by Jo Gatford
These are my peers, my contemporaries, and I hate them. We’ve lived too long, seen too many people die. There are a few here left with souls still intact, hideously jovial creatures who cajole and jolly the rest of us about. They like to check on whether we’ve had the latest round of tea, they pat our shoulders and call us ‘ducks’ and try to maintain their parenting instinct, cling to it to keep themselves real and useful and needed.
The rest of us are ‘confused’, unable to care for ourselves. We make dangerous decisions concerning the use of hobs and seasonal clothing. We speak our minds, except our minds are no longer our own. We sink into the quagmire of things that should already be dead while the young ones watch and pity and forget who we were.
A man in a suit jacket and tracksuit trousers sits across from me, head resting to one side against the wall, hands flickering in his lap. His fingers are so thin that if it weren’t for his swollen, arthritic knuckles, the wedding band on his left hand would have flown off long ago. It slides up and down with the undulation of his digits as they tap rhythmically on his thighs. I don’t know his name, but I know he used to make a living busking with his saxophone in the town centre. He lived in a caravan by the marina, paid no tax, no rent, made enough money each day to buy himself his daily bread.
After twenty years of living and playing day in and out, he falls asleep on his pitch - too cold, too slow to make it back to his caravan. He loses most of his toes to frostbite. They section him and find out he has a physiotherapist daughter who happily fronts his weekly rent for The Farm House. He breathes through pursed lips and I can hear a melody there, smell the rot inside him.
A woman called Frances used to sit where I am now, always the green corduroy chair with the silk tassels on the armrest. She made four attempts at escape before I arrived here. She succeeded, twice, but was brought back by staff or police, meek and quiet and thoroughly apologetic - didn’t know what had got into her, she said. She was dying before she got here - crippling headaches and a marching band inside her brain playing incessantly, just for her. A holy band of angels guiding her to heaven, she said. She’d been destined for incredible heights but had sacrificed it all for her sickly brother, who died and left her to raise his children. God wanted to reward her, and the marching band told her – or maybe she’d read it somewhere – that if she died in a royal place she’d be eligible for a state funeral; they’d pull out all the stops and the nation would wail for her, just like they did for Diana-lord-let-her-sleep-in-peace. So she took to loitering around the Palace of Westminster, sitting in a lobby chair listening to her auditory hallucinations play The Saints Go Marching In on an endless loop, waiting for the day she’d fall asleep forever and watch her good old send off from above. But it was not to be. She was escorted from the premises so many times that eventually social services investigated and found a nice lump sum sitting in her savings account that brought her here instead, where she died three weeks later, sitting in this same armchair watching Loose Women.
I gather my bones together and haul myself out of the chair, take a round trip through the circular corridor that leads around the whole ground floor - a never-ending journey for a happy little goldfish. I come to a natural halt at the foyer where an uncomfortable sofa, bookended by dusty plants, faces the receptionist’s desk. The Gatekeeper, Ingrid calls her. She frowns at me. I lower myself onto the seat opposite and stare blankly until she looks back down at her paperwork.
Her two bloodhounds languish under the desk at her feet - two more elderly gentlemen, bored out of their tiny brains, here until they die. Their eyelids droop low and their drool stretches to the floor. They smell atrocious but I have an overwhelming urge to join them on the carpet, to rest my head on their flanks, rising and falling so gently. To drape their ears over my hands and see life from a dog’s-eye-view.
The receptionist scowls. “It’s nearly lunch time, why don’t you head down to the dining room?” she barks, too loudly, jarring against my cushioned brain. It’s not a bad idea. I am, I realise suddenly, incredibly hungry. I hoist myself to standing and blunder over to her, dropping into an uncomfortable crouch before the dogs.
One raises his dry nose to sniff my outstretched fingers, my nub of a wrist. I wonder if he can sense that one of his brothers was to blame for my maiming. He gives it a lazy lick.
“Good boy.”
I rub the spot behind his ears that makes his back legs twitch. I’m almost sure he smiles.
