by Ben Aitken
‘Afraid so.’
‘So who are yeh?’
‘Graham Norton.’
‘Feck off.’
‘It’s true.’
‘So you’re reading your own book? That’s gas.’
I walk back to the coach with Marty. He’s had a soup and a sandwich and a sit down in the church. It was a Protestant one, but he reckons no one will mind. ‘They were lucky to have you, Marty,’ I say.
Frank puts a CD on to see us through to Dublin. It’s an Irish fella telling stories about two other Irish fellas, Murphy and Casey. I’ll paraphrase a section, to give you an idea. ‘Murphy says, Murphy says to Casey, “What do you think of the euthanasia, Casey?” And Casey says to Murphy, Casey says to Murphy, “They’re as bad as the youth in Ireland, Murphy.” And Murphy’s son, Murphy’s son asks if he can get an encyclopaedia for the school, and Murphy says, Murphy says, “You can feckin’ well walk like the others!” And then Murphy, and then Murphy gets done for doing 80 miles per hour. He says to the police office, says to your man, “It’s impossible. I’ve only been driving twenty minutes.”’ And so on. The coach loves it.
I’m happy. I could dress up the sentiment but that’s what it comes down to. It’s the same feeling – or almost the same feeling – as the one I had sitting next to Nan, waiting for the coffee to cool down. There’s a bit of sun, and there’s a bit of laughter, and I’m not at all impatient to be somewhere else. We’re going along nicely, across Ireland, through the afternoon. Chris leans across Carole and shows me a picture of her dog.
‘She misses me,’ says Chris. ‘She’ll kiss me all over when I get back. She kisses Carole too.’
‘Kisses me?’ says Carole. ‘She blooming well licks me makeup off!’
My hotel room is on the edge of Dublin, and three times the size it needs to be, which means I can unpack the TV I nicked without it getting in the way. I watch the motorway from the window. The scene is reassuring somehow – all the motion, all the toing and froing. It implies purpose and co-operation. And it’s quite pretty, to be honest, seen from this room, from this evening. The lines are nice, and the colours. I suppose lines and colours are what pictures come down to. Though that’s not to say that’s what they amount to – something’s added, is always added, by an invisible hand. A red van has pulled over on the hard shoulder. It’s a younger couple. They seem to be having trouble with the satnav.
At dinner, I’m next to Ann and opposite Clive. Turns out Clive has no discs between his vertebrae and is in constant pain and no surgeon will go near him. That’s what Ann says, and Clive does nothing to suggest she’s lying. They married a year ago, and met six months before that. Their respective partners died of blood clots in 2015. Clive got cancer soon after their wedding, then both his knees went and had to be changed, and now his back’s knackered. Ann says it’s been the best of times, the worst of times, but Clive disagrees. ‘It’s been the best two years of my life,’ he says. ‘And I’ve a tattoo that says as much.’ Ann isn’t a big fan of the tattoo because Clive plans to update it annually, so changes the subject to her grandson who works for a gourmet sausage roll company that supplies the Queen. The grandson also got married a year ago and for a present, Ann did a painting of a sausage roll in a wedding dress. Ann always wanted to paint but didn’t until her first husband died. She prefers watercolours because they spread nicely, and you can really catch a sky, a sea, a flower – if you’ve a mind to of course. It’s calming – the painting that is – because you don’t think of anything else, which is good if your husband has just … She regrets waiting. Waiting to paint. She regrets thinking she couldn’t. Then I hear about her knitting and how she did a shawl for Clive, but to be honest, I’m struggling to keep up with Ann’s yarn, and Clive can tell. He knows his wife has a habit of going on and he likes it. It makes him smile, despite his back. He says that perhaps Ann wants to make a start on her pudding. Ann gets the hint. And then doesn’t, because now she’s telling me that she and Clive aren’t really coach tour people, but that Clive can’t drive anymore so they thought they’d give it a go; and that when she’s not painting or knitting or talking, she’s volunteering at a care home; and that her friend Ethel is 101 and would beat me at Scrabble with her eyes closed. She finishes her pudding and gives Clive a look – a loving apology, an admission: I know, I know. Then she turns to me and says, ‘And what about you, Benjamin?’
It’s a new dawn when I get on the coach. Clive asks if I got into Dublin after dinner last night.
