by Glen Duncan
‘Janet?’ Skinner says, struggling. Then something connects. ‘Oh, right, yes, yes, she said…she did say…That’s you, is it?’
‘Yes, that’s me. And this is my father.’
‘Is she not coming, then?’
‘Oh yes, she’s coming, of course. At three, though. You see, we were early, as I said. I’m sorry, this is all very confusing.’
‘It’s lucky we were early,’ Pasha says. ‘You could’ve been lying there, some bugger could’ve robbed you, done all sorts.’ This isn’t, despite the emphasis, irony, just his world view. They–youths, muggers, thieves, thugs, bleddy criminals and delinquent buggers of every stripe–are always there, waiting for their chance.
Skinner looks at him. Still no recognition. ‘That’s true,’ he says. ‘These days you’re not safe. I’ve been burgled you know. Twice.’ This with the quivering pride the elderly take in such things, the credit demanded for still–in spite of what Nowadays tries to do to them–being here.
‘Look, I’ll tell you what,’ I say, glancing at my watch. ‘If you’ve got a plaster or something I think we really should see to your leg there. At least get it cleaned up a bit–otherwise I suspect there’ll be hell to pay when Janet arrives. What do you think?’
Skinner makes a dismissive face to hide the embarrassment of having to agree, but after a little puffing and blowing directs me to search the bathroom cabinet, where I’m told ‘Janet keeps some first-aid rubbish just in case, though God only knows what’s in there because I never use the blessed thing…’ As I leave the room I hear him telling my dad to ‘sit down, sit down. Sorry, bit shaken up by that. Is that front door still open?’
The fierce cleanliness continues in the bathroom, all white, with a wicker laundry basket in one corner. No bathtub, but a new-looking shower cubicle with a specially installed handrail and seat for octogenarian utility. All surprisingly natty and well equipped; there are Body Shop toiletries, a couple of potted ivies, a loofah, a few shells and pebbles strategically dotted. Again I feel Janet’s hand at work, Skinner carping–What the bloody hell do I want with shells?–but secretly loving it, the attention, the fuss, the nice smellies. There is, of course, the other sister in Earls Court, but Janet’s got these kindnesses in her, I believe, takes satisfaction in furnishing people with small pleasures. Believe based on what? I ask myself, opening the bathroom cabinet, hands shaking. Two nights together? Pushing forty I don’t need much more than that. It’s one of the consolations of age: you see a person’s kindness in the way they get out of bed and put on a dressing gown, someone else’s meanness in the way they hold their knife and fork. Fuck how I know. I just know. Another consolation of age.
The cabinet, mirror-fronted, is, however, rather full. Old spectacle cases, a battalion of pill bottles, contact lens paraphernalia that must be Janet’s when she stays over, and a little blue plastic dish of miscellaneous items which, reaching for the first-aid box, I narrowly avoid toppling. I damp what looks like a clean hand towel and return to the kitchen.
‘Do you want to do it yourself?’ I ask Skinner. My father’s taken his hat off and put it on the table, though despite our host’s insistence remains standing, hands in pockets. I’ve got down on one knee to attend to Skinner’s injury–thinking knights and squires, idiotically–and have been ambushed by the prospect of touching him, the intimacy.
‘Eh?’ Skinner says. ‘Oh, just stick a ruddy plaster on it, that’ll do. Christ, I’ve had worse. It’s just a—’
Interrupted by a quiet oh from Pasha, a strange tender noise of gentle revulsion. I look at him, follow his eye back to Skinner, whose nose is bleeding.
‘Oh, blimey,’ I say. ‘Your nose…’
Skinner puts his hand up, fingers come away wet with blood. The three of us freeze. I’ve always had a disproportionate horror of nosebleeds. My supporting knee wobbles.
‘Here,’ Pasha says, reaching into his trouser pocket and coming out with a pale-blue hanky, still neatly folded. ‘It’s clean. Take it. Put your head back.’
‘Is it back or forward?’ I ask.
‘No no back, back,’ Pasha says. He passes me the hanky (I recognize it; my mother–embroidery unsurpassed on planet Earth–monogrammed a whole set for him years ago, RDM), which I pass to Skinner, who sits staring at his fingertips with a look of dismay.