#
I am seventy-four-years-old and I am lying on the carpet behind the reception desk and laughing while the nurses discuss the best way to lift me.
I am thirty-nine and it is a very good year.
I am hugging a dog and I want to cry.
I am flickering like a badly-tuned television set and I need someone to smack me around the ears until I’m sensible again.
I am being lifted by a male care worker and I nuzzle into his chest as he carries me like a baby down a corridor that never ends.
Here’s a doorway. I wonder if I will become weightless as we pass through, as my body temporarily loses its soul.
I am standing in a hospital waiting room listening to my wife cry.
When I was thirty-nine, it was a very good year. Heather threw up in a supermarket queue and kept on throwing up every day for a week. She went to the doctor and came back pregnant. Just like that. After ten years of being told that we couldn’t have children, and “no, we don’t know why” and “no, we can’t help you” it had happened out of sheer indifference. Infertility treatments in the sixties weren’t like they are now - popping out babies like microwave popcorn, made with a syringe and a Petri dish. The scan produced a little grey ink blot that you squinted at until you pretended to see a limb, or a head, exclaiming, “Amazing!” Nowadays you can find out whose nose your kid will inherit in bizarre orange 3D images, lasered onto little glass paperweights for the grandparents.
The doctors weren’t able to tell which one of us was broken, so naturally we blamed ourselves, and secretly, each other. I got angry, she got fat, and we spent ten more years making ourselves enjoy a life without a child. Then Heather came home pale but flushed, shaking and smelling of sick. And pregnant. Alice forced champagne on her nauseous daughter and told her she was eating for two now, even though she had been doing that for several years.
I spent nine terrifying months not mentioning the fact that I expected her to lose it at any moment. I could see she felt the same way, always one hand on her belly. I celebrated my fortieth birthday with an ill and ironic feeling of not being old enough or responsible enough to become a father.
She went into labour at five past six in the morning on the twenty-third of November. I don’t know what she went through and I don’t want to know and I won’t ever know. But I am standing in the hospital waiting room, the same room I have been in – on and off for eighteen hours – listening to her moan and plead and whimper and scream.
The doorways are not an escape; they are torture. A hell before I get to hell. And I realise now: the doorways were sent by Heather.
I wait there for my eighteen hours and when I am handed my son – a little purple sack of bones with a distended face like a bulldog – Heather lies among bloody sheets, staring at her swollen ankles, and will not meet my eyes.
Chapter Fifteen
I’ve been driving for an hour so far and Jamie and I have exchanged three words. I found a hard lump behind my ear this morning and I can’t stop rubbing it. Maybe it’s cancer. Fair enough.
I slept through my alarm this morning, unable to wake to turn it off, tormented in a nightmare of buzzing and bleeping that merged into a crowd of questioning faces all talking at once. Clare grunted and huffed her way through my room – blinded by sleep, kicking aside DVD cases, discarded underwear and crusty crockery – and stabbed the off button as aggressively as possible “Are you fucking deaf? Jamie’s going to be here in an hour.”
A tight whine forced itself out of my throat. E
ven with my eyes shut I could hear Clare’s eyes roll in disgust. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
A little envelope flashed at the top of the screen of my phone. A text from Sarah:
HI. HOPE YOU’RE OK. BEEN WORRIED ABOUT YOU. THINK YOU SHOULD TALK ABOUT IT. I CAN COME OVER IF YOU WANT.
Sympathy. I’m not used to that. The very idea of it immediately released a gut-punch of guilt at the thought of feeling anything other than guilt over killing my brother. And horror at the thought of the amount of cleaning I’d need to do for Sarah to step foot in the flat.
A crumpled letter sat next to my phone, as abhorrent as a chainsaw in an orphanage. It contained a list of scribbled details that Jamie had copied down from Lydia’s letter, an abridged version that omits all the my gorgeous boy, please don’t be sad, I just wanted you to know that I’m so sorry filler stuff and focuses on the hard, depressing facts. She was about six weeks pregnant when she met my dad. She’d left Alex’s real father – a man named Lee Burnett – a few months before. He was a good person. They’d separated amicably. He didn’t know about the baby. It just wasn’t meant to be, Peter was the one who should have been Alex’s father, and she hoped he could still think of him that way, blah, blah, blah, until I start to doubt that it was even written by Lydia. She called things what they were and kept quiet if she couldn’t explain it. Lydia was full of clear-cut vinegar; this was positively saccharine.
