Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘I’ve done the laundry,’ adds Dad, his head still bowed over the iPad, his finger tracing the surface of the Braille reader. ‘Will you be able to eat? The tooth?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be fine.’

  I walk across the parquet flooring and place my ineffective bag on the narrow console table in front of the window.

  ‘It’s bloody hot in here,’ I remark.

  The Palladian window is closed again. I walk over and open it, letting in the noise and the smells of Chalk Farm. I know Dad will grumble, like he always does, but he used to love standing at this window, with it wide open, and listening to life on the street below. He used to sit by it on stormy evenings, absorbing the sound of the rain. Now he likes the window closed and the flat quiet; far from the world.

  ‘I like it shut,’ he complains.

  ‘I know, but we need to let some air in. It resembles a fusty old garden shed in here.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to talk, after the injection,’ he says.

  I roll my eyes. I have to be as silent as he is blind.

  ‘I’ll just go and get changed.’

  By just go and get changed, I mean, take off my make-up now there’s no one to see my face.

  I use baby wipes. It usually takes about six or seven of them to remove my thick foundation and expose my heart-shaped monstrosity. I have it down to a fine art. We only have one mirror and it’s in our bathroom; it’s badly lit in here, but that’s OK. My birthmark is already angry-looking as I disturb it with my wiping and rubbing, my unveiling and my disclosing. I don’t need to see it clearly. It’s not like I don’t know it’s there. Yet, sometimes it still surprises me. Even after all these years. I might catch sight of it in a mocking shop window or in a bastard mirror I’m not expecting – at the clinic, say, or at Dad’s doctors’ surgery, and think, Oh, look at that. That’s horrible.

  A strawberry birthmark. How anodyne and Enid Blyton and Pollyanna that sounds. It isn’t. It’s raspberry red and asymmetrical and bumpy and is a bugger to blend into the rest of my face with that thick, thick foundation, now deposited on baby wipes. Most days I still feel really despondent about it. Every day I just want to hide from the world and never come out.

  That feels better, though. My face can breathe. I throw the browned baby wipes in our little pedal bin and head back to the sitting room and my bag, to open one of the letters I picked up downstairs. Oh, it’s another architectural magazine, wanting to do a feature on where we live. There’s a lot of interest in the only flat created inside a London tube station.

  ‘Someone else wants to talk to us about The Palladian,’ I say. ‘Another magazine.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Dad gets up from the chair and walks to the kitchen – he knows exactly how many steps it is from here to there and doesn’t need his cane – where he starts clattering around. I always leave him to it; he doesn’t require help in the kitchen, unless something does something it shouldn’t – like a rogue lid flinging itself off a jar and on to the floor.

  ‘Another Leslie Green fan!’ I call to him.

  ‘They all love Leslie!’ he calls back.

  Leslie Green was the architect who designed Chalk Farm underground station and forty-nine other tube stations, in a five-year period from the early 1900s – before he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three. I know a lot about the long-admired Leslie Green. Dad knows an awful lot more. But we will turn down the inquisitive magazine person, like we always do. Dad doesn’t want anyone coming into his beloved home, doesn’t want to talk to anyone about anything, even the things he is most interested in. I mean, he bought this flat because of Leslie Green. But he won’t engage with anyone about it now.

  I put the letter in the recycling box in the hall, then go and stand in the doorway of the kitchen. The room has been organized so it’s easier for Dad. We have talking scales and measuring jugs. Braille labels. All spices and condiments and sauces are kept in wicker baskets, so things can’t be accidentally swept on to the floor. Neither of us is the tallest – I’m tiny, actually – and everything is no more than shoulder height, to avoid droppages. And everything goes back in its place in a military system. Only twenty per cent of blind people are actually totally blind, so many visually impaired people may have items colour-coded in a kitchen – with heightened contrasts between light and dark – but my dad is one of the unlucky twenty per cent with NLP: No Light Perception. He’s been blind since 17 August 1980.