‘Hold it against your—’
Skinner’s mouth quivers, rights itself, quivers again, then horribly downturns. A sob. Three drops of blood fall and spot the hanky, audibly, putt, putt-putt. I look at my father. Pasha observes. It’s as if we’re all inhabiting entirely separate realities.
I take Skinner’s hand (cold, phthisic, thin-nailed, the texture reminds me of a frozen chicken foot) and guide it with the hanky up to his nose, very gently recline his head. Language refuses. The forced intimacies are unspeakable.
The cat, having decided that the situation offers him nothing, abandons the couch and avails himself of the cat-flap into the garden. The sound of his exit releases us.
‘I get these,’ Skinner says, pulling himself together, sniffing. ‘Janet makes a fuss. They’re just nosebleeds.’
‘I was in India,’ Pasha says. ‘I knew you there.’
Skinner slowly rights his head, keeps the hanky pressed, looks at my father.
‘I’m going to clean this up,’ I say. ‘Tell me if it hurts.’
And so, while I dab, disinfect and dress Skinner’s wound, Pasha begins. Lahore, gold bars, Sikh, Ram, bloodstone ring. It comes out like a favourite bedtime story stripped of emotion. It is a favourite bedtime story, mine, I grew up with it. Now it’s reduced to facts, places, dates. My father sounds depressed.
‘Is that right?’ Skinner says from under the hanky in a long pause after the Malaysian’s plain brass diagnosis. ‘Can’t say I remember you. Nineteen forty…I was in and out of Lahore for years. All over the country. I can’t just now think…’ My father stares at him, trains on him the full force of his insistence. Skinner, belatedly registering the morality of the anecdote, tightens. I feel it in his big-boned knee. ‘What do you want?’ he says.
‘You don’t remember me?’
‘I don’t. No.’
‘We met again,’ Pasha says, ‘in ’47. You don’t remember the riots? The massacre outside Bombay? I picked you up and got you to hospital. You don’t remember any of that?’
I’ve done what I can with the dressing. It doesn’t look good. Janet’s going to turn up, take one look and redo the whole thing. Thinking of which, I check the time. If she’s punctual we’ve got maybe twenty minutes. If she’s early…
The two old men are staring at each other. Pasha’s aura of disgust (not with Skinner, not with himself–with what? Me?) is palpable. As is Skinner’s of rising excitement, fear. What do you want? We want something.
A chair scrapes in the flat above. Muffled sound of a cutlery drawer being opened and closed. Someone else’s life.
‘You’re the boxer,’ Skinner says, in a dead voice, after what feels like a long time.
Pasha continues to stare for a moment, then turns his face away. ‘Yes,’ he says.
The silence this engenders lasts long enough for my knee’s ache to register. I get to my feet.
‘Bloody hell,’ Skinner says. ‘What, from…? You live here now?’ He’s half smiling; the reflex reaction is pleasure, the satisfaction of making the connection, his past momentarily revivified, endorsed. But my father gives only the slightest affirmatory nod. It’s beneath him, now, all of it. Having led the Englishman to recognition, it seems there’s nothing else he wants.
‘I do remember you. Bloody hell. I can’t believe it. Christ that must be sixty years…You look well.’ Anxiety into pleasure. I can see it: the older he’s got, the less interested in him everyone’s become. The daughters, the cleaner, the home help, the buttonholed bystander at the bus stop: he talks of his past and no one wants to hear. Janet et soeur barely believe in the place, India, his youth, Dad’s off again…It gets to the p
oint where you begin to wonder if any of it really happened, since there’s no one to corroborate it. You’re like the last child who still believes in Father Christmas, everyone else has moved on. Now here is the past, his youth, his corroborating witness. I’m wondering how long it’s going to take, the synaptic connection between the memory of the person, my father, and the memory of what happened. His face is glassily awake, flooded; manifestly he hasn’t put two and two together.
‘Dad?’ This isn’t working for Pasha. Skinner isn’t supposed to be glad to see him.
‘How did you find me?’ Skinner says, tremulous. Then–making the connection–to me: ‘How do you know Jan?’
‘It’s a long story, Mr Skinner. I’m sorry. How’s the knee feeling?’
