isn’t called. Get it?’

  It’s hard to explain exactly how Jim’s raffle manages to keep everyone amused and laughing (sometimes to the point of tears) for the next half an hour, but what I can say is that its appeal has something to do with not knowing how the next person is going to say ‘Oh no, Jim!’ At any rate, the winner of the raffle is a lad called Rodney. The prize is an Easter egg. When Jim informs Rodney that convention dictates that the egg be shared with the evening’s entertainer, Rodney says, ‘Fair enough. Just let me know when he turns up.’

  When Nan moves to the upstairs lounge to make some calls, I nip outside to bum a cigarette. I get one off a lady from Folkestone, who says her highlight of the week was seeing a Punch and Judy performance. She thought the marital disquiet was hilarious. She understands why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, however, and wonders if it would be more politically correct if it was a same-sex couple. As I’m giving this some thought, and finishing the cigarette, Nan spots me out the window. She’s on the phone. I bet she’s telling my mum right now. Bloody windows.

  Turns out it wasn’t Mum on the phone but Granddad.

&nb
sp; ‘He’s mown the communal lawn,’ says Nan.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Well, not all of it.’

  ‘What do you mean not all of it?’

  ‘He left a bit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Next door’s grandchildren have been over.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And they left some toys on the lawn, which is against the rules, so Grandad mowed round them.’

  ‘Jesus bloody hell, Nan.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d approve.’

  ‘Have you heard of William James?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well he said that wisdom is knowing what to overlook.’

  ‘Well William James didn’t have my neighbours.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. But if he did, he would have mown all the lawn and invited his neighbours for tea.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  I’ve never heard Nan say the word. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but he just wouldn’t.’

  Nan goes to bed and I get another pint. Or I try to get another pint rather, because Jim insists on getting it for me. He’s sat in the upstairs bar with a few others. It’s nice to chat to him. He says he was in the Marines for twenty-odd years and reckons the alternative to telling jokes and calling bingo was post-traumatic stress disorder. Not that his life’s entirely stress-free these days, mind you. He’s in a new relationship, you see – ‘a May–December one,’ he says with a wink, as if I know exactly what he’s talking about.

  When Jim calls it a night it’s just me and Gary from Leeds. A big, burly, stoic-seeming fella. He used to drive a lorry all over Europe. He says his wife worked at a university and would get in the cab for six weeks each summer. Those were the best times, he says, though they did have a run-in with the German police once because they thought she was a prostitute. His wife used to joke, ‘We’ve been married 40 years but I’ve only seen him for 25.’ Gary reckons that might be the secret to a happy marriage – fifteen years off.

  ‘You say “used to joke”, Gary.’

  ‘She died in 2012. Cancer. She was 65. Got it at 47. It came and went. She couldn’t take the chemotherapy anymore. Said she’d had enough. So I said alright, and we stopped it. I held her hand at the end.’

  I look at Gary apologetically.

  ‘I’ve still got her though.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  ‘She’s in t’boot.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘She’s in t’boot.’

  Turns out Gary keeps his wife’s ashes in the boot of his car, and whenever he finds a place he thinks she’d like, he scatters some of her there. I raise my glass to the man. He raises his and says, ‘T’boot.’

  When I get back to my room, I text Megan to tell her about this oddly romantic gesture, and that I’d like to do the same with her one day. Of all the things she might have said in response, Megan writes back: ‘But you don’t have a car.’

  At breakfast, I tell Nan about Gary and his wife in the boot, which prompts her to remember a friend who buried her husband in the garden, but when it came to winter couldn’t bear the thought of him out there in the cold so dug him up and brought him inside. Now each year she buries him in spring and exhumes him in autumn. ‘Seems like a lot of work to me,’ I say. ‘Lugging a body in and out like that.’ ‘No, you brush. He’s in a small tin.’

  We’ve ten minutes before departure, so I go through to the lounge. Val’s here, sat in the window. We instinctively account for our better halves. She says Deborah’s having a final walk, and I say Nan’s making bacon sandwiches for the road. Then she asks if I’ve learnt much this week. I mention Lewis Carroll and the slate industry and she says, ‘Yes, but anything bigger?’ I say it’s hard to put your finger on such things, because they tend to creep up on one after the fact, or register via a side entrance. I’m sure something’s incubating – whether to do with Patrick or Nan or Dan Walker or Gary – but for the time being, it’s all just grist for the mill.

  ‘But you’ve enjoyed yourselves, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, we have.’

  ‘And that’s it really, isn’t it? That’s all you can ask for. I know Janet’s enjoyed it. She said she’d stay longer if it wasn’t for seeing the podiatrist on Monday.’

  ‘And what about you, Val? Good week?’

  ‘Very. I met a man who races pigeons. That was interesting. And when I sprained my ankle was funny.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘I did it the first evening and it got rather swollen so I came in here and put my foot up. One of the staff – a young man – came in and asked if I was alright. I asked if he had a bag of frozen peas I could put on it. He went off and came back shaking his head. He said he was very sorry, but they’ve only got mixed veg. Of course I thought he was joking, but then when I realised he wasn’t – well, it was even more funny.’