  ‘I don’t need any help, Prue.’

  ‘I know you don’t.’

  Dad is already getting out chopping boards and utensils. He makes delicious food for us both every night, in near silence. Once upon a time he used to cook to music: to The Kinks and The Doors and The Jam and the New Faces. He used to hum along or sing as he worked. We have a really good music system here, excellent speakers, but we don’t use it any more. We also have a vintage record player in the corner of the sitting room, but the duck-egg-blue lid stays closed.

  ‘So, go away and leave me to it. Go and catch up on all your women.’

  He means the women I like reading about. Talented women, heroic women, pioneering women; women nothing like me … Recently I’ve been reading a lot about Amelia Earhart, Indira Gandhi and Dian Fossey. Most of yesterday afternoon was spent down a Catherine the Great-shaped rabbit hole. Dad likes the fact that I can occupy myself without bothering him. I don’t talk to him beyond the necessary: ‘What are we having for dinner tonight?’, ‘I’m doing the online shop; do you still like apple juice?’, ‘Can I help with that, Dad? No? OK.’ I eat quietly, looking through Facebook on my phone in silence. I’m not really on Facebook – I have an account with about ten ‘friends’ that I never post on, but I use it to stalk abusers I knew at school and scoff at my sister. At any other point in time, I’m either watching telly or listening to music through headphones, the volume as low as I can bear it. Anything else I fear he views as some kind of attention-seeking. Obviously I am seeking his attention. There’s nobody else bloody here.

  I open the second letter: an A4 envelope. I’m not particularly intrigued; it’s probably another brochure from a local estate agent with an accompanying missive trying to persuade us to sell our flat. Oh. Inside is a very belated 2018 calendar from Gourmet Burgers for Dogs with a Great Dane demolishing a quarter-pounder on the cover. I used to work at Gourmet Burgers for Dogs, until I resigned from packing vacuum-packed home-made burgers for dogs into cardboard boxes, at age forty-five. Actually, I resigned from all jobs at that point. The burgers simply pushed me over an edge I’d been teetering near for a while.

  I flick through the calendar; September looks cute.

  There is a clatter from the kitchen.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No, I’m all right!’

  I can hear Dad counting the steps to the fridge under his breath. I put the calendar back in the envelope. God knows why they keep on sending me the things – I really don’t need a reminder of how my far-from-illustrious working life finally came to an end.

  ‘Oh, bugger it!’

  ‘Shall I come in?’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine.’

  I put A Place in the Sun on. Plug in my headphones. Watch lucky people browsing beachfront properties in Barbados. I tell myself I’m Dad’s companion now, that I need to be here – not working – but we both know that’s not true. I just haven’t got the will or the confidence to put myself out there any more. Still, we’re all right for money as I’ve always saved hard, in all my jobs, even though I now do nothing at all, and Dad has his compensation pay-out and his handful of investments – and we’ve no mortgage – so we’re ticking over, ‘like a clapped-out Ford Cortina’, as he puts it.

  I take off my headphones. I can hear grumble, grumble, clatter, clatter, from the kitchen; I can smell onions being sweated in olive oil and garlic; I can already taste the pancetta and the parmesan and the peppery, creamy sauce. I can also see exactly how the evening will pan out, just as it always does. Da
d and I will have dinner, then retire to our chairs: me to browse the internet or watch TV or listen to not-loud-enough music; Dad to read on his Braille reader or listen to a podcast – always on architecture, a subject he has never stopped studying. The light will fade; we’ll stay in our chairs. We might have a snack, a glass of beer. At around eleven, Dad will say, ‘Well, I think I’ll turn in, Prue’, and I’ll say, ‘Me too, Dad’, and we’ll go to bed. Always the same, day after day, month after month, year after year. And that’s OK. We like it like this. We wouldn’t have it any other way. What other way is there, for Dad and me?

  ‘Fifteen minutes, Prue,’ says Dad.

  ‘Righto, Dad,’ I reply.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Angela called,’ Dad yells from the kitchen twenty minutes later.

