by Ben Aitken
We walk down Via Garibaldi and then around Piazza della Chiesa. We sit under the bell tower of the San Giacomo Basilica. I ask a bit more about Sharon’s work. She explains that she retired a few years ago but still does stints out of town. She’ll be parachuted in (figure of speech) to assist local councils with their social care efforts. Her husband doesn’t mind her being away for weeks, sometimes months at a time. He knows the work is all-consuming, that you can’t do half a job. He’ll give Sharon a call on Friday afternoon and say, ‘So are you coming home this weekend?’ The space is good for them, says Sharon; it lets their relationship breathe. You see the ones joined at the hip and wonder who applied the glue or staples. ‘It never looks comfortable, does it?’ says Sharon.
We walk back up Via Garibaldi, and back down Salita Serbelloni, and as we go, Sharon’s saying she’s going to take her sons to Ascot this year, for the horse racing, for a proper day out; and that on this type of holiday, she finds it easier to socialise with the loners like Sid and Graham and Jill and me because the wives don’t like it when she talks to the husbands, because they think she’s a threat, that she’s going to run off with their hubbies to Sardinia; and that she doesn’t really like Italian food if she’s honest. The talking and walking and browsing is a piece of cake with Sharon – un poco di panettone. It’s a nice piece of cake as well. I feel like I’m in a low-budget – or no-budget – version of that film Before Sunrise, wherein the main pair stroll around Paris or Vienna just chewing the fat. They end up marrying in the sequel, and then having a family and splitting up in the one after that. I don’t think that will happen in this version for several reasons, not least Sharon’s husband. And Megan of course. She’d certainly have something to say (and something to paint) if over the next ten years I got married, had three children, and then divorced in Greece off the back of a conversational stroll around Bellagio on a Shearings holiday.
We stop for coffee. Sharon adds sweetener to her latte, stirs, sips, adds a bit more, then asks me if I know what grief is. I say no. She says that might be my problem. She says I’ll cheer up after I’ve had a bit of grief in my life. As a diagnosis, it’s oddly similar to the one given by Deborah in Llandudno, who said I needed a tragedy and then offered to push my nan down the stairs. I ask how one can gain perspective and gratitude and so on in advance of the grief. She says one can’t. I go in to pay the bill, but Sharon’s beaten me to it.
Jill and that lot didn’t make it to Milan. They got to the train station at Como and then learnt that the train drivers were on strike. Jill says that Sidney – and this won’t surprise me – was on the loo at Como station when the automated door opened. Sid puts it another way.
‘I was on the English throne and what happened? I’m on display to the concourse!’
‘What did you do?’
‘What did I do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, what do you think I did? I covered my nipples and pressed the frigging button!’
Jill says they took the setback in their stride. In some respects, it was a dodged bullet as far as Jill’s concerned. She was under the impression that Milan was a quaint little town. Instead, they went up to the church in Griante. They just sat there, really. Jill lit a candle for her husband and Sid lit a candle for his wife. It was good, says Jill. Yeah, it was, says Sid.
Dinner is mushroom soup and turkey with baked fennel. I sit alone and read as I eat and I don’t mind how that looks. It’s an interesting finale: a son kills his mother so his wife might escape. I hope Graham Norton’s not writing about what he knows.