‘Eh? Oh, that’s all right
‘Dad?’
Pasha exhales, heavily, slowly shakes his head. This is what you get for building the bridge between then and now. The length and brevity of the years. Time, yes, has passed, tells you what you knew already, tells you what you don’t want to hear.
‘I think my father just wanted to…I think he feels you owe him an explanation.’
‘Never mind,’ my dad says. ‘I don’t need anything.’
Skinner takes his glasses off, rubs his eyes, squints. Wonders, I suspect, if this isn’t all a hallucination.
‘Looks like the bleeding’s stopped,’ I tell him.
He doesn’t know what to do. Too much has happened. I can see from his face that he’s trying and failing to get a handle on this. When Janet arrives I’ll tell her she needs to take him to hospital. He should have an X-ray. There’s the possibility of concussion. I wish we hadn’t done this. I wish I wasn’t going to have to explain it to her. I wish I wasn’t going to have to see her face, angry, disappointed, betrayed–especially now I’ve got used to seeing it vaguely desirous and sad.
‘What’s he on about?’ Skinner asks my dad.
‘You took my money and skedaddled,’ Pasha says, not looking at him. ‘You said passports. You don’t remember?’
Skinner’s face creases, the effort. It’s the look a face gets on the brink of an almighty sneeze.
‘Cheh,’ Pasha says–to me, emphatically excluding the Englishman. ‘He doesn’t remember. Come on, let’s go.’
‘Dad, Jesus…’
Another hiatus.
‘I got arrested,’ Skinner says.
My father looks at him.
Skinner lets out one dry laugh. Goes quiet again. Frowns. Is this the right story? His hands are trembling. That fall was no joke; it’s jolted the accrued undifferentiated days, the backwards stretch of what had become a white noise existence.
The clouds are breaking; the kitchen brightens and dims by turns.
‘In Bombay,’ Skinner says. ‘The police picked me up. I did six months in the bloody clink, then they deported me.’
My father says nothing. A twitch in his jaw indicates molars being squeezed together.
‘Is that what you’re talking about? I sent you a letter with a cheque.’
‘Rubbish. What letter? I never got any letter.’
‘I sent you the money.’
‘Lies,’ Pasha says. ‘I never got any bleddy letter and I never got any bleddy money.’
‘Look here,’ Skinner says, trying and failing to extricate himself from the couch. ‘You can’t just come in here and call me a liar. Who do you think you are?’
‘Take it easy,’ I say, tidying up the first-aid stuff. ‘There’s no need to get agitated, either of you.’
‘You can’t come in here,’ Skinner says, lower lip quivering again, hanky raised. ‘You come into my house and make accusations…This is my home.’
It’s not right that he’s so teary. I’m not senile. The possibility’s been in the air, then. Overheard daughters, perhaps, or an eavesdropped confab between Janet and GP. You’ll find he won’t remember things. Once it starts, I’m afraid it’s irreversible. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him. I’m not senile. Maybe not, but precarious. No match for Pasha after all. That’s Ross’s deflation. This is a feeble old man struggling to get out of his own couch. He feels cheapened, cheated, tired, embarrassed. Sad. It’s never what you want, when you get it.
‘I’ll put this stuff back,’ I say, picking up the first-aid box. ‘And then we can…Dad?’
A reverie. He and Skinner have dropped back into themselves, Skinner with a frown, as if he’s lost his thread.
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t you think we should leave Mr Skinner in peace?’
‘Did you win?’ Skinner says.
‘What?’
‘The boxing. It was boxing, wasn’t it?’
‘I lost.’
‘Did you?’
‘Sucker punch. Muslim bugger.’
‘You got knocked out?’
‘I got knocked out because I was looking for you in the crowd with the bleddy passports. I lost focus. Cheh. What’s the point?’
Pasha, after this brief engagement, returns his head to profile. Skinner shuffles to the edge of the couch and tries to stand–again unsuccessfully. Weight on the knee makes him wince, with a flash of the formidable dentures. He remains seated. ‘My daughter’ll be here any minute,’ he says. Part self-reassurance, part threat. He’s worked it out and will keep hold of it now: the man’s got something against him.
‘You seriously expect me to believe you sent me the money?’ my dad says. ‘That the whole thing wasn’t just another bleddy scam?’