  ‘Oh? What did she have to say for herself?’ I try to make my voice sound bright and not at all like I’ve been asleep for the last quarter of an hour. It’s a shameful habit I have – nodding off during daylight hours – considering I don’t work or do anything all day. Dad naps a lot too. Our morning routine tends to be BBC Breakfast followed by The Wright Stuff followed by This Morning, then we stop for a bit of lunch – some ciabatta or pasta, a salad or some soup, depending on our mood or the season – then it’s the music or the podcasts or more television and two or three small afternoon naps each. We’re like a couple of bloody dormice. And if we’re a couple of dormice, then my sister Angela is an ant, or a busy busy worker bee – always working, always socializing, always shopping or baking, always doing something. My little sister (she’s forty-six) checks in with us from Canada every three months or so, not that she needs to; her life is on Facebook. Where she’s been, how work’s been, how well her perfect girls have done at school and nursery, what she had for dinner last night …

  ‘I didn’t answer,’ Dad calls. ‘I had my headphones on. She left a voicemail that she’d call back.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  Angela is all Photoshop filters and clinking champagne glasses and beautiful local scenery and home-made cakes and gorgeous children and new shoes. We have absolutely nothing in common.

  ‘Maybe she’ll call back after dinner.’ Dad sounds about as enthusiastic as I feel.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  I plug back into my headphones and put on the Bonnie Raitt album, Luck of the Draw – an old favourite of mine, except I always avoid ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’, because its lyrics make me cry. I like female singer-songwriters. I like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton and Sheryl Crow. I like Carole King and Carly Simon. I like strong women with something to say because I am not a strong woman and I have nothing to say. I don’t always agree with all their lyrics, though. ‘Jolene’ could have had him, for example, and good riddance … If he’s that vain, it really isn’t going to help that this song definitely is about him … I’m also sad for how someone like Janis Joplin lived and died, but when she rasps her way through ‘Summertime’, I am utterly transported.

  I take my phone from my bag as I listen and have a nose on Facebook – Angela has a new bag and went to the cinema with it last night. Some idiot I knew at school has had another baby and named it after a shampoo. I go on the Daily Mail online, the Sidebar of Shame: their showbiz gossip. I look at their news column. Then I go on to Safari and search ‘News, Warren Street tube station’, and it comes up straight away: ‘Incident on the line, suspected jumper’:

  British Transport Police were called to Warren Street underground station this afternoon. At least 10 emergency services vehicles were seen outside the station and the Northern Line was suspended for three hours. Sadly, a woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

  How awful, I think. It makes me feel funny – a feeling of vertigo, almost, or that I am as lightweight as that balloon, floating to nowhere. Although I saw nothing, I was so close to where it happened, mere feet from where this woman lost her life. I wonder how old she was, if she had children. How bad her life was that she wanted to bring it to an end. I remember the card I was given by the well-meaning London Underground woman. Did I look bad? Just being me? So bad she deduced I must have seen something?

  I mooch around the internet some more, gaze at lovely tropical holidays I’ll never go on, then head on to Twitter, where I follow a handful of achieving, purposeful blind people, to get ideas for Dad to reject. Then I read a new article about Billie Holiday.

  Dad comes out of the kitchen and plonks two steaming plates of carbonara on the little round table between our chairs.

  ‘Here we are,’ he says, like he always does. ‘Buon appetito.’ He’s so proud of his Italian heritage. Well, I am, too, of mine. I’m half Italian, a quarter Swedish. Dad’s parents – Papa and Nonna – came to London in the early 1950s and ran a gelato parlour in Clerkenwell, where gangsters and organ grinders alike enjoyed their stracciatella; my mother’s parents met in London when Nana Larry (her real name was Brigitta) had a week off from the Electrolux factory in Stockholm, came to London with a friend and met Grandpa Larry outside the Ritz, in a rainstorm. My family history – well, some of it – is the most interesting thing about me.