I skip dessert and take a coffee to the lounge instead. Before long, I start to hear the entertainment coming to life downstairs in the bar. The Rolling Stones, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’; ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing. I imagine Sidney clapping and spinning and thrusting and grinning and admonishing anyone who won’t do the same. I imagine Jill and Sharon, strangers last Friday, throwing each other around the dance floor. I imagine Graham – the gentle giant to Sidney’s restless pixie – sat in his preferred spot, smiling at one of his own quips, delivered in that cherishable Yorkshire accent of his. Or if not smiling at one of his own quips, smiling at the sight of Sid doing the ‘lawnmower’, or Jill pouting and pretending to have a pair of castanets. Vinny, if he’s down there, will be taking it easy because of his knee, though he’s probably up on his balcony spilling red wine on Rita. Gabriel and Joan will be at their favourite table, working through the cocktail list, and young Dan will be sat with his grandparents, chatting and mingling, enjoying their final night away. I imagine the bar staff putting a brave face on it, doing what they can to enjoy the various British ways of asking for booze. I have to imagine all these things because I’m not going down there, not tonight. Sometimes it’s nice being on the fringe, getting a taste from the edge. Sometimes it’s just nice to imagine and start a new book. Besides, I can’t clap and dance like they can; I don’t have the same cause, the same character, the same animating principle – not yet anyway, not tonight. So for now, I’ll let them be.
Then the music stops abruptly. And then some paramedics arrive. I go down and Jill says that a woman fell over, that she was jiving with this bloke like there was no tomorrow and then bosh, she smashed her head against the floor and was on her arse. ‘He was spinning her like a top, Ben!’ says Sidney. ‘I said to Jill, “I don’t like the look of that. That’s reckless is that.” And where is he now? He’s buggered off, the twerp.’ The lady’s fall has brought the night to a close. They say she’s going to have a big bump and won’t be going out for a kebab, but will otherwise be fine. I say my goodbyes in case I don’t run into this lot in the morning. Jill gives me a kiss. Graham pretends to. Sharon’s in the loo. Of course, Sidney has the last word.
‘You won’t see me in the morning, Ben.’
‘No?’
‘I’m off out early.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Going to get up at dawn, walk up to that church.’
‘Sounds good, Sidney.’
‘You’ve heard of the early bird, right?’
‘I have.’
‘The one who catches the worm?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Well that’s me, mate. And you know why?’
‘Because—’
‘Because I frigging love worms.’
I’m alone in a preferred corner, which gives a wide angle, and the right amount of light. It’s quiet – just the rattle and bustle of the dumb waiter, of cooks changing trays. I can see Sidney in a new T-shirt, holding court with a group I don’t know, showing off his worms, doing a re-enactment of what happened to the woman last night. There’s no Sharon or Graham or Jill. No Vinny or Rita. They’re probably packing. The coach leaves in about an hour. I should like to hear from them again, but I’ve not said as much. No details have been swapped, no numbers taken, no promises made to stay in touch. This travelling coincidence was enough, it can end with a few honest farewells – I suppose that’s the feeling. I wait at the bus stop happily, all things considered.
Part 6
Pitlochry, Scotland
23
She says that thanking God gets easier and harder every day
At the Normanton interchange, there’s a lady of maybe 90 sitting on a bench, puffing away on a fag. I imagine telling her to pack it in. Then I imagine her response. ‘What, so I don’t die at 70?’ Her face is brilliant. Its years are shown like the rings of a tree. The American writer Grace Paley called it – ‘it’ being the loosening and folding of skin as we age – the ‘rotten handwriting of time’, which is one way to look at it. There are other ways of course. I’ve heard that in Japan, when a broken vase is pieced back together the cracks are emphasised with gilt, and finally the broken thing is considered more beautiful than the unbroken thing. It’s certainly an optimistic take on damage, though doubtless there are times when the Japanese are straightforwardly pissed off they dropped something.
I
sit on a bench opposite bay thirteen and talk with a couple off to Eastbourne. They’re a colourful pair. He’s got a canary jacket on, and she’s in lime green trousers. They’re not backwards in coming forwards either. Within a couple of minutes I know that he was conscripted to be a cook in Germany after the Second World War. He says the gig was part of his national service, and that it was a funny time to be out there because the war may have been over, but the Germans were still scared, still shaken, still shell-shocked. Their world had been turned upside down and given a shake. ‘You could blow ’em over, the poor buggers. Or kick ’em over, which is what the sergeant major generally opted for.’