  When she asks what I’ve enjoyed the most this week, I start to give a silly answer, about baptising Patrick or whatever, but then check myself and say: ‘It’s been my nan, really. Getting her take on things, hearing about her life. It sounds silly, but I might start calling her Janet. After all, she was Janet before she was my nan. Janet’s sort of the whole thing, if you know what I mean.’

  Val chuckles to herself. She can’t help it.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Is that too cheesy?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just. I asked the same question of your nan.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She said the jam roly-poly.’

  Somewhere on the M6, Tim’s asked what he’ll do this weekend. ‘I’ll probably get the wife out the cupboard for starters, then I might cut the grass, then it’s back to Wales on Monday with the next round of you lot.’ Deborah snorts at this, and then turns to give me her paper so I can do the crossword. With Nan’s help, I get all but one of the answers. None of the answers resonate or connect with the themes of the week – there’s no heaven or grandmother or rabbit or boot. Instead, there’s crossbow and caravan and Calcutta and cheese. I pass the crossword to Patrick and point to what I’m struggling with. He chews the end of my pen (cheers, mate), looks out the window, invisibly rifles through the words of his life, and then, after a few minutes, and wearing an expression at once doubtful and cheerful, says, ‘I’m afraid this is all I’ve got’, and fills in the gap.25

  At the interchange on the edge of London, I set Nan up in the lounge next to Patrick and Val and Deborah. They’re all going different directions from here, but can sit together for now. Nan’s presently telling everyone that her next holiday will be in France for her son’s 60th birthday. Turns out Patrick used to live in the same village as my uncle, on the French-Swiss border. He says he was there to organise the transport of dangerous goods. ‘A bit like Shearings then?’ I say. Nan tells me to stop it and help Patrick with his cardigan.

  A few hours later, in a pub garden in London, I text my nan to see if she made it home. She says there was some traffic, but nobody minded. I’ve had a few beers by this point, so reply: ‘I love you Janet. I knew you were a lovely person, but after seeing it every day this week, I know it even more.’ And then: ‘ps. mow all the bloody lawn.’

  25 He was wrong.

  Part 4

  Killarney, Ireland

  13

  I’m not used to the likes of you. On ye get

  When I think of Ireland – and when I say Ireland I mean the whole thing, the island of Ireland – I think of stew and stories. I think of Wilde, Shaw and Father Ted. I think of the Easter Rising, the Potato Famine, and Mrs Brown’s Boys. I think of Bobby Sands and Sally Rooney, the Giant’s Causeway and Trinity College. I think of Roy Keane and Maud Gonne, Seamus Heaney and Paula Spencer. I think of Horatio Kitchener and his compelling finger, and Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four. I think of emigration, emigration, emigration. I think of Celts and druids, Vikings and Normans, and a certain Patrick from somewhere near Stoke. I think of Davy Lyon
s and the Celtic Tiger, the breakfast roll and a Galway girl. I think of Ken Loach and Oli Cromwell, black Guinness and green grass. I think of the Troubles, Veronica Guerin, and my old mate Mick.

  It’s May. It’s Manchester. It’s two degrees. When David Snr gets on, he’s poking fun at precise pickup times. He says he was told to be at the stop at 8.24am. He thinks it’s hilarious, is telling everyone – ‘’ere, what do you think of this – 8.24 they told me, 8.24 and fifteen seconds …’

  You can spot the jolly ones from a mile off. They walk in a jolly way. They’ve got their hands behind their back and their chins in the air. They greet the driver as if he were a lost son, a lost daughter. One jolly geezer has forgotten his brolly. Another’s raincoat has got holes in it. For all their talk, the British aren’t very good at weather.

  I sneak a peek of a Daily Mail through the gap in the seats. Kylie Minogue is happier at 50. I can’t read why – the print’s too small. Less spinning around, I would have thought, less locomotion. Someone once said that (wo)man’s unhappiness owes to his/her inability to sit quietly in a chair. Perhaps Kylie’s learnt how to do it. Perhaps she’s learnt how to sit down. The lady behind me hasn’t though. She’s fretting about the electric toothbrush. She thinks she forgot to pack it. The man with her says it’s alright because he did it. ‘Jack!’ she says, slightly affronted. ‘You’re meant to be senile.’

  At the Stretton interchange, the queue for tea and bacon rolls would be out the door if it didn’t have the sense to bend. I go outside to wait in the sun. I’m glad I do because Jeff’s out here and he’s not one for small talk. Within ten minutes, I know his brother sailed to Dunkirk in a pleasure boat and his sister died of cancer at 49. She never smoked or drank and yet she was riddled with the stuff. ‘I never got over it,’ says Jeff. ‘She was yellow! She told me not to come and see her, but I went anyway. She was a great sister. She bought me a pair of roller skates. I’ve still got ’em under me bed.’

  Jeff worked for 50 years as a joiner, and didn’t mind it one bit. ‘We were all in the same boat. You finished school, you went to work. You did what you were told.’ And who told you what to do, Jeff? ‘My dad mainly. He wasn’t a soft fella, and nor was he easily pleased. I played cricket and he’d come and watch and tell me where I was going wrong. I averaged 64 over my career, which is funny when you think that I was never doing anything right. I remember a final against Runcorn. I scored the winning runs. When I saw him after, I thought he was going to say something about me getting caught in the crease. He said he was proud of me.’