‘That’s what happened, I’m telling you. I don’t care what you…I can’t believe that after all these years you come in here and you’re—’
Key in front door, front door opening. ‘Dad?’ Janet’s voice calls. ‘It’s Jan.’
Pasha looks at me, doesn’t want this, reaches for his hat.
‘Now listen, Dad–where are you?–I couldn’t get the Greggs pasties because they were—oh!’
Well, here we all are.
‘Oh,’ she says again, this time without surprise, when I’ve given her the bare bones. We’re out in the little back garden. The two old men, left to get on with it, are chunnering in the kitchen. Skinner has been re-doctored and equipped with a fresh pair of trousers, but has thus far stood fast in the matter of not going to hospital. (He’ll go, Janet said. I’ll take him in a minute when he’s calmed down.) The garden’s well kept, small patio, oval lawn, trim borders, a couple of eucalyptus trees, a cherry, a dozen waxy green shrubs I can’t identify. She’s brought shopping for him and the Caribbean brochures to show him where she’s going. Three chocolate eclairs (one for me), a bottle of Glenmorangie, an Options magazine for herself, no doubt, to flip through while I ‘interviewed’ her aged dad.
The ‘Oh’ is shorthand for: so that’s why you slept with me.
‘So that’s why you slept with me,’ she says, lest I’m in any doubt.
‘No. Not that there’s any point in my saying this now, but no, that’s not why I slept with you. I slept with you because I was attracted to you, very attracted to you, and because you seemed to want to sleep with me. You don’t have to tell me what a disgusting mess I’ve made of all this, how badly I’ve behaved.’
‘What a bizarre thing.’
‘What?’
‘All of it. Your dad.’
Emphasis shifted to this not because I’m forgiven but because now isn’t the time. Or possibly because she assumes it’s clear enough I won’t ever be forgiven, therefore it won’t ever be the time.
‘Look, please,’ I say. I’m still holding the goddamned first-aid box in my hands, like an offering. ‘I know what I’ve done. Lying’s no way to get anything started. I know I can’t—’
‘We got something started, did we?’
She’s standing with her weight on one leg, arms loosely self-hugging. Dark maroon blouse, black corduroys and a dark green long woollen cardigan-coat. Her make-up’s precise and lovely; I wonder what she thought this afternoon was going to be like, me meeting her f
ather, the faint boyfriend connotation. Dad, this is Owen. I wonder if she was construing it as a Third Date. However she was construing it, I’ve fucked it up. I’ll come round again, Scarlet said. Like a comet.
‘Is there any way on earth I can apologize enough?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘Probably not.’
‘But not definitely not?’
‘I don’t know. At this stage I’d say it was definitely more definitely not than probably not. At this stage I’d say don’t hold your fucking breath.’
Back in the kitchen Pasha is seated in one of the dining chairs, turned round to face Skinner. The cat sits on the floor between them, gives a yawn when I come in behind Janet.
‘No, no, Walton,’ my father’s saying. ‘I was up there for basic training. IAF. I didn’t go back to Bhusawal till the war was over in forty-five.’
‘Your wife,’ Skinner says. ‘I remember her in the hospital.’
‘Kate, yes. She doesn’t know about any of this.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I, Dad?’ Janet says. The two men look up, sheepish. Can they drink tea together?
‘Bugger the kettle,’ Skinner says, deciding something. ‘Let’s have a drink. Don’t open that new bottle, Jan, there’s one in the cupboard already open. You’ll have a drink, won’t you?’ This is to me, initially, but veers to my father when I hesitate.
‘We should probably…’
‘Put that back, will you, for God’s sake,’ Janet says to me, meaning the first-aid box. ‘You look like you’ve lost the other two Wise Men, standing there holding it like that.’
‘Did you do my tapes, Jan?’ Skinner says.
‘What do you think?’ She fishes in her bag and pulls out a VHS cassette. ‘America’s Wildest Police Videos,’ she announces, for me, eyebrow raised. ‘Trevor’s coming on Saturday with a new recorder for you so you won’t have to rely on me. You shouldn’t be watching that rubbish, anyway. I’ve told you. You give yourself nightmares.’