I sent a hurried reply to Sarah in what I hoped was a nonchalantly stoic tone (THINGS PRETTY SHIT BUT I’M OK) and played down the possibility of a pity date (GOT A FEW THINGS TO DO BUT LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU’RE FREE AND WE’LL WORK SOMETHING OUT).
Jamie didn’t bother coming up to knock but let my phone ring twice before hanging up to ensure as little contact as possible. Fine with me. Clare had been relaying messages to him whenever I found something else out about Lee. She’d nod, scowl, then type a text off with furious fingertips. I didn’t ask how she knew Jamie’s number.
The details on the letter were fairly useless – a phone long ago disconnected – so I spent the week tracking down Lee’s employment history. He’d started out in Croydon running a family-friendly American-style restaurant and knocking up Lydia. The month after Alex was born he’d relocated to run a petrol station restaurant in Aberdeen, about as far away as he could get. Then a pizzeria in Stoke-on-Trent, a café-bar called The Starling in Worcester and finally to Bath, where I was told, “Yeah, but he’s not in today,” when I rang the place he was said to be working, half-cut on boxed wine and not really caring any more whether I got through to anyone.
I swore, apologised, waved frantically at Clare. “Do you know when he’ll be in next?” I asked the sighing woman on the phone.
“Tomorrow. Do you want me to tell him you called?”
“No. No. Thanks.”
Francis Lane: a contemporary wine bar serving locally sourced, seasonal, organic Tapas. Well done, Lee. Self-important wankiness runs in the blood, clearly.
So: to Bath. And I have no underwear on. After a reply from Sarah to say she could come round after work, I threw all the clothes from my bedroom floor into the washing machine, realising only after I’d put the cycle on that every pair of pants I own were in there. We drive through blue skies into looming grumpy-eyebrowed clouds and the rain appears like a drawn curtain as we hit the motorway.
We’ll be there by midday for a friendly chat with the oblivious father of my dead brother and I could be home in time to make dinner for Sarah.
We pass another ten minutes in the comparative silence of the radio until Jamie taps the dash and says, “Alex was so pissed off you got the car.”
I shrug. I knew this. When Dad went into the home he didn’t need it any more. Angela already had a car, I was next in line, Alex didn’t need one in London. I try to shrug it off. “First son and all that. It’s a piece of shit anyway.”
“You could have put him on the insurance.”
So, this is going to be a list of all the things I did to piss off my brother. Okay. If that’s my atonement, so be it. But I don’t have to agree with him.
“He never asked.”
“He loved this car. He learned to drive in it.”
“So did I.” Oh such joyful memories: Dad thumping his stumped wrist against the gear stick yelling, “Change! Change! Come on, Matthew! Into fourth!”
“Yeah, well. If he’d been able to drive it… If you’d given him a lift that night… ”
I turn to glare at him, wrenching the wheel accidentally as I do so, almost veering into the side of a lorry. Jamie shrinks back into his seat, knees pushing against the dashboard. I take a breath. “If I’d given him a lift, he would have charged into a nursing home, wasted, and shouted at my dad. What a lot he would have achieved.”
“He’d be alive.”
“Would he? Maybe he would have died on the way, or while he was ruining my dad’s life, and mine. I thought they said it was inevitable, it was just one of those things.”
“Wow. ‘Just one of those things’?”
He’s smiling. He’s enjoying this too much, even though I know it’s hurting him to talk about it.
“I can’t do this,” I say, wondering if honesty works on people made of bile. “I can’t drive for two hours with you telling me how it’s all my fault. Don’t you think I feel guilty enough?”
“Slow down.”