‘I did.’
‘Get up to much?’
‘I met a friend.’
‘He?’
‘She.’
‘I’ll ask no further questions.’
‘You shouldn’t have a mind like that, Clive,’ I say. ‘Not with a back like yours.’
It’s a short drive to the ferry, then there’s a bit of sitting about before we can get on the thing. Some get off to stretch legs, to fetch coffees. Carole doesn’t. Carole turns to me and touches me on the arm and says she didn’t have time for a shower this morning because she was meant to get a call from reception to wake her up, but before she went to bed – force of habit – she’d unplugged the phone.
‘Why do you unplug the phone?’
‘In case someone calls in the night.’
‘Does that often happen?’
‘No, because I unplug the phone.’
Chris had time for a shower – a long one she says. She was in there for three songs on the radio. Chris was up at five. Always is. Like clockwork. No need for an alarm. She’s got her own system. Before she goes to sleep she bangs her head on the headboard five times. That does the job. It makes her wake up at five.
‘Who taught you that?’ I say.
‘I taught meself!’
‘And it always works?’
‘Every time.’
‘Well I hope you don’t ever plan to get up at twelve, Chris, else you’ll have a sore head.’
‘It would never happen. I only ever do five. I’ve too much to get on with.’
Later, boarding the ferry, Carole shows me a picture of her John. And then she shows me some more pictures of her John, and as she does so she says quietly (and more to herself than to me) that John is Yani in Greek, Eoin in Gaelic, Juan in Spanish, and even Yahya in Arabic. ‘If I’d known back then,’ she says, ‘I could have called him all sorts.’
Back at the Stretton interchange, we get off for the last time. I try to give Frank a tip, but he won’t accept it. I try to put it in his top pocket but he slaps my hand away. ‘Get away with ye!’ Good old Frank.
Inside the lounge, I wait for the Manchester coach, while others wait for Preston, Stoke, Derby, Leeds. I ask Chris and Carole if they want a tea. The queue’s not as long as it could be, but nonetheless, they might not fancy standing in it. They do want a tea, and try to push a fiver on me, but I won’t have it. I deliver the teas and then sit a few rows behind them, close enough to hear Chris say, a few minutes later, ‘I’m glad I didn’t pay for this tea, Carole. It’s rubbish.’
31 Note to self. Get Chris to write a review of this book for the Derby Telegraph.
Part 5
Lake Como, Italy
17
Life’s not about living to 96. It’s about living to 84
When I get back to Manchester, I stay there, because I’m due on another coach tomorrow morning at 5.50am. To Lake Como. A deep body of water in the north of Italy lined with David Beckham and George Clooney. I check into the cheapest hotel I can find – the Britannia. It’s above a disco. I spend the night subconsciously bopping; tossing and turning to nightmarish beats. In short, I don’t get much sleep, which is a nuisance because I’ve got a 27-hour journey ahead of me, which is the sort of undertaking you need to be ready for, else it will feel like a test rather than an adventure. I know it’s antisocial but I hope I get two seats to myself.
The lady sitting next to me is wearing a Union Jack travel pillow. I ask her about it. She sor
t of grimaces.
‘I lost my husband a year ago.’
‘Sugar. Sorry. But I don’t follow.’
‘It was his. And now I use it. I think he won it in a raffle.’
‘And does it help?’
‘Oh yes. I sleep like a log.’32
‘And you’re looking forward to the holiday?’
‘I’m looking forward to everything. Even the tunnel.’
‘The tunnel?’
She nods. ‘Some hate the thought of all that water over them, but I’m alright because I quite like water.’
Then, something about the tunnel prompts a thought or memory, because Jill says, ‘I need to get better with my long irons.’ For the uninitiated, a long iron is a type of golf club which is meant to (but reliably does not) make the ball go a long way. ‘I’m jealous of those that can hit a nice long iron,’ says Jill. ‘I used to be quite good with them. But then I stopped playing for seven years when I was looking after my husband. I just started again. It’s nice, but a bit sad as well, because every time I play I think about why I can.’
