by Jim Pollard
Her hands were pointing here, there and somewhere else, animated. Her eyes were happy, or so I picture her now, dancing from side to side, her hair, the same gold as Cal’s, flowing from beneath her hair band.
‘We were so close. Cal and me. You were so close, Cal and you,’ she said as we shared a bed that night. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’ She kissed me on the nose. ‘And a nice thing to do.’
That was our last night in the pension. The following day we bought and moved into the apartment, buying sheets and cafetières and coffee bowls and a bed as we went.
8
One day, the spring after I started at Beech Park, my father was late coming home from work. It was still unusual then.
Marching around the kitchen like someone in prison or a cartoon, my mother was muttering about pubs being popped into and dinners being spoiled. She turned the gas beneath the potatoes off and on again, off and on, igniting it with a tubular implement which she held like a gun. When his key turned in the lock, she froze as if the music had stopped. We heard the door open and the distant sounds of the street float in. As the door clicked shut again, her shoulders slumped as if they had disappeared from beneath her skin. She sat for the first time in over an hour, the chair, white with a red checked plastic seat, creaking beneath her weight. I hadn’t seen her look like that before. For a moment I thought she was ill.
Looking at her, listening to him. I heard my father’s footsteps - his heavy workboots on the thin narrow rug that ran the length of the hallway. The sound was more familiar to me than the sound of his voice. Although he was a minicab driver, my father never went to work without boots more suited to the market like his father or to the pit like my mother’s - ‘workboots, Frank,’ he’d smile when I was very young, ‘boots for work.’ Their sound was haunting because the volume never seemed to change, the steps never seemed to get any closer. It was as if he were marking time. Then we both heard the tweet of a bird. My mother sat up with a start.
The kitchen door swung open and my dad came in carrying a small silver cage containing a green and yellow budgerigar. He put it down on the table and smiled at my mother in a fresh way. He seemed younger.
‘Sorry, love, I had to. Janice was giving them.’ He was breathless or speaking as if he were. He didn’t sound like my father. ‘She breeds them and um...’ He smiled. ‘I thought Frank might like one.’ He turned and ruffled my hair, something else which was not a habit. Janice was the woman at the cab office who talked to all the drivers on the radio telling them about the next job. Around the home, my Dad called her ‘the fat controller’ like in the railway books but I’d seen her and she wasn’t that fat.
‘Thanks, dad,’ I said without enthusiasm.
‘Be careful he doesn’t get out,’ said my father. Then he kissed my mum.
A budgerigar is a far from ideal pet for a child - you can’t really do very much with it, not like a dog or a cat. Even a hamster has more potential. For the initial weeks of its residency chez-Dane, I occasionally fed it and changed its drinking water but by and large, its limited needs were met by my mother. She put an old tablecloth on the sideboard and set the cage on that. The budgie could see our little garden from there: father’s tomato plants, mother’s chrysanthemums and pansies, my football, the lawn like a green dishcloth. It seemed happy enough, tweeting away, irritating next door’s cat, but it never uttered a discernible word.
‘The green ones are the talkers,’ announced my Aunty Anne when we told her.
‘She should know,’ said my father into his cup. Aunty Anne never heard him because she was busy telling me off for peeling the skin from my coffee. ‘Don’t handle your food, child,’ she said.
Aunty Anne’s coffee always had skin on it, folded like her face. Her breath was very close to you all the time, not just when she kissed you and her house smelled of hot milk and Sunday afternoons regardless of the day of the week. She had things with Victorian names that we didn’t have at home, things like antimacassars and doilies, and the furniture was in dark regal colours: burgundy and purple. Sitting in the back seat on the drive home after our visits, I’d regularly hear my father muttering about his elder sister’s airs and graces but even as a small child I knew he was wrong. She didn’t have any heirs at all because there was nobody for me to play with.
I put the coffee down delicately on the woven coaster and began shining my shoes with my handkerchief. My mother had long told me to polish my shoes until Aunty Anne could see herself in them. As a very young child, it had crossed my mind that this was because she was unable to use a wall-mounted mirror on account of her permanently stooped shape. Now I knew that it was to do with what my father called showing some respect and, if I didn’t like her coffee I could at least have clean shoes. I was trying to be polite.