They’d both bring national service back if they could. I ask if they’re sure they’re still up to it. He grins and she says, ‘No not for us, silly, for school leavers. They’d learn some discipline that way. God knows they could do with some. Trouble is you can’t clip them round the ear these days, can you? I remember pinching some rhubarb from an allotment and hiding it under my bed for weeks because I was terrified what the police and my parents would do if I presented with it in the kitchen.’ I ask if this was recently and he grins and she says, ‘Point is, I knew there’d be consequences and I feared them. These days, they don’t fear a thing. They’re wild. Not all of them of course. Our grandsons are lovely. If a bit spoilt. You should see what they get on their birthdays. It’s not good for them – no way. They’ve got everything and yet reckon they’ve got nothing. We had no choice and it was good for you. It was stew or you went hungry. And it weren’t much different when it came to marriage. You weren’t fussy. You couldn’t afford to be. He was an apprentice butcher on four pounds a week. It was that or nothing.’
He didn’t stay an apprentice butcher. He saw an opening in copper tubing and climbed into it, then became a driving instructor. He says it was a lovely job in the 80s, on the back lanes, out in the countryside. She would sit in the back with a magazine, smoking out the window, touching his right arm down the side of the seat. When he’d done all his learners they’d stop somewhere and find a field or drive to the airport and watch the planes. He’s been retired twenty years and he doesn’t mind it one bit. She minds it a bit because he gets under her feet, but still, they get along, better than ever, even. They keep busy in the greenhouse, growing tomatoes and flowers, and the radio’s always on. And there’s the family, she says. Oh yeah, there’s the family, he says. And there’s events, she says. Oh yeah, the events, he says. This year alone they’ve had a birth, a death, a wedding, a christening, an engagement and a divorce. (And that was all the same couple!) Above all, they appreciate just being around still. Not everyone is, you know. His brother isn’t, that’s for sure. He collapsed on the bus with a ruptured aneurysm. ‘And what’s more,’ she says, ‘it was the wrong bloody bus.’
The thinking used to be that if you got threescore and ten (70), you were lucky, but you could keep a Vauxhall Cresta going with some of the tablets they’ve got these days. To say nothing of new parts – well, you can get the lot. And if they can’t get you a new part they’ll do their best to fix up the old one. He had a displaced stomach last year. They only went and stapled it in place, as if it was a piece of carpet. It’s good, they say, people living longer – they mean, why shouldn’t they? They’ve paid their taxes, fought their wars, brought up their families, done a fair bit of work. Why shouldn’t they get a bit of breathing space at the end of it? A bit of time in the greenhouse with the radio on in the kitchen? Of course some of the government would rather they just dropped off their perches at three-score and ten and saved them some money, but they’ll be old in time, and we’ll see what they’re saying then.
Having said all that about modern medicine, the treatment he swears by is two pints down the pub at lunchtime, and a drop of whisky in his tea. After all, whisky means the water of life in Gaelic and he only has five or six cups a day, unless someone comes over or there’s a national emergency, in which case he stops counting. And her medicine? She says that him being down the pub is her medicine, that and their caravan. When she says caravan, she notices that their top halves are in sunlight and their bottom halves aren’t. ‘Look how bright your jacket is,’ she says. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘No bugger will miss me in this. I’m high-vis.’
The call comes for Pitlochry. When I get on the coach, someone asks if I can shove their bag overhead. Then another lassie asks if she can borrow me to open that and stow this. I do as I’m told and realise that it’s the first time it hasn’t felt at all awkward or peculiar getting onboard with my elders. It feels normal.
Malcolm’s our driver, and from Newcastle by the sound of it. When he says ‘Reet, ladies and gentlemen. How’s it gan?’ most of the coach says nothing because they think he’s just clearing his throat, but the two or three who understand Geordie reply, ‘Geet champion, yee propa radge gadgie yee, Malcolm wor laddie.’