Jill says those seven years left a mark on her – not a bad mark, she wouldn’t say that, but a mark nonetheless. Her comment makes me think of Wild Strawberries, the Ingmar Bergman film, in which Professor Borg, who is a bit of a Scrooge, picks up some teenage hitchhikers on his way to Lund from Stockholm to collect a prize, a sort of lifetime achievement thing. The professor enjoys the company of his passengers more than he expected to. They soften him, enliven him, take him to new and old things, through dreams and visions and memories and talk. One result of all the dreaming and remembering is that he crashes the car. No it isn’t. That’s wrong. One result is that the professor comes to see that certain things are carried with us through our lives: deep affecting moments, character shaping events: a heartbreak, a betrayal, a loss, an act of neglect – or, in the case of Jill, a period of care. The film is good for plenty of reasons, but for me its chief virtue is its invitation to see that reflection is good, that taking stock is good, that intimacy is good, and that going on long, slow, capricious adventures is good, and better still if the travelling party is made up of provocative youngsters and provocative oldsters and provocative whoevers, for then the range of feeling and thought is broader, more colourful, more affecting. A note of caution though. At the end of the film, when the youngsters hop out of the car and say farewell and the professor smiles and waves and says that he would like to hear from them sometime, his remark goes unheard, because the young, too eager maybe, are already out of earshot.
Seventy metres under the seabed, Jill tells me she’s on a diet. From what I can tell, the diet mostly consists of Greek dishes involving lamb, because that’s all she mentions. She gets up one of the recipes on her phone. Reading the method out to me, she pretends there’s an instruction to put the lid on and do nine holes. Jill’s quite pleased with the phone. It was a present from her son. She shows me a picture of him (he looks like Phillip Schofield), and then pictures of things she generally approves of, like swordfish and Cyprus and the indoor market in Shrewsbury. Then, passing Saint-Quentin, she shows me a double-spread of her Sun and asks what I think of Nigel Farage. I say I don’t think much of him, and she says she thinks he’s funny. She flicks through the paper and annotates and remarks as and when. Added together, the annotations and remarks get us through a quarter of France, and combine to form a slightly bloated, slightly abstract haiku.
What do you think of Farage? I find him funny.
Jagger? Not another baby. Would you look at that. Would you look at her.
The Tottenham manager is ready to quit.
Danny, one of the two drivers, takes to the microphone. He says the good news is we’re halfway through France, and the bad news is we’re now on the most boring road in the world and will be for the next fourteen hours. I sigh at the news, but Jill smiles. Without doubt, the holiday’s already started for Jill. I reckon it would have started for me as well, had it not been for getting no sleep last night, and the prospect of getting no more for another twenty-odd hours. When I tell Jill that I can’t sleep sitting up on something moving, she says it’s because I’m an Aquarius. Jill dabbles in astrology, you see, and won’t go near a Pisces if she can help it. She’s also a busy gardener, a keen pastry chef, and an occasional poet. One of her poems – about eating alone – was published in her church magazine. She’s also into birdwatching, walking and foraging. Occasionally, she’s able to combine the three: she’ll be out walking and spot a finch or a kingfisher or a chough and some wild herbs or mushrooms or whatever. Foraging is in her genes, she reckons. There’s an ammonite on display at Swansea University that was discovered by her maternal grandmother. Jill thinks she might have got her independent streak from her maternal grandmother. Either way, her friends think she’s odd for doing things on her own – be it playing golf or going for a walk or going on holiday or going out for a cigarette. She misses smoking. If she’s honest, she misses it more than she misses her – no, she won’t finish that sentence. Suffice to say, she enjoyed smoking, and only gave it up recently and reluctantly, which is to say she still has the odd one or two now and again. Another of Jill’s guilty pleasures – alongside smoking, jam sponge and teeing her ball up in the rough – is chocolate. Of course, she tries to watch her weight, but when there’s so much of it, well, it’s tempting to take your eye off it sometimes. Besides, life’s not about living to 96, it’s about living to 84, and so if Jill wants to have a cigarette and a square of chocolate on the tenth tee, and the occasional jam sponge, then she will. She quotes Oscar Wilde, who said that temptation resisted is poison to the soul. I point out that Oscar Wilde died at 46, and not from an excess of jogging.