‘Put that bloody handkerchief in your pocket,’ said my father from the corner of his mouth, thin and downturned like the flourish of my cheap fountain pen. ‘What do you think this is? A bloody boot room?’
‘Derek,’ hissed my mother. Aunty Anne never heard them. She was a bit deaf too.
After a few weeks, I tried to educate the bird. I thought that educating him would educate me. My memory was terrible. Everybody reminded me of that. I stood next to the cage looking down at him on his perch, a football annual in my hand.
‘Brown, Baker, Henry, Blanchflower, Norman, Mackay, Jones, White, Smith, Allen, Dyson,’ I whispered over and over like a mantra, my head less than a foot from his. After a day or two, I had learned the Spurs double-winning team off by heart but there was nothing from the budgie but the odd cheep. I tried something a little easier. ‘John, Paul, George, Ringo.’ Not a dickie bird.
I even tried singing softly to him but I didn’t know the words. My father had a record player, a pile of 78s and six stereo LPs but none of them were by The Beatles.
‘Jimmy Greaves, Jimmy Greaves,’ I tried in desperation. After a few days, I was losing interest. So was my father.
‘They may be the best bloody club side the world has ever seen but I don’t...’ And then he would stop, turn the page of his newspaper, call to my mother or simply sniff. He never finished the sentence. I decided that if I didn’t stop soon, he might remember what he didn’t, and I didn’t fancy that. What I did learn from the whole thing was the value, to me anyway, of repetition. Later I would revise for my O-levels by talking to myself over and over like a madman or somebody training a bird.
So I let the budgie be until one slow Saturday a couple of weeks later when I was kicking around the house with nothing to do. I’d read my comics and my mum wanted me to tidy my room. Logically I should have gone out. There was a football match down at the marsh that we had arranged specially but for some reason I didn’t feel like it. I was watching the budgie in his cage.
My mother called him Scratch because of his habit of scratching around on the newspaper at the bottom of his cage as if trying to dig a tunnel. My father and I didn’t call him anything much. The bird jumped from one perch to the other and back again. He took a sip of water and jumped from one perch to the other and back again. Then he flapped his wings wildly, discharging loose feathers around the room and jumped from one perch to the other and back again. I realised how often my mother must vacuum the carpet. Scratch jumped from one perch to the other and back again.
I picked up the cage. The bird regarded me curiously, his head tilted to one side. Then I picked up the tablecloth and draped it over the cage. In the corner of my bedroom, I had an old folding coffee-table with five years of comics on it. I put Scratch on the bed while I removed the comics to the floor. The table’s pockmarked surface included a large ornate monk-like letter ‘a’ that I had engraved at the age of three. I covered it with the tablecloth and moved Scratch to his new home.
My mother was sceptical at first - she thought it was a ruse to get her to Hoover my room more often. In fact, it had the reverse effect. I happily to
ok on the task myself and there was even less reason for her to come into my room. My mother liked this. My father welcomed it too. It both vindicated his choice of gift and meant that Scratch’s constant cheeping was out of earshot.
I spent most of that summer playing dice-cricket. Round our way, the football season was 364 and a half days long (the close season being Christmas morning). As the nights got longer so simply did the matches. But I also enjoyed what my father called the summer game. I still played football at the marsh of course, but at the slightest sign of overcast or inclement conditions, weather which in my childhood seemed marginally more common in the summer than at other times of the year, I was indoors.
Football was fine. Football was fantastic but I was only one of, what, dozens. That year on Whitsun bank holiday evening, for example, as kids came back from weekends at the beach, in the country, or over their Aunty Anne’s, we had reached 23 a-side. With dice-cricket, I alone picked the teams, placed the field, changed the bowlers, cheered the batsmen and took the glory. With football, the nearest thing was solo Subbuteo but, because you couldn’t keep goal and shoot at the same time, every game ended up as a seven-all draw which was most unrealistic. Properly designed dice-cricket offered authentic scoring and strike rates.