Flicker and Mary aren’t Geordies. They’re sat in the row behind me and across the aisle, so they’re not exactly the easiest pair to access but I manage. Flicker says she lives in Derby but comes from South Africa and leaves it at that, whereas Mary says she lives in Derby but comes from Scotland and doesn’t. She says that she was born in Dundee but moved to Coventry when she was sixteen. She says she got a job in an office, as a secretary. She didn’t much like the work but she got a husband out of it. He was a junior manager and she married him when he got a promotion. She says you had to think on your feet in those days, because there wasn’t the money there is now. She says she enjoyed 55 years of happy marriage and thanks God for every one of them. She says that thanking God gets easier and harder every day. Easier because the things she’s thankful for seem to have got bigger somehow, more obvious, and harder because she’s got a bit of arthritis in her hands. When we pull into Washington services, Mary says, ‘Excellent. I’ve needed a wee since Easter.’
Pauline gets on at Washington. She asks me to shift over because her mates are in the seats across the aisle and she doesn’t want me in the way. I do as instructed and by way of thanks, she tells me that her son has a Shih Tzu called Benji; that she remembers when the Angel of the North only had one wing; and that yonder factory is where there’ll be making the new British passports. When Malcolm makes a joke about people from the south of the River Tyne, Pauline asks if he’s been going on like this the whole time. I tell her that, to be fair, he’s only just found his voice. ‘Well, ah hope he loses it again,’ she says.
I ask Pauline what Newcastle was like back in the day. She says it was poor, simple as that. She says if you weren’t building ships you were down the mines. She says you were thought posh if you weren’t working your fingers to the bone. Things have changed though. Pauline’s got richer every year of her life, give or take the odd wobble. That’s why there’s things like salmon teriyaki in the fridge, and why she can go on holidays. She goes with her auntie and her auntie’s husband – those two over there. She looks across to them now – they’re both snoozing – and then beyond them to the vastness of Northumberland. She looks at the openness and emptiness and then looks at me and says, ‘You wouldn’t think we were full, would you?’ Then she looks at my shorts like she’s never seen a pair before, and says,
‘I suppose it’s hot where you’re from, is it?’
‘Twenty-eight yesterday.’
‘What, Fahrenheit?
The land turns Scottish. You’d need canny vision to notice, which is why there’s a sign and a flag. We stop for lunch just across the border. I have haggis on a jacket, and a can of irn-bru. I sit with Flicker and Mary. The former looks at my lunch as though it were a collection of sins. She knows she’s doing it as well, because she says she’s always telling her grandchildren not to say they don’t like something until they’ve tried it, and now here she is raising her eyebrows at my lunch, having never tried a mouthful of either. ‘Don’t do it, Flicker,’ says Mary. ‘I’ve had both and as the Lord is our shepherd, let me be yours – stick to your cheese sandwich.’
Mary’s got a nice habit of saying what she wants. She does it now. She says the death of her son-in-law about a year ago has been harder to deal with than the death of her husband. Chiefly because of the suffering of her daughter and grandchildren. He was a senior bank manager and complained of headaches for years but carried on regardless. He said he had no choice. In fact, what he had was a brain tumour. The doctor said he’d better make some memories while he still could. They went down to Cornwall. Mary was illegally squeezed in the back with him and the two kids. She’ll never forget it. It was wonderful in spite of everything. Mary has a tear in her eye. Flicker touches her friend on the arm and then looks at me and says, ‘Actually, would you mind pouring me a bit of your drink?’
Walking back to the coach, they ask if I do this often. I say it’s my sixth one. They ask if I’ve enjoyed them. I tell them that I have, that they’ve done me some good. They ask in what way. I say that before I went to Scarborough, I was grumpy and complacent and scared of getting old, whereas now I’m still those things only a little bit less. ‘Besides,’ I say, ‘I met a man that keeps his wife in the boot, and I took my nan to Wales and now I call her Janet.’ Mary asks if I get on with my nan then. ‘She can be a pest,’ I say, ‘but that’s just her age.’