Six hours later, with my right cheek pressed to the cold glass of the window and Jill’s snoring in my left ear, I decide that I’d dearly love to be somewhere else and horizontal. I don’t mind where – a trench, a morgue, the Korean Demilitarized Zone – just so long as I could stretch out. I’m not one to be precious or territorial, but to say that Jill’s leaking across the threshold is to put it mildly. I can feel her pillow against my cheek. Not always, but now and again it’s there, which means that Jill’s facial features are about fifteen centimetres from my own. I’m not saying that’s bad per se. I’m not being ageist. I’m just saying it’s not normally how I get to sleep. I know my suffering is comparatively tiny but nonetheless, it’s hard to bear graciously. A case in point: I want to poke Jill in the eye, just to give her a hint that leaning in the other direction might not be the worst idea in the world. Or pinch her nose. Or take one of my socks off and put it in her mouth, just briefly, for like a second, just long enough for her subconscious to associate this side with danger, and that side with safety. If I were at liberty, I would be in a bed and dead to the world. As it stands, I’m wedged between a cold window and Jill, increasingly uncomfortable, with sleep but a dream. They call this overnight service Night-Rider, which makes it sound sexy, risqué, desirable. Night-Survivor would be more like it.
We stop at a Swiss service station. It’s dawn and there are mountains. I watch some of my lot enter, spot the prices, work out what that is in pounds, share a look that says ‘Are they taking the piss?’ and then discreetly reverse as if they were just browsing and didn’t want anything anyway. Which is fair enough, because Switzerland is laughably expensive. But to hell with it, I need to buy some stuff, if only for something to do, so I get a black coffee and a chocolate bar and a pastry and some salted nuts, and it costs me more than the money I saved by taking the Night-Rider instead of the slower service which involves staying in a hotel overnight. There’s a lesson in that I reckon, a bit of low-hanging wisdom, if only I could be arsed to reach up and claim it. Jill is awake when I get back on the coach. She looks five years younger. She looks amazing.
‘You look awful,’ she says. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Vital supplies, Jill. Did you sleep well?’
‘Like a log.’
<
br /> ‘Yeah, a f*cking noisy one,’ I say, to myself, in my head, more than once. ‘Pleased to hear it,’ I say. ‘Do you want half a Twix?’
I’m not doing this on the way back. That’s what I decide. Halfway through my coffee. In fact, I might not even go back. Not after this odyssey. I feel like Ulysses on the home stretch, or one of Hannibal’s elephants, or one of Keith’s pigeons after flying back to Cumbria from sodding Cuba. Jill tells me to look at the snow. I make a noise. She says I could be a bit more enthusiastic. We enter Italy.
‘Bit of housekeeping, folks,’ says Danny. ‘We’re about an hour away now from Lake Como and your accommodation for the week, the lovely Britannia Hotel.’
The Britannia? Are you kidding me? Another one. If there’s a bloody disco …
‘There’ll be an opportunity to have a good wander around the local area this morning, folks.’
You what?
‘Officially, rooms are available from midday …’
Oh for the love of …
‘But in our experience, that doesn’t tend to be the case.’
Thank God. Thank the merciful heavens.
‘It’ll likely be closer to three, I would have thought.’
Shoot me.
32 A very noisy log, she might have added.
18
They’re talking of switching rooms because their neighbours were at it half the night
We’ve arrived in time for breakfast, which strikes me as an odd notion given that I haven’t slept in months. The dining area is a grand, opulent space – Italianate is probably the word. If you get down here early, you can get a window table with a view of the lake. If you don’t, you get a view of those with a view of the lake. I’m not bothered either way. A good view would go over my head right now. I’ve barely been able to see since the Italian border. I can hear well enough however, and in particular, I can hear well enough the table of Irish folk next to me. They’re talking of switching rooms because their neighbours were at it half the night. Your man thinks it was actually next-door-but-one, but your woman won’t credit the idea that a man could have done something to provoke such appreciation. ‘Besides,’ she says, ‘the couple in that room are too old for all that. They both use walking frames, sure they do. They’re past their sexpiration date, so they are.’ But your man’s not having any of it; he says there’s no such thing. ‘There certainly is and you should know there is,’ says your woman, ‘bearing in mind that we’ve not ourselves discussed doing it – discussed doing it, mark – since the Good Friday Agreement.’ And your man says, ‘Well I had to get to the chipper, did I not?’