Sometimes I would proceed with my play-to-a-finish match between the staff and pupils of Beech Park Grammar. It was a standard two innings affair but everyone played: thirty kids and thirty teachers. Like the original test matches, there was no time limit. In the first innings, FD Dane came in at number 17 and made a whirlwind century. More often, I played more conventional ‘Five-day’ test matches or even limited overs games between the teams of the moment. By that I don’t mean Surrey or Kent but sides such as Frankie’s All Stars, Former And Current England Players Whose Names Begin With B, The Spurs Double-Winning Team or Good-looking Girls Around Our Way (A Select XI).
During the day when father was at work and my mum was out, I would let Scratch out of his cage. At first, as his universe expanded exponentially, he just sat on his perch staring out of the open door. Then he edged nearer and peered around the pencil lead thin bars, head on his shoulder. His first flight was undertaken in panic and ended on the curtain-rail where he remained for two hours: the ideal vantage point from which to witness the batting collapse of Good Footballers Who Don’t Play For Tottenham: Geoff Hurst 12, Martin Peters 3, Bobby Charlton no score and so on. The innings was partially salvaged by a splendid tenth wicket partnership of 102 between Jimmy Greaves, 45, and Alan Gilzean, 57 not out (two Tottenham players having been permitted in the absence of 11 sufficiently qualified non-Tottenham players.)
But Scratch improved. As the summer rumbled on, he was making almost graceful flights between the curtain-rail and the top of the bookcase only occasionally troubling the scorer. He seemed to try to tunnel out of his cage less often and I toyed with changing his name to Swoop. I enjoyed his company, his chirping clamour whenever I exclaimed aloud or chuckled to myself as a wicket tumbled or a boundary was struck. When Cal was bowled first ball by Mrs. Garrison the art teacher coming on at the Radcliffe Rd end, he positively squawked. Perhaps he even spoke.
That summer was a sad time for me: a nasty emotional awakening. It took me three weeks to figure out just what the problem was. Cal’s family took him away to America for a month and I missed him. It was the first time I missed anyone.
9
Beech Park, the present day
I don’t know if my mother ever received an actual diagnosis of Alzheimer’s for my father. Neuroses, psychoses, does it matter what names we give to our madness? I wonder if she even noticed at first. The obsessiveness, the unfinished sentences, the meandering... nothing new there. He actually started to finish some sentences and to say some things that were interesting. Of course, it gets worse and after years of excusing and explaining, justifying, joking and plainly ignoring there comes that steely stark moment where perception and reality collide: the warm pool of urine on the museum floor, the once gleaming shoes now scuffed and damp and the husband who cannot understand why his trousers are wet.
‘Come on, Derek,’ I imagine her saying, leading him to a chair - ‘come on’ - and him, for once, coming.
Family Dane are at home. It is the first spring day, the sun uninterrupted in the sky, the daffodils just beginning. We are playing football, boys onto girls. I am attempting to recreate the golden goals I never scored in my youth. Our back lawn is like a soft carpet and Philip takes every opportunity to roll on it.
‘Get up, you big girl’s blouse,’ says Wendy, kicking the ball towards the garden shed on which a goal has been painted in hesitant pink emulsion.
Rebecca stops, hands on her proto-hips, and turns on her teammate, ‘why is a big girl’s blouse such an insult,’ she demands. ‘Why not a big boy’s shirt?’
‘Big girl’s blouse,’ yells Philip, leaping to his fickle feet.
‘Well?’ Rebecca asks of her mother. Wendy takes the opportunity to sidefoot the ball home. ‘Three-nil.’
Philip and I look at each other. ‘Hey, that’s not fair,’ we say in outraged unison.
That’s when my mother appears around the side of the house, the old wooden door swinging in her wake. She is breathless and urgent. In front of her, the ball bounces across the gravel path. Wide eyes follow its diminishing arcs, and for a moment I think she’s about to join in. Wendy twigs.
‘Where’s Derek?’ she asks.
My mother points vaguely back down the path.