  I go over to the table. We eat. We do not talk. I want to talk.

  ‘Hey, Dad, did you know there’s a blind architect?’ I pause, brave, my fork over my steaming bowl, toying with a cube of pancetta. ‘In Hawaii. He’s about your age. He’s semi-retired but he consults, he teaches. There was an article in the Evening Standard about him and I’ve found his profile on Twitter. He’s really interesting.’

  Dad sighs. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s called John Harrison Burrows; he consults on conference spaces and art galleries – multi-sensory, accessible to all. He’s got a studio on the Big Island. He teaches architecture at the university there.’ I gabble, trying to get the words out before he shuts me up.

  ‘That’s nice for him.’

  ‘You could be a blind architect. Or you could teach. You probably know more about architecture than anyone in the world!’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not? You could read all about this guy and see what he does. He does TED Talks and stuff. He uses special technology.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s not impossible.’

  Dad became blind when I was ten. He had just qualified to be an architect and was embarking on his first project.

  Dad lays down his fork. ‘Why don’t you look up all the people who are blind and aren’t architects?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Or those blind people who can’t do anything at all.’

  ‘Dad.’

  The accident was such a blow after everything my father had done to turn his life around. He became a parent at sixteen; for some that would have been game over, but Dad, who left school to become a carpenter not long after I was born, got what he termed a ‘fire in his belly’ for architecture while working on early development of the Barbican. He took his A levels at night school and got into University College London on a scholarship. He caught the bus from our little house in Clerkenwell to Russell Square every morning. He studied every night. With Nonna and Papa doing the school runs and looking after us after school – Nonna making us cannoli and Bolognese and focaccia, and Papa entertaining us with his sleight-of-hand magic tricks and his false tooth that he would pop out into his hand whenever he felt like it. Dad continued with the degree and he became an architect. For a while.

  ‘No, drop it, Prue. It’s utterly ridiculous.’

  ‘OK, Dad, subject dropped.’

  We eat in silence for a few seconds. I don’t really have a leg to stand on anyway, I think. I’m hardly out there setting the world alight and I’m not even blind. I silently thank Dad for not pointing this out.

  As usual, after dinner, Dad stays at the table while I clear the plates and take them to the kitchen. After I’ve washed up and dried up, with one of Nonna’s old red gingham tea towels, and put everything away and tidied up the kitc
hen, which Dad has left pretty spotless anyway, Dad will be back in his chair again and I will take to mine. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were to sit in his chair, or he in mine? Spontaneous combustion, probably, leaving just our feet on the floor, in front of those chairs.

  I return to the comfort of Bonnie Raitt and my phone. There’s more news now on Warren Street. ‘Breaking News’, they call it, which is so ubiquitous a phrase now it carries a degree of anticipation not always rewarded, but it doesn’t say much more.

  British Transport Police say the woman, who has not yet been named, was in her twenties and worked in the entertainment industry.

  So young, I think, and what was she, an actress, a TV presenter? Why on earth would she jump under a train? I feel so sad for her that I have to come off my phone. I’ll watch a film. I look across at Dad, in his chair. Will he watch with me? He sometimes does. I note that he needs a shave, but I know he’ll do it in the morning. He is fastidious; always clean-shaven, and what hair he has left is kept neat monthly by the mobile barber who comes. Standards never slip when it comes to my father. Although he can’t witness his own appearance, he never forgets others can, even if it’s just me. It may be the Italian in him.

  I find The Talented Mr Ripley on Amazon and start watching it on my own as Dad says he doesn’t fancy it. It’s hardly a cheery movie, but I love it, and I enjoy gazing at everyone’s gorgeous outfits. Dad has his headphones on and is listening to an audiobook. Now and again he’ll laugh, a sound only elicited by the voices of strangers. The light fades. We have a snack, a glass of beer.

  ‘Well, I think I’ll turn in, Prue,’ says Dad, at just gone eleven.

  ‘Me too, Dad,’ I reply.