We approach a flashing fifty miles per hour sign and an endless stretch of roadworks. I coast to the end of the jam and turn up the radio volume. As we leave one county’s radio behind, the static masks most of what the presenter is saying - a quiz on nineties music.
“Cotton-Eyed Joe,” Jamie says.
The radio confirms it. I turn up the heater to drown out the music.
I silently rehearse what I’m going to say to Lee like a wedding speech. There’s really no easy way to break two deaths to someone in quick succession. Maybe if I say it really fast. Maybe Jamie will help me out. Maybe he loved Alex enough to see this through with me.
The traffic moves several inches forward. We crawl, nose to bumper, for six miles. No sign of a crash, but suddenly we are free, creeping back up to sixty-five as if nothing had happened. I push the scrappy little car up to seventy and it starts shaking - bolts rattle in their housings.
Jamie unbuckles his seatbelt so he can take his jacket off. I visualise braking so suddenly that he flies through the windscreen and ends up stuck through the back window of the camper van in front, legs flailing wildly as the van fishtails across three lanes into the central reservation. Then bursts into flame. One can but dream. “Why are you always in such a foul mood?” Jamie asks me, suddenly, with a grin.
“Maybe it’s just when I’m around you.”
“Ha. You’re funny, Matty.”
“Maybe it’s because you and Alex spent most of your spare time winding me up and driving me insane.”
“You think that’s all we did? Don’t flatter yourself.”
“He’s even doing it from the grave,” I mutter.
“You. Are. Priceless.”
He gives me the same look that has made me cringe with anticipation for nearly thirty years. If we were eight he would have given me a dead leg that bruised brown and purple. If we were twelve he would have spat gum into my hair and pressed it in hard. If we were sixteen he would have flicked a cigarette butt down the back of my shirt. I’m too old for any of this, to be bullied.
“Why are you here?” I ask him. “If you’re so convinced that telling Alex’s dad the truth is my responsibility, then why do you need to come along, too?”
“To make sure you don’t wimp out like usual.”
“Right. It’s a kind of male posturing thing then.”
“Just drive, idiot.”
Ninety-four miles to go.
#
I put the coins in the ticket machine slowly and with deliberate irritation while Jamie remains silent on the subject of helping towards the cost of parking. As we walk, I
study the Google map I cunningly printed out last night and Jamie stops to buy a packet of Minstrels from a newsagent and doesn’t offer me a single one.
The rain has not reached Bath and my blood warms me beneath my open coat. It is twelve-oh-three by my watch, and then twelve-oh-four a few seconds later when I check again. Unsurprisingly, time continues to pass, despite my anxiety at getting back in time to meet Sarah, and I send Clare a text to say please hang my washing on the radiators and maybe wash up those pans that have been in the sink for the three days following her much appreciated spaghetti puttanesca, please?
When the bar sign comes into view my blood pressure surges and the clear winter sun becomes a sweltering ball of flame. Jamie is mucking about with his iPhone and carries on walking a shop or two past Francis Lane before he realises that I am stuck to the pavement, as if my feet are made of wax and have melted in all this heat. He stops in front of me and takes the map from my hands, “This it?”
I nod. “What am I supposed to say to him?”
He shrugs, “Not my problem.”
If he wasn’t such a cunt I’d ask him for a hug. He’s already gone, pushed through the double doors into the warm black and red themed wine bar. Buena Vista Social Club plays over the PA. The smell of grilled Mediterranean vegetables and balsamic vinegar makes my stomach clench. There’s a waitress behind the bar, also playing with an iPhone.
Jamie stalks the place like a forensic specialist hunting for a fragment of skull bone. “Maybe we should have a drink, first,” I mutter in his ear, and take a seat at the bar. The waitress raises eyebrows and makes eye contact for a few seconds before returning to her phone, “Yep?”
“A Becks, please.”
Jamie does not sit down, but he still orders a beer and makes no move to remove his wallet from his pocket when she gives us the total to pay. I pay. Of course I do. The waitress takes my money, dumps it in the till and goes to the far end of the bar – as far away as she can get from us – and leans there, alternately flicking pages of a newspaper and tapping the screen of her phone.