Philip’s muddy hands on the back of his shorts. My mother’s random movements of her suddenly heavy head. Wendy’s eyes. I run past them all, through the gate and out into the street. My father is walking slowly along the white lines in the middle of the road calling in a stilted disembodied voice my mother’s name over and over. The car door, open, creaks in the wind, and slams shut with a fierce finality my father fails to notice. The driver’s seat is forward now that Mum drives. As a kid I never realised that she could. For him, a symbol.
‘Dad,’ I shout, ‘dad.’ He continues to walk away, continues to call my mother’s name. I look right and left like a child crossing the road. ‘Derek!’ I say tentative at first and then again at the top of my voice. I like the taste. My father’s senseless eyes look all around like a character in a film who believes he has heard the voice of God. ‘Derek,’ I shout again. He looks at me. ‘Margaret?’ He says.
I sense my family - wife, mother, daughter, son - behind me, scuffling and shuffling to their different halts. My father has turned and begins to walk towards us, his arms locked in front of him in an incomplete gesture of pleading. ‘Poppet?’ He begins, ‘poppet?’
My mother coughs quietly and turns her heel in the gravel. ‘It’s what he used to call me,’ she says. ‘When we met.’ Philip sniggers. Rebecca kicks him in the shin. I notice the damp darkness on my father’s trousers.
We take him inside and I lead him upstairs. He raises not a word of objection when I take the belt from his piss-stained slacks and says ‘thank you, son,’ as I remove these damp and sticky encumbrances from around his creaking ankles. My father smells like a public lavatory but it appears not to bother him. Nothing does. He grins. I thread his belt through a pair of my old jeans. He is a grinning thing. I find him hard to look at. His face is of a naughty boy not reluctant to be dressed but not smart enough to help and his predicament passes him by like the years. I cannot make out what he is talking about at first. And not solely because I have not had a conversation with him for longer than I can remember.
‘Beautiful, son. Wasn’t it? Beautiful, like poetry in motion, it was, like poetry… beautiful. Mackay to Blanchflower.’ Ah, he is on about the Spurs double-winning team. ‘You remember. Five-nil they won. Glorious. Glory, glory. Sunderland, it was and Dyson scored twice.’ I am doing up his flies, my flies. I was a toddler the season Spurs did the double and I know my father never took me to a game. The first mat
ch I can remember was in 1963, the season Jimmy Greaves scored 37 goals and we became the first British team to win a European trophy when we beat Athletico Madrid 5-1 in the Cup Winners Cup final. I didn’t see that game either but I remember the breakfast table the following morning and the smile on my father’s face as he spoke. That memory is vivid as a puddle of piss. ‘Happy days, Frankie, happy days,’ my father rambles.
‘I knew there was something wrong,’ my mother says, her hands clasping and releasing a steaming mug of coffee, clasping and releasing. ‘When I said to him this morning, let’s, let’s go to the museum, he said that’ll be nice. Didn’t complain at all. “That’ll be nice, love”.’ She looks at me. ‘That was all he said.’
Wendy is ushering the children back into the garden. She throws the ball after them and, without the usual warnings regarding windows and the gardens of neighbours, closes the door. My father and I stand by the kitchen door - it’s as if we are all giving my mother space. Proudly, he is wearing my old jeans. They are several sizes too large and the sort he would not be seen dead in yet here he is wearing them. Perhaps the situation in which he finds himself is worse than being dead.
Margaret Dane looks up at Derek Dane. They smile at each other but the smiles are fifty years apart. My mother shakes her head and sips slowly. ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Dad?’ asks Wendy.
We decide that they should stay with us for a few days. While my father festers in front of the television, my mother and I return to the family home where we walk through those familiar rooms selecting those necessary items. My mother packs an overnight bag, neither of us prepared to acknowledge that the stay is likely to be longer, much longer and possibly permanent. Tea as ever is the sustenance. My mother still hasn’t switched to tea bags. The smell of fresh tea leaves is a smell of my childhood. As the steaming pot stands, my mother begins. ‘We’ll just let the flavour draw,’ she says.
